If Iran isn’t nuclear capable then America is wasting its dried out money.

Familiar with the Cold War work of Kanatjan Alibekov? You don’t need a nuclear warhead to make trouble. You could argue that the Alibekov solution would be far, far more devastating than a simple limited nuclear strike.

The Patriot protection to the site will show unambiguously that NATO is interested in its anti-Russian potential

That’s an interesting way to make the facts fit the argument, given that Poland already asked for PATRIOT missiles to be deployed for protection as a condition of the basing agreement! If Russians are allowed to be skeptical of events for historical reasons, then the Poles are as well…

Given that PATRIOTs were already going to be there, it would suggest that Russia believes that current Iskander SRBMs can avoid interception. It also makes the reporter look slightly foolish for not understanding the entire situation.

http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/US_missile_deal_gives_Poland_Patriots_bolstered_defence_ties_999.html

Also, the file you posted is interesting, but they need to provide source data to back up their assertion that the missile velocities aren’t accurate. The graphs are interesting, but where did they originate from? The ground trace is not an accurate measuring stick for missile velocity anyway. That totally discounts the Earth’s rotation, a serious factor in East to West missile launches. They also don’t seem to have considered the fact that GBI needs about 250-300 seconds before launch for accurate track data to be established for the HTK interceptor. That’s 4-5 minutes. Place the Russian ICBM 4-5 more minutes down its trajectory and see what happens…

Well, the SOC’s map is quite interesting.

Oh, that’s good! You shall all address me as “The SOC” from now on! :diablo:

Iran never threatened the U.S.

So all of the “Death to the Great Satan” talk since 1979 is addressed to who, exactly?

Plus all of Iran’s missile bases are in the western half of the country.

Seriously though, why no Russian objections to ABM capable AEGIS ships? New software and new STANDARDs could make every AEGIS cruiser or destroyer a potential mobile ABM platform. That’s a far more serious threat to Russian deterrence than 10 missiles in Poland. This is all political, Russia just doesn’t like continued Western meddling in Eastern Europe, and historically I can understand why even if I don’t agree with it. Russia knows that we have a right to develop a total ABM system if we want to since the ABM treaty is over and done with, and sovereign states like Poland are free to do business with whomever they wish. ABM missiles in Poland is however good fuel for the “stop NATO expansion and stop messing about in our backyard” fire though, so there’s where we stand now.

Armenia does.

Firing from eastern Iran near Mashad takes it between the Dombarovskiy and Tatischevo trajectories. I picked Tabriz because it has the silos, no other missile site in Iran has anything like that from what I can tell.

Firing it from the eastern-most actual Iranian missile facility located southeast of Semnan (roughly a quarter of the way between Tehran and Mashad, and a little to the south), however, takes it far back to the west and over Belarus and Lithuania.

But that’s still not the point, the point is that the system really doesn’t stand a chance trying to play catch-up with a Russian ICBM. An Iranian ICBM? They’ll have a good deal of time to see it coming and set up a kill.

I’d redraw the graphic, but Google Earth conveniently crashed and I managed to lose the damn ground traces from all of the Russian ICBM sites :rolleyes: Really, Putin and Medvedev should have the SRF paint gigantic middle fingers on the side of their ICBMs, because that’s what they’re in effect giving to the Polish ABM site when they launch and go flying by.

A mix of S-300PS/PM units?

Also, can you elaborate a little on occupied vs unoccupied positions?

Some are simply left in case the needed arises to use them?

S-300P systems are deployed at sites by variant. You won’t find S-300PT and S-300PM components at the same location. There is a degree of backwards compatibility with the missiles and the hardware components. You will find S-300PS and S-300PM batteries close to each other, but they’re at separate sites.

Why are there so many empty sites? Probably because they:

1. Don’t have the money to keep them all manned

2. Have sold off some of the systems to places like Belarus and Kazakhstan

3. May use a lot of those sites to relocate systems during wartime to complicate targeting

Want to see where they all are?

http://imintandanalysis.googlepages.com/SAMSiteOverview.kmz

Download and open that in Google Earth. There’s almost 3,000 SAM sites in there worldwide.

Another joke. The Iranians, in case an American aggression will retaliate by raining missiles on Saudi oilfields and refineries and by obstructing Ormuz. This will cause much more damage to the already weakened Western economy than a few MRBM in Warsaw or in Athens (that’s the real Iranian capacity and not the paranoid and unrealistic tale of “Iranian nuclear ICBM”)
Another (more or less known) asymmetrical measures will also unleashed by the Iranians. This will be more rational than the stupid “Iranian actions” that the propagandists of the Pole GBI site argue. They are definitively not fool.

