The non-ballistic variety that Russia claimed was unstoppable has been stopped several time in the past couple weeks now that Ukraine has Patriot systems. Seems like they’re not really a big deal at all.
And just some rando with the closest to the original raw video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LjxX2gqdlkQ
Objectively as possible it looks like ~30 Patriot missiles were fired (plausibly the whole 32 missile battery). The production rate of these by Lockheed Martin is 500 missiles, annual. Up to 550/year starting this year. They're apparently attempting to intercept somewhere between 2-6 Kinzhals fired, and it appears 1-2 of those Kinzhals (i.e. between 15-100%) got through and struck the Patriot battery and at least damaged it. That's around 3 weeks total annual production of Patriot missiles fired in 2 minutes at a handful of targets with at best partial success.
So it's both correct that Kinzhal is really just an air-launched SRBM not a hypersonic glide weapon, and that our existing missile defense looks at best barely capable of partially defending against very limited numbers of conventional SRBM.
How many Kinzhals can Russia make a month? I can only find motivated sources, but those say ~10/month, and that's after a push to increase production.
* Is the Patriot the only available system? (No. THAAD, SM3.)
* Is monthly production likely to matter in a US vs. China war? (Probably not.)
* Can China's hypersonics hit moving targets like carriers? (Much harder, at the very least.)
China also has to ask the "what if our R&D, procurement, and training system is as corrupt/ineffective as Russia's turned out to be?" question.
And difference of how many China “can” make in a month and how many Patriot missiles Lockheed “is” making in a month are very different questions. How many missiles could Lockheed make in a month given 3 months lead time in a conflict with China? I bet it’s significantly more than we are currently making now.
Powerful countries have been surprised at how much ammo is required since firearms became the dominant way to wage war.
This isn't really a surprise, either - this isn't any different from any other major modern war where the sides are roughly on par. The original surprise was that Ukraine managed to hold up against the initial invasion such that positional warfare became more prominent, and with it the traditional dominant role of artillery.
Artillery became dominant quite early on, since the initial Russian attempt at blitzkrieg failed last spring, and things changed into something more closely resembling trench warfare. Since then, its extensive use has caused supplies to dwindle. Wagner troops under Bakhmut specifically were high-priority as far as Russian logistics is concerned due to the political importance of the battle, which is why it didn't take them until this past winter to run out - this is when Prigozhin started posting photos with piles of corpses of his own troops and complaining about insufficient supplies. At the time, people from various other units noted that they have been having those problems for much longer, and the unofficial term "meat assault" (мясной штурм) was already in widespread use among Russian troops to describe the way they were fighting by the end of 2022.
Its a total success; the purpose of a defensive system is prevent something else from being hit. And, there’s pretty good reason to believe that the reason there aren’t more than about 6 Kinzhals in Russia every-one-to-two-week mass missile attacks is that they simply aren’t producing enough to fire more. Also, there were 18 missiles in the barrage, including other SRBMs (the ground launched Iskander), S-300s used in surface-to-surface mode, and cruise missiles, not just the 6 Kinzhals.
> So it's both correct that Kinzhal is really just an air-launched SRBM not a hypersonic glide weapon, and that our existing missile defense looks at best barely capable of partially defending against very limited numbers of conventional SRBM.
Patriot isn’t the whole (or even the most capable system) of our existing ballistic missile defense, even if it is the most notable system of ours deployed, as of today, in Ukraine. THAAD exists, and is more capable than Patriot.
We don’t need to take the Ukrainian claims as totally accurate, but it’s worth at least including that the battery of patriots were fired at more than just the 2-6 Kinzhal missiles that you tallied (at least when we want to look at annual production rates).
The Russian’s haven’t been able to sustain a launch rate of once a month with smaller attacks. This attack was an unusually high density. Expending three weeks production capacity to fend off an attack that can be launched at most every 2-3 months seems… manageable.
In terms of this conflict, also worth considering that Patriot isn’t the only system in Ukraine, so if production of Patriot missiles becomes a constraint, they can shift more AD burden to IRIS-T and other European systems.
When considering the broader implications to the US, I think it’s not exactly right to describe Patriot as our “existing missile defense”. We have a number of other missile defense systems such as NASAMs and THAAD that occupy complimentary roles to the Patriot systems. If anything based on the performance of Patriot in Ukraine I have more confidence than I previously did in our missile defense systems. Performance in real world conditions has seemed pretty good to me.
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=patriot+Suchomi...
