In June 2017, Israel successfully launched a ballistic missile from a container, which was placed on the deck of a ship at sea. With this experiment, Israel brought forward that old argument that any ship can be a warship. There are two aspects of this missile test. One, a missile can be hidden inside a container-carrying ship.
Russians have been developing container-launched missiles for some time. But the Russian focus was more on firing a cruise missile from a hidden container. Such a cruise missile can be targeted at a ship at sea or can also be used to attack targets in land. Yet, this is a cruise missile; that is, it would crash onto the target like a suicide airplane. A ballistic missile, on the other hand, brings a completely new dimension in here. The Israeli experiment is important for this reason. Ballistic missiles have more strategic importance than cruise missiles. The second aspect is, the missile was, in fact, fired from a mobile missile-carrier or a missile-launching vehicle. The vehicle was taken on board the ship and fastened to the deck using various mechanisms. That means, a land warfare weapon was bolted on top of a ship, which turned the ship into a warship. The vehicle did not lose its original mission. Once the vehicle is off-loaded from the ship, it would be able to continue its original mission of firing ballistic missiles from land. From another viewpoint, it can be said that a ship like this has the ability to carry a ballistic missile and fire it from the middle of the sea. And again, the ship can potentially increase the range of the missile many times by carrying the missile-launcher from one seaport to another.
This second aspect brings forward a thousand-year old strategic idea. The idea is that a ship’s abilities are equal to what it is able to carry. The idea of permanently installing weapons on a ship is not that old – only several hundred years. On the other hand, the history of taking land weapons aboard a ship to fight a land war at a far-away place is a thousand-year tradition. This thousand-year-old tradition can be seen in the utilization of amphibious warfare ships of today. These ships can carry a huge number of soldiers and munitions, which can be off-loaded at any location to fight a land war, and even to capture a big piece of land by force. There was a time when this matter was normal for all warships, not just for ships specifically made for amphibious landings. In fact, the ship specifically built for amphibious warfare was not developed before World War II. Before that time, if a captain grounded his ship, he was supposed to face court martial!
