The word "Iskander" strikes awe on impressionable Europeans. Behind this word, they imagine a "terrible Russian club" that can fall on them at any moment.
We are talking about the Iskander-M operational-tactical missile system (OTRK). It was put into service in 2006 and since then every year it plays an increasing role in the traditional (since the time of Peter the Great) dialogue between Russia and Europe on building relationships between these two worlds.
Located in the Kaliningrad region, Iskanders can shoot through half of Europe. Since these complexes are extremely mobile, which was well shown by the exercises of the missile forces of the Western Military District, which took place in early December last year, it is practically impossible to prevent them from preemptively destroying them in the event of a complication of the situation in the European theater of operations with conventional weapons that NATO has here. Therefore, any mention of the fact that Russia, as a sovereign state, can supply Iskanders in the vicinity of Kaliningrad, causes a panic attack among impressionable European politicians. However, few people know that it was they and their overseas partners who directly contributed to Russia getting this formidable weapon.
The fact is that by the mid-80s of the last century, American and European politicians finally managed to reverse the military-political parity with the Soviet Union in their favor. A number of international treaties signed at that time, in fact, disarmed our country in areas strategically important for NATO. One of them is operational-tactical missile systems with nuclear charges, with the help of which the USSR could really "break through" any resistance in the European theater of military operations (in the domestic classification, OTRK includes complexes with a firing range from 100 to 1 thousand km, on the west - from 300 to 3.5 thousand km). And it was precisely these complexes of the Elbrus type (firing range up to 300 km), Temp-S (900 km) and Oka (407 km) that largely ensured the balance of power between the Warsaw Pact countries and NATO countries in Europe. For example, the positions of the American Pershing-2 ballistic missiles and the land-based Tomahawk cruise missiles were hit by the Oka and Temp complexes. Moreover, it was precisely the Soviet strategy - NATO was guided by the development of strike aircraft with high-precision means of aviation destruction. But, in fact, the Soviet strategy at that time was more effective than the Western one. “Unlike aviation, which experienced restrictions on weather conditions and the need to preliminarily carry out complex organization of air operations, missile systems could be used for nuclear strikes immediately. The enemy did not have any protection against ballistic missiles,”the historian Yevgeny Putilov emphasized.
Reference: The basic version of the Iskander is a self-propelled wheeled launcher armed with two solid-propellant missiles, which deliver warheads weighing up to 480 kg each to a distance of 500 km. The missiles can be equipped with high-explosive, penetrating, high-explosive incendiary, cluster, cumulative, volumetric detonating and even nuclear warheads. The launch time of the first rocket "from the march" is 16 minutes.
The interval between shots is 1 minute. Each vehicle is completely autonomous and can receive target designation even from photographs.“The complex is not dependent on reconnaissance satellites or aircraft. Target designation can be obtained not only from them, but also from a special combined arms reconnaissance vehicle, a soldier of an artillery fire spotter, or from a photograph of the area, which will be inserted into an onboard computer directly at a combat position through a scanner. Our homing head will unmistakably bring the missile to the target. Neither fog, nor a moonless night, nor an aerosol cloud specially created by the enemy can prevent this,”Nikolai Gushchin, one of the creators of Iskander, noted at one time.
The 9M723K1 missile of the Iskander-M complex with a launch weight of 3800 kg develops a speed of up to 2100 m / s at the initial and final flight stages. It moves along a quasi-ballistic (up to 50 km altitude) trajectory and maneuvers with overloads of the order of 20-30 units, which makes it impossible to intercept it with all currently existing missile defense systems, since they would have to make maneuvers with overloads 2-3 times greater.
In addition, the rocket is manufactured using stealth technology, which also makes it extremely difficult to detect. The accuracy of the missile hitting the target (depending on the guidance method) is up to 1 to 30 meters. Another modification of the Iskander is armed with R-500 cruise missiles. Their speed is 10 times less than that of the 9M723K1 missiles, however, the R-500, according to some sources, can fly over a distance of over 2 thousand km at an altitude not exceeding several meters above the ground.
Therefore, in 1987, the United States and its allies persuaded the then leadership of the USSR to sign an agreement on the elimination of short and medium-range missiles (INF). It concerned, first of all, OTRK "Temp-S". However, in fact, the new "Oka" also went under the knife. “The official motivation of the Americans for their demand to reduce the 9K714 Oka missile system under the INF Treaty was that an American missile of the same size could have a range of 500 kilometers. The Soviet "Oka" during tests showed a maximum flight range of 407 kilometers. However, the position of the Soviet negotiators allowed the Americans to demand a unilateral reduction of the Oka complexes under the slogan "You promised." And that was done,”Yevgeny Putilov recalled.
