Mauler SAM

When you compare like to like i.e. whole-NATO developments and Soviet developments, you start to see the "better Soviet air defense" is just "early adopter syndrome" of absolute trash like Krug meeting the subsequent waves of slightly panicky investments to catch up to French and British bomber and missile development. Strategic air defense gets a lot of newsprint and air time but it's really undeserved IMO. The actual combat performances of anything older than S-300, with the noteworthy exception of the handling of the S-125 complex by the Serbs, is rather weak. You can chalk this up to defender use cases (and probably be right), but even in Vietnam the PAVN's PVO troops had to use MiG-21s as proxy for command guidance of the S-75s, due to American formation jamming. How often would a strategic air defense system be allowed to do that in nuclear combat?

In terms of radio-electronic combat the Soviet Army had a lot to say but not a lot to show on the subject. The US was plainly better in this regard to a somewhat embarrassing degree, even if America never fully understand what it was doing or why it did something, it could just invent a new jammer system out of thin air until about the mid-1970's. Since we've yet to see a major air campaign against late-stage Soviet air defense troops, it's an open question what is better of course, but complaining that your tank divisions are "only" protected by Rolands and Gepards, one of the most statistically lethal air defense combinations on the planet, is a bit of a poverty of riches.

Mainline Soviet air defense for a long time was just Chaparral/VADS equivalents, and later became a Gepard with some funky ACLOS rockets and a slightly better Chaparral, then the USSR imploded. Osa and such were not battlefield air defense units but rather division air defense for wide protection, and Osa was not very good, since it was continuously stymied by development problems and pushed through mostly as a industrial subsidy to keep the factory funded and workers employed I guess.

Kub and Buk are rather nice but again are division systems, not highly mobile tank-chassis ZRKs that move with company or battalion size units supporting the ZSUs in ground gaining offensives.

Everything else was barely keeping pace at the end of the day, but Krug was a dumpster fire that kicked it off.

Despite ostensibly being contemporary with Thunderbird/Bloodhound and HAWK, it was worse in all aspects and instead of just buying a couple and waiting for a better system, the mindset was to buy thousands of the things and that becomes a problem. Kub ended up comparable to HAWK...a decade later, but it had too few ammunition rounds to be useful for tactical defense of the division. Enter Osa, to kill the flying things, being a approximation of Roland, which was division air defense for French Army of 1964...in 1972. Because Osa had a protracted and rather painful gestation period resembling the Mauler except instead of being thrown in the bin and restarted with more realistic requirements, it just kept failing tests until requirements were adjusted to something that could actually be made, albeit dollar short and a decade late. So you have the Shilka, Strelas, Osa, Krug, Kub. Great it's finally over, but now we need something replace the Krug and maybe the S-75 as well. We can make this big ass truck that uses the latest phased array technologies for that job for the PVO troops. Krug 2. This begins in 1967, and produces results a decade later with AKA S-300.

The "early adopter" cycle repeats. C'est la vie. The Soviets had the same problem Britain and America in developing a strategic SAM system in the Nike Hercules and the Bloodhound missiles, except they didn't actually just stop and wait to break out of it, because they really couldn't. America, after a decade of titanic thonks and possessing of fairly good LAADS in the Vulcan/Stinger/Chaparral triplets, eventually came up with MIM-104 one day after seeing the S-300P I guess.

You end up with weird overlapping generations and crazy quilts of SAM belts using once-common-now-obscure and bizarre antique systems in a realm where being an antique is bad because your opponents know your every electromagnetic pattern, and your effectiveness mostly hinges on how much of a surprise you are to automatic electronic defense systems of aircraft (or ballistic missiles) and of the pilots of the aircraft in particular.

Now MIM-104 is the crazy quilt and S-400 is fairly new and threatening, but eventually America will replace the MIM-104 with something like MEADS and Russia will be stuck with S-400 and the crazy quilts, the S-300V/P cousins.

Battlefield air defense is substantially easier in though than strategic air defense though, and substantially cheaper, and that is why the Soviets made do with the trifecta of Strela-2/Strela-1/Shilka or Igla/Strela-10/Tunguska for decades. Now I guess it's supposed to be Verba/Sosna ZRK/AU-220 but who even knows.

After all, Roland is perhaps the best performing air defense ever built, and was sort of the last of the "1950's air defense" systems. Rapier, ADATS, and Crotale are no slouches either. It's hard to imagine what you'd realistically need to cover once you've bought Roland and Gepard though, besides theater air defense of the HAWK. That seems to be adequate for at least 30 years of battlefield air defense if the handful of engagements, near all successful, it's been involved in against the best trained contemporary air forces say anything.