How scary is the Russian S-400 SAM? - Scott Wolff - http://fightersweep.com/3414/how-scary-is-the-russian-s-400-sam-system/
Simply stated, of all the surface-to-air threats being faced by coalition airpower over Syria, the Russian S-400 SAM, known as the "Triumf" at home and better known to NATO as the SA-21 "Growler," is the most capable and lethal long-range air defense missile system on the planet.
S-400 air-defense shields Russia from sky & space threats WATCH: https://youtu.be/yxUnnbZDqAc
In response to the downing of a Russian Su-24M by a Turkish F-16C on 24 November, the Russians announced a few changes to their Air Tasking Order in Syria: 1) ALL surface attack sorties would have fighter escorts and, 2) air defense batteries would be standing up the S-400, with orders to engage *all* aircraft deemed to be hostile to Russian air operations.
Developed by Almaz-Antey Central Design Bureau, the SA-21 has been in service with the Russian military since 2007. The system is capable of destroying airborne targets as far as 250 miles away, at speeds that are just....ridiculous. An excellent write-up on the system and its various components can be found here, courtesy of Airpower Australia.
So what does all of that mean for coalition airpower? Our good friend Tyson Wetzel, a graduate of and former instructor at the U.S. Air Force Weapons School, has broken down the tactical and strategic implications for the Russian S-400 deployment in Syria. The bottom line? It's a pretty scary prospect, considering the SA-21-from its current position around Hmeymim Air Base near Latakia, can cover all by the eastern-most points in Syria.
That also means a healthy amount of Operation Inherent R1esolve air assets, both U.S. and coalition, are underneath the Growler's coverage at their forward-deployed locations. That fact is, as one U.S. pilot said, "not even remotely" awesome for anyone flying over Syria.
While other news outlets have reported no U.S warplanes have flown since the SA-21s have been deployed, we know this simply is not the case.
"SA-21's haven't changed our fly rates or the areas we operate in," says one American pilot. "We've been flying in SA-5 MEZs for a year now and they have known we have been there the entire time."
Russia begins delivering S-300 air defense system to Iran -
http://www.timesofisrael.com/russia-begins-delivering-s-300-air-defense-system-to-iran/
Moscow arms adviser says advanced battery on the way to Tehran; worried Israel has long urged Putin to scrap deal
President Vladimir Putin's arms trade adviser says Russia has begun delivering S-300 air defense missile systems to Iran, according to the Russian state news agency Tass.
Tass quoted Vladimir Kozhin as saying Thursday that the implementation of the contract for the delivery of the S-300s has begun and the deliveries have started. He didn't provide any specifics.
One of the most sophisticated anti-aircraft weapons in the world, the S-300 is capable of tracking multiple planes at once, and some versions have an interception range of up to 200 kilometers.
In 2010 Russia froze a deal to supply advanced long-range S-300 missile systems to Iran, linking the decision to UN sanctions. Putin lifted the suspension earlier this year following Iran's deal with six world powers that curbed its nuclear program in exchange for relief from international sanctions. Officials said last month that Russia and Iran finalized the contract for their delivery.
Israel has long sought to block the sale to Iran of the S-300 system, which analysts say could impede a potential Israeli strike on Tehran's nuclear facilities. Other officials have expressed concern that the systems could reach Syria and Hezbollah, diluting Israel's regional air supremacy.
Russia initially agreed to sell the system to Iran in 2007 but then balked, saying at the time it was complying with a United Nations arms embargo on the Islamic Republic.
In April, shortly after the announcement of the Lausanne outline for the nuclear deal between world powers and Iran, Russia announced it was lifting the ban on selling the advanced missile defense system to Iran, over American and Israeli objections.
In August, Iran and Russia announced that the system would be delivered by the end of the year, with Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov saying at the time that "just technical details" remained to be agreed upon.
