When Iran admitted that its military shot down a Ukrainian airliner, a high-ranking officer stated that the plane was misidentified by an air defense battery as a cruise missile—a tragic irony is that they believed it was
Share to linkedin... [+]When Iran admitted Saturday that its military shot down a Ukrainian airliner, killing 176, a high-ranking officer stated that the plane was misidentified by an air defense battery as a cruise missile. If that’s true, that’s not the end of the soldiers’ poor judgment.
The head of the aerospace arm of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, Brigadier General Amir Ali Hajizadeh, said in a televised speech Saturday that Ukrainian International Airlines Flight 752 had been shot down by a mobile air defense unit that had been deployed to protect a sprawling IRGC ballistic missile base near the Tehran-area village of Bidganeh in the wake of the U.S.’ targeted killing of Iranian commander Qassem Soleimani.
That’s beyond the 12-km maximum range of SA-15 missiles listed by the manufacturer, Almaz-Antey. Even assuming actual performance is better, the distance and the geometry of targeting a hostile aircraft on the flight path the airliner was on made launching missiles at that point a “hail Mary shot,” says Kopp, and one that training manuals for Soviet-pedigree systems using the same guidance system discourage taking.
“When the IRGC leadership say the operators thought it was a cruise missile, it says to an expert that the operators did not understand the limitations of their equipment,” he says. IRGC air commander Hajizadeh said Saturday that the air defense unit had 10 seconds to decide whether to fire or not and were unable to contact their superiors. “Unfortunately, because of the hasty decision of one person, this great disaster happened,” he said.
As opposed to the all-volunteer U.S. military, which can design weapons systems with deceptively simple user interfaces that contain a complicated range of options that it heavily invests in training soldiers on, Soviet air defense systems have “a load of buttons and switches on the consoles,” says Bronk, but most do one thing only.
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