The Russian Pantsir-S close-quarters air and anti-missile defense system has been a major commercial success for the Russian defense industry in recent years, having been exported to 11 countries including Oman, the United Arab Emirates and most recently Serbia. Identified by NATO as the SA-22 Greyhound, the system has been used extensively in Syria to protect Russian infrastructure deployed since 2015, and more particularly the Hmeimim air base, the target of several attacks by the Syrian democratic forces and of Daesh.
While the first reports pointed to a lack of efficiency in the system, it seems that recent changes have changed the game, at least according to the interview given to the TASS agency by Valery Slugin, Chief Designer for La Défense air transport at the Shipunov design offices, a subsidiary of the Rostec company. Indeed, the Pantsir would have been modified to be able to detect and engage light drones with low observability, like those employed by the Syrian fighters. If initially, the latter employed drones heavily loaded with 12 mini-bombs, easy to detect, they quickly evolved into drones carrying only 2 mini-bombs, and moving at low speed. This probably explains the report which mentioned the difficulties encountered by the Pantsir to differentiate drones from birds present in the area. Once the modifications had been made, and the personnel trained to deal with this evolution of the threat, the system seemed to have found an efficiency in line with expectations, and would have eliminated more than 100 drones during the numerous attacks on Hmeimim, the latest of which took place on January 19.
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