Russian military has been beset by corruption and negligence for years. Ideally Russian army should have 100 Tornado-S at the start of the conflict. The US has about 300 HIMARS by comparison.
What is the differences between Tornado-S to a Smerch i'm curious ? Is it the rocket it fires or something else. Because from what i see so far they look the same. So does the Tornado-G.
I'm kinda thinking that the design is actually a "kit" and new rockets for both Smerch and Grad.. While Uragan.. might go extinct instead.
The Tornado systems are modernizations. They added electronics to the cabin, they have new missiles, and new vehicle chassis.
Instead of having to consult a ballistics table and adjusting the Grad launcher, you can insert the GLONASS coordinates of the grid you want to hit in an electronics module inside the cabin of the truck and it does the adjusting for you. The electronics in each vehicle can receive target coordinates from the army centralized command system network instead of needing a separate command truck for the Grad battery to do this. These systems also come with new missiles. For example the Grad now comes with a rocket with twice the range, 40km instead of 20km, this was done with slimmer casing and new propellant. It is still compatible with older rockets as well. The vehicle chassis has an improved 240hp turbocharged diesel engine, so it should be capable of higher road speeds. Original Grad had 120hp gasoline engine, which was upgraded with 210hp diesel in 1970s.
The Smerch upgrade does similar electronics upgrades i.e. it adds GLONASS capability to the system. It also has several new missiles available for it including a long range GLONASS guided round.
As for delays of introduction into service and reduced production of these systems. The Smerch uses a high mobility 8x8 vehicle chassis made in Belarus. They wanted to replace it with a vehicle chassis designed and made in Russia, but that program i.e. Platforma-O by KamAZ, was a failure. KamAZ wanted to use hybrid propulsion with one electric engine per wheel. This vehicle chassis turned out to be too complex, expensive, heavy, and prone to failure. All because they did not want to design a complex mechanical transmission. Platforma-O was supposed to replace the Belarussian vehicles used in the Bastion, Iskander, Smerch, Yars, etc. The government considers the use of imported vehicles on the launchers of the strategic deterrent to be a problem. Guess why. In theory, for the Smerch launcher, a BAZ Russian truck similar to the one used in the S-400 and S-350 systems should also work. There are 8x8 versions of it with over 500hp. But, because this truck was not available when the program started, or because production is already all tied up in the S-400 and S-350, or whatever this was not pursued. The Grad uses an Ural truck. The factory for that, which I think was in Moscow, was demolished and the land was used for urban redevelopment. They seem to have built a new factory elsewhere since they are producing new trucks. But for several years there could be no production because of this.
The Russian government wanted to make KamAZ the producer of all the trucks for the army in the early 2000s. You could say it was to try to reduce the logistics footprint in the case of the small trucks, the Soviets used to have like 4 truck designs made by different factories with different engines, while this was mostly successful with the small trucks being mostly converted to the KamAZ vehicles thus reducing logistics costs, the military did complain that the KamAZ trucks were less reliable in the field than the Ural trucks for example. In the case of the larger vehicles making KamAZ design them was an abject failure. They simply lacked the skills to do it. The only factory Russia had which made heavy vehicles in the 8x8 category back then, designed a replacement vehicle for the Uragan launcher vehicle in the late 1990s, the KZKT-7428, but they struggled without orders for almost two decades before finally going belly up. I still somewhat remember hearing about this back then. The government said the vehicles had a lot of deficiencies, they did not want to pay for the vehicles, the company tried selling vehicles to the oil & gas companies, they refused to pay for them. It was a mess really. KZKT was shut down in 2010.
The Russian military complains that the KamAZ trucks break down more often in field conditions in rough terrain than the Ural trucks did and are way more complicated to service in the field when they break down as well. The KamAZ trucks however have better speed in paved roads and there are lots of parts and proper service stations for them inside Russia. So pick your poison.
Basically the Russians had to continue using the Ural trucks on the Grad, and buy vehicles from MAZ in Belarus with the Smerch, since KamAZ failed to deliver proper vehicles for those applications. This was the main cause for delays on either of those programs. Ural and KZKT languished with a lack of orders in Yeltsin's time, and defense minister Anatoliy Serdyukov (2007-2012) basically put the knife on them betting everything on KamAZ. That did not work 100% well.