The decision to liquidate the Oka and stop work on the Oka-U (firing range - more than 500 km) and the Volga OTRK (it was supposed to replace the Temp-S), of course, was a terrible blow for the Design Bureau mechanical engineering "(KBM, Kolomna), which has been developing tactical and operational-tactical missile systems since 1967, and personally for the chief and general designer of KBM Sergei Pavlovich Invincible. By that time, KBM, being the parent organization, had already developed and organized the serial production of almost 30 missile systems for various purposes, including anti-tank missile systems "Shmel", "Malyutka", "Malyutka-GG", "Shturm-V", as well as "Shturm-S" equipped with the world's first supersonic missile, "Attack", portable anti-aircraft missile systems "Strela-2", "Strela-2M", "Strela-3", "Igla-1" and "Igla", high-precision mobile tactical and operational-tactical missile systems "Tochka" (firing range 70 km), "Tochka-U", "Oka", "Oka-U". Therefore, Invincible did the almost impossible - he went to the Central Committee of the CPSU and achieved that in 1988 the Central Committee and the Council of Ministers of the USSR decided to start experimental design work to create a new OTRK with a firing range of up to 500 km. Moreover, with the liquidation of Oka, our country, indeed, remained completely without OTRK, since by that time the Elbrus had already been, in fact, withdrawn from service, and the Tochka-U operated only at a distance of up to 120 km.
This is how Iskander was born. However, a year later, it seemed that the project would be closed, since at the end of 1989 Sergei Pavlovich Invincible resigned from the post of head and general director of KBM. They say he left loudly, slamming the door, saying unflattering words about "order" that "perestroika" imposed on the leading defense enterprise …. (then he worked as a chief researcher at the Central Research Institute of Automation and Hydraulics, was a scientific director of the Reagent scientific and technical center, and then returned to KBM as an advisor to the head and chief designer of this enterprise).
But work on the Iskander continued. Moreover, it became "two-horned", that is, it was decided to install not one on the launcher, as was always done in the Soviet engineering school, but two missiles. “The KBM was given a task: the Iskander must destroy both stationary and mobile targets. At one time, the same task was faced by "Oka-U". The Oki-U prototypes were destroyed together with the Oka under the same INF Treaty. The reconnaissance and strike complex, which the Iskander was supposed to include as a means of fire destruction, was named Equality. A special reconnaissance aircraft was being developed, he was also a gunner. The plane detects, for example, a tank column on the march. Transmits coordinates to the OTRK launcher. Further, it adjusts the missile's flight depending on the movement of the target. The reconnaissance and strike complex was supposed to hit from 20 to 40 targets per hour. It took a lot of rockets. Then I suggested placing two missiles on the launch pad,”recalled Oleg Mamalyga, who from 1989 to 2005 was the chief designer of the KBM OTRK.
In 1993, a decree of the President of the Russian Federation was issued on the deployment of experimental design work on the Iskander-M OTRK, for which a TTZ was issued, based on a new approach to building the complex and optimizing all solutions. However, now the economy has stood in the way of a new weapon. The volume of tests of the new OTRK assumed 20 rocket launches. The money, according to the recollections of the employees, was enough to launch … only one rocket per year. They say that the then GRAU leadership, together with the KBM employees, personally traveled to the factories - manufacturers of components for the Iskander, and asked to make the required number of parts "on credit". Another six years - 2000 to 2006, was spent on conducting state tests of the new OTRK. And, in fact, only in 2011, Iskander-M began to be produced in series, within the framework of a long-term contract between the Machine-Building Design Bureau and the Russian Ministry of Defense.
The complex has not yet been delivered abroad - we do not have enough ourselves. And since a holy place is never empty, the place of the Soviet-Russian OTRK on the world arms market was taken by the Americans with their ATACMS complex developed by Lockheed Martin Missile and Fire Control with an inertial guidance system and a firing range from 140 to 300 km, depending on the modification. They have been in operation since 1991 and are launched from MLRS M270 MLRS launchers (on the tracked base of the M2 Bradley BMP) and HIMARS (on the wheel base of the FMTV tactical truck). The United States actively used these complexes during the 1991 and 2003 wars with Iraq and actively sold them to Bahrain, Greece, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, South Korea, etc.
The armies of Western European states have now practically abandoned the use of operational-tactical missiles (OTR). The most significant number of them was in France. But this country removed them from service back in 1996 and since then there has been no serial production of OTP in Europe. But Israel and China are actively working on this topic. In 2011, the Israeli Armed Forces adopted an OTRK with a solid-propellant ballistic missile LORA (firing range - up to 280 kilometers) with an inertial control system integrated with Navstar (GPS) and a television homing head. China, according to some reports, produces up to 150 tactical and operational-tactical missiles with a firing range of up to 200 km per year. He not only intensively saturates his southern coast with them, but also offers them to Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Syria, Turkey, Pakistan. And China is not at all embarrassed to receive any sanctions from anyone.
