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How Himars changed the war
In the first year since Russian forces intervened in Ukraine, an American-made weapon changed the war, counterbalancing Russian power: the HIMARS
It has been part of the U.S. military arsenal for decades but when theHIMARS, an acronym that stands for High Mobility Artillery Rocket System. (high-mobility artillery missile system), arrived in Ukraine Has changed the face of war.
Since June 2022, the United States has provided Ukraine with HIMARS launchers and thousands of rockets, which it has used to attack hundreds of Russian command posts, ammunition depots, supplies and other high-value targets far from the front line.
HIMARS fires a 200-pound warhead up to 80 kilometers away, offering Ukrainians the chance to reach and hit targets they thought were safe. I Russians had to move command posts and ammunition depots back from the front line to get them out of range, but in some areas, such as Kherson, it is logistically difficult.
However, even if some strategic assets can be moved, the ammunition still has to get to the artillery, but the distance the trucks have to travel has increased by becoming subject to artillery, drone, commandos, and Ukrainian air force fire, with losses amounting to more than a thousand trucks.
An important factor that has contributed to the maintenance of our defensive lines and positions is the timely arrival of the M142 HIMARS system, which allows surgical strikes on enemy command posts, ammunition and fuel depots
The characteristics of the HIMARS
Ukraine is achieving real and tangible results in the use of these systems. For example, the Ukrainians have hit more than 400 targets with HIMARS, with devastating effects.
One feature that makes the system particularly lethal is its sniper accuracy. The ogive has a satellite guidance system is able to hit the target with an accuracy of 3 meters maximizing the potential of each shot.
In reality, however, the strength of HIMARS is not only the sophistication of its technology, but the simplicity of its use. It takes a week's training for an average, experienced artillery operator to understand how to use them.
The combination of these factors virtually eliminated the numerical advantage, albeit concentrated only in certain areas, of Russian forces and literally changed the war.
The overall result was a Significant reduction in artillery barrage falling on Ukrainian forces and had been the main strategy adopted by the Russian army in the slow advance in the eastern quadrant of the front.
Now Ukraine is hitting key targets virtually every day with HIMARS and MLRS systems, but one question arises: given The quantity and quality of the Russian Federation's vast air defense network, systems such as BUK, TOR, S-300 or S-400, shouldn't they be able, at least on paper, to shoot down the rockets fired by the Ukrainians?
According to official data, the S-400 should be able to detect targets at a distance of 600 kilometers and hit targets at 400 kilometers, intercepting targets up to the speed of mach 14.
Then Because it seems that the S-400 nor similar systems Is unable to stop the rockets Of the HIMARS system?
The difficulties of Russian defenses
Let's consider the most advanced system held by the Russian Strategic Forces, the S-400 cannot shoot down MLRS guided missiles, but it still has difficulties for several reasons: The cost-benefit ratio, countermeasures, and inherent weakness.
First, the cost-benefit ratio is tremendously unfavorable for Russian systems. The S-400 was designed to shoot down combat aircraft, drones or long-range ballistic missiles that have a much higher unit cost than the S-400.
Each missile costs between $500,000 and $2 million, depending on the version, while the missiles in the HIMARS system each cost about $160,000. Even with 100 percent shooting accuracy, which is impossible for any flak, the equation does not add up in the long run.
The main reason an S-400 has difficulty shooting down HIMARS are its characteristics: the missiles received from Ukraine have a range of just over 80 kilometers, are rather small in size, with a diameter of less than 230 millimeters and a speed of about mach 2.5, or over 800 meters per second.
War magic
The arrival and early effects of these systems on the battlefield alarmed the Russian military, but despite all efforts made according to Ukrainian sources have ever succeeded in destroying a single U.S. missile system
The Russian command thought of several ways to destroy the HIMARS, fruitlessly. At first they tried to get the location from the network of military satellites.
According to the Ukrainian military, Russia fired several dozen Kalibr missiles from the Black Sea Fleet. The HIMARS were indeed destroyed but they were wooden models.
Inspired perhaps by the "Ghost Army" made of inflatable tanks deployed by the Americans on the English Channel coast during World War II to deceive the Germans at the landing site in Europe, Ukrainians created full-scale wooden replicas of American systems, which they then covered with metal sheets of the same color.
Finally to complete the work, they created embedded in these artifacts a device to generate heat so that it would be visible to radar and satellites.
In all respects equal to the real HIMARS appears to have tricked the Russians into wasting on precious million-dollar missiles.
Hunting for HIMARS
Eventually it appears that they organized several groups of specialized commandos to infiltrate behind enemy lines, but the missions turned out to be unsuccessful, as HIMARS are the Ukrainian military's best-defended devices.
It appears that throughout 2022 the protection of HIMARS systems is effective, and to date not a single HIMARS missile system has been destroyed, as also officially confirmed by the Pentagon, partly because range allows it to operate far behind the fighting front.
Having failed attempts with precision missiles and special forces, the Russian military since August has had a new weapon at its disposal that could be very effective in targeting these lethal devices: Iranian "loitering ammunition" drones of the Mohajer-6 and Shahed-136 type, which, despite being of inferior quality to other specimens, fly at low altitude, are difficult to detect in radar and could be a very insidious weapon in this Tragic cat-and-mouse hunt in the cold plains Ukrainian
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