The S-300 ‘Ground Attack’ Capability: Fabricated by Ukraine, Amplified by Western Media, Totally Fictitious.

Uncle Volodya says; “If people in the media cannot decide whether they are in the business of reporting news or manufacturing propaganda, it is all the more important that the public understand that difference, and choose their news sources accordingly.”

Well I’m accustomed to a smooth ride
Or maybe I’m a dog who’s lost it’s bite;
I don’t expect to be treated like a fool no more
I don’t expect to sleep through the night
Some people say a lie’s a lie’s a lie
But I say why deny the obvious child?
Why deny the obvious child?

Paul Simon, from “The Obvious Child“.

“That propaganda is good which leads to success, and that is bad which fails to achieve the desired result. It is not propaganda’s task to be intelligent, its task is to lead to success.”

Joseph Goebbels

Tell it like it is, Joe. I daresay we all remember examples of propaganda which, in retrospect, it is hard to believe a wide audience fell for. “We know where the weapons of mass destruction are. They’re in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat”, how about that one? I remember reading a critical response to it in which the writer congratulated Donald Rumsfeld on having, with the vagueness of his description, eliminated only international waters and deep space from consideration, and laughing in delighted appreciation; good times, my, yes.

But that and other completely fabricated martial fairy-tales successfully convinced huge western audiences of the smoldering malevolence of Saddam Hussein and, by extension, of Iraqis in general, and by even further extension, of more or less all Muslims. To the extent that tens of thousands of Muslim men were forced by the Bush administration to register with the US Government – a policy which “broke up families by triggering a wave of mass deportations and instilled fear throughout Muslim communities across the country, all while proving itself wholly ineffective at accomplishing its primary task: catching terrorists.” The same reference helpfully highlights that such propaganda ‘successes’, once internalized, contribute to longstanding bias even after they are outed as propaganda – there was no shortage of support for Trump, more than a decade later, calling for a ban on all Muslims entering the United States.

At its simplest, propaganda is little more than consistently and repeatedly expressing an allegation, while claiming it is supported by evidence, and then shouting down any source which attempts to correct the record, deflecting their arguments with insults and rhetoric. In fact, I covered the methodology in some detail on the old blog back in the Spring of 2015; re-reading it now, I find we are offered a priceless lead-in quote, from none other than Anne ‘Poland Makes Me Wet’ Applebaum.

“…[o]nce upon a time, it seemed as if the Internet would be a place of civilized and open debate; now, unedited forums often deteriorate to insult exchanges. Like it or not, this matters: Multiple experiments have shown that perceptions of an article, its writer or its subject can be profoundly shaped by anonymous online commentary, especially if it is harsh. One group of researchers found that rude comments “not only polarized readers, but they often changed a participant’s interpretation of the news story itself.” A digital analyst at Atlantic Media also discovered that people who read negative comments were more likely to judge that an article was of low quality and, regardless of the content, to doubt the truth of what it stated. “

It’s hard to argue with the forthrightness and accuracy of that opinion – but Annie was complaining about commentary which criticizes western intervention and regime-change operations, and the low-lifes in those instances were – you guessed it – Russian trolls and ‘spreaders of disinformation’. The west prides itself on open forums, respect for a wide range of opinion and a willingness to entertain alternate points of view. It would never stoop to trolling as a means of silencing dissent.

Ha, ha. Perhaps that was true once, but that kind of integrity went out of fashion in the west at approximately the same time as the top hat. Anyway, we’ll be coming back to this post later; I want to show you something. But for now, we’re going to look at a contemporary phenomenon – the tremendous investment by the west, and most especially the western media, in breathing life into propaganda from Ukraine.  In the example I’d like to discuss, the underlying theme is Ukraine’s brash public-relations technique of spinning every single negative thing that happens as having been the fault of The Russians, from the pitiful murders of  ‘collaborators’ in Bucha to the damage to civilian apartment buildings by falling or uncontrolled air-defense missiles fired by panicky Ukrainian crews…and the west’s role in polishing those stories’ credibility.

Long before what looks to have been an S-300 air-defense missile – designed and built in The Country That Doesn’t Make Anything, according to Obama – landed in neighbouring Poland and caused a couple of fatalities, missiles said to have been S-300’s struck a couple of apartment buildings in Kuh-yiv, and caused some fatalities among Ukrainian non-combatants. But when life hands you lemons, the smart move is to make lemonade, they say, and Ukraine quickly spun the situation so that the diabolical Russians had re-engineered some of their S-300 air-defense missiles so they could be used to attack ground targets such as apartment buildings full of helpless, shivering civilians. A bonus of this trope was that it could be used to argue Russia is running out of precision weapons, and has to repurpose existing stocks to do a job they were never designed for; the S-300 is old now. But journalists have given it new and malevolent life, and ‘S-300’ is apparently the only weapon system they can remember. So they make up for it by writing lurid fan-fiction about it.

