05 Aug 2019, 02:11
I suspect the real answer to why the difference in scale with Western SAM systems is more obvious.
What we're looking at with S300, S400 and S500 is the product of a country that's never had sufficient or consistent enough budget generosity to build anything but oversize SAMs. So they've not developed the affordable technologies needed to miniaturize them while retaining the performance levels they need from them. So they're forced to build outlandishly large and very heavy SAM interceptors and mobile launchers, even in 2019.
Thus everyone, especially the public, becomes over-awed by the enormous scale and evident power of these heavy SAM complexes, but fail to realize that they're so large simply because the core technology is so obsolete. Russia has typically built heavy SAMs for the army, then retro-fitted them to a heavy naval fleet.
US and NATO countries instead went for developing dedicated very compact naval SAMs which lost little if anything in performance to the heavier SAMs still on land, which Western army SAM missiles also then shrank in size while increasing their performances to current PAC and especially mobile THAAD level.
The fact that 40N6 'S400' missiles were a decade late, and that the Russians struggled for so long to develop and produce such a heavy missile with that range is evidence enough that a lack of funds and resulting difficulties developing, optimizing and testing the affordable older technology needed to get them to perform to the maximum is what made the S400 complex what it is (and why for the Russians 'Aegis Ashore' is such a challenge, as they can't match it).
I think the realistic way to view the newer versions of S300, S400 and S500 is as competent old-school heavy SAMs which are appallingly hard to hide, easy to detect, easy to track, and relatively easy to kill, using western targeting, VLO weapons and tactics. There's just not much there to actually be over-awed by.
A navy needs a ~500 km range SAM to kill stand-off maritime patrol and bomber aircraft plus SATs if they don't have an all-aspect naval VLO 5th-gen with a >150 km range AAM. Such SAM range is nice to have, but is clearly not necessary if you have such a jet. But if you don't have the competitive all-aspect VLO 5th-gen supersonic naval fighter at least an S300, S400 or S500 complex looks sufficiently grandiose and fierce, even if they are largely impotent, vulnerable and temporary.
Accel + Alt + VLO + DAS + MDF + Radial Distance = LIFE . . . Always choose Stealth