Iran Air Defense Systems

You're going to great lengths to deny what is too obvious to the eye. I'm not sure If I should take all of that seriously.

Makes sense to me... I trust Medo regarding SAMs and his images show the Iranian version of the BUK like missile has straight sides... if you look at the BUK in Georges post above of an Iranian BUK the body gets narrower in front of the main strakes (stabiliser fins).

Iran domestically made long range air defense system Bavar-373 260 KM range, Altitude 27 KM, detection range 320 KM, ability of 100 target tracking simultaneous, and engaged 6 targets ,
https://www.presstv.com/Detail/2019/08/22/604153/Iran-missile-system-Bavar373-President-Rouhani-Defense-Minister-Hatami

Hopefully the system is as good as they’re making out; they do afterall have a shocking record for proclaiming this, that and the other on all manner of systems.
Any interceptions vids available yet?

Truly hope it’s a game changer for them and they mass produce the shit out of it and spread all over the country.

I read on a defence site that the Russians offered the s-400 system but was declined by Tehran. Anyone in the know have info on that?

In any event, hope the system can kick ass.

crod wrote:

I read on a defence site that the Russians offered the s-400 system but was declined by Tehran. Anyone in the know have info on that?

Just a rumour or more serious info?

It was mentioned not long ago by some Rus. official that Iran wasn't interested in the S-400 so maybe there's some truth to it

Iran Joint Army & IRGC Air Defense Exercise and Third Khordad air defense system. S-300 PMU-2, Casta radar, new Mersad-2 Air digital Defense System, Man Pad AD, tropospheric scatter systems

Yeah, it seems a US media outlet claimed that Iran asked Russia for S-400 missiles and that Russia declined to sell them...

https://tass.com/defense/1063060

As you can imagine... American bullshit... no request and no refusal... fake news.

Agree about new AD system Bavar 373. Must mass produce. Kill ratio of 30 % against cruise. My estimate.

Would be really wasteful to be using BUK sized missiles against cruise missiles... you are better off developing or buying something small and cheap like Pantsir or TOR, that can be produced in enormous numbers without breaking your economy and can be used against drones and other aerial targets.

I suspect a US attack these days would start with as many drones as they could launch along with cruise missiles trying to take out your HQs and Comms centres to weaken your defences. By sending an enormous number of targets they would try to overwhelm your defences while at the same time get all your air defence systems active and working so they can also target them in real time with armed drones... they wont expect the first strike to defeat you, but will likely plan to wear you down with wave after wave of attacks. You ability to strike them with ballistic missiles and cruise missiles and your own drones will be critical to give them a slap in the face they have never received before when playing at war against little countries they think are weak.

The military industrial class in USA. We only address the effect. With numerically inferior symmetric war. We only eradicate the Gi from Bronx. Not Bolton

You need to spread that message... any war the US starts it will be starting because Trumps kids and Boltons kids and Pompeos kids wont be involved in the fighting... only kids from poor or middle income families are going to get shot at and risk their lives saving America from Iran who is no threat to anyone except Israel and her extermination of Palestinians. Start a movement in the US called "black soldiers lives matter too"...

They screw around with other countries... it is time to screw with theirs.

Iran have quite effective IADS, which start with long range OTH radars and VHF radars, which see stealth targetas without problems. Iran itself produce its whole cluster of long range, medium range, SHORAD and MANPAD missiles as well as different AA guns. Iran have around 30 Tor-M1, but they themselves produce Crotale SHORADs and with improvements inside they could as well engage cruise missiles, drones, etc. Their last line of defense are AA guns guided with radar/EO complexes like skyguard. IRIAF also very often trained with air defense and are well integrated in IADS. Their fighters are not the most modern, but coordinated with GBAD they will be still very effective in defending their air space.

GPS can be influenced at a local level, the important thing is mobility and actually using the mobility... train to move your air defence systems that can fire on the move. If the target is fixed then build dummies and also alternative positions you can easily move to if existing equipment is hit or incapacitated.

