Air defense

S-400: The Air Force's Ultimate Nightmare or Over-hyped?

Russia has spent decades developing multilayered air-defense systems, each tier of weapons capable of handling different targets at varying altitudes and ranges. The bottom layer is made up of point-defense vehicles capable of engaging low-flying aircraft at short ranges as they approach frontline troops or key installations, a role performed in Syria by Russia’s Pantsir S-1 (NATO codename: SA-22 Greyhound) air-defense vehicles. One level up, there are medium-range missiles that can strike targets at higher altitudes a few-dozen miles away, such as the Buk-M (SA-17 Grizzly) missile involved in the Malaysian Flight MH 17 incident.

The S-300 and -400 family of missile systems, starting with the S-300P first deployed in 1978, constitute the long-range end of the spectrum. The have the range to be considered anti-access/area-denial (A2/AD) weapons capable of denying the airspace of an entire region, and can also, in theory, take out incoming cruise missiles and shorter-range ballistic missiles. A specialized missile-defense variant, the S-300V4, was deployed to the Russian naval base at Tartus in October 2016.