S-300 Missiles

I was sitting in the car the other day shoving a cheeseburger down my well-muscled throat and listening to the news when someone (I want to say it was the BBC) announced that the Russians had agreed to sell some unspecified number of Russian-made S-300 surface to air missile systems to Iran. This, the BBC said, would fundamentally alter the balance of power and cause all of us in the west to suffer from nasal hair. Later the story was retracted, but who knows if it's really true or not.

So I looked up the S-300 to get an idea of what it's all about. What it amounts to is a Russian version of the Patriot - the individual missile round looks a bit like a Patriot, and the whole missile battery has a Patriot-like feel. Not that the Russians necessarily pirated the Patriot hardware, but I suppose it's possible. Did we leave Patriots lying around somewhere were the KGB could examine them?

The system is better known to the West as the SA-10 "Grumble", once again pointing out the difference between what NATO calls Russian weapons and what the Russians call Russian weapons. The Soviets deployed a largish number of them in the late 1980s in what looks like a terminal defense of Moscow against ALCMs, and was later sold to China and India, where the Chinese use it for the same basic anti-ALCM terminal defense business around Beijing and the Indians, apparently, are more interested in the SA-10's THAAD-like ability to intercept ballistic missiles (not that the SA-10 comes anywhere near the performance of THAAD, but you get the point).

The missile system is awash in what amounts to advertising copy. Track-while-scan, ability to engage multiple targets simultaneously, a single Flap Lid fire control radar able to provide solutions to umpteen mobile launchers, missiles containerized as discrete rounds in tubes that look suspiciously like drainage culverts... Is all of the copy true? Probably, but just casting a quick glance over the specificiations, I see two things.

The first is that the warhead is estimated at between 70 and 100 kilograms for an earlier version and as much as 145 kilograms for a later verison, probably the same "ball bearing" frag/HE warhead type. Why such a big warhead? Normally missile engineers compensate for poor missile accuracy by putting bigger warheads on the missile. This is why missiles that are truly inaccurate are usually nuclear-armed. It doesn't matter how badly you miss when you've got a nuke on board. But gee whiz, 145 kilograms of frag/HE? A PAC-3 Patriot is only about 70 kilograms. Why does the SA-10 have a warhead twice as big? Because it's twice as inaccurate? Just a thought.

The second is that the SA-10 uses the same "two missiles in one engagement" technique common to Soviet doctrine since the 1960s. Does this mean the missile's Ph is that poor that they need to expend two rounds on each non-maneuvering ALCM, or is this just an old Soviet habit that they haven't quite gotten rid of yet?

The bottom line is that this system is reasonably impressive (an engagement envelope from about 50 feet to 100,000 feet is pretty good) but it's been around since the 1980s, its large warhead and ripple-fire requirement make me doubt its accuracy, and I rather doubt we've forgotten how to jam the search, designation and fire control radars in question.

I say, no destabilization threat; the Russians are probably just looking to sell some older stuff cluttering up their warehouses.