You need missiles that can shoot down their missiles, and the defence needs to be coordinated... give them more targets than they can handle... an old tractor with a gas heater inside with camo netting over it looks like a vehicle with its engine running... use the same camo netting and concealment techniques that you use for the real thing so they can't just immediately ignore a lot of your decoys because they have been watching them for weeks and no body ever goes near them, whereas the actual air defence vehicles are continually manned with crews standing outside having a smoke and regular foot traffic around them and communications signals coming from that site but not from the others that are clearly dummies.

Talk to your own people who look at satellite imagery and generate intel... some things are easy and obvious, other things not so much... in the cold war the US had a good idea of where the Soviets moved their missiles because of the turn radius of the roads they drove the missile transport trucks down... a big long missile truck needs wide radius turn roads to manouver down... of course new trucks with rear wheel steering meant they had rather better capability than the US thought they had for a while... action and reaction... the more tricks you have the more the enemy will under estimate you, which is useful in time of conflict.

Thoughts about interaction between air assets and air defense assets is cursed with a high amount of wronged assumptions.

Space-based strategic ISR assets (and in particularl radar based ones, to the contrary of the typical fascination of common scarce-knowledgeable people with optical based ones, that usually came into play, for target recognition and confirmation, only much after the former have detected the overall area of activity and eventual motion of enemy units) exist since a very long time and ,since theirs introduction, they have represented a problem infinitely bigger for permanetly monitored fixed area with well known coordinates in particular command centers , port facilities and even more airfields , against which the satellite orbit is purposedly programmed since its launch, than easily relocatable and ,even less, high mobile and dispersable ground units.

With the right knowledge of enemy constellation of space ISR satellites position and composition an advanced enemy can obtain effective "strategic surprise" even with mobilization of significative amount of equipment and personnel on the ground or through internal littoral body of water (obviously with blue water area the thing become much more complex), that has been repeatedly proved by Federation's Command with the mobilizazion ,concentration and activation of its forces in actual operations in 2008, 2014 and also in 2015 ,in all those instances objective observation of NATO communications and command lines shown that they had became aware of the scale and area od the operation only after it had been fully completed.

In substance the limitis of space based ISR are fully exploitable by any player owning similar systems, at least if we talk of mobile forces; as said previously for fixed installements and in particular command centers and airfileds that remain the most vujlnerable targets in XXI century wars, mostly for the exposure to stand off cruise missile attacks and, for airfields, the high concentration of very frail vehicles and weapon and fuel storage sites, the unique real defense remain : new generation SHORADs, very high power EW systems, multispectral area masking elements and passive hardening and for ALL of those elements NATO structures remain literally orders of magnitude more vulnerable that similar Federation's ones lacking often even only the semblance of even only ONE of those protection layers !

Now the point about "UAV swarms": UAV with surveillance capabilities and capable to disseminate data collected to other nodes of the network are not only terribly vulnerable, both to soft and hard suppression, but also anything except cheap and fast to produce , even only limiting the reasoning to UAVs with short theatre range with such capabilities (that in a conflict with an advanced opponent will be likely unable even only to take-off for the first time because them and theris base would be obliterated from the face of earth short after having being deployed in a theatre of operation, because remaining within the range of enemy tactical and sub-startegic range missiles.......unless protected by strong area defense previously named) we can observe that even the US in over a decade and half has been capable to produce only few hundreds of them that would no last more than few hours in a conflict with an advanced opponent even if would be all employed in a small section of enemy IAD network.

The allowing technology for realize true unmanned "swarm attacks" (mostly related to realization of truly authonomous IA and to massive reduction ,both in terms of mass and cost, of the electronic and optronic constructive elements and last but not least the realization of a data sharing and collective command channel that wouldn't shatter in presence of today level of high power ground based EW systems) are still very far in the future and taking into account today pace of development of air defense technology it will well behind the capabilities of the latter also when fully realized.

