SUBSCRIBER+ EXCLUSIVE REPORTING — In late March, hunkered in his sandbag-lined compound with visiting Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky pleaded for Congress to pass the long-promised $60 billion Ukrainian military aid package. While the bill included a broad range of weapons, Zelensky had one particular item on his mind.
“ATACM-300s, that is the answer,” Zelensky said.
It was a remarkable moment. Two years into the war, the president who had never imagined being a wartime leader was begging for a weapons system that until recently had been unfamiliar to civilians. Now, the long-range ATACMS (the acronym, pronounced “attack-ems,” is for Army Tactical Missile System) had vaulted to the top of Ukraine’s wish list. Zelensky said it would help eliminate the threat posed by Russian warplanes in Crimea, which have pummeled Odesa and other Ukrainian cities.
“When Russia knows we can destroy these jets, they will not attack from Crimea,” Zelensky said. “It’s like with the (Russian) sea fleet. We pushed them from our territorial waters. Now we will push them from the airports in Crimea.”
Actually, as Zelensky knew when he said those words, President Joe Biden had already authorized a small shipment of the long-range ATACMS, as part of a $300 million emergency delivery that drew from existing Pentagon stockpiles. Biden had approved the shipment in February, based on Zelensky’s pledge that Ukraine would use the missiles only on Russian-occupied territory inside Ukraine’s borders, and not against the Russian homeland.
But Zelensky wanted more of the ATACMS – and thanks to the passage of the $60 billion aid package, he will have them. Ukrainian forces have already put the initial shipment to use, and the question now is whether Zelensky was right; at this pivotal moment in the war, will the ATACMS be “the answer”?
ATACMS 101: What they can do
The development of the ATACMS missile traces to 1978 and the Pentagon’s elite Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, DARPA. Initially, the idea behind the weapon was to counter a hypothetical ground invasion by overwhelming numbers of Russian or Chinese troops. Its original name was "Assault Breaker," and it was designed to cripple an enemy advance, penetrating deep behind the front lines and degrading or destroying the enemy’s high-value strategic assets, including command, control and communications complexes, missile launch sites, radar and other air defense systems, and field headquarters - basically any military targets that might lie well behind the battle lines.
Experts say the key features of the modern ATACMS are their range, power, mobility and precision. They are surface-to-surface ballistic missiles, and the latest models have a 300-kilometer (184-mile) reach and carry a 500-pound warhead and advanced GPS-assisted precision guidance technology.
ATACMS are produced by Lockheed Martin’s Precision Fires operation in Camden, Arkansas, and according to the manufacturer, the weapons can rain fire on targets “well beyond the range of [other] existing Army cannons, rockets and other missiles.”
Military analysts say the ATACMS system gives Ukraine an edge it didn’t have before. Ukraine has received Storm Shadow cruise missiles developed by the U.K. and France and SCALP cruise missiles from France. These are powerful weapons but they are launched by air, which makes them more complicated and risky to deploy.
“ATACMS has the advantage that as a tactical ballistic missile system with an operational range, it can react relatively fast to changing circumstances,” Frederik Mertens, a strategic analyst with the Hague Centre for Strategic Studies, told The Cipher Brief. “It is a whole lot easier to have a launcher in range and ready to fire than it is to mount an airstrike at short notice.”
The Lockheed Martin launchers that fire ATACMS are ground-based, mobile (HIMARS is wheeled and MLRS is tracked) and concealable, thus far less vulnerable than Ukrainian aircraft to preventive Russian counterattacks.
“A Ukrainian SU-24 loaded with missiles should be an easier prey for the VKS [Russian Aerospace Forces] than the easily concealed launchers,” Mertens said.
The ATACMS’ range gives the Ukrainians the opportunity to strike Russian-held Crimea – the capability Zelensky stressed when he made his plea. “Fortress Crimea,” as it’s often called, has been heavily militarized since the Black Sea peninsula was illegally annexed by Russia in 2014. A detailed interactive map—created by journalists at Krym.realii, the Crimean project of the Ukrainian service of U.S. government-funded Radio Liberty— shows 223 Russian military facilities on the peninsula. “Crimea is home to Russia's Black Sea fleet, six air bases, command-and-control centers, arms depots, docks, barracks, and more,” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty said in an explanatory article published April 29.
Ben Hodges, a retired U.S. Army lieutenant general who commanded U.S. forces in Europe, echoed the point in an interview for that article.
"Right now, Crimea is like an unsinkable aircraft carrier for the Russians, launching drones and aircraft and providing logistical support to their forces in southern Ukraine," Gen. Hodges said. "The first big step toward the liberation of Crimea is making it untenable. And long-range, precision strike capability will give Ukraine the opportunity to do that…You don't have to kill all the Russians. You just have to make sure that they don't have fuel, ammunition, and food."