Israel's air superiority clouded by new Russian missiles in Syria - By Judah Ari Gross -
http://www.timesofisrael.com/israels-air-superiority-in-syria-clouded-by-russian-s-400/
Putin's deployment of advanced S-400 system impacts a mainstay of Israel's defense strategy, though coordination with Moscow mitigates the threat
Israel's air superiority over its enemies has been a linchpin of its defense strategy for decades. The capacity of Israeli planes to carry out attacks well within enemies' borders has prevented Syria and Iraq from creating nuclear weapons. The Israel Air Force's unquestioned supremacy over neighboring forces has kept Syrian, Egyptian and Jordanian planes almost entirely out of Israeli airspace in the country's wars.
But with the recent deployment of the Russian S-400 "Triumph" missile defense system in Syria, that absolute primacy is now in question.
The S-400's specs are enough to make any Israeli's heart race. The anti-aircraft system - constituting an array radar to monitor the skies and a missile battery - can track and shoot down targets some 400 kilometers (250 miles) away. At its new position on the Syrian coast in Latakia, that range encompasses half of Israel's airspace, including Ben Gurion International Airport.
This is not the first time that Russian technology in Syria has called into question Israel's aerial supremacy, and the precedent was catastrophic: In the 1973 Yom Kippur War, the 2K12 "Kub" missile defense system, provided to Syria by the then-Soviet Union, destroyed dozens of Israeli planes.
The "Kub" prevented an Israeli aerial offensive into Syria in 1973; the S-400 extends deep into Israel's sovereign air space.
In addition to the S-400, Russia has been bringing highly advanced ordnance into the Syrian theater of war, including outfitting its jet fighters with air-to-air missiles, the Israeli NRG website recently reported.
By bulking up their air defenses in Syria, the Russians hope to prevent future attacks on their aircraft, like the incident last week when the Turkish military brought down an Su-24 jet that Ankara claimed had entered its airspace.
"This system is liable to worry people," said Yiftah Shapir, a military technology research fellow at the Tel Aviv University-affiliated Institute for National Security Studies, said curtly of the S-400.
Nonetheless, he stressed, while the S-400 restricts the previous free rein that Israel had over its neighbor's skies, the people with their finger on the trigger are not enemies.
"Today [the S-400] is in the hands of the Russians, and we have coordination with them over what's happening in Syria," Shapir noted.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu highlighted the importance of that coordination during and after a meeting in Paris on Monday with Russian President Vladimnir Putin.
So long as that's the case and the Moscow-Tel Aviv hotline remains open, the S-400's presence in Syria shouldn't "keep anyone from sleeping at night," said Uzi Rubin, a missile defense analyst for the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies.
Besides, Rubin said with dry humor, "there are enough other things for us to worry about."
The S-400 missile defense system is also intended to stay in the hands of the Russians, even when - or if - their army pulls out of Syria. The anti-aircraft battery will not be a party favor for whoever ultimately winds up running Syria, both Shapir and Rubin pointed out.
In Paris on Monday evening, Netanyahu and Putin further discussed the lines of communications and announced they would be strengthened in the coming days, with IDF and Russian Army generals meeting in Tel Aviv on Tuesday.
And yet, some experts stress, while there is currently no impending threat to Israel's operations in Syria, there is an inherent discomfort with having your freedom of movement potentially restricted and requiring coordination with an outside force, no matter how friendly. The supremacy of the Israeli Air Force, one of the most advanced and capable air forces in the world, is, after all, a central factor in Israel's essential capacity to defend itself, by itself, in a hostile and wildly unpredictable region.
No conflicts of interest
Today, the interests of Russia and Israel in Syria do not conflict with one another. Israel's immediate concern in Syria is not President Bashar Assad or his forces, but Hezbollah. Putin, meanwhile, is concerned with propping up Assad and defeating the Islamic State - and very much in that order of preference.
Though Israel certainly sees no friend in Iran-backed Assad, who regularly speaks out against the Jewish state and whose father waged war with Israel in 1967 and 1973, the IDF has taken a hands-off approach to the Syrian civil war, only intervening and striking Syrian army outposts when mortar shells or rocket fire spills over onto Israeli territory.
