As big an advertisement as the Russo-Ukrainian has been for western technology such as HIMARS and ATACMS, it’s been an even bigger anti-advertisement for Russia’s S-300/S-400 air defense systems. It must be pretty embarrassing to see your SAM systems getting blown up time and time again by the very threat it was designed to intercept.
Just today Suchomimus features yet another instance of HIMARS making an S-300 system blow up real good:
This is not to be confused with his video of ATACMS taking out an S-400 system in Mospino, Donetsk 11 days ago:
That’s the same battery that failed to intercept ATACMS before being hit by it. Six times.
Or the successful ATACMS strike that took out several S-400 system components at Belbek Air Base in Crimea:
Or his video of an S-300 system being taken out by ATACMS at Dzhankoi airfield in May:
Ukraine claimed to have destroyed two S-400 batteries in Crimea in September 2022, out of five that were initially deployed there. In April 2023, Ukraine said it destroyed or critically damaged four S-400 launchers in Crimea. In October 2023, Ukraine launched ATACMS missiles that destroyed an S-400 system in Luhansk Oblast. In November 2023, a UK intelligence update stated that Ukraine likely destroyed at least four Russian S-400 systems in a week. On April 19, 2024, Ukraine launched ATACMS missiles at a Russian airfield in Crimea, destroying S-400 launchers, three radars, and a Fundament-M air surveillance system. On April 23, 2024, Ukraine destroyed a 92N2 radar and a 96L6 high-altitude radar of an S-400 system. On April 28, 2024, Ukraine launched multiple ATACMS missiles in Crimea, destroying more S-400 air defense systems. On May 6, 2024, Ukrainian forces destroyed a tracked version of a Russian S-400 missile launcher in Zaporizhzhia region.
And, of course, the numerous drone strikes Ukraine has carried out against Russian territory over the course of the war also testify to S-300/S-400 failure.
There’s speculation that Ukraine is taking out S-300/S-400 systems as battlespace prep for deploying F-16s in theater later this year.
This is hardly the first failure of the S-300/S-400 system, as shown by Israel’s ability to hit targets in Syria with impunity and Syria’s inability to intercept 30-year old Tomahawk cruise missiles.
The United States (Patriot) and Israel (Iron Dome/David’s Sling/Arrow) both field SAM systems that have been proven effective on the modern battlefield. Russia, by contrast, has fielded a system that’s a demonstrable failure.
Tags: ATACMS, Crimea, HIMARS, Israel, Military, Russia, Russo-Ukrainian War, S-300 air defense system, S-400 Triumf air-defense system, SAM, Soviet Union, Suchomimus, Ukraine, video
I honestly do not know that it’s a good idea to write these systems off as technical failures or bad designs.
As with so many things Russian, it’s all too likely that this is another one of those cases where the vision outstretched their actual reach, in the sense that they have a good design that’s all sorts of capable, but their execution and training are so bad that you can’t overcome either factor.
Russians are brilliant designers, but spotty. Usually, what happens is that the design is inspired, but the actual execution is terrible due to sloppy worksmanship, poor maintenance practices, corruption, and abysmal training. The human material using this stuff is another factor… You have a complex air defense system, and you’re going to have it manned by men who’re subject to all the glories of dedovschina? Who lack the self-discipline to stay out of the vodka bottle?
There are so many factors going into Russian military performance that are outside the realm of pure technical merit that it ain’t even funny. Those systems may actually be as capable as they say they are, but with the rest of the factors going into the equation, they simply can’t get the theoretical performance out of the equipment.
Is it true these were early-warning radars watching for incoming nukes?
If so … am I the only one who thinks its a bad idea to go around blowing these things up? Fighting a bear is one thing, but if you drive it to anger/terror there’s no guarantee that’ll end well for you.
These were not over-the-horizon ballistic missile radar, more local mobile battle radar.
Ukraine did hit a ballistic missile radar site that also covered aircraft in the Ukraine theater last week.
