Russia’s Combined Arms Strategy for Neutralizing NATO’s Air Defense Hardware in Ukraine
/ Go to the mediabank Russia’s Geran-2 drones. File photo
/ Go to the mediabank
The Russian military’s strategy of combined aerial attacks, involving waves of strike drones followed up by ballistic, cruise or hypersonic missiles, has proven highly effective not only in the Ukrainian theater, but Iran’s defense against US and Israeli aggression, says Russian defense analyst Alexander Stepanov.The tactic, almost impossible to defend against, involves:drones (slow-flying Geran-2s, faster Geran-4s or rocket-powered Geran-5s – which fly at speeds up to 800 km/h) which by themselves are “extremely difficult” to down using small arms and air defense means available to mobile fire teams“multiple wave” tactics designed to overwhelm and expend expensive and limited Patriot missile stocks and overload enemy air defenses, forcing Ukraine to disperse its Patriot launchersfollow-up precision ballistic and quasi-ballistic missile attacksPatriots, the last line of defense in Kiev’s arsenal, have four missiles per launcher in their PAC-2 variant, and up to 16 in PAC-3. Typically, two missiles are assigned to a single target.
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Playing the Numbers Game
When Russia launches hundreds of projectiles across multiple waves, defense essentially becomes impossible, and involves expending interceptors which cost tens if not hundreds of times more than the strike systems they’re targeting ($4.2-5.3M per Patriot interceptor, compared to tens of thousands of dollars in the case of Geran drones).“All these points create extreme vulnerabilities for SAM operators forced to respond quickly to serious threats, including in the context of massive combined attacks,” Stepanov says.“Even if they manage to repel the first wave of attack drones, [the next waves include] ballistic weapons, high-precision missiles that can fly along a quasi-ballistic trajectory, including Iskanders, and hypersonic ones, like Zircons and the air-launched Kinzhals.”“There is a clear understanding that the equipment being shipped, primarily through NATO countries and the United States, are incapable of countering these speeds. We saw this as well in the Iranian campaign, when expensive systems, including THAAD over-the-horizon interceptors, failed to cope with attacks and were destroyed, along with expensive radars and the regional component of the US’s global early warning system,” Stepanov summed up.
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