It is a hallmark of both Ukrainian spokesholes and Ukraine’s defenders that they will not give ground on any allegation, regardless how absurd it is, once it is out in the public domain, as if admission of having been wrong is worse than continuing to lie. When various towns in Ukraine, after the beginning of the Special Military Operation (SMO), were struck by what were assessed by the defenders to be S-300 missiles, of course Russia had to be responsible. Probably doubts were expressed, as well they might be; the S-300 is a purpose-built surface-to-air missile (SAM). The warhead is 145 kg. maximum, and earlier variants were between 70-100 kg; a warhead that size would not obliterate 3 floors of a steel-reinforced concrete building. As we have discussed previously, a surface-to-air missile does not plow through an aircraft  – or a building – like a harpoon. When the missile senses via its proximity fuse that it is at its closest point to the target, the warhead detonates and showers the target with pre-fragmented shrapnel. The missile body complete with rocket engine and any unexpended fuel falls back to earth. Which begs the question of who is firing S-300 air-defense weapons in Ukraine. The Russians? At what? Ukraine has virtually no air force left, and if Russia has S-300 air defense systems at its Ukrainian positions – which it might – it does not make much sense to fire one at a puttering drone built in someone’s garage. Ukraine might be using its Bayraktar drones it acquired from Turkey, but you would think those would be reconnoitering Russian positions rather than over downtown Kharkiv. While it remains possible that buildings were damaged and maybe even Ukrainian casualties caused by S-300 missiles, in all probability they were fired against incoming Russian cruise missiles by Ukrainians, and either crashed into buildings when they ran out of fuel or after reaching their target and the warhead exploding. But that option is unacceptable – it must have resulted from a Russian attack.

Enter the heretofore-secret S-300 ground-target capability.

This was proposed as far back as mid-summer, by – yes, you knew what was coming, didn’t you? – Mykolaiv regional Governor Vitaly Kim, who may have been the first to puzzle out Russia’s latest dirty trick against Ukrainians: using the S-300 air-defense missile in a ground-attack role, against Ukrainian cities. Fortunately for Ukraine and nuts to the dirty Russians, although the missiles are ‘fitted with GPS’, they are inaccurate. I’m not surprised; the SA-10 and variants up to SA-20 fly at above Mach 6. It would take quite a GPS system to update something going that speed. Cruise missiles are a lot slower, but they have the GPS coordinates of their target input before they are launched.

The proposed repurposing of the S-300 is defended by supposed admission from Belarusian news sites that the S-300 was tested against ground targets and found to have a reliable capability in that role. If you try to get to that site to read what the Belarusian military supposedly admitted, you will get a 404 message or a ‘service not available’. The report by TASS which was also claimed as a supporting reference made mention of the S-300 being used to “hit a simulated enemy’s ground air defense objects during drills in eastern Siberia’s Republic of Buryatia”. This seems very ambiguous and could refer to the S-300 being used to engage ground-to-air missiles launched by an enemy. If so, it would imply a fairly impressive crossing-target capability for an older missile.

At bottom, using an anti-air missile against a ground target is not impossible; very little that we can articulate is impossible. It just makes no sense. Fitting a different warhead and fuse, so as to achieve an impact blast or penetration followed by a blast would necessitate completely re-engineering the missile. The air-defense warhead is unsuitable; as I already said, it consists of pre-fragmented metal and the explosive charge is intended to distribute the fragments at high speed, like the blast of a shotgun. The fuse is a proximity sensor unsuitable for employment against a ground target. Any changes to weight or point of balance change the flight characteristics of the missile and imply altering and possibly relocation of the fins. The motor is probably the only major component which would not need to be changed, since it would be more than adequate to strike targets 75 miles away.

