The War in the Ukraine

gelgoog said:

Iron Dome was designed to intercept cheap artillery rockets. Think of those as home made Grad rockets. It will be useless against Shaheds or cruise missiles. The Shaheds and cruise missiles can change direction unlike artillery rockets. In order to protect from air attacks, Israel has multiple layered air defense systems. Iron Dome is just one of those systems. They also have David's Sling for intercepting aircraft, which is what you would use against Shaheds or cruise missiles, and Arrow for intercepting ballistic missiles. David's Sling would likely work against those kinds of weapons but it is too expensive to use against a Shahed. Each interceptor missile of David's Sling costs over a million dollars.

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I disagree. The Iron Dome is more than capable of intercepting Shaheds and Cruise Missiles - with a caveat.

The Tamir interceptor within the Iron Dome system is similarly proportioned to a WVRAAM. It is a maneuvering missile with mid-course correction capability via datalink, a (simpler than AAM) seeker with proximity detonation, It's "simpler" probably because the primary target set is not quite as capable of the active/passive defensive countermeasures of a combat jet.

Shahed and cruise missiles are also not capable of reactive evasive maneuvers. They may have preplanned maneuvers (change of vectors or terminal phase maneuvers) but they are unlikely to be in reaction to an incoming interceptor. In all likelihood - the Tamir, which is touted as an agile interceptor - shouldn't have problems dealing with a UAV/Missile. Further, in 2021, Raphael upgraded the software to deal with this target set and demonstrated the capability in a that included rockets, missiles and UAVs.

That said, where it has a problem is it is Very Short Range. It is really meant to be a "point defense" system and has demonstrated real world effectiveness against direct incoming targets. It probably won't do as well against tangential intercepts of tangoes heading past or away from the firing battery. That will be left to the next layer - the David Sling (DSWS).

I'd say comparing ID to DSWS is like comparing SEA-RAM to SM-2
They're not competitive, they're both capable but complementary.

tankphobia said:

So what's the damages from this massive salvo? Other than the ammo dump I haven't seen much else that was hit. Western SAMs seems to have worked this time.

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Pavlohrad is erupting like a volcano and you are saying that Ukraine western SAM worked! I'm sry but in what world does your statement make any sense?
A massive ammo dump has been taken out, the only thing that did it's job here was the Russian missile strike.

obj 705A said:

Pavlohrad is erupting like a volcano and you are saying that Ukraine western SAM worked! I'm sry but in what world does your statement make any sense?
A massive ammo dump has been taken out, the only thing that did it's job here was the Russian missile strike.

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But this is one of the largest strikes yet involving many aircraft, compared to previous waves where significant chunks of Ukraine went into blackout and widespread reports of damage, I consider an ammo dump relatively tame. If a big kaboom is all it takes to be called a great success, Ukraine would be winning every day from HIMARS ammo dump strikes but that is not the case is it?

tankphobia said:

But this is one of the largest strikes yet involving many aircraft, compared to previous waves where significant chunks of Ukraine went into blackout and widespread reports of damage, I consider an ammo dump relatively tame. If a big kaboom is all it takes to be called a great success, Ukraine would be winning every day from HIMARS ammo dump strikes but that is not the case is it?

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This salvo targeted military elements only.

Previously target was to destroy the air defence, looks like they achived they target, and the air defence is not capable any more to defend against missile salvos.

tankphobia said:

But this is one of the largest strikes yet involving many aircraft, compared to previous waves where significant chunks of Ukraine went into blackout and widespread reports of damage, I consider an ammo dump relatively tame. If a big kaboom is all it takes to be called a great success, Ukraine would be winning every day from HIMARS ammo dump strikes but that is not the case is it?

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That is because powerstations wasn't the target this time, it was the ammo dump, and apparently a dozen or so S-300 launchers have been destroyed along with their accompaning missiles. You consider that to be tame?

obj 705A said:

That is because powerstations wasn't the target this time, it was the ammo dump, and apparently a dozen or so S-300 launchers have been destroyed along with their accompaning missiles. You consider that to be tame?