(I am referring to S-400s in Russia itself, not those deployed into Ukraine & its Crimean peninsula)
“Fighting a bear is one thing, but if you drive it to anger/terror there’s no guarantee that’ll end well for you.”
So that all ends well (like in the fairy tales) a Kinder and Gentler response to bear attacks is necessary. I propose tranquilizer darts, a mild sedative and a quiet garden spot at the zoo.
Better yet, there are numerous loving families eager to adopt rogue animals into their social circle. This allows little Suzy and Timmy to have an enriching encounter with the Wild Kingdom. After thusly being properly socializing by the redemptive power of Love and Sympathetic Understanding, the newly reformed bear will contritely enter society as a performer in the Las Vegas casino circuit.
And all will live happily ever after. I guarantee!
Whats interesting is the the third video, where the ATACMS take out the site that’s trying to fight back: it’s shot from a drone that they also didn’t manage to take down.
The burning vehicle at 0:26 in Suchomimus’ ‘HIMAR Destroys S300 Launchers…’ video is towing a Russian field kitchen. Could be associated with an S300 system, but nothing in the background or the rest of the video supports this thesis.
ed in texas said:
“Whats interesting is the the third video, where the ATACMS take out the site that’s trying to fight back: it’s shot from a drone that they also didn’t manage to take down.”
Which is something of a clue about the actual competence of the Russian crew/leadership on that site…
Here is the thing about modern war: The endeavor has gotten so complex and interrelated that you cannot send the traditional Russian “meat masses” into combat against men and women who’re “switched on” and who have full agency. The rigid hierarchical structure and mentality of Russian combat technique doesn’t work, when you have to have ever man doing everything possible in defense. Some Russian mobik at that site probably saw the observation drone and since the last time he did anything remotely on his own initiative, he got slammed by all and sundry…? He did nothing about what he saw. Or, someone failed to ensure that the drone jammers were on and functional, updated, etcetera, etcetera…
Trust me on this… It’s hard enough getting US troops to all get on the same sheet of music and working at full potential to do a job, but I can’t even comprehend what it would be like trying that in the Russian context.
Their theory is basically that all the thinking and all the direction comes from the “highly-trained” officers, while the rest of the force is conscripts that won’t be around for long. You put a force like that up against a military based on long-service professionals at every level, with junior enlisted guys who’ve been doing their jobs for a couple of years and who’ve been through intensive and realistic training…? You’re going to lose, every time. Unless you’ve got masses that the Russians simply don’t have, anymore.
The key player in all these engagements isn’t the Colonel commanding the battery, but Specialist 4th Class Jones, the guy who is fully switched on, knows his job, and has full agency to do it to the best of his ability. He’s the guy who’s going to be spotting that drone, or making sure that the jammers are functional and fully updated.
Russian military cultural issues stem precisely from the same sort of over-academized “expert” theory that led the French into the bloodbaths of WWI through the St. Cyr military academy. The “grande ecoles” theory of how to run a society does not work; academic theory and instruction do not substitute for the tacit knowledge and organic expertise that rises up from the bottom when you have a culture of “get it done, correctly” down at the lowest levels.
The more of that “grande ecole” theory we take on, the less successful we are. There is one real school of life, and that’s real life itself. You don’t need a college education to be even a company-grade officer in the military; what you need is the intimate personal knowledge and experience you get coming up through the ranks and learning the trade from the root up; the Soviet/Russian theory that you can create ideal officer-class types via taking in teenagers, running them through a military academy, and then putting them in charge of things they’ve never done for themselves, over men whose lives they’ve no clue about? Folly.
And, as we increasingly have come to rely on the academy for selecting and training management and leadership, we’re making the precise same mistake. It’s not “anti-intellectualism” to say that, either… The academy is not about intellectual excellence, it’s more about conformity and making the professor happy to get your piece of paper, rather than demonstrating real competency and merit.
Which is precisely why the Russian officer corps is such crap when it comes to performance.
