status of Ukraines Modern Neptune Missile.

2023 Neptune Surface - Surface (anti ship w/ land strike capabilities recently displayed)

On Monday, that official said Ukraine had developed a GPS guidance system that takes the missile to a pre-determined location. The missile's infrared imaging seeker then searches for and locks onto a target based on a pre-loaded image and then makes its terminal attack run on that target. If it cannot match the target, the missile aborts its attack.

This would be a major capability leap as these missiles would not be able to be jammed using electronic warfare and would be very hard to detect during their terminal attack stage due to their seekers being passive in nature. We have discussed the value of the use of imaging matching for targeting, also commonly referred to as DSMAC (Digital Scene Matching Area Correlator) or ATR (Automated Target Recognition) for cruise missiles that are or could be

Currently, Ukraine's donated Storm Shadow and SCALP-EG cruise missiles use this guidance arrangement. Employing it on a reworked Neptune would directly mirror the path that RGM-84 Harpoon took, which turned it into the SLAM (Stand-off Land Attack Missile) missile via modification with infrared passive seeker, among other tweaks. Eventually, the follow-on SLAM-ER would be an even further advance from its Harpoon progenitor.