Meanwhile, Russia has adopted a laissez-faire stance towards Assad's ally, and one of Israel's main enemies, Hezbollah, according to Nadav Pollak, a researcher with the Washington Institute for Near East Studies and former analyst for the Israeli government.
"Russia has sold a lot of weapons to Syria. If they sell 15 crates and two of them go to Hezbollah, Russia's not going to say anything. I'm not even sure they're aware it's happening," Pollak said.
But on the flip side, he said, "It doesn't seem that Russia cares too much if Israel is targeting those arms shipments."
Which it has been doing, Prime Minister Netanyahu admitted on Tuesday. According to an accumulation of reports, in fact, Israel has struck sites in Syria some five times in the past few weeks alone, for the most part against weapon caches and convoys. One of these raids, an alleged bombing run in Qalamoun, near Syria's border with Lebanon, occurred on Saturday night, two days after Russia claims the S-400 was put in place.
Russian pilots have also accidentally breached Israeli airspace, with no Israeli response - in stark contrast to the Turkey incident. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon and IDF officers have all indicated that these non-incidents demonstrate the efficacy of Israel's hotline coordination with Russia.
At this stage, there is no threat to that hotline. Israel's security demands have not changed. And should Russia's plans for Syria change, the frequent communication between the IDF's deputy chief of staff and his Russian counterpart is meant to ensure there is ample notice for the IDF to determine how best to proceed.
Though security experts are wary to hazard what exactly Russia's intentions are in the Middle East - "might," "possibly," "could" and "may" are the constant refrain in analyses on Putin's plans - no serious defense thinker has proposed that a surprise attack on an IAF jet is on Moscow's agenda.
But Russia is scary
All that having been said, the increased presence of Russia as a Middle East actor is troubling to both Israel and the West. In the past few years, Putin has proven time and again that he is prepared to take steps, in both Ukraine and Syria, that NATO countries denounce.
Russia's overall support for the Assad regime, and its current presence in Syria, have miffed Americans, several European countries and the Gulf States, who have called for Assad to step down.
For Israel, more problematic have been Russia's plans to sell the less advanced, but hardly less problematic S-300 missile system to both Syria and Iran.
Israel's concerns over Russian military tech in the Middle East extend back to the Cold War, and the installment of anti-aircraft batteries in Egypt and Syria. Israel has always been able to overcome the challenges those systems presented, but often at some cost, in terms of both military effort and human life.
With regards to Israel's enemies, Russia - and the former Soviet Union before it - has wavered between active support, as with Syria, and a more tacit form of support by remaining a trade partner, in the case of Iran. Such policies do not engender much good will among Israelis.
When Russia's sale of an S-300 battery to Bashar Assad seemed set to go ahead in 2013, Mitch Ginsburg (my predecessor as Times of Israel military correspondent) summed up the problems with Russia's support for Syria in his still-appropriately titled piece, "It's not just the missiles, stupid."
The ever present Plan B
When Soviet surface-to-air missiles - SAMs, in military parlance - neutralized the brunt of the IAF's attacks in the Yom Kippur War, Israel's air supremacy was not in question, it was in tatters. But that was not the end of the story.
In the years following the war, Israel invested heavily in developing weaponry to counteract those anti-aircraft batteries, and in the First Lebanon War, Israeli pilots successfully destroyed those missile defense systems, using a combination of radar jamming and radiation-seeking missiles.
In 2013, when the threat of Syria receiving an S-300 battery was looming, Uzi Rubin described the relationship between aircraft and missile defense systems as a back and forth exchange: I learn how to stop your airplanes with my missiles, then you learn how to stop my missiles with your airplanes. And repeat.
"Air defense is always a game of cops and robbers, and once you know a system for some time, you get to know its strong points and its weak points," Rubin said at the time.
For years, Israel has been preparing for the deployment of the S-300 in enemy territory. The S-400 system is simply a more advanced form of the same S-300 system that has existed for years; indeed it was once known as the S-300 PMU-3.