There are numerous types of missile systems (SAMs) protecting Kyiv including IRIS-T, S300, and others. Looking at the various videos of the attack on Kyiv, the missiles had a very different physical appearance from each other, lending credence to the supposition that different SAMs were active. This would make a lot of sense considering there were different types of Russian missiles active (Kinzal, Iskander, etc.).
> They're apparently attempting to intercept somewhere between 2-6 Kinzhals fired, and it appears 1-2 of those Kinzhals (i.e. between 15-100%) got through and struck the Patriot battery and at least damaged it.
Although information is limited, there is no evidence of any Kinzhals making it through and striking anything of note. It seems that one Patriot Battery was lightly damaged, but all Patriot Batteries of them were fully operational before and after the strike. The one Patriot battery was lightly damaged and repaired in the field within a few days. This strongly suggests that the Patriot battery was hit by debris of some kind (perhaps from shot down missiles) [1], and not a direct strike as the clowns at the Russian MOD laughably claims (they've also claimed to have destroyed every single HIMARs launcher and the Ukrainian Air Force three times over).
Everyone else however can see them just fine.
So they might be able to maneuver (normal ballistic missiles can usually do last minute maneuvering too!), but without data it’s blind.
Maybe useful if already programmed with a decent random walk, but it doesn’t help it actively avoid something coming for it, and it doesn’t let it aim for moving targets that can adjust course.
Slower stuff doesn’t have this issue, but is of course slower.
This is the same reason why supercavitating torpedos seem really cool on paper, but are not actually all that useful or scary (unless nuclear tipped). Unless the blast radius is huge or the target is fundamentally fixed (a large building), you can just… move out of the way.
No, hypersonics are a legitimate new development, Russia just deceptively brands some of its low-tech arsenal.
Why ignore all of the article? If a hypersonic missile can be intercepted by a Patriot, then it stands to reason it wasn't truly maneuverable, i.e. it was ballistic!
It’s a good article. But the reality is that the Russian missiles making headlines don’t meet the specs of the article. Ukraine is shooting them down just fine using decades old technology.
It is not publicly known whether this is true.
The Ukrainians claim they shot down 6 of 6 Kinzhal missiles over Kiev in one night with a Patriot battery. In the available videos of the event, all that can be seen is that a few dozen air defense missiles were fired, and that something got through and struck the general location where the air defense battery was.
A very healthy dose of skepticism is warranted about claims made in wartime by interested parties.
Note also that they purposefully forbid videos of air defenses to avoid showing where air defenses are.
At least one Kinzhal was confirmed shot down earlier before the wave of 6 or so.
> Note also that they purposefully forbid videos of air defenses to avoid showing where air defenses are.
This has not prevented videos from leaking, as in this case.
> At least one Kinzhal was confirmed shot down earlier before the wave of 6 or so.
Independently confirmed, or claimed? This gets to my initial point, that one should be extremely skeptical about unverifiable claims made by both sides.
The best case you can make for Russia is that the Kinzhal developers actually did commit treason but in a way that was unrelated to the Kinzhal missiles not being effective which is… laughable
The governments of both countries are being "selective" about the truth and imposing censorship by force. Which makes sense at times of war!
Nobody here should take anything released by the involved parties (and their sponsors) as gospel. It's war. War is about deception.
What is the purpose of arresting your missile scientists for treason? What’s your best case interpretation?
The problem is both, and Ukraine is arresting people who film them. It's martial law, both countries are at war and truth suffers (understandably).
> What is the purpose of arresting your missile scientists for treason? What’s your best case interpretation?
I don't know, I would guess:
- They said something about the Khinzal that downplays the importance of the weapon.
- They said something that would help Ukraine better counter them.
- They said something against Putin or the military invasion.
What they very likely didn't say is that the Khinzal is a hypersonic maneuverable weapon, which is the point of TFA you're commenting about.
They’re getting arrested because they promised Putin an unstoppable weapon and now he looks like a dumbass.
It's part of the reason why the initial invasion went so terribly; Putin's analysts told him Kyiv would bend over immediately, and that the public would welcome them as liberators.
Putin smells so much of his own farts that he bought it completely. The analysts were then shocked when Putin said "Okay, invasion today"
"Article 353. Planning, Preparing, Initiating, or Waging War of Aggression
1. Planning, preparing, or initiating a war of aggression - is punishable by deprivation of liberty for a term of seven to fifteen years.
2. Waging a war of aggression - is punishable by deprivation of liberty for a term of ten to twenty years."
When in modern times has an aggressor ever framed the aggression in terms different from a righteous defense?
As things are, if he's still alive by the time regime in Russia changes, that will probably be (one of) the law he will be prosecuted under.
