Actually Ur wrong. We never compared or saw them anything like us. They did slate various pieces of equipment and actually praised others.
Obviously I never had any military access to intel, but most of the publicly available information were based on open intel reports or intelligence.
Obviously such information was coloured by the provider... for instance many many years ago a firearm expert called Hogg published an article about the Stechkin machine pistol, which became the standard western description of the weapon... it was big and heavy and unwieldy its rate of fire was too high and its ammo too weak and all machine pistols are obsolete so it is really junk and the only reason they had a few token models was because of nostalgia for broom handle Mausers which were particularly popular in Russia before WWI.
That article/paragraph was repeated in every military magazine and weapons book published afterwards.
In the mid 1990s in Combat and Survival magazine a guy finally got the chance to test one and he thought it was fantastic. He said it is big and heavy.... but not as big and heavy as a 45 calibre colt pistol and it held 20 rounds of 9mm instead of 7 rounds of 45... The 9mm round it fired was not a hot loaded high energy round but it made the same 9mm hole that western pistol ammo did and three holes would do more damage than one .45 in hole would. He said that like any fully auto weapon the key is controlled bursts and in that way it is very similar to a very small SMG. It explained why Soviet teams kept using it... though not all departments had money for new gear, even those that did kept using some because its features were unique.
I realise the publicly released stuff was part of the propaganda war but pretty much anything negative was considered true and anything positive was Soviet Propaganda and there was always inuendo over anything proven to be good... AKs were reliable but not accurate and were basically copies of a German gun etc etc
I also remember the time we did war games and a major from USA Intel came and he played Russian commander for the exercise and he won he clearly knew the capabilities and best way to use them. Our Lt col was not happy hahaha I was laughing inside
Well then he is an idiot... such things should be about learning and improving for the real thing and not about winning and ego... it is like those Soldier of fortune magazine reports about logistics units in the US army that had women in them that did an A1 job... till the testing officer got suspicous at how easily some of the smaller women in the unit seemed to be handling large heavy boxes of ammo and equipment and he tried it himself only to find they were empty because none of the women in the unit could pick up full ones let alone carry them.
From not knowing it existed to being told by western sources that it was the cheap replacement for the Fagot... and now the suggestion that it might not have been so widely deployed as I thought... I don't care about being wrong, I just want the truth.
Even if the Metis was selected to replace all Fagot systems it could not replace the vehicle launched systems... which is BMP-1/2 and BRDM-2 mounts.
I recently came across a description of the Fagot and Konkurs on the BRDM-2 chassis where the loadout was described as either 15 Konkurs rockets (effectively HOT or TOW equivalents) or a mix of 10 Konkurs missiles and 10 smaller Fagot missiles. Now in a built up area an extra 5 missiles would be useful and the 2.5km range of Fagot is still rather good as many targets probably wouldn't be visible from much further away.
But on the BMP-2 and then retrofitted to what then became the BMP-1 the launcher was a dual launcher too so could use Konkurs or Fagot... but it would not make sense to use Metis in any of those situations.
The normal infantry carried Fagot system would be carried in the back of an MTLB most likely most of the time but for dedicated anti tank they had the BRDM-2... which has been largely replaced by the MTLB based Shturm/Ataka system... which is likely now in the process of being replaced by the very similar looking Krisantema on the same vehicle but of course with a radar antenna added.
I would think the Metis would make sense for special forces... VDV and Spetsnaz and Naval Spetsnaz.
The new model of Metis... the Metis-M2 or is it 3 has a range of 3km and I suspect it is a cross between Kornet/Bulat and Metis with no trailing wire so it can fly much faster and would become a much more sensible replacement for Fagot on obsolete vehicle and man portable mounts
KBP used to have a news page where they listed when their gear was introduced by the Russian military but I can't seem to find it... Russian military procurement is a very strange thing... the Makarov has been replaced several times yet you still see it everywhere... and things I have seen advertised for sale for decades were not in service in numbers... the Mi-28 and Ka-52 were good examples of that for a long time and they showed drones at airshows and displays all of the 90s and 2000s but it was only after 2008 that they actually started funding them and taking them beyond plastic mockups....
There is a balance between using cheap older missiles and missiles that are just too old... the Sagger and Swatter don't come in protective tubes and the Fagot and Konkurs are still very capable systems with upgraded components I would assume... a comparison between the two generations is significant improvements in terms of accuracy and cost and weights, so while they all could be upgraded to be useful the fagot and konkurs are better protected from the elements.
A comparison of Fagot and Metis is that metis is lighter and cheaper but has better range and the standardised mounts on BMPs are designed for it and not for metis. Both are wire guided and have similar flight speed and penetration most likely and both are in a protective tube...
I would believe they still use Fagot and Konkurs, but the new vehicle upgrades are basically eliminating the Konkurs and Fagot launcher for either Ataka or Kornet... so with the phasing out of such systems that might be what the new model Metis is for.... 3km range with the same laser beam riding guidance as Kornet.... so for Boomerang IFV crews with a 57mm high velocity gun and four Kornet-EM missiles and 8 Bulat short range missiles, perhaps the troops in the back will get a portable missile launcher that can fire the new 3km range manportable Metis-M2 or 3, but also launch any remaining Bulat or Kornet missiles too as a dis-mountable system...
I know you are asking why Metis-M2/3 if there is Bulat, but Bulat is for use against lighter targets that are moving so IFVs or drones so you don't need to waste Kornets which are needed for heavy targets. Metis-M2/3 is for heavy targets too... but out to 3km or so, while Bulat might reach 5-6km, and of course Kornet-EM reaches armoured targets at 8.5km.
First off I doubt British and USA intelligence got it wrong.
To be fair would not be the first time... most western sources would tell you that the Russians used 37mm gun mounted cannons for anti tank warfare during WWII, but the guns themselves were low velocity large HE rounds that were more often used against enemy bombers...
Secondly why would Russia design a system such as metis and not use it. It's far better than fagot which is outdated.
But Fagot is not outdated... with a thermal sight it is every bit as capable as Milan with a thermal sight... and it has better range than Metis... the first models of which are more comparable with Dragon III... would you replace Milan with Dragon? Dragon is lighter than Milan and more portable... and terrible. (not suggesting Metis is terrible but weight is not really an issue in a fully mechanised force but range is...)
I do believe that many fagot are still in service most likely down sheer amount of ammo but I believe metis and metis m are in service as well. Fagot with its max 600 penetration compared to metis m 900+ and the system being better across the board that Russia snubbed it?
But with the 1980s models compared side by side the Metis had a penetration very similar to Fagot... about 500mm, but a much shorter range. In the 1990s when the improved Metis with a 1,5km range and better penetration came into view there was no money for large scale replacement.
The Metis was not a cheap for export design... it was a simplify and reduce weight experiment intended for mobile warfare without vehicle support... more Spetsnaz than VDV (who have vehicles with Fagot/Konkurs launchers too). Because it was a very simple and very light weapon it is successful on the export market and a lot of its features found their way into other missiles, but I don't know that it was designed explicitly to replace fagot or even if it did.
More than 100 servicemen and about 40 military hardware, including self-propelled artillery weapons Nona, 100-mm antitank guns Rapira, antitank missile complexes Metis and Fagot, were involved in the exercise.
Nona is a VDV vehicle and use with marines means it could be old Naval Spetsnaz stocks of Metis and marines stocks of fagot were being used...
Metis is cheap and although the early models were short ranged the newer models have improved... but Fagot has a serious range advantage over Metis and is portable enough and is used as a vehicle weapon option together with Konkurs.
This needs more investigation I think..
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