Ukraine not having an easy time knocking down hypersonic kinzhal missiles.
0/4 or (0%) of Kinzhal Missiles shot down overnight.
en.wikipedia.org
I'm thinking the thaad defense system would take care of this.
en.wikipedia.org
There are reports of Kinzhals being taken out with Patriots. The Kinzhal is just an air launched Iskander. The "hypersonic" claim is typical Russian overhype. A large number of missiles achieve hypersonic speeds at some point in their flight profile. There were missiles in the 1950s capable of hypersonic speeds.
A true hypersonic missile can maneuver at hypersonic speeds to avoid missile defense systems. Nobody has one working yet and there are only two countries very far along in development: the US and China.
A missile defense system like the Patriot has a fairly narrow intercept cone. The missile needs to be coming in close to the Patriot launcher for a successful intercept. A Patriot system can defend a city, but the same system can't defend another city some distance away. Ukraine is short of Patriot missiles and we don't know what the Kinzhals were targeting. If there were no missile intercept batteries in position or those batteries didn't have missiles, they would have gotten through.
This is an important, and I think scary, dynamic. Throughout history we go back and forth between defenders being best suited for doing damage to attackers, and attackers having the edge to do damage to defenders (think castle walls and cannon - being behind castles walls was a bad plan when cannon came along). Seems like defenders have the edge most of the time, but then a technology comes along that breaks that defensive advantage, and we have a new era of warfare.
Back when I was a teenager (1980s) I saw a documentary on PBS about the three weapons of WW I that many people thought would end all wars: the submarine, the airplane, and the machine gun. All three were new tech in WW I and all three were initially difficult to counter, but counter measures were developed. All three are now just threats that need to be taken into account by war planners.
We are in one of those moments when the tech has changed everything.
My interpretation from what I'm reading about drones is that for the people who are ready and willing to do mayhem and destruction to another, probably without the capability to actually capture and keep what they've attacked, drones are about as good as it gets. The particular dynamic of being able to send cheap drones to be destroyed by expensive defensive hardware is a pathway to impoverishing a nation. Nobody, not even the US, can pay 3+ orders of magnitude more for defensive capability. If nothing else the more expensive stuff can't be manufactured fast enough, regardless of the cost, to avoid being overwhelmed.
At least for Ukraine the missile defense systems are mostly being used to shoot down missiles and drones are being countered with other weapons. The Gepard was a weapon without a purpose when this war started, but it's proven to be a very effective anti-drone platform. A relatively few 35mm AA rounds per drone is cheap and does the job.
The US had it's own gun AA system that was retired in favor of the Avenger missile system. The M163 VADS which deployed a 20mm cannon from the F-4 Phantom.
M163 VADS - Wikipedia
The US has retired all of it's VADS, but there are still a lot left around the world. Chile is the biggest user with 405 of them. Egypt has 108, Jordan 120, and Saudi Arabia 90. Israel has an unknown number that they retired in 2006. I would think that Chile could be coaxed into releasing some of theirs to go to Ukraine, maybe with some incentives or promises of other defense goodies down the line. Chile doesn't really need them right now as all of South America is at peace with no prospect of any conflict on the horizon.
It was bound to happen eventually. HIMARS are designed to be very mobile, it's in the acronym, but Patriots are intended to be parked in one place and not moved around all that much. The Ukrainians were using a Patriot battery like the HIMARS and the Russians eventually caught them.
www.theguardian.com
