WHAT ARE THE CAPABILITIES OF S 400 & WHY SWARM DRONES CAN TAKE IT OUT ?

The S-400 Triumf is an anti-aircraft weapon system
developed in the 1990s by Russia's Almaz Central Design Bureau as an upgrade of the S-300 family.
It has been in service with the Russian Armed Forces since 2007.
As of 2017, the S 400 is considered ad the best air-defense systems in the world.
In this video Defense Updates looks at the CAPABILITIES OF S 400 AND WHY SWARM DRONES
CAN TAKE IT OUT?
Each S-400 battalion is equipped with 8 launchers, a control center and radar.
Each of these 8 launchers is equipped with 32 missiles, so a single S400 has 256 missiles
onboard. The S-400 uses four different missiles along
with a multilayered radar-tracking umbrella to cover its entire performance envelope.
Here are the different missiles:
1. Very-long-range 40N6 (400 km) 2. Long-range 48N6 (250 km)
3. Medium-range 9M96E2 (120 km) 4. Short-range 9M96E (40 km)
The S-400’s radar has a range of 600 kilometers and is capable of discriminating even objects
moving on the ground, such as cars and military vehicles.
It can track 300 targets simultaneously and engage 36 of those at any one time.
The S 400 system is mobile — and can move at a moment’s notice making
it hard to engage.
These capabilities make the S 400 a deadly adversary for any air force.
S-400 is fatal threat to everything except the most advanced stealth fighters and bombers.
This basically renders all the 4th generation fighters like F 16 and F 18 obsolete.
Only the Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor, F-35 and Northrop Grumman B-2 Spirit stealth bomber
would be able to operate inside areas protected by S 400. But even those aircraft could be
challenged if there were enough S-400 batteries operating as part of an integrated air defense
network.
It also must be noted that S 400 radar can detect even stealthy aircrafts up to an extent
and this capability is being constantly enhanced.
Current drones are remote-controlled be it small once like the PD-100 Black Hornet 2
or large armed once like the General Atomics MQ-9 Reaper.
Soon, it could be quite different: drones are becoming smaller, cheaper to make, can
zoom around on their own, and gather in groups of hundreds, even thousands, to fly like a
flock of birds. They’re called swarms and with enough numbers
could be a deadly collaborative force on the battlefield.
There is no leader or commander in a swarm; the swarm is a self-organizing system in which
all the elements are equal. Swarming allows drones to search an area efficiently, or fly
together without colliding. And only one operator is needed to control the whole swarm.
Swarms are tough. One missile can bring down an aircraft, but a swarm can lose dozens of
members and keep going. They keep functioning as a cohesive unit as
damaged drones drop out and fresh reinforcements arrive.
There’s more than one military power pushing swarm technology, which includes US, Russia,
China and Israel. The US, for example, recently launched 103
small ‘Perdix’ drones from F/A-18 jets. These weigh a few hundred grams, and are released
from dispensers normally used for flares.
The 3D-printed Perdix drones are disposable, and are intended to suppress enemy air defenses
by acting as decoys or jammers or by locating radar so they can be destroyed.
The drones feature two sets of small wings, making them look like World War I fighter
planes. The biplane configuration reduces wing weight and wingspan. The wings are made
of carbon fiber and the fuselage is made of a Kevlar composite. The drone is powered by
a lithium polymer battery pack powering a rear-facing push propeller.
The drones are capable of withstanding ejection at speeds of up to Mach 0.6 and temperatures
as low as minus 10 degrees Celsius.
Swarm drones is a pet project of the Strategic Capabilities Office, which is in turn part
of the Pentagon's Third Offset Strategy. Third Offset is designed to use America's technological
edge and combine it with new ideas to maintain dominance against potential adversaries.
William Roper, director of the Strategic Capabilities Office:
"Perdix are not pre-programmed synchronized individuals, they are a collective organism,
sharing one distributed brain for decision-making and adapting to each other like swarms in
nature," He added:
"Because every Perdix communicates and collaborates with every other Perdix, the swarm has no
leader and can gracefully adapt to drones entering or exiting the team."
During the test, the drones formed up at a preselected point and then headed out to perform
four different missions. Three of the missions involved hovering over a target while the
fourth mission involved forming a 100-meter-wide circle in the sky.
The drones were originally designed by engineering students at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology and were first modified for military testing in 2013.
There's no word yet on when the Perdix system will be certified for combat. The Department
of Defense (DoD) is currently looking for companies to partner with to produce the micro-drones
at scale, up to a thousand drones at a time. It's also working to further improve the swarm's
distributed processing to include more advanced autonomic functions.
US aims to develop a swarm of drones that costs less than a missile. These will be fitted
with smart bombs in future.
Swarm drone strength will be in the age-old concept of “strength in numbers”.
Colonel Travis Burdine of the U.S. Air Force said at the conference:
“You have maybe 100 or 1,000 surface-to-air missiles, but we’re going to hit you with
10,000 small drones”.
S 400 has a large cache of missiles, 256 per system but it is still finite.
Like all Air defenses, the S 400 can be overwhelmed by enough opponents.
Also it must be noted that current radars which act as eyes for air defense system including
that of S 400 are designed for detecting decent sized targets which fly in isolation and would
find it hard to lock onto small targets which fly in groups of similar kinds.
The Swarm Drone technology is nascent but represent a revolution in military affairs.
Swarm drones could be used not only against air defenses but also against aircraft carriers
or fighter jets, which currently have no countermeasures for such attacks.
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WHAT ARE THE CAPABILITIES OF S 400 & WHY SWARM DRONES CAN TAKE IT OUT ?

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