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Patriot Air-Defense |
Introduction :
Air defense has come a long way
from the famous large AAA-guns where
literally, thousands of rounds could be
fired without hitting anything
to modern day missiles able to hit
targets moving at hypersonic speeds.
They have become some of the most famous
military equipment even people not
interested in the genre have heard of
these systems like Patriot or the S-400 .
Each generation gets
progressively better radars, better missiles, better
electronics but despite this, most of these have never really been
tested in combat.
Testing seems to indicate that they are
extremely capable
but are they ?
Recent Failures :
If you include
ballistic missile attacks
we've seen several high profile failures
of air defense systems to defend an area.
The attack on the Saudi oil fields where
dozens of drones and cruise missiles
attacked.
The Syrian S-300 hasn't fired or
defended against any Israeli airstrike
since it's been operational.
Again in Saudi Arabia, the Patriot has
failed several times defending against
ballistic missiles from Yemen
and the list goes on and on.
Now granted
some of these can be attributed to other
factors
than just the actual hardware itself
maybe Patriot batteries weren't facing
the proper direction in Saudi Arabia
or maybe the Syrians have decided or
been told by Russia not to use the S-300 but nonetheless, an area which was
supposed to have been defended
was not defended so i think that all has
to be factored in
when considering the effectiveness of
air defense not just hardware
limitations affecting performance
but human limitations that affect
performance as well.
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SAM |
Factor affecting Air Defense :
1. RANGE :
Air defense is an inherently difficult thing.
You have an aircraft or missile flying at several hundred even a thousand kilometres per hour so you can't just fire at the target.
You have to lead it figuring out where it will be once your missile gets there but they can also manoeuvre making it significantly more complicated now you have to adjust as well and calculate a new point of impact for each little turn the target makes and as you do this you lose energy unlike in some movies surface-to-air missile engines only burn for a short time the rest of the time it's just gliding and slowing down each and every little manoeuvre it has to make loses more energy and will eventually just fall out of the sky.
If you've ever played DCS this is something you are well aware of when a SAM site launches on you, you begin making a series of manoeuvres to bleed energy from that missile so a system like the Patriot might have a stated range of 150 kilometers but it has virtually zero chance of hitting anything at that distance against a highly manoeuvrable fighter jet.
The real effective range can be less than half of that so this is one difficulty another is the physical limitations of the missiles themselves.
How much can they manoeuvre ?
What kind of stress can it handle ?
Can the onboard guidance system see and track a large enough area ?
How reliable are the electronics and so on ?
2. RADAR :
The way that the system actually sees the target, most SAM systems have two types of radars: 1. an acquisition or search radar and 2. an engagement radar.
The search radar does just that broadly searching the sky for any threat.
If it finds something it passes that information over to the engagement radar.
Engagement radar is more like binoculars zooming in and focusing on a small area of interest.
It focuses all its energy on one spot giving it a much higher detailed view of that threat the engagement radar then uses that information to actually guide a missile to the target.
There are other forms of guidance other than radar such as infrared and optical but those are typically confined to the shorter-range systems.
Either way, there are inherent difficulties there as well if a radar or infrared tracker can't see the target it can't hit it, if it passes beyond a hill or below the horizon or sends false returns jamming it or other techniques such as notching can make it impossible to engage.
There are also the limitations of the radar itself the original S-300 FLAP LID engagement radar can only see up to 50 degrees in elevation.
So if you can loft a missile into the air and have it come straight down on it it would not be able to defend against it.
Engagement radars can only track so many targets and guide so many missiles at one time the FLAP LID again can only engage six targets at a time and guide two missiles to each.
So if you have a few dozen aircraft cruise missiles or even small drones attacking all at once you can defeat the system by overwhelming it.
3. COMMAND:
Then you have issues such as crew proficiency and getting approval up the chain of command to launch.
Even if you have the greatest SAM system ever created it can be useless without proper command and control.
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SAM |
Recent Development :
So there are many points of failure where these systems can fail in its job to defend an area they are far from the silver bullet which can defend any airspace perfectly which brings us to real-world events each progressive generation of air defense systems generally improves on each aspect of these issues.
The missiles can sustain higher stresses while manoeuvring.
The radar can track more targets.
Systems are more automated to cut back on the required training of crews etc.
And they have all shown to be extremely capable in testing.
Issues :
But a lot of modern
air defenses have never been actually
tested in combat.
The S-300 family, for example, has been
around for 40 years
yet never once used in combat.
Testing is
one thing
it's controlled sometimes even delayed
if the weather is bad.
The operators know it's about to happen
and the targets used are obviously never
manned
so they don't react and attempt to
manoeuvre the same way they would in a
real situation.
There are some things you just can't
learn from tests that require real
combat experience to sort out.
We saw this with the Patriot that
despite it being talked about how good
it was at defending against tactical
ballistic missiles
once it actually had operational use in
the gulf war it performed pretty poorly.
There were issues such as with the
internal clocks used which were running
for days on end and became just a
fraction of a second off resulting in a failure of the system.
In
exercises
this isn't a problem you probably notice
as everything is set up and recalibrated
for that test.
There was a report that the S-300 in Syria was completely
failing to engage
Israeli aircraft and missiles hence why
it has not been used yet
if true this could reveal some pretty
major problems with Russian air defense
systems
of which modern ones have yet to be
tested in combat like the S-300 and S-400
or and probably more likely is that
Russia has given Syria orders not to use
a system for these attacks
as doing so can only hurt the image of
the S-300 if it fires on Israeli
aircraft
Israel would likely bomb it.
As mentioned
before even the best systems can be
overwhelmed
destroying an S-300 site will be a major
propaganda victory for Israel and the
west
and really hurt the sales of Russian air
defence systems and that is true with
many military weapons
the F-117, for example, it enjoyed a great
reputation
said to be invisible to radar and
impossible to shoot down
especially after the successes in the
gulf war then one day that reputation
was suddenly shattered forever when it
was shot down by an older air defense
system over Serbia in 1999.
So sometimes it might be better just to
keep their reputation intact
and a system can be effective in
defending an area with fear alone
regardless of its actual capability but
without actual combat use, it's hard to
know just how effective they are.
I think it's reasonable to assume that
each generation is an improvement over
the last previous systems.
Conclusion :
So how truly effective the latest systems are is still up in the air the newest ones often have incredibly high reputations which might not be true however air defense is simply a tool one of many to defend an area from the attack they are not perfect but undoubtedly getting better every year.
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