Persian Gulf
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Iranian Air Defence Systems | News and Discussions
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Persian Gulf
INT'L MOD
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Intercepted missiles near Khorramabad
Jalz
Registered Member
There were a few deployed. Not extensively because these things are quite expensive
It was a research project to learn about long range AD.
Same goes for Talash, Radd which transformed into 15th Khordad and 3rd Khordad.
I'm more hopeful on Arman project, which is road mobile version of 15th khordad and uses vertical launch system.
Immortals
Elite Member
No there was a few prototype launchers built to test the product. Bavar-373 never entered serial production.
It was another Iranian grandiose project trying to emulate what the great powers can produce. In the end it cost Iran greatly when those same funds could have been spent on acquiring Chinese and Russian air defense systems instead of relying on a small order of S-300 to defend the airspace at long range.
Arman battery was picked off in the early weeks of the war. So clearly, it is not capable of survival against an opponent that can locate your air defenses. Wether it was the targeting radar or the command and control node, something was vulnerable in the product chain that allowed US/Israel to exploit and kill it.
Flotilla
Trusted Member
Whatever SAM system with radar emissions is easily trackable. From F16 wild weasel (something not that much complicated) to satellites (US has a grid of satellites specialized in SIGINT and can make a map or hostile radar emissions) to EAF18 and F35. It is not a fault of Arman or Bavar or even 3 Khordad, it is a operative limitation.
That is why AD08/Majid have been so successful and other systems like Shahed358/359 did also.
Without air force capable of protecting this advanced SAM systems the best Irán can do it is just hide them until arrive Su35 that would cover these systems.
Immortals
Elite Member
All these points are irrelevant when it comes to the fact that Iran spent 15+ years R&D and ultimately didn’t mass produce it. That is the problem with Iranian weapons program, many of them go no where and just line the pockets of certain defense companies.
It doesn’t take 2 decades to design and build a long range SAM system. In the end Iran couldn’t settle on final design and in fact there was at least 3 different versions of Bavar-373 which points to indecisive nature of the engineers during development.
GWXP
Registered Member
Who cares about Bavar-373 when it was just a stage of development of much more complex systems like Mehran AD system with ranges of 200km (Mehran-1) and 320km (Mehran-2)
Iran mass produced and deployed air defense systems while US and Israel never fully suppressed Iranian AD network.
Despite living in the era of smartphones we haven't seen even a single video of a US fighter flying over Iranian cities or airspace.
During the war US and Israel launched their stand-off munitions from a huge distance and from blind spots of Iranian airspace without entering areas covered by Iranian AD network.
US and Israel together hit 15.000 targets across Iran and US launched nearly 1000 Tomahawks from a distance of 1600km and 1100 JASSMs from a distance of 370km, while Israel launched thousands of Rampage aeroballistic missiles from a distance of 250km.
After partially suppressing Iranian air defenses US launched the rest of its stand-off munitions from various blind spots of Iranian airspace.
Also, multiple targets in Iran have been hit by US and Israeli drones.
And there are reports that Russia helped Iran to study US aircraft flight patterns and this allowed Iran to reposition its air defenses.
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Jalz
Registered Member
The IRGC seem to be better than the Artesh at operationalizing weapons
Immortals
Elite Member
How is Mehran “Much more complex” than Bavar-373? And Mehran also never reached mass production!
You can’t seriously think that U.S. attack over 15,000 targets using only long range munitions. And that Israel used “thousands” of missiles. So Israel fired more BMs than Iran during the war? Does that seem plausible to you? Israel is able to make a higher quantity of precision ABMs than Iran can?
The IADS failed dramatically in June war when it was only Israel attacking by itself.
The problem with the Iranian IADS was multi facet. But it didn’t help the backbone was a SMALL S-300 order that was too much small for a country the size of Iran and too easy to be weakened. Which Israel did via sabotage attacks LONG before the first war kicked off.
If Bavar-373 or Mehran were truly ready and capable than they would have followed the Supreme Leader when he traveled. Instead it was always S-300 battery that followed him. That should tell you all you need to know on how much Iran trusted its own domestic systems.
Second, Iran’s IADS was never able to be properly integrated into a central information sharing system of nodes. It was made up of Russian systems, Iranian systems, 1970’s US systems, Soviet Union Systems, French/Chinese systems. It was just a nightmare of different systems all trying to interconnected and at the end of the day we saw their command and control nodes using old versions of Windows OS!
If you wanted to protect Iran’s airspace you needed about an order of magnitude (ie 10x) the systems and radars and launchers than Iran actually had to cover such a large area. And unfortunately Iran decided to remain under sanctions thru distrasterous Khamenai foreign policy for so long that they simply didn’t have the budget to expand the air defense density and coverage that much.
You also needed INTERCEPTORS to take the pressure off the launchers so they don’t fail prematurely. But so many people here through that “100 BMs” could destroy an airbase and that US wouldn’t be able to keep a high sortie level once Iranian BMs hit all the airbases and infrastructure. It was extremely optimistic beliefs on this board for far too long.
Immortals
Elite Member
The IRGC also gets like over 60% of the military budget and has more talented pool of engineers and resources at its disposal. It has its own conglomerate of companies to get revenue from and international money laundering operations.
Jalz
Registered Member
Irans issue is the lack of a modern airforce. I understand the issues with air defense but Pakistan has a bunch of chinese/american/french/italien/indigenous systems that it was able to integrate into a single network. You also have to consider that Iran is a mountainous and large country so a lot of gaps existed even before the june war last year.
Iran should develop a nation wide array of passive sensors and deploy autonomous UCAVs to act as aerial landmines in the west/south of the country. Western missile cities should be converted into air defense/UCAV storage sites. The americans/israelis are afraid of losing fighter jets so they wont bother flying into ambush zones. This would reduce the number of standoff munitions that Iran's static air defenses have to deal with. A lot of these smaller PESA radars and passive sensors that the majid/azarakh air defense system use can be moved around via quadcopter drones rather than truck(Greater mobility and more concealed).
