We Are The Mighty: How one Russian truck can shoot down an entire squadron in a full-scale war
While the United States has let its short-range air defense systems decline since the end of the Cold War, Russia’s been very active in bolstering theirs. Of course, this can be explained in part by the different situations the two countries face.
Generally, the United States controls the skies over the battlefield, often to the detriment of gear that the Russians have sold to countries like Iraq, Libya, and Yugoslavia. This makes other countries that either bought or licensed Russian designs nervous. So, Russia’s been working hard to come up with more effective defenses, especially for battlefield forces, like tank and infantry divisions.
The latest in this series is a system called Pantsir. It is an advanced, self-propelled combined gun/missile system that is used on 8×8 trucks. On these trucks are 12 SA-22 “Greyhound” surface-to-air missiles and a pair of 30mm cannon. This is a higher capacity than the previous state-of-the-art Russian tactical defense system, the 2S6 Tunguska, which had eight SA-19 “Grison” missiles and two 30mm cannon on a tracked vehicle. To put it bluntly, one of these truck-mounted systems has enough missiles to kill an entire Navy or Marine squadron of F/A-18 Hornets.
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WNU Editor: There is a lot of fire-power packed onto one truck.
I cannot believe what I read! The Pantsir system was defending the nuclear building in progress in Syria with the help of North Korea. September 6 2007 (operation Orchard) Israeli F-15 and F-16 destroy this facility without any loss. We cannot say these planes are "stealth", but they still did the work.
ReplyDeleteOf course the Russian engineers rush to see what was wrong, and I'm sure they improve the system....but Israel, in the same time, improves its electronic protection too.