, saw the promotional video for a new missile system called Club-K, he must have known it was special. A Russian company called Morinformsistema-Agat is marketing a cruise missile that can hide inside and launch from inside a shipping container. The six-minute video depicts an invasion from a neighboring country, and the afflicted nation hiding the missile in a port setting, inside an innocuous grey shipping container. The container's top flips open, the missile extends vertically and launches. In the video (embedded below), music blares—what sounds like the soundtrack to the Disney movie Pirates of the Caribbean—as the Club-K's four missiles careen into the sky. The missiles take separate paths, aimed at warships, a concentration of tanks and an airfield.

How could such a weapon be used? For starters, it could make any container ship a clandestine missile boat, able to severely damage an aircraft carrier or escort. It could also be smuggled into a nation and shot from inside that nation's missile defense system. Loaded on trains, they become hidden missile launch sites. Such a system could counter many U.S. advantages, including satellite and UAV reconnaissance imagery and the ability to use ships as a base to support land operations. Remember the less-than-perfect mobile missile Scud huts of the first Gulf War? Imagine if they could hide in nondescript boxes. Close-to-shore terrorism threats also become a little more real, although the chance that a non-state actor would get their hands on one and ship it to the United States seems remote, mainly due to the price and the ability of the United States to track down the culprits via Russia.

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The U.S. has its own proposed missile-system-in-a-box plans, but the Army is poised to cancel the project, which was part of the now-defunct Future Combat Systems program. The Navy can't be happy about the prospect, since it was going to use a version of the system on its upcoming Littoral Combat Ship program.

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