By Helge Adrians
Recent conflicts in the Middle East highlight how maritime kill chains from ashore impose risk on global shipping. However, Western navies have yet to fully grasp that within these loosely integrated sensor-to-shooter networks, land-based Anti-Ship Missile (AShM) systems have become the decisive instruments by which littoral actors — both state and non-state — generate coercive effects at sea. It is through these systems that such networks translate dispersed sensing and targeting into episodic operational effects, thereby producing conditions that resemble artificially generated chokepoints or barriers in narrow seas.
Typically consisting of mobile, often truck-mounted launchers, sensor inputs, and command-and-control elements, land-based AShMs — whether ballistic or cruise configurations — facilitate a form of selective sea denial. Rather than enforcing broad area exclusion, they allow actors to threaten specific shipping lanes, vessels, or temporal windows of opportunity, thereby imposing calibrated risk, delay, and uncertainty while avoiding decisive confrontation.
While this approach is not new in principle, its contemporary expression is shaped by the growing integration of land-based AShMs with both traditional and emerging elements of coastal defense, including unmanned systems (UxSs). These combinations enhance target acquisition, extend operational reach, and complicate defensive planning by saturating attention and forcing continuous trade-offs in detection, prioritization, and engagement, thereby creating conditions in which AShMs can be employed to greatest effect — not necessarily through technological sophistication alone, but through dispersion, redundancy, and temporal unpredictability. Within such configurations, AShMs remain the central kinetic enabler, translating otherwise transient sensing and targeting opportunities into tangible maritime effects. Even limited successful engagements can therefore generate disproportionate operational, psychological, and economic consequences, particularly in narrow seas and heavily trafficked maritime corridors.
Accordingly, this form of selective sea denial is more than a tactical adaptation. It reflects a recurring but under-theorized pattern in evolving conflict: the use of land-based strike capabilities, operating in a distributed manner and under the protection of terrestrial topography, to disrupt global maritime trade flows and generate political consequences. Yet Western military thinking still tends to treat land-based AShM systems within sensor-to-shooter architectures as supporting assets rather than as the central coercive instruments, leaving a gap in conceptualization and countermeasures — one that is particularly acute in other narrow seas, especially in inland seas such as Baltic. Closing this conceptual gap demands moving beyond kinetic countermeasures alone and instead finding ways to contain the political utility of AshMs.
Land-Based Anti-Ship Missiles in Practice: From Tactical Denial to Political Leverage
Land-based AShM systems have often been viewed in the West through the lens of China’s defense posture in the Western Pacific — labeled as ‘anti-access/area-denial’ since 2003 — where they were popularized as ‘carrier killers.’ Although other states also began to acquire or modernize such weapons during this period, their significance has only become globally visible in recent years.
This shift is illustrated by the Houthi campaign in the Red Sea since late November 2023, which shows how rapidly limited military capabilities can generate outsized maritime effects.
What began with drone-based harassment soon expanded into a layered approach that included the recurrent use of land-based AShMs, drawing mostly on Iranian technology, itself rooted in Chinese designs. While UxS established presence and imposed friction, it was the integration of these missiles within a broader multi-vector threat environment that fundamentally altered the character of the battlespace. The coexistence of different trajectories — high/fast for anti-ship ballistic missiles, low-altitude high-speed sea-skimming anti-ship cruise missiles, and low/slow for UxSs — creates a persistent strain on sensor management, as systems can no longer exclude entire kinematic regimes from consideration. This forces continuous tradeoffs in detection, classification, and resource allocation, increasing processing load and degrading overall situational awareness. The destructive characteristics of AShMs — particularly the speed, range, and terminal flight profiles of ballistic variants — introduce a qualitatively different layer of risk, in which even limited successful engagements carry the potential for sudden kinetic loss at sea.
As attacks grew more frequent and less discriminate, the Houthis translated localized military means into broader economic and political consequences. Crucially, these effects were achieved mainly from the mountainous hinterland of Western Yemen, highlighting how even episodic missile employment can exert continuous pressure on commercial traffic.
In response to the escalating situation in the Red Sea, the United States — together with partners — launched multiple rounds of strikes against Houthi targets beginning in early 2024, building on earlier efforts to contain the group’s regional activities. The objective was not solely to eliminate land-based AShMs, but to degrade the broader ecosystem enabling maritime attacks, from sensors to shooter platforms. Precision strikes from the air and the sea hit suspected launch sites, storage facilities, and command elements, yet failed to produce a decisive reduction in the threat. Houthi forces adapted quickly, relying on mobility, concealment, and redundancy to preserve operational capacity. As a result, attacks on commercial shipping persisted, and the risk environment remained largely intact. Within this evolving campaign, land-based AShMs continued to play a central role, illustrating how even under sustained military pressure such systems can endure as instruments of regional disruption.
