Russia-Turkey S-400 missile deal

I wonder if the S-400 radar data on a F-22 or F-35 or even an F-16 has fed back into their Intel from an obliging friend in Turkish AD yet.

Lots of software in those Turkish systems that could lead them to false conclusions about what it can or cannot engage.

Russia has radars in Syria where Israeli F-35s and US F-22s have been operating, and we know their Container system tracked F-35s on the Iran Iraq border too...

I suspect US bluster about Turkey buying S-400 is to prevent Turkey finding out how vulnerable the F-35s are to S-400 rather than how vulnerable the S-400s are to F-35s...

I'd say it was definitely worth the US giving the Turks the money for it in payment for that information.

S-400 is just one piece of the Russian IADS... knowledge regarding Russian S-400s on its own is probably not that much use because it is its use within the entire Russian system that makes the system (S-400 and Russias IADS) so powerful and effective.

US knowing their S-400's weak spots means Greek/Israeli f-35 more likely to survive them during a bombing.

Assuming that knowledge offers some weaknesses that can be exploited... hell Turkey should realise such information would be used against them and they could get the Russians to mix up a batch of false information they can pass on to the US so they get the money anyway...

Russian S-400 are also better integrated. OTH radars will see f-35s coming way before S-400. Then Nebo will see them then S-400 and shorter range systems will see their munitions...

Exactly... the first radar that HATO need to bypass in a sneak attack on any part of Russia will never be an S-400 battery.... their OTH-B radars of all types see much deeper into international air space...

Except of course that Turkey does not have any Russian S-400s and only has a fraction of the support equipment that goes into making it a capable system...

I think they gave some numbers about one of the radars something like 260km against an f-16 for turkish version or export version and more than 400 for russian version.

Plus all the secret support equipment that the Russians will use with their S-400 batteries that are not for sale that make them much more effective than they would be on their own....

For that matter I would take Buks over S-400 any day. For the same price you can have 10 systems. One or two S-400 are useless against well armed countries when you don't have pantsir/tor and other L band radars to use with it.

If you think of it like transport planes... it is the difference between having 5 An-124s and 100 Il-476s...

There are some jobs the Il-476 simply can't do that an An-124 can, but most of the time the An-124 is just too big and heavy and expensive to use for most targets... it would be massive overkill against cruise missiles and drones...

Larger numbers of smaller systems makes more sense if you can't have both.

BTW Slovakia has had SA-10 SAMs for quite some time yet Syrian S-300s seem to still represent a serious problem for western air forces... for big systems like S-400 what they provide is long range high quality radar coverage of a very large volume of airspace... with a missile range of up to 400km you could probably cover all of New Zealands air space with 5-6 batteries... especially if you have a few container systems to see beyond mountain ranges...

The money generated from these sales is where these weapon makers get their best profit margins, so this is pouring money into SAM development for the future...

Well the S-400 is a heavy system to deploy and is very limited by the number of missiles. Send 24 drones on it and it will use all its stock of missiles then just a random bomber will take it out. Turks would need 4-6 tors and 1 Nebo radar with it to have a decent AD coverage/protection.

True, and fair enough, but Turkey already has other military assets... when they detect those 24 drones they might just send up a dozen F-16s with AAMs to shoot them down.

The S-400 adds something to the Turkish air defence network that they didn't have before, and while a dozen BUK or TOR or Pantsir systems would be useful too they would only protect individual targets from attack whereas the S-400 can defend very large areas at a time.

Like I said having 6 An-124s or 100 Il-476s... either is limiting... the better situation is to have a couple of An-124s and increasingly larger numbers of smaller and smaller aircraft gives you the best transport capability... so a few An-124s, a few dozen Il-476s, 100 Il-276s, a similar number of Il-114s and Il-112s and 400-500 An-2 replacements at the local small field level...

Ironically sometimes you use bigger planes not for their weight capacity but for their range... moving a 20 ton payload wouldn't normally need a plane bigger than an Il-276, but if you want to move it 5,000km then an Il-476 actually is a better choice for the job, or for a 10,000km range move an An-124 or equivalent.

Back to SAMs, the smaller missile systems are better but if an enemy JSTARS or AWACS platform wanders into range then obviously shooting that down will have an enormous effect on any conflict, both in terms of the loss of the aircraft, but also the change in tactics on the other side to prevent it from happening again... their support aircraft might start operating from further away reducing their performance and capability in the conflict.

The Russians have not launched a single S-400 SAM in Syria AFAIK, yet the impact in theatre is pretty clear...

I wonder how differently the Syrian theatre would've played out if Putin had honored the s-300 contract with Assad that was already payed for in 2010 instead of denying them valuable defensive weaponry for the sake of Israel? I guess we'll never know now.

Well we can make some pretty educated guesses... the Israelis would have mounted serious attempts to destroy it to start off and the so called Syrian uprising would have given them a golden opportunity to use terrorists on the ground to probably mount an operation to capture parts or all of a battery intact so they can take it to bits and see how it worked like they have done so many times before.

S-300s would not have stopped Israel on their own and certainly would have been worse than useless against ISIS and the Kurds and their western supporters...

The presence of the S-300 system would have added a lot of focus and made the west pour even more resources into the ground based destruction of Assad... a and perhaps led to them using a cruise missile attack on the battery to conceal a ground based attempt to snatch the system intact to take it back to Turkey or Israel for detailed dissection.

