Calamine Waffles

There are other surface-launched missiles with home-on-jam/home-on-radar capability, but they are usually anti-ship missiles (Exocet and Otomat have this feature).

What exactly would they nuke? Kyiv? I doubt that would cause Ukraine to surrender. If anything it would harden resistance even more.

He could quite easily declare "victory" now if he so wanted to and the Russian public would probably buy it. He's done so multiple times in Syria.

Probably still negotiating I imagine.

Your evidence of this is...?

The only response should be the classic one: you and what army?

This is again one of those cases where, yeah, on paper Russia and the US/NATO have these two comparable systems, but the US/NATO ones are backed up by other synergistic things that act as massive force multipliers, while the Russian systems...aren't.

This is for Tor-M1, but I can't imagine the M2 being that much better at intercepting GMLRS (which has a terminal velocity of 850 m/s)

@Haiduk did Ukraine decommission all the S-200 and S-125 surface-to-air missiles before the war? Did they also reactivate the Kub systems or are those no longer in Ukraine as well?

Yes, but as your post itself says, it will just lock on to the largest thing it can "see" with the primitive radar. Even then interference from the ground will make it difficult to maintain the lock. That's why even with the radar it's struggling to get a direct hit on even large targets, like at Kremenchuk: Of course, the warhead is huge, so even with a miss it will do a lot of damage.

Well, the Ukrainians already use cyborgs since 2014, so I guess bio-engineered mutant soldiers is just the next step.

They're basically the isolationist MAGA wing of the Republican Party. There is a similar kind of wing on the Democrat left side, but they are not *that* isolationist.

Kh-22MA/NA, the ones with inertial guidance and TERCOM for increased accuracy against ground targets, only have thermonuclear warheads. A CEP of dozens of meters is impossible using purely 1970s inertial guidance and requires radar. As already stated before, the radar cannot be used accurately except against targets with very large radar cross-sections (i.e., major warships or bridges). Even nuclear Tomahawk, which was widely respected for its accuracy, only has a CEP of 80 m, and that uses INS and TERCOM that is at least a generation ahead of whatever is on the Kh-22N. The only use for conventional Kh-22 against land targets is for terror bombing against cities. It's completely useless as a precision weapon. If you launch it at a city using the radar guidance it will just lock on to the largest target it "sees", whether that's a shopping mall or an apartment block.

I don't know where you get the CEP figures for those from, but I'm pretty confident it's not 100 m against land targets for the radar ones. Even KSR-5 from the 1970s with radar is credited with a CEP of 1-2 nautical miles against land targets. For comparison Block-I nuclear Tomahawk (TLAM-N) had a CEP of 80 m using TERCOM and INS from the 1980s. Both Kh-22MA and Kh-22NA with TERCOM only have thermonuclear warheads. From airwar.ru: Out of those 1000, how many are Kh-22N/NAs? How many Kh-22s are even left? It is known that Ukraine returned 386 Kh-22s to Russia, but another 423 were scrapped by Ukraine. I doubt they are going to use all their Kh-22s (especially new ones), they still need them in case of a confrontation with NATO for the Tu-22M3s. Kh-22 almost certainly does not have a top cruise speed of Mach 6. That's hypersonic. The original Kh-22 has a cruise speed of between 3,000 to 3,600 km/h. I don't have the numbers for the Kh-22M/N, but I suspect the speeds you are quoting are the maximum in the terminal dive phase. None of these are low-altitude terrain-following missiles like Kalibr. They should be interceptable with S-300P as well as S-300V in the cruise phase. Probably in the terminal dive phase you might need S-300V. http://www.airwar.ru/image/i/weapon/x-22_cx_n.gif The main problem is Ukraine doesn't have enough S-300s to protect every city.

The CEP of the Kh-22 is not 500 m, it's more like 3 miles (~5 km) in land attack mode. 500 m is with the radar against naval targets, which cannot be used against land targets. They don't have an infinite number of Kh-101, Kh-555, and they can't launch all of them anyway because they need to keep some for use against NATO and/or China etc. The Kh-22 is very much not impossible to intercept. It's a 1960s missile with 1950s technology. It's just that Ukraine doesn't have enough of the tools needed. Hopefully that will change.

The US has 50,000+ GMLRS rockets, they can probably spare a few.

It will be an excellent way to waste precious cruise missiles...but then again, Russian has virtually zero target-finding capability past the near-FEBA, so what are they going to use them on anyway in Ukraine?

You'd basically need a ground-launched AARGM...and you'd need another stage to give it enough range from a ground launch, like the Kilshon (Israeli ground-launched Shrike)

Polish border is too far away, they would be below the horizon of those signals, I think.

If you can suppress the bigger SAMs and you have good ISR, enough PGMs, and decent aircraft, you can operate outside of MANPADS ceiling and drop PGMs. But you will also need escort for the strike packages to deal with enemy interceptors. I don't think there is any MANPADS in Russian service that can deny airspace up to 15k feet. The effectiveness will be drastically lower, especially vs. a fast mover, and they will need early warning as well, which if you suppressed the radars will be difficult.

You need the appropriate receivers and have them located in the right places to triangulate those signals.

It's not that simple. Most of these SAMs are mobile, so the kill chain may not be short enough to allow them to consistently hit them. You might be able to get the more static S-300/S-400 systems, but they are much farther back than something like the Buk-M1/2/3 would be. These SAMs are also denying the airspace to Ukrainian drones, so it will be hard for them to use those to find them in the first place. It is possible, yes, once the Russian artillery has been mitigated/neutralised, but Ukraine doesn't have nearly enough SAMs (especially medium/long range ones) to do that currently.

This has been observed by people who watch the Syrian War. The Russians basically have no idea what is going on past 30-40 km behind the FEBA.

It's pointless to send them strike aircraft like F-15Es if you don't give the Ukrainians the training and equipment to do proper SEAD.

No sign of that so far: https://www.timesofisrael.com/israel-to-send-new-batch-of-defensive-equipment-to-ukraine/