Yeah pantsir got destroyed by drones the size of missiles in Syria. Armenian S-300 got destroyed too. Does it mean russian radars suck ?
They were made vulnerable because they were not used properly... Saudi Arabia has the best weapons money can buy from the US and Europe... not only did they not stop drones and cruise missiles they didn't even detect their presence... what it means is that Saudi Arabia sucks when it comes to setting up their air defence systems.
The concentrated efforts of the Israeli and US air forces managed to occasionally hit individual Pantsir vehicles on maybe two or three occasions over how many years... it is hardly anything to skite about... and S-300 is not supposed to be used to shoot down UAVs, it is a long range system for shooting down enemy aircraft before they launch their stand off weapons... lower level systems are supposed to defend them from attack... using an S-300 against any of the drones used in that conflict is just stupid.
Iranian drones can't be destroyed in international airspace in peace time.
The airspace over a US carrier group is not considered international, which an Iranian Airbus found to its cost.
Of course they detected it. And those radar are working in peace time mode with reduced power.
If they had detected it they would have sent up helicopters and aircraft to "escort" it away.
No you don't down drones in peace time. US drones fly non stop around Crimea, when was it the last time Russians destroyed one of them ? Never.
US drones do not enter Crimean airspace and if they did they would be brought down simply because they don't have overflight permission and are a danger to civilian and military air traffic in the area.
Drones flying over your carrier group are also deemed a threat to the safe operations of the air component and would be shot down to prevent an accident like a collision with an aircraft.
Same the persian gulf is full of drones of both sides everyday and they are shot at only if they cross the borders.
There is a border bubble over a US carrier group where they don't allow foreign air traffic... for safety reasons of course.
Nearby AEGIS have S babd radar that van pick such drones easily. They are just as good as S-300 radars. They also have optics to spot them.
The same radars we were told in the 1980s could identify an air target by counting the number of turbine blades in the target aircrafts engine/s... of course they stopped saying that after they shot down an Iranian Airbus thinking it was an F-14 fighter.
The airspace above a carrier is international airspace. You can fly above them as much as you want.
The iranian civil plane was downed during military tensions around the Iran-Iraq war.
The Iranian airbus the USN shot down was still in Iranian Airspace.... and they shot it down with a missile fired from a US ship while inside Iranian territorial waters.
US drones fly at the limits of Crimean waters and take picture all day
But never in Crimean airspace.
US won't shoot randomly at iranian drones. That can give Iran the right to attack US assets and escalate the conflict.
We are not talking about the USN hunting Iranian drones, we are talking about drones that overfly US ships and groups of ships.
For all the Americans know this drone might be packed with HE and is going to be used as a suicide bomb... in revenge for that Iranian General the Americans murdered last year.
Aegis radar is just as good as a S-300 radar. You are talking about the fixed plateform vs the mobile plateform which has nothing to do with aegis being able to spot a drone or not.
The S-300 radar is designed for all sorts of air threats including enemy standoff weapons and low RCS stealthy platforms and is likely rather better than AEGIS systems that will spend most of their time turned off or just listening to prevent giving away the position of the ship all the time.