It would be like saying an S-300 battery would have saved Serbia, but if Serbia had S-300 then the west would just send cruise missile after cruise missile to try to defeat it and cut off the supply of new missiles.

What would have been rather more use would have been Pantsir... smaller, lighter and very mobile and very capable of shooting down aircraft and munitions in numbers to make them highly dangerous... but again more than one battery would be needed... and they would find decoys would be valuable too.

Even if it was captured (unlikely because the S-300's would've been stationed in the Damascus military airport which was never captured throughout the war), it's an export model which wouldn't have compromised Russia's domestic S-300's. Of course Israel would mount an offensive to destroy the systems, but they would've been protected by Pantsir-S1's which were delivered to Syria between 2007 and 2009.

You are missing the point.... the S-300 could potentially shoot down aircraft over Israeli airspace and so would in their eyes represent a terrorist threat that could shut down Israeli airspace any time they wanted.... and the Israeli military is like the western military and very aircraft oriented... being unable to use their air power would be very limiting for them... in their view it would be akin to Russia giving Syria a nuclear weapon...

The Israelis have bottomless pockets because the US will simply supply them anything they want... so missile after missile after missile... eventually they would start getting through.

Damascus airport was not captured because it was a harder nut to crack than the rebels would be capable of managing on their own, but the presence of S-300 would have made support and funding from the west basically make attacking that area a requirement of continued support... the Turks would be helping them too because they wouldn't want Syria to have S-300s either...

It would've stopped Israel and the United States from bombing the SAA and its allies for ISIS and the moderate headchoppers unimpeded.

It would have been seen as a serious threat and Syria would have been heavily attacked before it could be made operational...

You mean even more than the massive amount of resources they've already poured in to oust Assad?

Yes... they would have gotten more internal support for what they ended up doing... it wouldn't just be about toppling Assad, it would also be about saving Israel again...

That seems like a cop-out to me, other than a full scale invasion like Iraq, what other support could FUKUS have given the terrorists which they didn't by then?

No fly zones and direct support to Turkey... destruction of the Syrian Air Force on the ground... you saw how they over reacted to that fake chemical weapons attack... the actual presence of S-300s in Syria, but no Russian troops to protect them... the only reason they didn't go after the S-300s this time was the risk that the Russians would help them fight off the attack and if that was the case they might start cleaning up the Allied airpower in the region... Israeli, Turkish, American...

A cruise missile attack from where? Israel? Syria would've responded with Smerch and Tochka-U.
A US destroyer? That would've forced Russia's hand (for better or worse) to respond.

Where were Smerch and Tochka-U when the west attacked Syria with cruise missiles?

The presence of Russian forces made the west show some restraint, but they still launched over 100 cruise missiles to hit two airfields and some old buildings that used to be chemical labs.

They only got the exchemical labs because they are not chemical labs any more and therefore were not defended, but if they had one S-300 battery then that would have had 100 cruise missiles fired at it alone.

Their BUK and Pantsir would not have been located with the S-300 only... the simple fact is that if they had an S-300 delivered then they would need to gather up their air defence systems together in one place to defend the S-300 leaving the rest of the country vulnerable to attack... making this AD centre a prime target for ground forces... western or their terrorist allies.

If Serbia had the S-300's then they would've set up a defacto no-fly zone over the whole country and while NATO (the US) would've launched cruise missiles at them, they would have a difficult time pin-pointing where the systems are as they would be constantly on the move, with their radars turned on intermittently. No country as far as I'm aware has been defeated with a cruise missile attack only.

They could just hit military targets in the country with cruise missiles and use drones.

The S-300 has to be set up to work and when they set it up it can be attacked... if all you need is a big SAM system then Syria should already be fine... they have S-200 which has better range than most SAMs. S-300 is certainly much better than older SAMs but it still can't win wars on its own.

Syria had 50 Pantsir Systems by 2009, they would've protected the S-300's and vice versa.

Even now they operate them individually or in pairs, which leaves them vulnerable to being overwhelmed.

Look at the numbers of missiles used in these attacks... usually 20-24 which would easily be handled by a Russian battery of Pantsir... but against one or two vehicles it is close to overwhelming...

Saying that Israel, the US and their terrorist proxies would've gotten their way anyway because muh-cruise missiles (that Pantsir shoots down as easily as the S-300 does planes) quite frankly seems like bullshit to me.

I am saying you are overestimating the effect of one SAM system... whether that is a MANPAD or Pantsir or S-300.

What has really made a difference for Syria is being linked in to the Russian IADS, which means their sensors and weapons are vastly more effective than they were before... previously if a Syrian air defence battery was turned off it saw nothing and anything to fly past it, but now they can see you and wait till you are most vulnerable and switch on tracking radars and launch missiles without any warning... much more effective and difficult to deal with.

S-300 is mobile but Syria is also mostly desert.

We'll never know for sure how much the S-300's would've helped Syria but pretending like they wouldn't have helped at all is absurd.

What would have helped would have been Assad not flirting with the west and turning away from Russia in the first place... he could have taking Syrias internal and international situation rather more seriously.

Buying a battery of S-300s would not have saved them... any more than buying a regiment of Su-30s would have saved them.