Significant Little News.

Behind all craziness happening all around us, some significant technological development for Russian Navy, with completion of state trials for Poliment-Redut system slipped through the 24-hour news cycle strainer. 

MOSCOW (Sputnik) - The testing of the Russian shipborne Poliment-Redut air defence missile system for the frigates of the Project 22350 series has been completed, Commander-in-Chief of the Russian Navy Adm. Vladimir Korolev has announced."The state testing of the Poliment-Redut air defence missile system has been completed," Korolev said as quoted by the Russian Krasnaya Zvesda newspaper.The air defence missile system is capable of hitting air targets located within an up to 150-kilometer (93-mile) radius and at an altitude of up to 30 kilometers.

Thus an extremely important milestone in evolution of Russian Navy is reached. It also signifies a very short lifespan of many Western "analysts" forecasts re: pretty much development of any Russian weapon system when normal and inevitable problems during testing are consistently presented as a doom-spelling developments for anything Russia does. Poliment-Redut (P-R), naturally, was not an exception but Dmitry Gorenburg surely painted a bleak picture in the Summer of 2016. 

It looks like the Russian military is now facing a choice regarding how long it is willing to wait to commission the already long-delayed first ship of the Admiral Gorshkov frigate class. So far, the Defense Ministry has not been willing to commission the frigate without a fully functional air defense system, though this may change as the delays grow longer.   

Truth is, the issue never was stated this way to start with, since Admiral Gorshkov-class frigates were one of those "till the victorious end" deals, which was clear from the get go, once one followed the news on the power-plant development for those ships. But, I guess, when one gets his news, mostly rumors that is, from Moscow uber-liberal shuffle of military ignoramuses one is bound to be surprised non-stop with the failure of both forecasts and the excessive level of drama in those. I am not talking about other ridiculous statements such as Poliment-Redut being "Russian answer to US Aegis system"--by now it became a beaten to death cliche. This is not to mention the fact that four phased arrays on Gorskov-class are just one single outwardly visual similarity with US Navy's venerable AEGIS, which, of course, is Combat Management System, which, of course, Soviets/Russians were developing since 1960s. Truth, however, is that P-R is fully equipped with short to medium range weapons specifically honed for shooting down, by means of own 9M96E and 9M100E missiles, enemy's anti-shipping missiles and other PGMs whose velocities are Mach=3. 

Of course, US Navy has its very own RIM-162 ESSM (Evolved Sea Sparrow Missile) for such purposes but truth is--it is difficult to really judge effectiveness of any US anti-missile system due to sample space for any of them being primarily tests, many of them conducted in "augmented" mode. Russians used and honed their air-defenses in full combat mode since 1960s non-stop. But then there is another teeny-weeny issue--US Navy simply doesn't have real combat-ready supersonic AShMs. In other words, P-R is primarily for Fleet's defense, despite it being very capable ABM system. I will omit here speculating on networking of P-R, but if any earlier Russian systems, such as, say, Mineral ME radar, are any indication, it seems all modern Russian systems are completely networked. So, let's leave it at that, for now. So, here it is, it is in full operational capability now and it covers short, medium and intermediate range air-defense and anti-ballistic zones of the fleet and, rumor has it, the capabilities are very robust. In related news, Russia has also latest version of her Buk-M3 AD system and some people say it is a wowser. While at it--google S-350 Vityaz;-)