But the aircraft can see it coming, or should know that he is being painted by a fire control radar. I really don’t see much advantage to 300 km range for a SAM, and like I said, feigning attacks and scooting would seem to be an easy way to exhaust the defense’s ammunition.
Ummm... you do realize that was and is the point of a lot of *our* missile systems when combined with AWACS, right?
Let’s say you’re a fighter bomber pilot on your way in to your target. You pick up a fire control radar well ahead of you, but well beyond the range at which your HARMs or other counter radar missiles can hit. You don’t see any signs that that site is throwing missiles at you (obvious missile launch is obvious) so you continue on. All of a sudden, missiles that have already reached burnout and are coasting come screaming into your formation from a completely unexpected angle launched by a different site that can’t actually see you. Whoops, you just got ambushed by extremely long range datalinked missiles. Unfortunately, you do not have the opportunity to learn from this because you’re dead.
That’s the point. S-300 missiles do not have to use active radar seeker heads to find their targets and once they climb to altitude and burn out, just like the AIM-54 there’s nothing to tell the target aircraft that they are under attack.
Additional advantages of a 300km (now 400 with the S-400 that was developed from the S-300) range include the ability to use it to engage ballistic missile threats.