In the USA, the arrival date of the NASAMS air defense system to Ukraine was officially announced
Obtaining the NASAMS air defense system is extremely important for the Air Defense of Ukraine, which relies on Soviet complexes. The NASAMS anti-aircraft missile system, which can destroy targets at a range of up to 40 km, will arrive in Ukraine already in November, which was officially announced during a media briefing at the Pentagon.
“We expect NASAMS to be delivered within the next few weeks. Of course, we will rely on our Ukrainian partners to announce when they arrive and when they will be operational. But as we mentioned earlier, we will continue to work diligently to deliver them there as soon as possible”, – it was stated during the briefing.
It should be noted that there was already a certain “false start” regarding the NASAMS transmission due to an error in the simultaneous translation of the speech of the President of Ukraine during his interview with the American TV channel CBS.
At the same time, the Pentagon did not specify the number of these SAMs that will be transferred in the near future, it can be about one complex or two, the transfer of which was announced at the end of June. The fact is that, as in the case of the German IRIS-T, we are talking about the manufacture of complexes from scratch, which requires much more time than the transfer from the armed forces of one of Ukraine’s allies.
It is worth noting that the transfer of even one or two NASAMS will qualitatively strengthen the air defense of Ukraine due to the fact that the latest air defense systems have a much higher efficiency compared to the Soviet samples, which are now the main ones in the Armed Forces. In particular, IRIS-T has already proven that it can shoot down 9 out of 10 cruise missiles.
It should be noted that the developers of NASAMS, Raytheon and Kongsberg, recently conducted air defense systems tests specifically to work out the most effective algorithms for destroying a cruise missile attack, for which three types of missiles were used simultaneously: AMRAAM-ER, AIM-120 and AIM-9X.
It will be recalled that Ukraine should receive at least eight NASAMS, but the production of the next six, according to the concluded contracts, will be extended until the summer of 2024 with a gradual transfer as production progresses.
