Dagger for the Patriot
Ukronet is persistently spreading the news about a fake Ukrainian air defense victory that allegedly shot down a Russian Kh-47M2 Kinzhal hypersonic missile over Kiev on the night of May 4th.
It is alleged that the American Patriot air defense system was used for this purpose. Mayor Vitali Klitschko even showed the wreckage to German journalists.
Pentagon spokesman Patrick Ryder confirmed the fantasies of the Kyiv city administration. I really want to announce the super capabilities of my air defense system. Surely the producers of “Patriot” hinted that it wouldn’t be a bad idea to make an advertisement based on this fact.
Why! The Russian Kinzhal, inaccessible to air defense, was shot down by an American super complex! You'll see that sales will increase. Well, we won’t be in debt!
Of course, they will grow up if buyers, like the “suckers from Privoz”, believe every gypsy or every Klichka who poses against the background of a piece of iron with a hole in the nose. Well, this one will say everything the Pindos say. Even the fact that this is a Russian nuclear submarine that tried to surface in a Kyiv park, but landscape design workers discovered it and dug it out with a cultivator.
One of the Ukrainian specialists even compared photographs of the “Dagger” suspended from the plane and the scrap metal found. It’s a pity that the authors of the news did not play a game called “Find ten (five, etc.) differences.”
But the reader is invited to compare the Kh-47M2 “Dagger”, the wreckage found in Kyiv, including a certain warhead and ... a BetAB-500ShP concrete-piercing bomb without a missile part. (See photo) In my opinion, the similarity is obvious. And obviously not with “Dagger”.
This is for Kyiv lovers of collecting scrap metal.
As for how realistic it is to shoot down a hypersonic Kinzhal with an American Patriot, I asked my longtime friend, retired air defense officer Evgeniy Kirichenko, to tell me and this is what he wrote:
“Having looked at the pictures of the “downed” Kinzhal, I can say that it strongly resembles a fragment of a cast-iron sewer pipe. It's as thick as a matchbox, no less. The Kinzhal, like all similar missiles, has a radar homing head in its warhead, which should “shine through” the wall of the warhead, i.e., the warhead should be much thinner.
We do not know which Patriot systems the United States transferred to Kyiv, but only one thing is known: they are not capable of working against missiles at hypersonic speed.
Firstly, the trajectory of the “Dagger” is constructed in such a way that the Patriot’s radars can detect it only on the last part of the route - experts call it the terminal part of the flight, when the rocket, having accelerated, is practically in space, where there is no atmosphere - this is 250-300 km from the surface of the earth, dives sharply downward, breaking through the atmospheric layer and becoming very hot due to friction with the air. At the same time, its speed slows down, which gives the Patriot interceptor missile some chances to hit the Kinzhal.
That is, theoretically, she can get into it. But then the wreckage would look different. After hitting the target and exploding the Patriot's warhead, the found element would resemble a sieve due to fragments. And here there is only one big hole.
But this is purely theoretical. And in practice, the Patriot is not capable of intercepting hypersonic missiles, because its radars do not have time to detect them. The Americans themselves admit this. The Patriot can intercept aeroballistic targets such as glide bombs, cruise missiles and Iskander missiles.
The hypersonic X-47M2, called the Dagger, can only be intercepted by a nuclear charge. And at the same time, we must keep in mind that the “Dagger” maneuvers when approaching the target.
In this case, colossal overloads arise, and in order to intercept it, the interceptor missile must make sharp turns in the same way. But her body is unlikely to withstand such overloads.”
The reason for the spread of misinformation around the mythical defeat of the Russian Kinzhal by the American Patriot is probably also related to the significant lag of the Americans in the creation of hypersonic missiles. After a series of unsuccessful tests of its hypersonic missile AGM-183 ARRW in December last year, this missile was launched from a B-52 strategic bomber and accelerated to hypersonic. But the performance of Russian, Chinese, North Korean and Iranian models is still very far away. And it is still too early to talk about the completion of development and testing and, even more so, about the likelihood of prompt delivery of these weapons to the US Air Force.
So they are trying, if not to promote their own, then to discredit the enemy’s weapons.
As they say, “whoever you get along with...serves you right,” - apparently the purely crested “... and whatever I take, I bite” is highly contagious!
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Now the editors are aware.