But why? The Kalibr is a purpose-built land-attack cruise missile, comparable in size to the S-300 – at least in length; the Kalibr is bigger around, and needs to be, it carries a 450 kg warhead and needs fuel to fly more than 2000 km. It has displayed excellent and discriminating accuracy against ground targets in Ukraine and as far away as Syria. There not only is no evidence Russia is running out of them, the reverse seems to be true, as wave after wave of country-wide air attacks attest and in complete disregard for the dour predictions of British ‘intelligence’ assessments. But those are expensive missiles engineered to attack targets which are trying their best to divert them through electronic jamming or to shoot them down – they would be kind of wasted on dopey targets like apartment blocks. For those, Russia has warehouses full of general-purpose bombs designed to flatten buildings; as demonstrated in Syria, Russia took a different approach to the USA, and rather than spend oodles of taxpayer dollars on individual ‘smart’ bombs with self-adjusting fins and possibly cup-holders, they designed and installed ‘smart’ bomb-aiming apparatus which is mounted on the aircraft, and achieves similar results using general-purpose bombs, which are dirt cheap. Russia has any number of options which would be far more logical than re-engineering an air-defense missile to attack buildings.

But those who are insistent that Russia has done just that are…well, I can give you an example of the loony rationalizations. Just recently I had several conversations with boosters of the S-300 ground-attack capability, in the comments section of posts at Moon of Alabama, beginning on November 17th.

It started out fairly polite, in this thread. I came in at comment # 170, detailing the basics of what I’ve discussed above – the S-300 is an anti-air missile, it is not suitable for attacking ground targets, and any damage to buildings in Ukraine which is attributed to Russian attack is likely to have been caused by Ukrainian S-300’s which fell back to earth after failing to find a target or running out of fuel. Nothing happened for a half-hour or so, and then a commenter who calls him/herself  ‘Outraged’ corrected me, claiming the alleged ground-attack capability – not an accident, mind, but a built-in option designed into the missile – “[is] designed for addition use in Ground attack if loading the correct missile. Max range depends on weather is USSR/RF model, or export only.”

I see. The Russians designed in a ground-attack capability and then sold all the missiles with that capability, since it was only on the export variants. Whether or not a given position has this capability depends on what missiles are on the launcher, and the range is weather-dependent although the missile is allegedly guided by GPS, which does not care if it passes through a 32-mile-high hologram of Ded Moroz on its way to the target. Well, suppose you don’t have the correct missile loaded – is it just a matter of “Anatoly!! Hand me that ground-attack missile! No, not that one, you dumb balalaika-strumming sack of shit and vodka fumes; the one with the green band above the tailfins.” I’m afraid not. As I alluded to earlier, the missile is more than 20 feet long, and is mated to the launcher by a loader crane like this one (photo courtesy of Air Power Australia). Switching it out would not be fast. Remind me again, which constitutes the greater threat to a stationary missile-launching position – a cruise missile or aircraft screaming in with next to no warning, or a half-empty apartment building miles away? How long would it take you to switch back to air-defense missiles? You’ve only got four. How many should be the ground-attack variant? Two? One? Cue Freddie Mercury in the background, singing “Who Wants to Live Forever?”

This is the most comprehensive reference on the S-300 system. Names are NATO-assigned codenames; all Soviet/Russian ground-launched air-defense missile types begin with ‘G’, and that is the only significance of the name “Grumble’ or ‘Growler’, just as all Soviet/Russian air-to-air type names begin with ‘A’. Despite exquisite detail on every modification and update to the system, somehow Dr. Kopp completely overlooked the development of a ground-attack capability!

As it happens, the S-300 system does have a GLONAS GPS feed. But it’s on the ground system, not the missile, and is used to give the system operators precise information on their own location and the immediate area, for ‘shoot and scoot’ missions where the threat of USAF Weasel aircraft or a comparable threat exists. In order to use the mystery ground-attack capability to strike an apartment building in Kharkiv, for example, the launching system would need to know the GPS location of the building it intended to hit, since there is no GPS capability in the missile. I suppose the position could be provided by a forward spotter who could see the building. But then he would know it was a completely non-threatening civilian target. Would you waste one of your four missiles destroying three floors worth of apartments? Why?

As provided in the table which appears near the bottom of the reference, the guidance of the missile is command link, provided by the engagement radar that is part of the complex. No mention of GPS guidance. The service life in storage of S-300 missiles, probably determined by the life of the solid-fuel propellant, is 10 years. Russia stopped producing them for its own forces in 2011. A detailed reading of the reference would also tell you the lower limit of the engagement envelope is 82 feet, although some references have as low as 30 feet. Both are considerably higher than a tractor, even in Poland, which is known for its tall tractors.

