New Missile System to Put End to Upgrades

New Missile System to Put End to Upgrades

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Russia is upgrading its missile defense system. Its Aerospace Forces will get their first medium-range surface-to-air missile system S-350 Vityaz next year, the Defence Ministry said.

The troops will also be equipped with around a dozen of Pantsir-S air defence missile-gun systems and S-400 Triumf long-range air defence weapons, according to sputniknews.com.

The system design traces its roots from the joint South Korean/Russian KM-SAM project and uses the same 9M96 missile as the S-400 missile system.

The Russian military has long planned to replace their aging S-300 short-range missile defense system. The original, Soviet S-300P underwent a series of minor upgrades over the span of several decades, focused on implementing more powerful, longer-range missiles, according to nationalinterest.com. But the manufacturer, Almaz Antey, found themselves brushing up against the technical limits of the S-300 platform.

With the S-300 having run its course, a new missile system engineered with modern design principles was in order. As military expert Andrei Frolov put it to Russian news, “Vityaz is a fundamentally new system, not a modernization of Soviet systems, which makes it even better than the Buk-M3 [missile defense system].”