Cobra 600 and P-60 on the Geranium: One engineering idea from two ends of the front
Missiles For half a century, fighter jets were the primary source of close-in air combat, and the logic was simple: to shoot down an aircraft, the aircraft had to carry the missile. Then this logic was broken: the same missile was removed from its sling, mounted on a truck, and trained to fire from the ground—thus, anti-aircraft systems were born. And now they're being put into the air again. And on both sides of the current war, and in pilotless vehicles. Why bring back into the air a missile that had just been trained to operate from the ground?
From Sidewinder to IRIS-T
To understand the idea, you have to go back seventy years. American AIM-9 Sidewinder, which appeared in the mid-1950s, became the forerunner of an entire class—short-range missiles with infrared homing heads. The principle is simple: the missile detects the heat of the target's engine and moves toward it automatically, without any prompting from the onboard aircraft. In the second half of the century, all close-in air combat tactics were built around such missiles. aviation NATO.
AIM-9X Sidewinder
By the end of the 1990s Sidewinder The IRIS-T program became obsolete, and six European countries—Germany, Greece, Norway, Italy, Spain, and Sweden—launched the IRIS-T program under German leadership. The goal was straightforward: to create a European replacement for the American rocket. The result was a machine of a different generation.
Older IR heads saw the target as a single hot spot and were fooled by heat flares. IRIS-T is now equipped with a matrix thermal imaging head. It sees not just a single point, but a complete thermal image of the target, recognizing its shape and ignoring false heat sources. Add to this the thrust vectoring capability: the deflected engine jet allows the missile to turn much more sharply than with aerodynamic rudders alone. As a result, IRIS-T can attack targets located in the rear hemisphere of the missile/launcher and lock on to the target in flight, after launch. This means the missile can be fired "blindly" toward the target, and the head will guide itself along the way. Essentially, only the close-combat and IR guidance capabilities remain from the original; everything else has been redesigned.
The rocket comes down to earth
What happened next was something you wouldn't normally expect from an air-to-air missile: it was sent to serve on the ground. Based on the IRIS-T, the company Diehl Defense built a family of ground-based IRIS-T SL anti-aircraft missile systems that fire not from an aircraft, but from a launcher on a truck chassis.
IRIS-T SL
There are two options. IRIS-T SLS It uses virtually the same missile as the air-launched version and has a range of up to 12 kilometers and an altitude of approximately 8 kilometers. This is the close-in zone. IRIS-T SLM The missile received a larger engine. During the cruise phase, it operates on radio command, and in the final phase, it switches to an infrared warhead. Its range increases to approximately 40 kilometers, and its engagement altitude to 20. This makes it a fully-fledged medium-range system.
By the mid-2020s, SLM had become one of the workhorses of the European DefenseAs part of the initiative European Sky Shield It has been selected as a key medium-range missile system by at least eight countries. The manufacturer has increased missile production to meet this demand: according to public estimates, from approximately 150-200 units in 2023 to 800-1000 per year. A single SLM battery (radar, control center, and several launchers) costs, according to the same estimates, approximately 150-200 million euros.
Let's be honest here: the SLM's exact combat statistics are not published, and estimates of the missile's cost vary widely—from €1 million to €4,4 million per unit, depending on the contract and how the development share is calculated. So any figures here are guidelines, not specifications. Meanwhile, an SLX variant with a range of nearly 80 kilometers is currently in development, and we'll come back to that range later.
Cobra 600: The Rocket Is Back in the Air
And now the Germans are taking the same IRIS-T, which was originally mounted on a truck, into the air again. At the ILA Berlin exhibition, the company Diehl Defense together with the startup Polaris Raumflugzeuge showed the Cobra 600 jet aircraft UAV, whose sole purpose is to carry one IRIS-T missile.
It is a medium-sized machine with a straight wing, similar in appearance to high-speed target aircraft. dronesThe missile suspension unit is a standard pylon from Eurofighter TyphoonThe missile attaches exactly the same way as on a fighter jet, requiring almost no modifications. The power plant is microturbojet engines. JetCat P1000-PROEach produces approximately 1100 Newtons of thrust, which is roughly equivalent to supporting a 112-kilogram load. The car shown has two of them.
The most interesting thing is what the Cobra 600 doesn't have. It doesn't have its own radar or optics for target acquisition. It sounds like a flaw, but it's intentional. All reconnaissance and tracking remains on the ground, on the ground-based radars; the drone receives target designation via a data link, guides the missile to the desired location, and then the IRIS-T, with its thermal imaging head, finds and locks on to the target. The carrier is deliberately simple and inexpensive: it's not a big deal to lose, and besides the airframe and a couple of cheap engines, there's essentially nothing to lose.