The real danger for future air defense structures lie instead in within-atmosphere maneuvrable hypersonic elements; but those problems, as well known, concerntoday much more our "western partners" ,lacking even soft and hard defense against even only subsonic PGMs , than Federation's designers

nomadski wrote:https://youtu.be/uUfpA9YAgWM
https://youtu.be/Fnre6C803M8

https://youtu.be/RI_tr7aGR8c

https://youtu.be/V30vSPFLeoE

https://youtu.be/Yq1VzmWOwOQ

https://youtu.be/R3XE1T6fezM

never too strong!

Savage systems if they exist. Bibs has been saying for some time they have systems to defeat the S family. Haven’t used yet because they don’t want a hiding from Russia but I wouldn’t put it past them to have some counter measures that’s for sure.
The pantsir kill even if it was by one of these isn’t really countable due to it being switched off and operated poorly by the Syrians.

Mindstorm said it: If you know the enemy satellite installation you can adjust your timing.

Finding system as large as S-300 or Bavar-373 remains very difficult, not easy at all, even for the U.S.

As for lowest class kinematic capability targets such as prop driven drones:

Iran did a very smart thing about this kind of threat.

They took the good performing Soviet KS-19 100mm gun, equipped it with a auto loader and connected it to a optical/thermal guidance system.
4-8 of those Sarir guns are controlled by that thermal imaging sensor that also performs the ballistic and fuse timing calculation.

The idea behind it is the same as the new Russian 60mm AAA system: Kill such low performance targets at extended ranges by 1-3 shots of very inexpensive rounds.
This works up to SDB class targets that are very low on energy in the terminal phase.

The Pantsir-SM retains the 30mm guns that has lower economy but higher all-round and last-dich performance, instead to switching to the 60mm fused gun solution.
Iran seems to go for a Morfey-like all-missile system as new SHORAD system to which hopefully a 76mm or 100mm dedicated gun system would be added.
The benefit would be more ready to fire missiles against targets of higher kinematic performance and cheaper large calibre rounds against targets of unpowered class PGMs and prop driven drones (all generally well below 500km/h).

I'm not an expert on sattelites as well, but simple logic told me, that if a sattelite want to got such high resolution picture, that its lenses have to focus to less than 1^o, what meant it could monitor only a very small area. Specially if sattelites are geostationary at 36.000 km altitude. To have such resolution, you could only monitor few streets in Tehran, not whole Iran. If you want to monitor larger area, you have far lower resolution and in that case masking, false targets, etc still play their role. Iran also had their space program and have equipment to monitor sattelites over them and know, when they are passing over Iran and when to hide important things. Iran knows, that their enemies are US and Israel and they are not naive.

Actually they can use camera sensors with enormous resolution... a modern digital camera seems to have stabilised at between 20 and 24 megapixels, but for spy satellites you have to assume gigapixel level sensors at the very least.

As you point out... the more zoomed in and detailed the view the longer it takes to search larger areas... the night vision system on the Apache attack helo used thermal imaging to see in the dark but the sighting system projected a view to a small monacle in front of the pilots eyes... flying in the dark with a small area visible through the thermals has been described as flying while looking at the world through a straw... you have to keep swinging your head around to see where everything is instead of using your natural field of view.

Searching... even with very high resolution images is slow and I would suspect they will use computers to scan the images for parts of fragments of things of interest like buildings or vehicles of a specific type or colour, or specific road shapes or certain trucks. A human would then examine it in close detail and make determinations without having to visually look over hundreds or even thousands of square kms of ground... I would say searching a city would be more difficult than open empty ground.

The point is that a large radar set up and operating emits a signal that can draw attention to that region, so to find the radar an electronic emission map overlayed with a satellite photo of the ground and you can quickly locate radars and comms centres and often just by monitoring certain cell phone numbers you can find HQs even if they are bunkers under ground.

