Rodolfo is correct, these are higher up regiment level radars and are not meant to follow individual batteries around. In the case of Nebo-M I’m pretty sure its operational range is something like 1800km’s so it can be a solid 1000+km’s away from an S-400 and still relay it information.

The first Nebo-M goes operational in 2012 and is undergoing acceptance trials as we speak. The first Protivnik-GE went into service this year.

The Burmese haven’t officially cancelled the order, they just haven’t paid for it yet.

http://www.rg.ru/2011/11/15/reg-cfo/zakaz-anons.html

New LOI signed with Angara airlines for 10 An-148’s and the Nigerian Air Force has signed for 6. Nigeria will likely get the 2 An-148’s built for Burma while the factory attempts to sort things out with that government.

Finally, there is news on the Il-96 front. 2 more Il-96-300’s will be built over the next 2 years.

Makarov in general has proven to be a hot bag of wind whose public declarations leave one thinking either that he is a complete incompetent who has no idea what he talking about or he is a genius who know something all the rest of us don’t.

Anyway, the extended range missile for the HIMARS system can’t be compared to Smerch. The proper comparison is between HIMARS and Iskander. In any case there are new rockets for the Smerch available. In the latest Jane’s Missiles and Rockets the Smerch-G and Smerch-S are talked about.

All the rest is equal nonsense.

“that’s the same quantity of the whole defense budget but just to procurement.”

The past few years they’ve been playing catchup on the military housing and basing side of things. There were very large outlays for construction of apartments for retired servicemen and the basing facilities at Novorossisk alone ate a billion dollars. In 2012-2013 this spending seriously winds down freeing up a lot of money for procurement. Once the current apartment construction program is finished there likely wont be another on this scale ever again — the current officer corp is much, much smaller and ultimately they will move to mortgages as a result. Additionally, the Russian army is shrinking and shrinking fast. There is no way it is currently 1 million strong. The numbers dont add up. It is probably somewhere in the 800-900k range and shrinking still further. As a result the manpower expenditures are at least 1/5th less than we think, and that frees up still more money for procurement. If they stabilize the force in the 700k range, and manage 4-5% GDP growth over the decade the 65 billion number looks rather more conservative. Plus, I suspect a good bit of that 65 billion is just loan guarantees to OPK factories, and much of that will be recaptured.

So have they ironed out all the bugs in the Redut system or is this thing entering service with no missiles? There was an article on the Rosprom website like a week ago saying Redut was first successfully test fired all the way back in 2009 which hints that the problem with the Gorshkov is the Poliment radar and not the missiles…. Since these corvettes have a different radar can we assume all the bugs have been worked out on them or is this thing going to be another Lada — inducted, but useless.

“The Zhuk-MAE fitted to the prototypes falls short of range performance, remains to be seen whether the final Zhuk-AE with a larger antenna will achieve the brochure specs which might exceed the raw range performance of the RBE2AA. “

Nope, this isnt 2009, the current Zhuk-AE prototypes were boosted from 160km’s to 250km’s well over a year ago. There were interviews and articles about this a couple months before MAKS. In tests they’ve had no problems with range if the open source lit can be trusted. Hell, they are so confident with the basic Zhuk-AE technology they are scaling up to naval radars based on the same modules. You will never make up for having a smaller nose. The Chinese at least understand this which is why the J-20 looks the way it looks.

The VVS’s problem with the Su-35S is very easy to sum up — they want a DAS installed on their planes and not a plain old MAWS, and in particular they want the DAS meant for the PAK-FA today, and not in 2-3 years. I’ve seen nothing in the open source where the VVS complained about any of the EW pods for the Su-35S.

The major reason why no one buys these fancy electronic Russian sub-systems is the insane price associated with low volume fabrication of electronics. The Russian army is paying $9,000 US dollars for a very simple GLONASS/GPS hand held receiver because they are fabricating the chipsets in Taiwan in tiny batches of 500 per year. You want a Russian IFF? Get ready to pay 3000% more than what a Thales IFF will cost you. COTS is great, but the Russian MoD still severely restricts where COTS components can be used. Its 2011, export sales have become secondary for them.