ZRPK "Shell" against the UAV attack: weaknesses with the option of poor crew training
Losses in Syria and Libya of the Panzir (Panzir-C1) anti-aircraft missile and gun systems manufactured in Russia led to the need to learn important lessons from the situation. Of course, the notorious human factor plays a paramount role in the fact that Haftar forces in Libya and government troops in the SAR lost such weapons. However, it is important to understand here that the technical side of the issue is of no small importance.
The effectiveness of using "Armor" is inversely related to the amount aviation means of destruction that are targets for the ZRPK and for which the ZRPK itself acts as a target. In other words, the more planes and drones the enemy uses against the "Shell", the less chance the complex has to resist such an attack. Everything is logical. An important aspect is precisely in the simultaneous use of several shock UAVs.
For obvious reasons, if the Pantsir-C1 air defense missile defense system is “pulled out,” as they say, in the middle of the desert and at this moment cool in its shadow, then no technical advantages of the system will help.
But for ZRPK, an important issue is the reduction in deployment time. Given that one “Shell-C1” sometimes has to confront 4-5 drones (for example, Turkish “Bayraktar” in the mentioned Libya and Syria), then literally every second is important in this situation.
The advantage in detecting the target and the distance to use the Pantsir-C1 missile weapons over the same Bayraktar is on the side of the SAM system: 36 km in detection range, 18 km in anti-aircraft missile range (with a target altitude of up to 15 km). The Turkish UAV uses UMTAS anti-tank missiles with a launch range of no more than 8 km. But the deployment time, which is about 4,5 minutes, can be too long in preparation for a real battle with several UAVs, especially when you consider the “did not wait” option, which is not so rare for Arab realities. The deployment time when taking into account problems with crew training is the weak point of the complex.
In Syria, the Turkish Bayraktar-TB2 fell "ripe pears" precisely at those moments when anti-aircraft missile and gun systems were detected in a timely manner and when effective combat tactics were chosen with the minimum possible deployment time. For the troops of Haftar and for the SAA in Syria, this became a problem, especially when the number of shock drones exceeded 3 units. The drones were sent from different directions and often put the Pantsir operators into a stupor. In the end, the air defense missile system either had time to release missile ammunition (12 missiles) when the “head” drone appeared (and two or three others used the situation to deliver a devastating blow), or simply was not deployed to a combat position. The volume of missile ammunition is definitely not a weak point, if you think with your head about its rational use.
It is worth noting here that in Russia there is a continuous improvement of the Pantsir air defense missile system. One of the modernizations is the Pantsir-SM, which detects targets already at a distance of 75 km, and strikes at a range of up to 40 km. In other words, while the UAV operator is just getting ready to choose a specific route and flight mode, the Carapace-SM crew is already able to take the drone on the fly and turn it into a pile of wreckage long before entering the zone from which it could launch a missile strike on an air defense missile system. But Russia is not in a hurry to share this option with an air defense system - in the first place, it is important to ensure that they arm their own air defense units.
Information