Responding to Kirk’s excellent discussion of the ‘grande ecoles’ theory: given the choice between a battle-wizened centurion and a well-educated legate, one should go with the centurion every time.
The missiles being launched in Suchomimus’ ‘S400 Embarrasses Itself – Six Failed Interceptions…’ video are neither S300 nor S400 missiles.
All S300 and S400 missiles are cold launched, without exception. Their shipping/transport containers are close ended and not designed to contain firing pressures.
The missiles in this latest Suchomimus fabrication are very clearly hot launched.
“Some Russian mobik at that site probably saw the observation drone and since the last time he did anything remotely on his own initiative, he got slammed by all and sundry…?”
By the time your Russian conscript sees the drone, it is too late to react. This advanced warning observation role was supposed to be provided by Russian AWACS.
The S-300/400 would be more effective if backed up by a few Beriev A-50s. Unfortunately for the Russians, Ukraine shot down a pair of them earlier this year.
This has caused the Russians to begin hoarding their few remaining specimens. It will be critical to the war effort to have battlefield oversight of the airspace once F-16s enter the fray. If any functional A-50s remain in strategic reserve, they will have to be pressed into service against a newly invigorated Ukrainian Air Force.
The term is Muzhik [Мужик], not Mobil.
@Steve White,
A little more thought along the lines I was discussing:
There are several different categories of “knowledge” on any given subject, which can be broken down into two major categories: One is the tacit knowledge gained through actual practice, the “tribal knowledge” consensus created by pragmatists who actually have experience in the field. The other sort is the theoretical sort of knowledge of a subject which is created, categorized, and studied by people who typically do not have actual experience of things beginning from the bottom and moving upwards. This isn’t to say that such knowledge isn’t valuable, either; simply that it’s a different sort of affair. Both categories are valuable to have, because it is only through the second sort of knowledge that important things are transmitted to people outside those specialist fields.
The current crisis in our civilization stems, in no small part, from the over-emphasis and reliance on the academized sort of knowledge. If you can’t find it in a book somewhere, produced by an approved “authority”, then that knowledge is deemed to be both unimportant and effectively incorrect.
The problem is that the average manager/leader these days is exclusively drawn from the ranks of the academically-trained. They’ve been conditioned not to ever even look for the tacit tribal knowledge in their fields, because for the academically-trained, that information doesn’t exist: It’s not in a book, it’s invisible, meaningless.
In reality, the sad fact is that there are entire worlds of knowledge not dreamt of in the academy, important things that anyone looking to have actual positive effect in the world needs to have, or at least, respect and honor. Because the shop foreman doesn’t have a college degree and cannot discuss issues with the rarefied specialized jargon of the academy does not mean the man is bereft of knowledge you need or skills you should take advantage of; he’s likely got a lifetime of experience observing things, and knows more about the pragmatic possibilities of things than the classically-trained academy graduate will ever attain until late in their careers.
One of the many things that led directly to the failure of the Soviet Union is that the vast majority of the people running the place were drawn from the second category of people, the academically-trained. If you ever have the opportunity to go digging in Soviet military references like their magazines, it’s striking just how much of that mentality flows over into their approaches to things like tactics and operational art. The Soviet military mind loved their predictive formulas and norms, treating everything as a mathematical sort of affair that could be reduced to an algebraic equation. “If you fire X rounds of 152mm artillery at Y area, Z effect will occur on the enemy…”
None of which takes into account of the multitude of other factors that could influence whether or not the “effect” on the enemy actually occurred… The norms must rule, and the whole thing was a part of the “scientific” basis of socialist thought…
Unfortunately, the world is a much more complicated and chaotic place than the human mind can conceive of or comprehend; some aspects are knowable, but there’s always Finagle or Murphy out there with a vote. And, the more you try to reduce things, the less and less predictable they become.
The Russians are, after nearly a century under Communism, irretrievably addicted to this mindset. It manifests itself in the way they cannot or will not produce an NCO corps in their military, which is part and parcel of why they’re having so much trouble in Ukraine… No organic leadership cadre of experienced career soldiers who know the most intimate roots of discipline and operations through personal knowledge and having “grown up” in the service.
