AIR AND MISSILE DEFENSE: A SYSTEMATIC VIEW

Independent Military Review. September 17 - 23, 2004. Vladislav Kramar

The next, 9th, volume of the series "Russia's Arms and Technologies. The XXI century Encyclopedia", issued, as previous ones, in both Russian and English, was given the name "Air and Ballistic Missile Defense" after a debate. The debate was about the country's Air and Space Defense (ASD) system creation. But, one way or another, the Publishing House "Arms and Technologies" has issued a book that systematically describes opinions of Defense Ministry heads and defense industry leaders and their views on evolution of main Russian ASD components. The book covers general organization of ASD, its role and goals to be achieved when ensuring national defense of the Russian Federation and creating European anti-missile defense. The book covers forces and systems for non-strategic missile defense, its goals and ways to organize it as well.

Materials about weapons are broken into four main sections: "Air defense aircraft and systems of the air force", "Army Air defense weapons systems" "Naval air defense weapons", and "Ballistic missile defense", and these sections are broken into chapters by subjects. The reader not only becomes familiar with destinations and details of modern weapons models, but also has a view on weapon systems in general: battle systems, fighting and technical support facilities, information and control systems, training facilities, as well as understands their role and place in operational and tactical parts within an entire typical battle system.

There is no doubt that the pages causing the greatest interest will be those containing descriptions of systems for XXI century, which were not presented before in such detail.