Why the S-300 complexes isn't a significant problem for the WestНаголошує на тому, що ЖОДНА із 30 ракет випущених під час тестів в Кап Яру в 2006 році не влучила в ціль!
Mikael Skillt
Veteran | Intelligence | Ukraine | Russia | CEO
Western media- and journalists often think of the S-300 as some kind of a super weapon that could be a potential game changer in the constant race between West and Russia. Nothing could be more wrong, the effectiveness of the S-300 is created by Russian propaganda.
The S-300 air defense system isn't an very effective set of anti-aircraft defense, its more of an tool for intimidation of Russia's neighbors and other states.
This is some of the reasons why the S-300 isn't an significant threat for the West and NATO:
The S-300 air defense system was adopted in 1978. During that time (from 1978 to 2016), for 38 years of operation, this system had never confirmed its high-declared characteristics in real battlefield conditions, and it have also never faced the opposition of the US and NATO electronic warfare systems. Meanwhile, full battle tests of this system, could have been conducted in 1999 in Serbia, but the Russian MoD refused to do so.
Russia lacks the plants for production of modern electronic components and are dependent on external sources to produce the S-300 and for modern air defense systems this is a crucial detail. Parts of the plants where located in Ukraine and was dissembled during the siege of Debaltseve and is up until today not producing parts for the S-300.
The complete absence of production technologies such as modernized automatic assemble makes production slow and unable to keep up with the demand an actual war would have.
Funding for engineering prototypes are often stolen by the corrupted elit, making modernizations weak and often not very effective.
This complex have never been used under real conditions, which has led to the fact that staff doesn't have the know-how to perform complexed technical- and tactical procedures under actual conditions of the 2000s. And therefor have to base their know-how on the Soviet air defense doctrine from the 1970s.
In 2006, at the site of "Kapustin Yar" in the Volgograd region, Russian MoD tested the system for 3 months. The means of the exercise conducted by the S-300 air defense 630th missile battalion was to confirm the high performance of rockets and radar systems, not only in terms of air defense but also for anti-missile usage. The targets was 9K72 rockets fired of the 8K14 missile system complex.
A total of 30 launches were conducted by missile launchers of the tactical system 8K14. Despite the synchronization of launch times between 8K14 and the S-300 air defense system, not one missile from the S-300 was able to bring down the rockets from the 8K14. Despite the fact that the 9K72 has a straight ballistic trajectory and is not capable of counter-measures. Even with the complete failure of every attempt to use the S-300 in means of missile defense, Russia, continued to state that the system is able to cope with such tasks.
The above mentioned and the tendency to self-destruction due to flawed electronics and the lack of possibility to produce a modern computing system has led to the fact that further attempts to modernize S-300 have been cancelled.
During a very short period of time from 1995 to 2003, Russia went thru an unique situation where they openly admitted to having flawed Soviet military technology in comparison to the west. During this time S-300 was openly criticized within the army and MoD. However, this period ended in 2004 and we saw the birth of the "Victory Parade" in 2005 and a completely new era started, where Russia now claimed "All our military equipment has no parallel in the west and it is the best in the world!”
Something western journalists- and media outlets swallowed without any actual fact checking.
