S-400 SAMs Knocked Out In Simulated Strikes During Big Army-Led Exercise In Africa

[rangerrebew]

S-400 SAMs Knocked Out In Simulated Strikes During Big Army-Led Exercise In Africa
Russia's most powerful air defense system loomed large over the huge "African Lion" multi-national wargames.
By Joseph Trevithick June 14, 2021

    The War Zone

 
Simulated strikes on a pair of Russian-made S-400 surface-to-air missile batteries were part of the still ongoing U.S. Army-led Africa Lion 2021 exercise that is taking place in various countries in North and West Africa. This comes as the Russian government continues to actively market export variants of the S-400, even to smaller countries, and amid persistent concerns within the U.S. military about the general increasing proliferation of higher-end air defense assets. The inclusion of these threats in African Lion 2021's training scenarios is also notable given that there were indications last year that the Kremlin had introduced S-400 or S-300 systems into the civil conflict in Libya, though U.S. Africa Command later said it had assessed that no such deployment had occurred.

Twitter user @kmldial70 was among the first to notice the mention of the mock strikes on the S-400s in footage that the U.S. Army's Southern European Task Force-Africa (SETAF-AF) recently released of a Command Post Exercise (CPX) being run at a facility in Agadir, Morocco, as part of the larger African Lion 2021 event, on June 9, 2020. A CPX is typically an entirely simulated wargame. African Lion 2021 kicked off on June 7, 2021, and is set to wrap up on June 18.

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/41074/s-400-sams-knocked-out-in-simulated-strikes-during-big-army-led-big-exercise-in-africa

[AARguy]

Stay leery of tactical simulations. I remember two four stars... one Army, one Air Force... committing to full integration of Army Air Defenders and Air Force assets at the National Training Center, Fort Irwin, back in the 1980's. The Air Force didn't accept the validity of the Army MILES (Multiple Integrated Laser Engagement System) simulation to determine engagement outcomes, and the Army didn't accept the validity of the Air Force computer-based simulation system.

After endless hours of "real" exercises, the Army folks concluded they knocked down most Air Force assets with few casualties of their own while the Air Force concluded they destroyed most Army assets while suffering few casualties of their own. The effort to integrate the assets at Ft Irwin slowed, stalled and died.

BOTTOM LINE: The accuracy of simulations will always be doubted by some of the players. Politics will always make simulations questionable at best.

Just another observation: When the Army Training Support Center at Ft Eustis tried to determine the "Probability of Kill" of a single shot of a Stinger against an Apache to program it into MILES back in the 1980's, Ft Bliss, then the Army Air Defense Center Center said 97%. Ft Rucker, the Aviation Center, said 7%. Army Material Command test and evaluation assets answered with truckloads of test data and no definitive answers.