2024 Iran–Israel conflict #2

Isos wrote:I doubt thry have the capacity to build many of their systems. Their capabilities are also exagerated, we saw how their BM lack precision when hitting Israel.

The Iranians have a whole menagerie of missile systems. The older ones like the Shahab-3 or Qadr-110 which are Scud derived are less accurate. But those are not the only missiles they have. For example they have the Qasem which is a MARV and should be way more accurate.

Isos wrote:They don't have the knowledge to build something like a S-400.

They do. The Bavar 373.


Iran has spent most of its money on missiles, so looking at their other military capabilities and trying to extrapolate that to missiles is a bad idea.

During WW2 , the Germans targeted London with V2 flying bombs . A statistical study was conducted after the war to establish if these strikes were targeted or random . To me it looks like some Rockets were flying on inertial navigation , hence a cep of 1 ~ 2 km , what you would expect from older missile flying 1000 km . But some had cep of 1~2 meters . This was done without GPS . So go figure !

I think you are referring to the buzz bombs, which were the V-1s, which used a simple autogyro autopilot to fly legs of a flight to target and could only be used because the target was London and therefore enormous.

There was no precise targeting with these weapons... their CEP was probably closer to 10-20km. If it happened to hit something important... well they got lucky, but a lot of the time they would land in open fields or the middle of a road or open area and do very little damage at all.

It is like the Scud from Desert Storm... most of the time they hit nothing. One time they hit a Marine Barracks and killed 70 odd Americans. It all comes down to luck and numbers. When you are firing a dozen rockets a day eventually you are going to hit something that inflicts pain.... that is just maths.

In fact there was a discussion about the strike that hit the Barracks and it was believed that the Scud that hit it had been hit by a Patriot, but instead of destroying it mid air it actually changed its course and led to the hit.

With Iranian missiles these days some are going to be deflected from their target by partial interceptions and of course the various countermeasures and jamming can effect accuracy as well, but of course some of the rockets used might be old time expired weapons being used up to add numbers to the attack to confuse and tie up the air defences too.

As they burn through their old stocks and also use new missiles and evaluate their performance their knowledge and the quality of the weapons they use and make moving forward will only improve.

People so quickly forget that the attack on Syria by the west involved about 103 weapons, of which 73 were shot down by the Syria air defences... before they were networked into an IADS. Most of the missiles that hit hit old buildings that used to be used in their chemical industry but had been abandoned for a decade or more, so the ones that did hit something didn't hit anything important... which is important too... you can shoot down some and jam and decoy others, but if the enemy direct their missiles at things that are not really important... like ships and subs in dry dock... then even the ones that get through are not the end of the world.

The Bavar 373 is a nice attempt but its nothing like the S-400.

Bavar-373 doesn't have anything like the S-400's unparalleled connectivity to a unified battle network - inside it can talk to a multitude of sensors nets which could include other AD batteries, aircraft like AWACS and interceptors, specialized sensors like space satellites, etc., to share information and allow integrated action while the commanders can exercise complete control over the whole force.

Its like comparing an entire orchestra playing on one sheet of music to a couple of good musicians playing by the ear in an impromptu session. Worlds apart is not even overstating it.

S-400 is a very powerful system but Syria didn't use any S-400s either.

In fact a combination of BUK and TOR would be rather useful if you had them in significant numbers, and indeed the new S-350 and the improved BUK (Viking) would probably be ideal for the job together with TOR to defend the SAMs doing the heavy lifting.

Pantsir would be a useful system too against cruise missile types and drones trying to take down your heavy SAMs.