BUK SAM system Thread

What else would Israel say?

And for every system there are countermeasures... the question is will they work?

An over confident Israel saw SA-6 SAMs deployed and assumed they were just some more missiles like SA-2 and SA-3 that they thought they could deal with.

In real combat they found they had no effective counter to continuous wave illumination SAMs even though they had plenty of experience of using such systems (like HAWK).

A clever enemy will always find ways to reduce or eliminate the effectiveness of an enemies weapons, but that goes both ways.

Modern Russian SAMs are not designed to be operated without a challenge, and ECCM is part of the design... including passive optical guidance modes.

Nice pics BTW.

Having 6 guidance channels is rather more important than most people give it credit for.

With each TEL having 6 guidance channels it means that one vehicle can control and guide all the missiles it carries and two missiles from another launcher all at once.

As shown in Libya a single heavy SAM battery from the 1960s can be easily overwhelmed because with one or perhaps two guidance channels it can only engage one or two targets at once, so if 4 cruise missiles are coming in from detection to intercept it can only deal with one or two of them and during that engagement the other missiles are getting closer and closer.

The more guidance channels you have the more effort is needed to overwhelm a system.

Needless to say a single Flanker could probably carry 4-6 cruise missiles each, so while one aircraft could overwhelm a SAM battery, a BUK battery with 6 TELs would require at least 6 aircraft with heavy payloads... and that is assuming those missiles don't cross any Pantsir-S1 or Tunguska or TOR batteries on their way to the target.

So russian army will base in S-300V, Buk-M2 in AD brigades, and Tor-M2 in the AD regiments?

Motorised brigades will consist of Tor-m2, Strela-10, Tunguska?

Yes, though for the future there will be S-300V4, and Buk-M3, an TOR-M3.

And of course TOR-M3, Morfei and a new laser beam riding missile called Baikanuk or something, and Pantsir-S1.

Also Igla-S is supplimented with the new Verba MANPADs.

TR1 wrote:Had a question about the utility of BUk-M3- from what I understand now there will be a potent battery engagement radar, individual TEL phased arrays AND active seekers on each missile?

Is such redundancy really necessary, for a system that does not have that much range by Russian standards, and would that not make each battery very expensive?
Why are active seekers not being sought for S-300V and S-400?

Well I think the point is, is that these things are designed to be very hard to all track down and kill. Even if all of the S-300s batteries and Radar stations get taken out by the enemy, these BUKs (each one of them completely independent if need be) can still run around, hitting and hiding again and playing hell with the enemy, almost like vehicle guerilla warfare. Just look to the Georgia conflict for confirmation. No way anything else will be able to pull that off.

Of course while the air defense umbrella holds and Russian forces have the long-range, short-range, etc... SAMs to back-up the medium-range ones like the BUK; a Pechora-2M will be able to do much of the same job and much cheaper. However, if the Russian air defense is really pressed, assaulted and is hit by everything a powerful adversary has; the Pechoras would be in great trouble. The BUKs however would not be; and this is what makes them a valuable asset; they have less range than the S-300 but are more survivable and harder to find.

The whole design focus behind the BUK was experience with KUB in the Middle East.

It was found that if the battery radar of the KUB system was taken out using UAVs and HARM or something similar then the entire battery became sitting ducks that could be taken out by F-16s with dumb bombs because the TELs had no search or track capability so the missiles on them were useless.

Newer ARH seekers are not as expensive as they used to be, and actually high frequency Ka band (MMW) transmitter/receiver seekers, or ARH seekers are not very expensive at all.

For a system like BUK having active radar homing seekers has many of the same advantages for the SAM system as it would for an aircraft using ARH R-77s instead of SARH R-27s. Remember the performance of radar drops off at the square of distance, so flying the radar seeker right up close to the enemy target means a better lock, and of course for low flying threats an active radar homing missile can be directed by off platform sensors to targets out of the line of sight of the SAM site yet the missile can still be directed to the targets vicinity and it can be engaged by that missile.

An example of that would be the first test of the R-37 where the Mig-31M that was used to launch the missile still had an old model radar with a lock on range of about 120km for fighters and about 200km for bombers, but with an Su-30M flying within 100km of the target passing target data to the Mig-31M it was able to launch its missile and direct it to the vicinity of the target without actually detecting and tracking the target itself. The result was a kill with a missile flight distance of 300km... which is pretty impressive.

For BUK with low flying threats, they won't be hitting targets 300km away, but missiles could be directed to places where targets have been detected and tracked by other nodes on the network and missiles can be fired to intercept targets on the other side of mountains or hills that would otherwise be safe from that battery if it has SARH missiles.

ARH missiles also often have much better terminal phase accuracy because the radar is in the nose of the missile instead of 60-70km away on a vehicle, so often the warhead weight can be reduced to allow an increase in flight performance. The BUK carries a 70kg HE warhead which makes it a big missile.

It will be interesting to see if they go to vertical launch tubes in the later models like they do with the naval Shtil-1.

Another advantage of vertical launch is engagement time... though with a vehicle like TOR you need to use the datalinking capacity of the 6 TELs because although they can each control multiple missiles at a time the tracking radar that controls the engagement is on the front of the turret so vertical launch in any direction means the vehicles must coordinate the directions their turrets face so they cover all potential threat directions... if all turrets are facing in one direction then their vertical launch capacity to engage from any direction becomes moot.

With ARH missiles there is less need to continue tracking though performance is certainly improved if the target is tracked and flight command updates are datalinked to the outgoing SAM to make sure that when it gets to its intercept point the target is nicely centred in its view so it can have maximum terminal manouver performance... if it reaches the intercept point it was given at launch with no updates because the target wasn't tracked after launch then you might find the target is not directly in front of your missile so your missile might have to turn hard just to acquire the target... if the target manouvers in the correct direction at the correct time even a very manouverable missile might not be able to turn fast enough before it blows past the target and loses lock.