NEW RUSSIAN MISSILE FIGHTS PATRIOTS

Given the, um, uneven track record of the Patriot mis­sile inter­cep­tor, you’d think such a weapon might not be nec­es­sary. But Russia has gone ahead and put together “the first bal­lis­tic mis­sile ever to include built-​​in coun­ter­mea­sures against the West’s grow­ing range of deployed the­atre mis­sile defence sys­tems,” accord­ing to Jane’s Defence Weekly.

The Iskander-​​E short-​​range bal­lis­tic mis­sile is designed to defeat Western bal­lis­tic mis­sile defence sys­tems, par­tic­u­larly the Patriot air-​​defence sys­tem…
It appears to forego con­ven­tional chaff, flare and anti-​​radar sig­nals and instead employs manoeu­vring at both launch and attack phases, a low and direct tra­jec­tory and a low radar sig­na­ture pro­duced by what Russian reports called “a spe­cial com­pos­ite”… These details will be [puz­zling] to Western mis­sile defence spe­cial­ists.
The Iskander-​​E has a max­i­mum range of 280 km and a pay­load of 480 kg to com­ply with the lim­its laid down by the Missile Technology Control Regime… In each case these mis­siles can be used to carry be nuclear, chem­i­cal or bio­log­i­cal war­heads.
Nations such as Syria (in 2004) and Iran (in 2001) were reported to have shown inter­est in pur­chas­ing this weapon — which is cur­rently avail­able to the mar­ket — how­ever this seems an unlikely event and was denied in each case. Russia appears to be court­ing its mar­ket by reveal­ing many of the mis­sile details in a 21 February 2005 broad­cast on Moscow’s Channel 1 tele­vi­sion news pro­gramme. “Missileers are usu­ally wary of show­ing their hands regard­ing coun­ter­mea­sures,” said Uzi Rubin, for­mer direc­tor of Israel’s Missile Defence Agency. “I can only inter­pret the Russians’ bout of trans­parency as a mar­ket­ing effort toward cus­tomers who face the­atre mis­sile defence sys­tems.”

April 5th, 2005 | Missiles | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.