Sweden Sends Robot 17 Anti-Ship Missile to Ukraine

Robot 17 Anti-Ship Missile Sent to Ukraine.

A little video on weapons been sent to Ukraine. It is more anti-ship weapons, this time, Sweden is sending a number of Robot 17 missiles. This will complement the Neptune’s, Harpoons and Brimstone’s which are already there. So, while the Neptune and Harpoon are long-range missiles, the Robot 17, a bit like the Brimstone, is short range—effective to around 8 km. So, while that seems short, these are very useful as they are designed to deter and defend against amphibious landings rather than target large ships.

Long-range missiles like Harpoon have a minimum effective range, meaning they would be useless against boats and ships close to the shore. So Ukraine needs short range missiles as well as long range one to effectively set up a short-defence system.

Now, the Brimstone we have seen in use in land. So I don’t know if all of the Brimstone batteries are used in land or if some are used to defend the coastline too. But these will either supplement the Brimstone batteries or, could even take the place of potential Brimstone coastal batteries allowing the Brimstone to be used in an anti-vehicle role instead.

So, the Robot 17 is a development of the famous Hellfire missile. It is designed to be launched from a shoreline firing post. Which can be set up quickly. It is laser guided and once fired, it travels at mach 1.3 to hit its target.

Sweden uses them in tandem with the CM90 boat and G-Boats. Using the boat to rapidly transport the missiles and teams between islands for rapid and mobile coastal defence.

So, the system features a launcher, and a seperate laser illuminator. The illuminator can be positioned at the firing point or in a different place away from the launcher. This makes it safer for the operators.

The target vessel is illuminated with a frequency-coded, narrow, high-enery laster beam, which the Robot 17s laser viewfinder looks for and then follows to its target.

In Sweden, a Robot 17 platoon consists of three fire units which are divided into robot and lighting groups.

An illuminator group consists of 4-5 men. Who use a G-Boat to move into position.

The Robot 17 group consists of 9-10 men. Operating out of the CB90. The entire platoon focuses on the enemy’s probably attack point.

These are very fast to deplot. Grouping the robots and the lighting unit takes around 5 minutes from arrival on site until the unit is ready to fire. It can even be done under 3 minutes.

These were requested especially by Ukraine, so it is nice to see Ukraine being sent requested weapons like this one.