You can’t ordain these things coming into being from above; they have to be organically brought into being, from the bottom up. It’s also why a competent military is the most fragile and difficult thing to re-create, once you’ve either burnt it up on the battlefield (British in WWI) or let it atrophy. Every one of those highly competent peacetime NCO-level leaders we had during the wars of the 1990s and 2000s cost literally billions of dollars to get to that point, through exercises and deployments. Losing one of them to dissatisfaction and/or the stress of constant deployments didn’t just cost us the money we’d invested, it cost us in terms of how much more we’d have to spend in order to get their replacements that experience… Which, over the course of a career, runs into literally millions of dollars per NCO. In some cases, like an SF cadre member or Delta Force operator, that money could well be in the billions, more expensive than a damn F-35. You don’t just churn out guys who’ve seen the elephant on multiple deployments by sending them off to the various NCO academies… That’s not how this works.
Russians haven’t figured that out. More worryingly, neither have our college-indoctrinated “leaders”…
“The term is Muzhik [Мужик], not Mobil.”
Oh, look at me: Aren’t I ever so smart…
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/mobik
mobik
Etymology
Borrowed from Russian мо́бик (móbik), from моб(илизо́ванный) (mob(ilizóvannyj), “mobilized”) + -ик (-ik, diminutive suffix).
Noun
mobik (plural mobiks or mobiki)
(informal, derogatory, Internet, military, sometimes humorous) A Russian conscript during the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, especially a young man with little to no fighting experience.
Do note that this term has been in use since about the first wave of post-February 24 Russian mobilizations. It ain’t, in other words, new; any commentator reasonably familiar with the situation in Ukraine should have heard it used by both Russian and Ukrainian commentators, incessantly.
“Mobik” is ironically fitting, having the English connotation of a disorganized and unruly Russian mob.
That said, I still prefer “Vatnik” because of its pejorative force.
Malthus, “Vatnik” predates “Mobik” considerably, dating back to 2011 and used to refer to a specific demographic in Russian society, their equivalent of the UK “Chav”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vatnik
I suspect that the term “Mobik” likely derives from it, but specifically refers to a different category of Russian society.
I’m not sure that either term is really pejorative; from the feel I get, they’re mostly being used by the other “higher” levels in Russian society as contemptuous signaling, akin to the way that the leftoid scum here in the US like to use “MAGATS” as similar signals.
Regardless of what the etymology is, it’s a fairly common term, well-understood among those paying attention to what is going on in Ukraine. It sure as hell isn’t a misspelling of “Muzhik”…
Though, were you to trace the etymology back, some expert might try and tell you they were related. I don’t know; I’ve rarely seen or heard “Muzhik” used in contemporary Russian sources. It’s an archaism, more than a current term actually in use.
There is also “Gopnik”, which is yet another sort of Russian demographic group. If you want the definition, a simple search on the term will turn up the usual sources… Which I’ll leave as an exercise for the reader.
No Russian or Ukrainian speaker uses ‘mobik’. It is exclusively a construct of Western propagandists.
It is a fake word used in a fake video.
“Though, were you to trace the etymology back, some expert might try and tell you they were related. I don’t know; I’ve rarely seen or heard “Muzhik” used in contemporary Russian sources. It’s an archaism, more than a current term actually in use.”
Muzhik has always been in common usage, both within Russia and the White Russian émigré neighborhood I grew up next to. I can personally attest to its widespread usage in the RFSFR interior during the 1980s.
Mobik is obviously a sly attempt to co-opt muzhik. It particularly attempts to devalue the rallying aspect of the word muzhik.
This propaganda ploy probably stems from some star struck CIA drone reading about Vladimir Putin calling Leonardo DiCaprio a “real muzhik” in 2010:
https://www.rbth.com/lifestyle/334708-what-is-muzhik-in-russian
Full of shit, as usual.
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