Structural limitations already visible in operations against the Houthis were reinforced in the joint U.S. and Israeli campaign against Iran since the end of February 2026.
Although U.S. and Israeli forces faced little difficulty in achieving theater entry — again demonstrating the limited effectiveness of Iranian anti-access measures, the ‘outer ring’ — this initial advantage did not translate into control over the threat environment within the ‘inner ring(s).’ This was evident in the maritime domain. For instance, while conventional Iranian naval forces were quickly degraded through stand-off strikes, this did little to affect the more resilient layer of land-based AShMs and UxSs. These dispersed capabilities, likely supported by foreign target acquisition, continued to pose a credible risk to merchant vessels transiting the Persian Gulf, maintaining a persistent sea-denial threat despite continued operational pressure. Operational and public attention, however, remained disproportionately focused on the possibility of mining in the Strait of Hormuz, diverting attention from the more immediate and lethal challenge posed by missile-based sea denial. Air-centric efforts — including strike aircraft and rotary-wing assets operating within a loosely integrated kill web — failed to fully neutralize these systems, highlighting the difficulty of suppressing mobile, land-based AShM threats without escalation or ground presence.
Repeated efforts to suppress these capabilities have highlighted their resilience once dispersed, as well as the limits of strike-centric approaches in countering land-based AShM threats in littoral environments. More importantly, their persistence preserves their value as a coercive instrument: by sustaining risk, they drive up insurance and operating costs, shaping maritime behavior without requiring the physical interdiction of shipping, while allowing actors to effectively switch maritime access on or off at short notice.
Targeting Flows: The Economic Consequences of Selective Sea Denial
Maritime commerce warfare, or the selective targeting of merchant shipping is not a new phenomenon. However, the time-compressed execution from dispersed, protected coastal or peripheral sites introduces a qualitatively higher level of uncertainty regarding when and against which vessels attacks may occur. This situation is structurally reinforced by the inherent difficulty of detecting, locating, and pre-emptively neutralizing modern land-based AShM systems, even for advanced militaries.
Significantly, their effectiveness does not depend on frequent successful strikes, but on the persistent possibility of sudden, high-impact AShM engagements generated by land-based, heterogeneous, sensor-enabled kill chains. Unlike other forms of coastal maritime disruption, such as piracy, these systems derive their strategic effect from their ability to disturb and compress naval decision-making processes under conditions of multi-vector uncertainty. That is, their strategic utility lies less in missile performance than in inducing cognitive overload, misallocation of defensive resources, and degraded engagement sequencing within shipborne combat systems.
This risk environment is rapidly translated into economic calculations through maritime insurance mechanisms, where elevated perceived risk leads to adjusted war risk premiums and the redefinition of high-risk zones along global shipping routes. In this sense, the proliferation of land-based AShMs in geographically constrained maritime environments takes on significance beyond the military domain, informing insurance assessments of emerging high-risk maritime areas.
Rising war risk premiums and associated operating costs undermine the economic viability of transiting affected sea lines of communication. Crucially, these effects are expectation-driven, as perceived rather than actual risk shapes insurance pricing and routing decisions. Even low-intensity or sporadic activity can therefore sustain elevated risk perceptions, allowing the mechanism to persist over time without escalation to major conflict.
Shipping companies are thus forced into costly trade-offs between absorbing higher premiums, rerouting vessels, or suspending operations. Such adjustments increase transit times, fuel consumption, and logistical complexity, reducing supply chain reliability even in the absence of sustained kinetic disruption. Insurers, in turn, aggregate localized threat perceptions into broader high-risk maritime zones, translating tactical developments into systemic market signals. In the wake of repeated conflicts in the Middle East, land-based AShMs have emerged as a distinct risk category within maritime insurance assessments, alongside established threats such as piracy or naval mines.
Insurance markets thus act as amplifiers of localized military signals. Even limited and visible deployments, as well as indications of the acquisition or modernization, of land-based AShMs can generate disproportionate macroeconomic effects. Such actions are incorporated into insurers’ assessments of emerging maritime risk through a feedback loop between perceived threat and commercial behavior. In this dynamic, maritime traffic is redirected not through physical denial, but through the imposition of cost and uncertainty. Over time, this produces not only disruption but a gradual reconfiguration of global shipping routes, as land-based AShMs shape maritime behavior indirectly through economic pressure rather than direct control of sea lines of communication.
From Effects to Strategy: The Political Logic of Selective Sea Denial
The economic effects outlined above are not yet globally diffused in a uniform manner, but are instead mainly concentrated in three regions where land-based AShM capabilities are either already fielded or undergoing sustained modernization: the Middle East, the South China Sea, and the Baltic Sea.
The South China Sea resembles a contested archipelagic space with layered maritime claims. Should a conflict arise there and maritime kill chains — including land-based AShMs — be activated, shipping traffic could still be diverted, as was the case in the Red Sea.
