Saturday, April 16, 2011

I&A April 2011

The April PDF is in the process of being distributed. I have now found a whole new problem: GMail limits the number of messages I can send in a 24 hour period. So, about half of the subscribers got it today, and about half of you will have to wait until tomorrow. Next month I will try and figure out how to do this using YET ANOTHER method, to get around GMail's rule. Someone suggested Google Groups as an option, that may work but may be a bit irritating to have to deal with multiple Google whatsits just to send out a web link. If you've got any ideas, let me know. I can't simply host the PDF file here or release it for open download through Google Docs as it'd evaporate my bandwidth limit in about 0.2 seconds.

Anyway, here's what the April issue ended up containing:

-Current Events: The Libyan Lesson
-Air Defense: The S-300P/S-400
-Air Defense: Contact Line (Contributor Feature)
-Strategic Warfare: War of the Weird
-Historical Analysis: SAM Modernization in China
-Facility Analysis: Fukushima (Contributor Feature)
-Reading List: Military Classics
-April 2011 Links, Source List, and What Is It?
-April 2011 KML file

All for now. Back to trying to figure out GMail.

13 comments:

Ika said...

Cant you host it on a free file sharing website like rapidshare?

ika said...

one of the best s300 articles, covers all topics, but sadly not at great depth. but then i guess you will need to make a book to discuss all the details. i would like to see a similar article of s300v or more indepth one on the s300p series.

Sean O'Connor said...

Rapidshare and a lot of the free file hosting places are not convenient for many of the readers.

I've got a lot more on the S-300P, and yeah, it'd need to be a book at this point to go into any more detail! For this I focused on the development history that you never see, and on the differences between variants and system components.

Pavel Novak said...

Greetings
Thanks for new PDF. There is however one thing I want to clarify. There is information about foreign operators in page 21 that: "The Soviet Union exported two batteries to Bulgaria, one battery to East Germany, and four batteries to Czechoslovakia." I know for sure that Czechoslovakia received just one battery and I think that Bulgaria got also only one. Now apparently some of your sources said different number and I think that it is interesting because I know that Czechoslovakia planned to obtain more batteries (10 in total) but I don't know if there were any negotiation for more. This question is interesting from historical view because 1989 stopped many deals and created confusion like that with MiG-29. There were written in some western publications from early 90s that Czechoslovakia even returned its MiG-29 to the USSR because deal was terminated. That was not true but it has partly real basis because Czechoslovakia originally ordered 20 MiGs in 1985 which got and then started negotiation for another 48 MiGs but this second deal was terminated before completion. So I am interesting how number "4 batteries to Czechoslovakia" was created.
Regards
Pavel Novak

Pavel Novak said...

Hallo SOC
One more thing to that czechoslovak battery question. May be your info about four czechoslovak batteries is just different understanding of organization given by translation. In czech language (and slovak too) "baterie" (ie. what I translate to english as battery) is whole system based in this case on 30N6E radar. Subsequently slovak units of three launchers are platoons (but original czechoslovak organization was with 2 platoons with 6 launchers each). Battery is however the smallest unit which can operate alone and can not be divided without degrading system. Thus individual SAM batteries were divided between the Czech Republic and Slovakia but subordinated platoons were not ripped from its batteries.
Regards

Austin said...

SOC , Thanks for the pdf the S-300/400 write up is quite deep,comprehensive and well researched.Great Stuff !

As far as hosting goes , if rapidshare is not a choice and google is not efficient ,I would suggest why not host it on your own ftp/http site with a generic password protected option.

Thats the most easiest and convenient way to download pdf.

Ika said...

The proper terminology (russian) in this case i believe is:
ЗРДН (zrdn) is the smalest operational unit (fire unit) and consists of 30n6, 4-12 tels, clam shell can be atached to improve low level coverage, tin shield/9l96 can be atached to serve as ew assets should you have a lonely batary.
ЗРП/система (zrp) is a group of up to 6 zrdn + hq + ew radar (big bird). So platoons can be internal designation in the country, but the s300 was always sold as zrdn or "system" (zrp) packages.
The structure i wrote up is the basic one and is not all inclusive.

ika said...

btw you stated that russia has s300pt bataries, yo mean those in storage? is it possible to state ammount of the different types deployed activly?

JJ said...

Sean,

Epic PDF! The new format really lends itself to readable documents. Congrats!

On pg. 18 there is a nice list of system components. I don't see any engagement radars specified for the S-400 System.

Anonymous said...

Well done again. I think you did a very good Job

Sean O'Connor said...

Ika: top of page 24 shows active Russian batteries currently identified. There are five active PT batteries.

JJ: Good catch. The S-400 radars should have been in the table!

Pavel: let me dig around and see what I can figure out.

Ika said...

Is it possible in the next issue to release more information on the iads support components suh as ecm and sigint/elint equioment?

Anonymous said...

Hi Sean,
Its a wonderful job u r doing. Pardon my ignorance, but wont u be publishing the articles on ur blog as well? As u were doing earlier.

I personally find it convenient to look for a topic on ur blog.