This is not some random theory we’ve made up, it is the stated design philosophy of the ASRAAM programme as laid out in many archived documents. You seem to be mis-understanding the concept behind ASRAAM, so I’ll try to explain it in more depth. Before that I just want to address this point:
Maximum range is not everything. Let’s imagine two hypothetical missiles, both are near impossible to avoid, one has a maximum range of 10 km range and the other 12.5 km range. You can indeed fire your 12.5 km range missile before the guy with his 10 km range missile can fire his missile; however if at any point between you firing your missile and it hitting him the range between your aircraft and his reduces to less than 10 km then he can fire his missile as well. Your missile will then hit him and he will be dead, however his missile is now in the air, so given a few more seconds it will hit you and you’ll be dead too. You can see that simply having a 25% range advantage over your opponent doesn’t solve the problem of modern missiles being extremely hard to dodge. This is where the idea of speed comes in, particularly when you consider that not every engagement will occur at the absolute maximum range of your missile.
Anyway back to this:
As the name suggests ASRAAM is designed to fulfil the role of a Short Range Air-to-Air Missile. By comparison IR MICA was designed to be a pretty unique (how many similar missiles can you name?) hybrid of a short range and medium range missile. ASRAAM is often compared to IR MICA due to them both having a high maximum range compared to other IR missiles, but this is not a particularly helpful comparison because the to missiles were designed for different roles.
Under UK (and let’s be honest - most other countries’) doctrine you have distinct short range (e.g. Sidewinder), medium range (e.g. AMRAAM), and sometimes long range (e.g. Meteor) missiles. ASRAAM was designed to fulfil the role of a short range missile; like the R-73, R-74, IRIS-T, AIM-9X, Python, etc.
At the end of the day not every air-to air engagement occurs at BVR ranges or at the maximum range of your air to air missiles, hence the existence of the aforementioned short range missiles, and why you don’t see Rafales, Gripens, and Eurofighters flying around with nothing but Meteors loaded. You either have to acknowledge that short range missiles like R-73/74, IRIS-T, AIM-9X, etc. have a role, or argue that as an entire class of weapon they are irrelevant these days and all you need are medium / long range missiles.
It is the role of these short range missiles that ASRAAM was originally designed to fill; medium range engagements would be handled by AMRAAM. This brings us back to what I discussed above: at shorter ranges simply getting the first short on a target is not good enough, you need to prevent (or at least minimise the opportunity for) the hostile aircraft firing a missile back at you. This therefore leads to the conclusion that you want your missile to hit the enemy aircraft before they even fire their missile; and so necessitates two key requirements:
- Your missile should have a longer range than the enemy’s short range missile
- Your missile should be very fast to minimise (or even eliminate) the opportunity for the enemy to respond.
The idea was that against enemy with older (but still very deadly) missiles like R-73 & AIM-9L/M the missile should be so fast that it can be fired and impact the enemy aircraft before the enemy can even get within the front aspect lock range of their missile (making it basically impossible for them to engage you in the frontal aspect - as they would be dead before ever getting a lock). Meanwhile against enemy with more modern missiles the high speed and increased range of your missile should reduce the window the enemy has between getting within range of their missile, and being hit by your missile to an absolute minimum.
It is true that an MICA equipped aircraft can fire their MICA at longer range than the ASRAAM equipped aircraft can fire their ASRAAM. But the ASRAAM was never designed for that situation, if you’re firing a MICA at its maximum range then the ASRAAM equipped aircraft is going to be firing an AMRAAM at you.
