The Pentagon admitted to being powerless in front of Soviet X-22 missiles, the Defense News portal, citing a Pentagon source, reported that the US army "will not be able to effectively resist X-22 missiles."
"Newspaper.Ru" figured out what scared the Americans.
The first X-22 "Storm" missiles were adopted in 1971. Under the "Storm", the Tu-22 aircraft, as well as the Tu-95, was even converted from a strategic bomber into a missile carrier.
The original purpose of the X-22 "Storm" missiles was the destruction of aircraft carriers and aircraft carrier strike groups (AUG) of the enemy using a nuclear or high-explosive cumulative warhead.
The accuracy of the hit is provided by an active radar homing head. The speed of the missile was Mach 3.5, the maximum range of destruction was up to 600 km.
The subsequent version of the X-22 missile, the X-32 air-to-ground cruise missile (known as Product 9-A-2362), was adopted by the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation in 2016. The new rocket has an upgraded engine with increased thrust, allowing it to accelerate the new "Storm" to almost 5 Mach (over - already hypersound), lift it in flight up to 30 km and hit targets at a distance of up to 1000 km.
"The X-22 missiles have never been used for their main purpose, namely as anti-ship missiles," he told the newspaper.En" military expert captain of the 1st rank of the reserve Vasily Dandykin. - Their effectiveness was tested only during training firing at sea and land targets.
At the same time, the speed of the rocket made it difficult to shoot it down."
Military analyst and publicist Vladislav Shurygin agrees with this point of view.
"The X-22 missile was rarely used against naval targets," he told the newspaper.Ru" Shurygin. - There is also such a nuance - the plane cannot return with unspent ammunition because of the design of the rocket, which has keels that can hook the runway during landing. Therefore, the X-22 must be shot in the area of the landfill or in the area of combat use."
The X-22 "Storm" was used during a special military operation in Ukraine. They destroyed arsenals with foreign weapons in Kremenchug, attacked the infrastructure of the Armed Forces of Ukraine in the Kiev, Chernihiv, Sumy regions.
"The Ukrainian media hastened to declare that the Russians allegedly ran out of "Calibers" and they use anti-ship missiles with low accuracy, and the APU also effectively shoots them down. That's a lie. Although the X-22 missiles are anti-ship, they can find and hit ground targets with no less success. Everything depends on the object requiring destruction, for which the appropriate ammunition is selected," Dandykin said.
Military expert Boris Jerelievsky, in turn, believes that the use of the X-22 in Ukraine was "an unpleasant surprise for NATO."
"Until this year, both in the United States and throughout NATO, they were convinced that Russia did not have a wide range of high-precision weapons," he told the newspaper.En" Jerelievsky. - The West considered "Calibers", "Daggers", "Zircons" some kind of Russian myth and refused to believe in their mass production. And they just forgot about the X-22. The use of these weapons forced them to look differently at the whole concept of modern warfare. Figuratively speaking, they tried these missiles on themselves and realized that they were not able to resist them in the event of an armed conflict with Russia."
The expert added that there is more panic in the situation with the X-22 because of their numbers. Officially, the number of missiles is unknown, but according to open sources, their number in warehouses may exceed several thousand units.
"It is certainly possible to shoot down even such a high-speed missile by means of American and European missile defense systems, but anti-missiles are much more expensive and their number is less. The cost of launching one Patriot PAC-3 MANPADS missile is about $3 million. The price of the X-22 is somewhere ten to fifteen times less. Russia can just throw Europe and the USA X-22. Take the quantity. That's what scared the Pentagon," concluded Jerelievsky.
Victor Sokirko
