by Sergei Adamov
[REGNUM] The White House has finally officially announced the allocation of two batches of military assistance to the Armed Forces of Ukraine in the amount of $1.85 billion. Among other things, Ukraine will receive modern American-made Patriot anti-aircraft missile systems, on which official Kyiv has been insisting for the past few months.
Delivery volumes are relatively small - only one missile battalion. However, as experts who analyze the course of deliveries of Western weapons to the Armed Forces of Ukraine note in a conversation with IA REGNUM , the problem of deliveries of NATO air defense systems should be considered more globally.
According to military experts, a more global topic went unnoticed against the backdrop of a conversation about the Patriot. NATO as a whole is reformatting Ukrainian air defense to its own standards. This is due to a purely practical necessity: in Ukraine there is no production of anti-aircraft missiles for existing systems, and in Soviet times everything necessary for air defense was made on the territory of the RSFSR. Soviet-style systems are being replaced so that the Armed Forces of Ukraine can supply ammunition that NATO can produce / get from warehouses. And doing this is easier than reaching an agreement with countries that have Soviet air defense systems in any significant amount.
Not only "Patriots" are delivered to Ukraine. On Thursday, December 22, the French authorities officially announced the transfer of Crotale anti-aircraft systems to the Armed Forces of Ukraine. In this case, we can talk not just about individual deliveries, but about reformatting Ukrainian air defense as such.
Soviet systems of short, medium and long range are being replaced by plus or minus NATO counterparts. As military experts point out, to simplify, the American Avenger air defense systems supplied by the Armed Forces of Ukraine are (in terms of technical characteristics and the nature of the tasks performed) like our Strela-10, HAWK and Crotale - this is plus or minus our Thor, only worse , and NASAMS and IRIS-T are the Western response to the Buk air defense system.
Add to this the German Gepard installations, which are almost copied from our Tunguska, and you will get a complete reformatting of Ukrainian air defense at all levels at once. The long arm is Patriot, medium-range air defense is IRIS-T and NASAMS, short- and medium-short-range air defense is Hawk, Crotale, Avenger and Gepard.
According to experts, NATO air defense systems themselves are worse than ours. The reason is that for NATO, first of all, the strategy of gaining control in the air is important, in which air defense, in principle, is assigned a secondary role. In the USSR, air defense was developed precisely with the aim of preventing NATO aircraft from dominating the air. So it’s definitely not worth waiting for a qualitative change in the situation here in favor of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.
But there are other aspects. Firstly, with the transition to Western models of air defense systems, the Ukrainian army generally removes all problems with repair / maintenance and the production of ammunition for itself. Secondly, for the Armed Forces of Ukraine, the issue of guidance and target designation is being resolved, because their air defense systems will be integrated into the NATO information system. This applies to target designation from NATO electronic reconnaissance aircraft, which, by the way, are actively cruising along the borders, and reconnaissance drones.
In summary: new deliveries will not allow Ukraine to shoot down all the missiles at once, despite Kyiv's expectations. But they will decide the issue of integrating the Ukrainian army into the NATO system.
We add that the American air defense systems in a collision with a real enemy showed their vulnerability. For example, they are significantly inferior to Iranian-made missiles, which, according to a number of Western media outlets, will be delivered to Russia (recall, according to Western journalists, Russia and Iran have reached an agreement on the supply of Fateh-110 and Zolfaghar class ballistic missiles. True, in Moscow this do not confirm).
“As for counteraction from Western-style air defense, it should be noted that ballistic missiles, in principle, remain a difficult target for air defense. This is well illustrated by the example of Saudi Arabia's military operations against the Yemeni Houthis, where the kingdom's air defense, built on Western systems - the same Patriot air defense systems, cannot guarantee to cover all important areas from missile attacks from the Houthis.
And during the well-known Iranian strike on the Ain al-Assad base in Iraq used by the Americans in early 2020, after the assassination of General Soleimani by the Americans, NATO systems showed far from their best side, ” the Iranian expert, author of the book , said in an interview with REGNUM . Persian Bastion” and a number of articles on the subject of the Middle East Yuri Lyamin.
December 22, 2022
Sergey Adamov