Middle Eastern targets can be defended by THAAD systems or PAC-3 ERINT systems. Iranian missile development seems to be progressing down an interesting path as well. They’re trialling a space launch system to orbit a satellite. It’s not a very big technological leap to go from SLV and satellite to ICBM.

Let’s look at this graphically. Russia has ICBMs at Dombarovskiy (SS-18), Kozelsk (SS-19), Tatischevo (SS-19/27), Teykovo (SS-25), Yedrovo (SS-25), Verkhnaya Salda (SS-25), Yurya (SS-25), and Yoshkar Ola (SS-25) in the western part of the nation. Let’s say that Iran drops an ICBM into a silo at the missile complex outside of Tabriz. Russia and Iran decide that it’d be a good idea to nuke Philadelphia. I picked Philadelphia because it’s on the eastern seaboard between DC and New York and trying to hit either of those two places won’t get you a significant degree of trajectory change, so it represents about as far “east” in the United States that a Russian or Iranian ICBM would likely try to hit.

Here are the ground traces for missiles fired from these locations towards Philadelphia, with the locations of the GMD missiles and radar in Poland and the Czech Republic added:

Iranian missiles would overfly Poland, making Poland a good choice for a midcourse defense system. Missile launch takes around 300 seconds according to the Missile Defense Agency, as an EW system like SBIRS has to cue the X-band radar onto a potential target (it doesn’t operate as a search radar, so it isn’t monitoring for missile launches itself anyway). By then Russian missiles are accelerating towards their targets and are going to be a very difficult tail-chase intercept for the GMD system, which is not what it was designed for. The X-band radar can pick out the warhead of a target and direct the HTK vehicle towards it, which would likely be damn near impossible in a tail chase environment.

Now, if Russia wanted to have a legitimate gripe, they’d be arguing over the deployment of ABM-capable AEGIS systems. You could easily plop those down in the middle of the North Atlantic and take shots at inbound Russian ICBMs, provided it has the altitude capability to do so. If they’re so worried about these ten missiles they could always simply retarget those western ICBMs towards targets further east (which a good deal of them are likely to do anyway) and use SLBMs to hit the eastern American seaboard.

If we wanted to deter Russian ICBMs, we’d have to place the GMD system in a far better location like Norway or even Maine. Ten interceptor missiles placed into silos in Poland is not going to do a thing to the Russian ICBM deterrent capability.

ALCM’s must be an headache for the tactitians, i mean an air launched missile with 2000 kms of range, out of the normal fighter range, with many missile launced per bomber (tu-95/b-52), even with aerial refueling the bombers are virtually in a safe launch place..and with all these missiles flying arround, seriously the things will get nasty

Bombers are not necessarily in a safe launch place. It depends on how far inland the ALCMs are targeted. This is why the MiG-31 was deployed to the northeast and northwest in Russia, so it could find bombers and ALCMs before they entered Russian airspace over the mainland. Truth be told an ALCM salvo would be a bigger threat to the USA than to Russia given the defenses involved in both places.

I see it a more relevant problem especially in a conventional war, there is any project dealing with that issue? for the task is needed a fighter?, maybe an adaptation of an tu-22m or b-1b were studied for that mission?, i know the mig 1.07 -or something like that- project, but for me designing a very heavy fighter is not a practical solution (better would be to redesign an medium size bomber)

The MiG 7.01 was the project to replace the MiG-31 using an abandoned Sukhoi T-60 configuration brought to MiG when one of Sukhoi’s designers switched teams. Heavy fighters were very practical for Russia all the way back to the old Tu-128. It gave them a large, long-range air defense platform for patrolling the north regions where deploying enough SAMs to cover the airspace would have bankrupted them back to the Stone Age in about three seconds. Just because a large heavy interceptor is out of place in just about any other air arm doesn’t mean it wasn’t a perfect fit for the Russian air arms.

The best way to deal with cruise missiles if you can’t get the launchers is to oversaturate yourself with SAM systems capable of engaging low RCS targets. Kinda like Russa/the USSR did with the S-300P series batteries. There are buttloads of S-300P emplacements, occupied and unoccupied, all over the former USSR. If they were all operational in wartime, good luck getting an ALCM salvo in there. In that environment ALCMs would be best used at very low level approaching under the radar horizon to take out coastal targets like SSBN bases, air defense sites, and the like to kill off what you can and make it easier for B-2s to worm their way inside of Russia on their Topol-hunting mission.

Could almost be an SS-N-19.