After a decade or two of development, they are finally putting in the first battalion near Moscow.  I think it will perform as you listed above  Thankfully, we won't have to find out for at least another 5-10 years until they start exporting it, and even then it will be so expensive that about the only country that will buy it is China.  If/when China does buy some, they will be a significant complication to our defense of Taiwan.

Well, at long range, like 300km+, I suppose it probably isn't moving too fast anymore.  I'm sure it does have a pretty good size RCS.  It does seem possible that we ought to be able to shoot AMRAAMs at it if a fighter is in the right position near the target of the S-400.

Those mobile Batteries only carry a limited supply of them and they probably are a pain to reload. I heard they keep them to target AWACS. So It would be cost effective to AMRAAM them.

Why shoot them in the air? Blow the launchers and the radars apart on the ground. Who says we fight fair?

 

Herald

 

Those mobile Batteries only carry a limited supply of them and they probably are a pain to reload. I heard they keep them to target AWACS. So It would be cost effective to AMRAAM them.

AusAirpower, even if it is run by Carlo Kopp, has some pretty nice photos of S-400 launchers with three long-range missiles carried in the standard S-300 fashion, and three short-range missiles in a triple cell located where the fourth missile normally is. Going off that logic, the S-400 battery could be optimised for a wide range of threats depending of the situation.

 

The shorter range missiles, being much smaller, give you a decent persistance (up to twelve per launcher) with an practical engagement range of ~120km as opposed to reduced (four per launcher) persistance for very long range (~300km practical) engagements, but the battery is infinately more flexible than the standard S-300/Patriot launcher configuration.

 

While I believe you that there were only three in the photo, the S-400 can be configured with a sort of "four-pack" of the smaller 40km and 120km range missiles replacing one of the large missiles.  Thus one possible launcher configuration would be three very long range missiles and four medium or long range missiles.  I think this is actually quite similar in configuration to the Patriot system, which IIRC can replace each of the standard size Patriot II tubes with a four-pack of Patriot III missiles.  With up to 12 launch vehicles per battalion, plus reloads, it could take a little while to run a battalion dry.  Even then, depending on the density of the IADS and just how far away the targets are, a neighboring battalion or two would probably be sharing the load of engaging the long-range targets.  Still, it does seem possible that we could have some capability of defending our high-value assets with a CAP by trying to engage the incoming SAMs.  Maybe in several years we'll get a chance to find out above and east of Taiwan.

 

Can't we all just get along?

 

 

-DA