The T-90 design is pretty old itself and Russia doesn't field many T-90 regiments themselves? A Russian poster in a different forum I'm in said Russia is on it's third new "mechanized Battalion" bought in almost ten years. Were talking Battalion not Brigade or even Division, so no I don't share much faith that Russia builds and produces a lot of these systems.
They bought only kind of pre-serial batches T-90's, I was talking about quality, not quantity.
What Germany could do years ago has little to do with Russia military factories produced in the 70s, 80s, and 90s.
Actually, it does. It shows state of art. Technologies disperse over educated countries - there's no reason to believe that the Russians couldn't match Maverick's early 70's accuracy with essentially similar Iskander terminal phase seeker. They probably even had the blueprints since decades.
Look at the Russian FCS on their tanks and where they are just about now, western counterparts been doing that for ten plus years already.
The Russians slept over thermal and low light sensors, no doubt. They catched up a bit. Today you could even use commercial equipment and harden it and still exceed mid-90's MilSpec performance.
Night sight technology was actually one of the few technology fields where the Russians neither kept up nor pursued a different path but lagged badly.
There's much Cold War propaganda still in the air about Russian technology - and the Russians tend to not show their new stuff, but only 10 y.o. stuff. They never showed off Arena-2 AFAIK. The latest Russian APS that I know about is 15 years old. Heck, they invented APS - they surely developed much newer stuff.
The information asymmetry exists even between the English/Hebrew speaking Western nations and non-English speaking NATO countries. I've yet to encounter any American who knows about the German AMAP ADS, but I've seen lots of articles about the U.S: and Israeli systems (which are apparently lagging one or two generations behind in capability).
Imagine the effects of the language barrier to Russia!
Russian smart weapons are interesting and I see the short films, and read the weapons releases and all I'm no expert by any means and don't claim to be, but.
I visited the Russian company's booth that promoted Iskander and other missiles at Eurosatory 2008. The widely distributed information is pretty much all that's publicly known about the missile. I have an original promotional CD, with few additional info.
How many of the new smart weapons we see and read about actually produced are fielded in active Russian units world wide? How many units really see and test and trained with these weapons? Most are made for export markets which is where Russia's military arms industry is geared for. Russia themselves don't buy a lot of new weapons sadly.
The Germans developed the 8,8cm Flak 18 in 1928 and used it to great effect till 1945, but didn't procure it in quantity till the mid-30's. A look at the technology tells about quality and potential, production (especially of a MUNITION like Iskander) can happen quickly if necessary.
What's right behind those advance T-72s Russia's front line troops are using are what next in reserve ex-T-55's? A good part of Russia's artillery is very dated as well.
T-62's. I recall no info about T-55's being used. The Russians have a habit of using two different inventories of tanks; training tanks and wartime tanks. It may be very well that they used old tanks for training a unit in basic tank warfare and sent that one to combat.
Learning from real soldiers here in this forum and others you can only learn and train on basically what you have. If a Russian Infantry units has D-130 cannons and BMP-2 and few T-72s to fill out a Battalion then that's what they have to trained with,if ammo and fuel is available.
Not necessarily.
D-130? Do you mean D-30? That's actually a great gun for its calibre. Much better overall concept than M777.
In most cases a little depending on terrain a modern mechanized forces would rip through a unit made up of such weapons and low level trained personnel. There are other factors as well like air power, artillery, and more but basically the better trained and equipped forces wins. I watch how US Army tankers train and can't see Russian tanker getting the chance to train like that.
Some tactics require less training than others.
U.S. training on many systems was apparently reduced to save fuel and spares as well (and to train for COIN instead of for major conventional war). The Russians aren't well-known for high quality training, but that can change rapidly in time of crisis or war.
Interestingly, Iskander needs almost not raining and especially no complex of CAP, SEAD, airfields, tankers and EW to hit a target. It works also fine during enemy air superiority. That's the true value of the missile - it's an allternative to demanding Kosovo-style strike packages.
That breaks down on why some of Russia's export customer do so poorly, Russians can only train their buyers how they were trained? I learned a lot from guys here training is the key.
Actually, Third world customers of Western weapons suck almost all the time as well. The Soiets/Russians just never were so openly aggressive in the Third World. That means that very rarely Western Third World armies had to face first class opponents.
The Iranians sucked with Western equipment, the Iraqis did, the Argentinians did (remember how mcuh their Western air defense weapons failed)...on the other hand the Serbs did a fine AD job over Kosovo with ancient Soviet hardware (kills ain't everything, especially not at such odds).
I don't mean to sound insulting but today's Russian solider is ill trained and equipped compared to most western soldiers.
There's a certain hype about Western troops involved. The Israelis found their reputation on 1973 (where they had in fact a mixed prowess), but have a vastly changed army since the late 70's, disappointed in the 1982 Lebanon invasion, were slowly ruined by Lebanese and Palestinian occupation and embarrassed themselves in the 2006 invasion.
The Western troops didn't have a fair fight since 1942, but still had many rather mixed results.
I'm sure a list can be made of western equipment to be fair.
*Try to find how the AA-12 was upgraded and the different models produce, if you can
We can discuss today's R-77 in ten years, that's how the Russians handle these things.
*Look at Russia Su-35 a upgraded on a 70s design aircraft, just another heavy large aircraft the biggest target in the fighter world. Do you think Russia has a 5th generation aircraft in works while there still producing 70 designed fighters? I don't think so.
PAK-FA. It makes sense to be few years late behind F-22 to build a better plane as this fighter generation will likely last for three decades at least.
*T-95 in it's early form already a dated design and most likely never get funding
T-95 is like F-19 - won't happen like rumored, but eventually there will be something. We cannot know whether ti will beoutdated from the beginning, as we know nothing about it. By the way; Russian MBTs were systematically underestimated by the Wett in the Cold War, and this habit still sticks. Their only real fault was poor mitigation of behind-armor effects.
*Over 400+ Su-27 more then half of Russia's best fighters can't even fired their best AA-12?
Such detailed knowledge is a) questionable (->maskirovka) and b) such problems could be fixed within weeks. Btw, a similar problem plagued hyped-up F-4's in the 60's.
* Is the AA-12 even produced in useful numbers?
Obviously, unknown. We cannot learn anything by asking without expectation of an answer.
Quantity tells nothing about quality anyway.
*The Su-27 upgrade program going on for years already and less then 1 regiment of Su-27M1 produced.
As I wrote earlier - they are saving money by developing, but not producing. That's a wiser budget decision than going broke on military spending like the USA does.
* S-400 in testing? Again can it happen, can if detect targets like they say it can? are the claims real? will it ever make production on a large scale or only if an export buyer is found?
S-400 is at the very least a system that has no Western rival and is well-suited to challenge an opponent's AEW/CAP/SEAD-based air superiority.
AD systems ias an area where the USA cannot really claim to have had always good systems. The USN is only now about to introduce an active radar seeker SAM (SM-6), a move that should have happened 20 years ago!
* Mig-35 not even produced yet even after India taking 9 nine years to make a fighter selection? They could have won this fighter selection five times over already.
The Indians have serious procurement bureaucracy problems, selling them anything is exceedingly difficult now.
...
Well, you get the picture. The state of the Russian Armed forces, the performance of exported (often monkey) hardware and even even their technology history give no decisive information about their modern systems' quality.
About Western arms/troops quality - well, it isn't all gold that shines.
Sorry but having somebody trained on equipment that works and is modern enough to see a target 60 miles away and then choosing what part of the target hit for most Russia units would surprise me.
The training isn't there and most cases neither is the equipment