In contrast, the Baltic Sea constitutes a quasi-enclosed maritime corridor with severely constrained routing flexibility, as alternative routes are few — primarily the Kiel Canal and the White Sea-Baltic Canal — and subject to state control. As in the Persian Gulf, disruption to maritime traffic in this region and its associated supply chains would have consequences for the global economy, not primarily through energy exports or trade flows, but through the activation of mutual assistance obligations among European states and the resulting increase in financial market uncertainty.
Building on this systemic exposure, the political significance of land-based AShMs in narrow inland seas lies primarily in their role within escalation dynamics rather than in their direct employment.
Both in the Baltic Sea and in the Persian Gulf prior to the outbreak of the current conflict, these systems remain embedded in broader coastal defense postures of the respective littoral states but continue to be relatively underweighted in crisis planning when compared to more immediately visible instruments of maritime disruption such as warships, naval mines, or naval aviation. Where they are considered, the focus tends to lie on the capabilities of Russia and Iran rather than on those of other regional actors. For instance, the land-based AShM capabilities of Baltic NATO members have so far received comparatively less analytical attention.
The Iranian case nevertheless illustrates that such systems can retain a persistent deterrent effect even under conditions of sustained military pressure, due to their mobility, dispersion, and survivability. Their relevance is therefore not static but contingent, functioning in a manner that can resemble an on/off logic depending on perceived targeting pressure and operational visibility. As such, they can serve as instruments for shaping the order of a maritime space and for exerting coercive pressure in both peacetime and crisis, by enabling a controllable form of escalation.
This is also relevant for Russian strategic considerations in the Baltic Sea, where perceptions of NATO’s qualitative superiority — reinforced by recent Ukrainian tactics and operational innovations in the Black Sea, and concerns about its ‘shadow fleet’ tanker flows — may further incentivize caution in exposing naval assets to comparable attritional dynamics. This translates into land-based AShM deployments in Kaliningrad and around St. Petersburg in the Gulf of Finland, where geographical conditions may generate episodically visible but structurally persistent deterrent effects.
Across these cases, escalation unfolds not as a binary transition but as a staged process, ranging from signaling and sensor deployment to targeting preparation and eventual kinetic employment. Within this framework, the political value of land-based AShMs derives less from their actual use than from their integration into credible escalation pathways that remain visible yet only partially suppressible. This generates a cognitive effect in which perceived survivability and latent operational availability enhance deterrence and coercive leverage even in the absence of engagement.
Selective Sea Denial as a Persistent Condition of Maritime Conflict?
The patterns observed in the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf indicate two transitions. First, they reveal how networked and distributed technologies shape conflict. Second, they demonstrate a shift from episodic disruption to a structurally elevated level of risk in key maritime corridors. Both are defined by the ability to calibrate maritime access through temporally and spatially bounded threats rather than area-wide denial. Looking ahead, other powers, notably China and Russia, may adopt and evolve selective sea denial in regions such as the South China Sea or the Baltic Sea. If this approach becomes a persistent rather than exceptional condition, it is likely to diffuse further as an attractive model of limited escalation under conventional constraint.
The demonstrated effectiveness of land-based AShMs is likely to accelerate their proliferation across multiple channels in the coming years, reinforcing a current structural dilemma for Western militaries. Stand-off strike campaigns and maritime defensive measures have so far proven insufficient to neutralize such capabilities, while the deployment of human ground forces remains politically and operationally unattractive, despite its doctrinal relevance in scenarios such as the South China Sea. This proliferation is likely to be accompanied by operational and doctrinal adaptation, as both state and non-state actors refine how these systems are integrated into broader sensor-to-shooter architectures. As long as traditional arms control and non-proliferation efforts are unlikely to gain traction given the simultaneous offensive and defensive character of these systems, and Western approaches do not overcome risk aversion or find new ways to counter them, they will increasingly have to operate within the constraints of remote and low-visibility forms of warfare.
Restoring the manageability of risk, effective management of the threat will depend less on eliminating elements of land-based AShM systems than on constraining their political utility. Rather than attempting to dismantle the networks in which these systems are embedded, planners must pursue deterrence, resilience, and the protection of critical shipping flows. This requires reducing systemic vulnerabilities to temporally and spatially limited disruptions of global trade, as well as greater resources for managing distributed sensing and engagement demands. Consequently, land-based AShMs should be understood not primarily as tactical enablers, but as relatively easy-to-use instruments of controlled strategic escalation. Accordingly, the strategic focus must shift from targeting platforms to shaping the behavior of the actors and networks that employ them.
Commander Helge Adrians, German Navy, M.A., is a Visiting Fellow at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs.
Featured image: An Iranian Qader missile being fired during an exercise in 2020. (Photo via Fars Media Corporation/Wikimedia Commons)
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