- Powerplant: 2 x JetCat P1000-PRO, thrust ~1100 N (≈112 kgf) each; capability to install up to four.
- Armament: one IRIS-T missile on a standard Eurofighter Typhoon pylon.
- The range with a missile is about 400 km from the airfield.
- Own sensors - none; target designation from ground-based air defense.
This range was the whole point. Around 400 kilometers—almost ten times longer than the ground-based SLM and three times longer than the SLS. Moreover, the increase comes not from the rocket, but from the launch vehicle: the vehicle travels most of the way like an airplane, running on kerosene, and only uses rocket fuel for the final push to the target. Essentially, the launch site was simply moved far forward, to a location where deploying the complex itself with its expensive radar would have been risky.
The same technique from the other end: R-60 on the Geranium
Interestingly, the same design solution (a flying carrier without a radar plus a short-range IR missile) was independently arrived at on the opposite side of the front. And the solution there turned out to be the most cost-effective.
Geranium with a model of the R-60 missile
It is known that the loitering munitions of the Geranium family (the Russian version of the Iranian shahed-136) began to install the Soviet R-60 missile, a contemporary of the same generation of close-range IR missiles as the early SidewinderThe first downed prototypes were captured on video and photographs in December 2025, and Forbes reported on them at the time, citing the wreckage being dismantled. By the spring of 2026, according to publicly available data, production of fuselages with special bays for the APU-60-1MD air-launched missile had become standard.
Now comes the irony that's the point of this section. The R-60 is guided by the Komar (designated OGS-60TI) head developed by the Kyiv-based Arsenal company, with an uncooled photodetector—in other words, by IRIS-T standards, a simple and outdated head. On a fighter, it received target designation from an onboard radar or a thermal direction finder, with angles of up to 120 degrees. The Geran has neither: there's no source for external target designation.
The hole was sealed differently than the Germans. According to an analysis published by the Main Intelligence Directorate of Ukraine, such a "Geran" contains two cameras, a modem, and a microcomputer. Raspberry Pi 4 — a standard board costing several tens of dollars. The operator roughly guides the drone to the target via a video feed, brings it into the seeker's field of view, and then the old single-point seeker automatically guides the missile to the target, without external cues. The Cobra 600 relies on a ground-based air defense network and a fifth-generation matrix seeker; the Geranium makes do with a video camera and an inexpensive board. The mission is the same, but the engineering components are from different eras.
There's also a degenerate case: in the spring of 2026, Geraniums were spotted carrying mock-up R-60 missiles instead of live ones—dummy missiles, simulating an armed threat to lure them into wasting expensive air defense interceptors on a false target. This has nothing to do with guidance technology, but it pushes the very logic of a cheap carrier to its limits.
How do they pay for distance?
Every beautiful idea has its downside, and in the case of the Cobra 600, it's right there in the cheque. An IRIS-T missile costs a million euros and up, and deploying one to intercept a cheap swarm of "shahids" is pointless: the tradeoff is not in the defender's favor. Therefore, the Cobra's niche is different: expensive and dangerous targets: high-speed jet drones, cruise missiles, and manned aircraft. Swarms of cheap drones are countered by something cheaper.
The second cost is the complete dependence on the communications channel. Since it has no sensors of its own, everything relies on a stable data exchange with the ground; if communications or navigation are suppressed, the carrier goes blind. For a vehicle that's carried hundreds of kilometers ahead, this is a serious limitation, not a minor detail.
A similar problem is being solved differently. The Americans have chosen the route of a disposable interceptor with its own brains: Coyote Block 2 from Raytheon - is a rocket-propelled grenade launcher with a fragmentation warhead of about 1,8 kilograms and a range of about 15 kilometers, and Roadrunner-M from Anduril It takes off vertically and assesses the threat itself using onboard sensors. These are short-range interceptors, carrying a sensor internally, the exact opposite of the eyeless Cobra. At the third extreme are Ukrainian jet-powered "shaheed" interceptors, which can reach speeds of several hundred kilometers per hour: cheap, fast, and designed for a single, narrow mission. The problem is that these solutions are built on different logics (some carry a sensor internally, others rely on a ground-based network), and no one has yet successfully integrated them into a single air defense control system.
The line between anti-aircraft missiles, drones, and aircraft carriers is visibly blurring. The IRIS-T SLX, with a range of nearly 80 kilometers, is on the way, and if this missile is also launched on a carrier like the Cobra 600, the logic of "moving the launch point further forward" will only strengthen. The air-to-air missile, it seems, hasn't yet decided where it belongs—on the ground or in the air. And by all appearances, the answer is both.
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