Russia agreed to sell the S-300 to Iran in 2007, but the transaction was on hold until July's signing of the P5+1 nuclear deal due to the sanctions against the Islamic Republic. In recent weeks, both Iranian and Russian officials have indicated that it is going ahead, but there has been no definitive confirmation.
In those intervening eight years, the IAF and Israel's defense industries have presumably not been twiddling their thumbs, Yiftah Shapir said.
"From my understanding of our capabilities, if we wanted to operate in the area protected by the S-400, we could do it. It wouldn't be easy, but possible," said Shapir, who served as a lieutenant colonel in the IAF before joining the INSS.
But a military response to the S-400 would be considered only in case of emergency, he stressed. The missile defense system is powerful and a distinct threat to Israel's air superiority, but at this stage, he reiterated, it is emphatically not trained on Israel.
It is also important to note that the S-400 is not alone in the region. Egypt has an advanced missile defense system; Jordan has an advanced missile defense system; Syria has its own missile defense system, though one that is decidedly less threatening and advanced than the others'.
"The Americans also have the capability of shooting down Israeli planes, but we don't fear them," Shapir said, referring to US Navy warships located in the Mediterranean sea that are equipped with anti-aircraft missiles.
And yet, Shapir acknowledged, the existence of other missile defense systems in the region does not diminish the importance of the S-400's deployment in so volatile a place as Syria and under the authority of so wily a leader as Vladmir Putin. "It is capable of harming Israel's air superiority," Shapir said.
Though Israel and Russia have thus far succeeded in coordinating their aerial attacks, the possibility always exists for potentially deadly mistakes.
Ultimately, though, the consensus among Israeli experts is that even if the situation changes dramatically, Israel always has its "Plan B" - its technological capabilities. In 2013, the IAF considered the S-300 to constitute a surmountable challenge. In 2015, there's no reason why the S-400 shouldn't be considered one as well.
Russia is building a second military airbase in Syria - Jeremy Bender - http://www.businessinsider.com/russia-opening-second-military-airbase-in-syria-2015-12
Russia is planning on expanding an Assad regime air base in central Syria into a second base of operations for Moscow's air assets in the war-torn country, various sources report.
The new base will be located southeast of Homs at the current Syrian military base of Shaayrat, AFP reports citing an unnamed military official and a Syrian monitoring group.
Russia is reportedly expanding the regime base into a location from which it can launch air strikes and house military helicopters.
"The preparation phase for the Shaayrat base is nearing its end. It is being prepared to become a Russian military base," the anonymous military official told AFP.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights told AFP that Russia is expanding the base to better allow it to carry out operations in central and eastern Syria.
Moscow is "building new runways at the Shaayrat airport and reinforcing its surroundings in order to use it soon for operations" across Homs province, Rami Abdel Rahman, the head of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, told AFP.
Currently, Russia carries out its air strikes from its base in northwestern Syria, in Latakia province. By having a second airbase in the center of the country, Moscow has a greater ability to carry out strikes in the east and south of Syria in support of Syrian troops.
According to a Now Lebanon translation of a Kuwaiti newspaper report in Al-Rai, the Russian expansion of Shaayrat also represents a significant increase in the number of aircraft and supplies that Moscow is deploying into Syria.
According to the Now Lebanon translation, "the Al-Shayrat airbase houses around 45 airplane hangars, each of which is fortified in a way that prevents any damage if it is shelled or targeted." In addition to the hangars, the airbase features a main and backup runway.
The Kuwaiti report claims that Russia is planning on increasing the number of aircraft it has in Syria to over 100 in the near future to better carry out operations in support of group forces fighting in support of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
This expansion of Russia's role in Syria could indicate that Moscow is trying to apply greater pressure to members of the US-led anti-ISIS coalition - or that Russia is actually increasingly serious about fighting ISIS. Either way, it shows that Russia is making an even greater commitment to its role in Syria's multi-sided civil war.
"The reports of new airbase - if they are true - suggests Russia needs a bigger footprint to meet its goals in Syria," Paul Stronski, the Senior Associate for the Russia and Eurasia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told Business Insider via email. "Its goals very well might be changing too."
