Wednesday, January 30, 2008

The Chinese SAM Network

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10 comments:

Feng said...

hey Sean, when are these GE images taken? Because, I think several KS-1A batteries got deployed in the past year and same with HQ-9 in a lesser sense, so there should be more if we can late 2007 pictures.

Sean O'Connor said...

You can use one of the layers in Google Earth to tell when the images were taken. There may well be further examples of newer systems out there as some of the imagery is a little dated, but I can only work with what I can see!

Unknown said...

Great reading as always!

Feng said...

sorry, I don't mean to offend you there. It's great work. I just looked at the pictures and saw 2008 in some of them and found it hard to believe they are that recent when the previously mentionned GE links that people put up were all said to be from 2006.

Sean O'Connor said...

No offense taken, surely. As for the 2008 date, that's just a copyright, completely unrelated to the date the image was taken. Anything with a 2007 copyright was an image I captured last year (I save images of every SAM site I catalog for various reasons); I did check and make sure that they didn't change over the last few months. Look at the two Tieshan images. They were both captured in 2007, so they both have the 2007 copyright on them, but I identified when the image was actually taken.

Anonymous said...

Greatest article i've ever seen regarding PLA's sam systems!!!

Good job! Sean!

Anonymous said...

BTW, the site at 39 22' 44.83" N 116 07' 52.16" E is a S300PMU1 site. The site at N40 06 54 E116 59 21 is a S300PMU site.

Sean O'Connor said...

The northern site can't be ID'ed as of yet because there is nothing occupying the site right now.

The southern site is currently visible as an S-300PMU site, as it has the shorter 42-43 foot TELs. That image was taken in May of last year as well.

Anonymous said...

hey sean, great informative article, but you have not mentioned anything on SAM sites in TAR region.

Anonymous said...

Great article. You should consider a job as an intelligence analyst, if you haven't already.