You are jumping to wildly unsupported conclusions.
Any of my guesses is more likely.
"This enables the missile to penetrate through all existing and projected air defense systems and deliver a nuclear or conventional warhead over a distance in excess of two thousand kilometers" - [1]
Either he overhyped it, or he was misled.
[1] - https://www.ainonline.com/aviation-news/defense/2018-03-02/p...
This doesn't conclusively demonstrate that; an intercepted missile or drone can still easily go kaboom when the pieces hit the ground. The footage has a building between the explosion and the camera.
> Independently confirmed, or claimed?
There's at least photos of an apparently-downed Khinzal. There are no photos yet of a destroyed Patriot.
Doesn't look much like anything one of us could recognize though. We are not experts.
More importantly, even if it is a downed Khinzal, it doesn't matter for the article, which is about hypersonic maneuverable weapons, which the Khinzal is not. So the initial post in this thread is wrong.
Articles about it cite said experts analyzing the photos.
It pays for Ukraine to claim they are easily downing Khinzals and minimizing their own casualties/hits. I don't blame them for this, misinformation and demoralizing the enemy is key. The Russians are doing the same on their side. Both apply military secrecy and censorship on their own camps.
"Expert" opinion shouldn't be taken as non-biased here, either.
Yes, fog of war exists. Yes, both sides are going to misdirect and misinform for a variety of reasons, both good and bad. We won't know quite a few facts until after the war when the history books are written, and we won't know some of them ever.
Anyone inclined to see the air defense video as proof of a Patriot being taken out is exercising motivated thinking. Anyone inclined to take Ukrainian claims to having downed everything is doing the same thing. Right now, what we can safely conclude is a) Ukrainian air defense seems thus far to be fairly effective and b) Russian Khinzals don't appear to be a game-changer at this time.
I didn't ask for experts, I said no-one here is one. I also said who knows what the wreckage is? If you ask pro Ukraine experts, they'll say it's a Khinzal. If you ask pro Russians, it's a bomb fragment or whatever.
More importantly, this doesn't tell us anything about hypersonic maneuverable weapons. We already know the Khinzal isn't one. Yes, the Kremlin is making a fuss about their hypersonic weapons capability, part of their infowar campaign. TFA explains that hypersonics are nothing new and that they can be countered.
> a) Ukrainian air defense seems thus far to be fairly effective and b) Russian Khinzals don't appear to be a game-changer at this time.
No, I cannot "safely" conclude anything about either, and neither can you. Both seem likely, but "likely" and "true" are so hard to say in this war were everyone is lying through their teeth.
It can be very difficult for radars to track objects coming in from a high angle of attack and low angle of attack simultaneously, so IMO the failure to intercept makes more sense from that perspective as well.
The article explicitly states, one paragraph later than the beginning, that "about half of that is just plain wrong".
The author also explains the hypersonic missiles are nothing new, that they are old tech, and that the real threat would be maneuverable hypersonic missiles, which the Khinzal is not. The Khinzal is ballistic.
So when the author writes of the threat of maneuverable hypersonics, and you say "The non-ballistic variety that Russia claimed was unstoppable [...]", you are both speaking of different kinds of weapons with different capabilities. The Khinzal is old tech for which there are counters. The author is speaking of newer tech for which there are fewer counters.
> These are specifically designed for ballistic threats, which are common, and their extreme effectiveness is precisely why Russia and China have invested in something else.
And
> Russia used hypersonic missiles against Ukraine” — alarming! The average member of the public, as well as many policymakers, now understand that these things are dangerous because they are just too fast to shoot down. Clearly something needs to be done… (sarcastic)
It really ought to make clear explicitly in the article that the missiles it referred to in the beginning are NOT what it spends the rest of the article discussing.
It confused me at least. Because, without doing further research, I assumed the Kinzhals must not be ballistic because they’re indirectly referenced in an article about maneuverable missiles!
It doesn't mention the Khinzal by name, true.
But whatever. Semantics at this point.
People without clearances, working on a domain that is tangential but not the domain itself are probably more reliable, as they don't know truths that cannot be told, but they know enough to make informed guesses.
I take this article as informative but only for the general idea. The part about which country has what capabilities, I give absolutely no credence.
All we have in the footage to go on is a flash. No indication of what kind or how much damage was done in it.
*have been stopped
The Kh-47M2 Kinzhal (in Russian: Х-47М2 Кинжал, "Dagger", NATO reporting name Killjoy) is a Russian hypersonic air-launched ballistic missile