What Iran needs are satellites of their own and to spend a few years looking at satellite images of the US and Israel and they will quickly work out what is easy and what is hard... as Mindstorm mentions... lots of Russian exercises surprised the west, not to mention a lot of their actions came as a surprise too. Iraq was able to continue to launch Scud missiles at will despite complete satellite coverage by the US and the west... they are not perfect by any means, but you do have to actively counter their ability to watch you.

The threat of swarm saturation, but slow suicide drones like the Harpy series can be confronted economically by systems like Derivatsiya-PVO 57mm and Irans Sarir 100mm system based on KS-19.
In a saturation scenario where numbers count, you don't want to spend a mach 3 guided missile, capable to intercept >mach 2 targets on something in the kinematic class of a Harpy.
Benefit here over systems like the Pantsir 30mm gun is that you can engage at longer ranges of course. This benefits the area under protection of this economic AAA component as well as the numbers of engagements possible until the targets come too close.

Iran would use its Sarir gun system with a single round, where the target is very slow and not maneuvering or concentrate the fire of a 4 gun battery, one shot each, on a single target with all rounds arriving at around the same time.
The latter was a concept followed by Iran in the later 2000's, where thermal cameras had become affordable enough to be used to control a Sarir battery. The goal back then was simultaneous automated firing and reloading against Tomahawk class cruise missiles. A concentrated burst of the whole battery would kill the CM target at a affordable cost.

The Derivatsiya-PVO 57mm system tries to follow this concept and make up lower destructive power shells with its relative high rate of fire. The mobility requirements of Russia, simply do not allow a static Sarir-like concept. The Derivatsiya-PVO needs to make up the destructive power difference of 3kg 57mm vs. 15kg 100mm round and the non-simultaneous arrival of the shells at target via a higher rate of fire and more rounds spend.

4 simultaneously arriving Sarir 100mm shells were apparently assumed to create a large enough kill circle against a low maneuvering target in Tomahawk class to allow a high PK at >6km distance.
The 57mm systems higher ROF allows the arrival of shells at still relative short interval to allow a equivalent kill circle to the 4-shell battery Sarir at maybe 25 shells.
More importantly: While Irans Sarir system needs a static 4 gun battery to achieve that performance, the Derivatsiya-PVO 57mm can approach it with its single mobile vehicle layout. Plus the amount of ready to fire rounds is several times larger than that of a Sarir battery.

If requirements on armor and mobility are as high as with the Russian Derivatsiya-PVO, economy gets affected.
I don't know the exact assured kill sphere that the KS-19 100mm shell creates but it may be sufficient to assure a kill against a maneuvering <200km/h suicide drone with a single shot (30m?).
This would be the economic requirement to confront "expandable"suicide drones, a simple shell with an electronic time fuse.

Chinese have already developed a more mobile 76mm large caliber concept with high ROF and large magazine. But an ideal AAA concept to allow necessary economy performance would be a 3-barrel rotary canon variant of the KS-19 on a heavy off road truck chassis. The benefit would be that 4-gun Sarir battery would be shrinkend to a single mobile vehicle. Barrel cooling, recoil force and overall weight would be the obvious hurdles here.
The AHEAD concept on larger caliber rounds could also be a solution that requires lower ROF.

In general, the higher the kinematic performance the lower the effective envelope of an AAA system. So where a Pantsir 30mm gun has its lowest envelope at around 1-1,5km against a crossing, maneuvering supersonic target, very good for self defense of the system itself, the Sarir/KS-19 100mm system achieves 3-3,5km in that worst case target scenario. This allows protection of larger areas and earlier attack cycle to counter mass-saturation scenarios.
There are always key static targets that require protection, such as the Konteyner OTHR-B or airbases.

Iran MOD development and construction Bavar-373 loange range air defense system and Sayyad-4 missile

yavar wrote:
Iran MOD development and construction Bavar-373 loange range air defense system and Sayyad-4 missile

Did it say how long it takes to construct and commission? Hope they can get a shed lot and built real quick....they might need them!