U.S. Air Force C-17 Globemaster III pilots from the 437th Airlift Wing take off during a mission generation exercise at Joint Base Charleston, South Carolina.
This exercise marked the largest C-17 launch ever from a single base and demonstrated the wing’s ability to rapidly generate and project overwhelming airpower alongside joint partners.
The Kalibr suite was designed to compare favorably with Washington’s prolific but aging Tomahawk cruise missiles. Whereas the original Kalibr 3M14 traded performance blows with the Tomahawk’s Block IV revision in what amounts to an approximate draw tilted slightly in Kalibr’s favor, Kalibr-M drastically outranges its US counterpart at 4,500 against 1,700 kilometers.
The most significant advantage of the 3M14T and its family is that they can be fired from a wider variety of smaller ships than the American ones that usually carry the Tomahawk, making it easier to deploy. It is also being developed to fire from fixed land bases, vehicles, and aircraft.Kalibr may not have some of the advanced loitering and interactive data link capabilities of the current Tomahawk, but that might well make it cheaper to mass-produce (in addition to parts commonality with family variants).