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Yes it's an ammunition explosion, quite a huge one at that, but for what reason would Ukraine put 12 s-300 launchers and accompanying rare missile stock so close and together at the front? Given that Intel Slav Z is a OSINT channel, not really sure why it is taken straight at face value.

tankphobia said:

Yes it's an ammunition explosion, quite a huge one at that, but for what reason would Ukraine put 12 s-300 launchers and accompanying rare missile stock so close and together at the front? Given that Intel Slav Z is a OSINT channel, not really sure why it is taken straight at face value.

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OsintDefender which is heavy pro-ukraine also reported it like that as shown in the message #14278 of this thread.

We are not taking it at face value,
But there are strong indications that they were indeed S-300s, as they have characteristic explosions that we have seen before.
Could it be another missile, even a stored ballistic missile as someone said?

Yes, of course it could.
We only know that something was in a train station (i.e. on the move) and was hit. Who knows, maybe even the Russians were finally able after 1 year to destroy some HIMARS ...

Btw, the first talk about the S-300 being hit was not a OSINT source, but the newspapper Readovka, this was later picked yp by Rybar and then by English speaking channels

Right_People said:

OsintDefender which is heavy pro-ukraine also reported it like that as shown in the message #14278 of this thread.

We are not taking it at face value,
But there are strong indications that they were indeed S-300s, as they have characteristic explosions that we have seen before.
Could it be another missile, even a stored ballistic missile as someone said?

Yes, of course it could.
We only know that something was in a train station (i.e. on the move) and was hit. Who knows, maybe even the Russians were finally able after 1 year to destroy some HIMARS ...

Btw, the first talk about the S-300 being hit was not a OSINT source, but the newspapper Readovka, this was later picked yp by Rybar and then by English speaking channels

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I'm not convinced that you can tell its S-300 ammo simply by having a smoke trail leading into the sky, any Rocket based ammunition can achieve that. I'll concede that it's PROBABLE that S-300 ammunition is stored at the site and have detonated. It's too early to simply declare 12-16 launchers are hit, I have read difference sources stating that it may be a mistranslation and that it's missiles instead of launchers loaded with missiles (which Ukraine may not even have).

Back to my original point, when in comparison to the amount of air raid sirens over Ukraine, an ammo dump near the front is relatively mild.

tankphobia said:

I'm not convinced that you can tell its S-300 ammo simply by having a smoke trail leading into the sky, any Rocket based ammunition can achieve that. I'll concede that it's PROBABLE that S-300 ammunition is stored at the site and have detonated. It's too early to simply declare 12-16 launchers are hit, I have read difference sources stating that it may be a mistranslation and that it's missiles instead of launchers loaded with missiles (which Ukraine may not even have).

Back to my original point, when in comparison to the amount of air raid sirens over Ukraine, an ammo dump near the front is relatively mild.

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1652844093314048000

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Well, every time a Mig-31 takes off, alarm bells go off all over the country.

It seems interesting that despite the large number of aircraft that took off, they launched a relatively small number of missiles according to the Ukrainian MOD.
18 cruise missiles (J-101 and J-555) of which 15 were reportedly shot down by Ukrainian defences.

tankphobia said:

Back to my original point, when in comparison to the amount of air raid sirens over Ukraine, an ammo dump near the front is relatively mild.

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1652844093314048000

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Your original point was that western air defence systems worked this time. What is the job of air defence, it is to protect military assests from enemy strikes, so when the target of the strike is up in flames you consider the air defence to have achieved it's objectives? Well you can believe in what ever you want to believe in.
And since when was air raid sirens a measure of how successful a strike is? If there were no air raid sirens in say Lviv then that just means Lviv was not targeted with any strike. The target was in the Dnipropetrovsk oblast.