Stronski added that Russia's operations in Syria might be reaching a scale, and a level of strategic risk, greater than what Moscow might have originally been bargaining for when it entered the Syrian battlefield this past September. "The warnings from earlier this fall about Russian mission creep in Syria - including some people in Russia who warned that Russia risk repeating the American mistake in Vietnam of gradually getting further involved - could be becoming a reality."
Moscow is already using Shaayrat to conduct operations against ISIS in eastern Syria, Rahman told the AFP. Russian helicopters are aiding Syrian forces in an assault against the ISIS-held town of Palmyra, which is roughly 80 miles east of Shaayrat.
And if Russia is actually constructing a second airbase at Shaayrat, the construction would give Moscow much greater flexibility in terms of operations throughout Syria.
"If reports are true, that Russia has helicopters deployed at Shaaryat already and preparations are being made for the arrival of fixed wing aircraft, it would give Russia more flexibility in their air operations and maintenance of aircraft," Boris Zilberman, a Russia expert and researcher at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, told BI by email.
"The continued air war will undoubtly wear down the older assets - such as the Su-24 - which Russia has deployed the Syrian theater."
Although Moscow is using the base to help target ISIS, the new airbase is likely to further provoke international tensions over Syria.
Turkey and Russia are in an escalating dispute over Turkey's shoot-down of a Russian military plane on November 24th. Turkey claims that the plane had violated its airspace, while Russia insists the aircraft was still inside of Syria when it was destroyed.
A new airbase would also allow Russia to more easily carry out operations against US, Turkish, and Gulf-supported non-ISIS anti-Assad militants in the south of the country near Damascus.
As the Institute for the Study of War notes, Russian targeting of ISIS in Syria has generally been reactive, usually following ISIS advances towards regime-held territory. In contrast, Russian targeting of rebel-held territory is more pro-active, with air strikes targeting anti-regime elements in areas where the militants aren't threatening to gain territory at the regime's expense.
Russia speeds tons of heavy artillery and MRLs to Syria for expanded ground combat - http://www.debka.com/article/25050/Russia-speeds-tons-of-heavy-artillery-and-MRLs-to-Syria-for-expanded-ground-combat
After several incidents, in which 130mm shells fired by Syrian rebel groups, particularly the Al-Nusra Front, reached the center of the Russian Khmeimin military enclave outside Latakia, the general staff in Moscow decided to rush heavy artillery reinforcements to Syria. debkafile's military sources report that Russia has transferred two types of heavy weapons systems by sea and by air to the front near Latakia during the past few days.
First, a body of three battalions of 2S19 Msta-S self-propelled howitzers was deployed at Khmeimin and has already started pounding rebel lines and command centers in the area. This heavy artillery system, capable of firing 152mm bombs at a rapid pace, is a veteran of Russia's former campaigns against Islamic terrorist groups, especially in the Russian war against Islamic rebels in Chechnya in the 1990s.
The 2S19 Msta-S has a modified chassis of a T-80 tank and a diesel motor of a T-72. It is effective against fortifications as well as military and terrorist targets in wooded mountain areas, exactly the kind of geographical environment in which the rebels around Latakia area are operating.
This self-propelled howitzer is also expected to be effective in battles being fought in the Qalamoun mountains, in order to break the stalemate in which the combined Iranian, Syrian, Iraqi and Hezbollah forces have been bogged down for months in their efforts to knock over rebel strongholds.
Another heavy weapons system that Russia brought to Syria in recent days is the TOS-1 220mm multiple rocket launcher. This system, which is mounted on the chassis of a T-72 tank, has been deployed near the embattled Syrian cities of Hama and Homs.
debkafile's military sources point out that, even though Russian President Vladimir Putin and Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu continue to claim that Russian forces will not be engaged in Syrian ground warfare, the heavy artillery systems brought to the country and their use in battle tell a different story. They show that Russian ground combat in Syria is expanding.
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