Already in action
The initial shipment of long-range ATACMS arrived in Ukraine in mid-April, and the Ukrainian military lost no time in deploying them.
On April 17, long-range ATACMS hit a Russian military airfield in Dzhankoi, Crimea. The missiles destroyed four S-400 surface-to-air missile systems, three radar stations, an air defense command post and a Fundament-M air defense command and control system.
On April 23, ATACMS hit several radar systems for a Russian S-300 air defense system near occupied Volnovakha, in southeastern Ukraine. And on May 1 and 2, reports surfaced on an OSINT technical account on X and the website for the Institute for the Study of War that three ATACMS had struck Russian troops on a training ground some 50 miles behind the frontline in the occupied Luhansk region, killing as many as 116 Russian personnel. These reports have not been officially verified.
The Luhansk training ground strike may have involved older, mid-range ATACMS the U.S. sent to Ukraine in the fall of 2023. Those models, the M39s, have a lesser range – 100 miles – but are still powerful; Ukraine used M39s last October 17 in an attack it called Operation Dragonfly to strike nine Russian helicopters, a surface-to-air missile launcher, multiple vehicles, an ammunition storage site and an airstrip in Berdyansk, also in the Luhansk region. “Today, special thanks to the United States,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky wrote on Telegram at the time. “‘ATACMS’ have proven themselves.”
Now it appears they are proving themselves again – the old and newer models both.
National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan says Lockheed Martin has stepped up production of long-range ATACMS to meet demand without draining U.S. stocks. (The Pentagon plans to replace the ATACMS systems it sends to Ukraine and other allies with Lockheed’s next-generation Precision Strike Missile (PrSM), which has a range of more than 300 miles. It passed qualification tests last November.) The U.S. fear that ATACMS might lead to a dangerous escalation was ultimately overridden by Zelensky’s pledge to use ATACMS only on Russian targets inside Ukraine – and by a White House assessment that Russia had already escalated by attacking Ukraine with ballistic missiles from North Korea, in violation of global nonproliferation regimes. Forensic analysis by the independent organization Conflict Armament Research concluded that fragments of a missile that struck Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, on Jan. 2 was a North Korean Hwasong-11A or Hwasong-11B ballistic missile.
Ultimately, Biden’s national security team determined that providing Ukraine with long-range ATACMS would not cross Russia’s two red lines: no NATO troops in Ukraine and no ground invasion of the Russian homeland.
A game-changer in the war?
While Zelensky and his military commanders have cheered the arrival of the ATACMS, American officials and military analysts have sounded more cautious. The words “silver bullet” keep surfacing in the conversation – as in, this new weapon isn’t one.
As he announced Biden’s decision to send the ATACMS, Sullivan sought to lower expectations.
"There is no silver bullet in this conflict,” he said. “One capability is not going to be the ultimate solution. It is an amalgam of capabilities that come together and combine with the bravery and skill of Ukraine’s fighters that’s going to make the difference in this conflict."
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin echoed the point on April 26. Referring to the ATACMS, Austin said, “that capability alone is not a silver bullet. It's the integration of that capability with the other kinds of things, like Storm Shadow and other things that other countries are providing, that really then gives them a capability to conduct a long-range fires campaign.”
And in his interview with The Cipher Brief, Mertens said, “ATACMS is definitely no silver bullet. The war in Ukraine is far too complex and multi-layered for one weapons system to be so decisive.”
Silver bullet or not, the impact may be profound, in Crimea and elsewhere.
“ATACMS will help a lot,” Mertens said. “Is it a very important and crucial addition to the Ukrainian arsenal? Yes, there is not a shred of doubt about that. Could it have a decisive effect if used in conjunction with other weapons in a key area of the war - like the Crimea? It might be a vital part of the mix, yes. Especially if they can help suppress the Russian GBAD [ground-based air defense] sufficiently for the F-16 fighters to operate both over the Crimea and the Black Sea. But as you can see, it is the mix that matters.”
There may also be an impact beyond the power and precision of the ATACMS. Back in March, Zelensky signaled that one reason he wanted the weapons system involved psychology. “When Russia has missiles and we don’t, they attack by missiles: Everything — gas, energy, schools, factories, civilian buildings,” Zelensky told the Post’s Ignatius. When he and his commanders had the ATACMS, Zelensky suggested, the thinking in Russia’s command and control would change.
Read more expert-driven national security insights, perspective and analysis in The Cipher Brief.