At comment #227 I pointed that out; how are you going to target an S-300 on a target at ground level when the system radars are all maximized for performance against air targets which are moving, and all subsequent modifications of the acquisition and guidance radars increased system performance against targets moving at higher speeds rather than non-moving targets down in the ground clutter? References which discuss system capabilities and specifications are quite unambiguous that the system is used only for air defense. For my efforts, I was recommended to this reference, which repeats the completely unfounded assertions of a Ukrainian regional governor and draws on alleged Belarusian assertions which are no longer available, still by the commenter “Outraged’. The Drive reference alleged the specially-modified S-300 could strike ground targets 75 miles away.  I used Omni Calculator’s Radar Horizon calculator, with a value of 127 feet for the radar system height (the height of the taller radar mast of the S-300 variants) and a target height of 100 feet, with radar refraction present. The calculated radar horizon is 25.645 km. Chances of seeing a ground target at 75 miles with a radar which has a low-level limit of somewhere between 30 and 82 feet at close range, nil. About the same probability as you being pulled over for exceeding the speed limit by a giant talking salamander in a police uniform.

However, interestingly, now the ground-attack capability is available only on non-export models, made for USSR/Russian Federation forces. Which is, you know, kind of the polar opposite of export-version only. Anyway, good to know just the same. Because all of Russia’s S-300’s expired in 2021, 10 years after they stopped producing them for their own forces.

“Only S300P family (NATO base designation SA-10 Grumble & subvariants) & subvariant derivatives have this functional capability re S300 class, and non-export models only. Very much a secondary capability, restricted to S300P derivatives and only ever available in USSR/RF militaries. Requires a subvariant missile model with a large or small Ground burst warhead.”

A large or small ground burst warhead; of course – why didn’t I think of that? Could somebody help me find that one in the S-300 missile table? Because I see ‘Blast Fragmentation” for every variant. A subsequent comment at # 240 informed me “derivative missile used for ground attack using inbuilt inertial guidance, etc. As previously stated, a secondary capability inbuilt from very first of S300p family models, onwards”, and encouraged me to read The Drive article in full. Well, you see, the inbuilt inertial guidance is used with the guidance radar, which can see both the outbound missile and the target. It can’t see buildings, which are down in the ground clutter on an air-defense radar. There’s no such thing as a ‘ground burst warhead’ except on a nuke, there would be a conventional-explosive warhead with an impact fuse. As I imagine you can quickly deduce, it would be on an air-defense launcher but completely useless against aircraft or enemy missiles, and how many do you have, again? That’s right: four.

But the next comment from Outraged at #247, made all former material read like a technical bulletin.

“Given it uses a custom derivative missile, with small or large ground burst warhead, rather that airborne target guidance & lockon with variant airburst warheads designed to hit thin skin aircraft/missiles.

Think much more modern generation of V1 buzzbomb.

Load on launcher, connect a data link to warhead, program target data, launch site data, for Glonass target co-ordinates with co-operative inertial guidance(internal to warhead). Or do it all in control pod and have a soldier connect the link, upload, disconnect. Launch. All other elements of S300 system platforms are redundant re this use. Really just an option for a short to moderate range light pseudo cruise missile. One advantage would be its very unusual launch & flight path profile, neither Air intercept nor true ballistic nor nominal cruise, which suspect would make it very difficult to Track/Engage and especially difficult to successfully intercept give ranges involved.”

Uh huh, sure – a custom-derivative missile built by the country that only built the ground-capable S-300 for itself and stopped producing them in 2021. Program target data….okay, got it….now…launch site data? What does the missile need that for? Considering it’s a ‘modern V1 Buzz Bomb’, which was a pure ballistic projectile with no guidance whatever. The stuff about launch and flight profile is just gibberish; the flight profile is a direct function of guidance and nothing else. A ballistic missile uses inertial guidance, and its flight path could not be more predictable – it’s hard to engage because its entire midcourse phase is out of range of pretty much everything. Your best opportunity to engage it will likely be in its terminal phase, when its speed is measured in kilometers per second. You don’t program anything into the warhead; it’s just a dumb inert lump whose duty is to explode on command, and fancy maneuvering orders come from the guidance section. All other elements are redundant? So the Russians specially engineered a highly-capable anti-air defense system, and then built a missile for it that uses nothing but the launch rails? Couldn’t they just fire it over the tailgate of a pickup truck? What do they need all those radars and a command vehicle and shiznit for?

I returned at the next comment and tried to explain that sometimes – yes, disappointing, I know – Ukrainian officials misrepresent themselves as knowing a great deal about something when actually they know nothing about it; that, moreover, sometimes these forays into loopiness are nothing more than trying to reverse-engineer a situation in which calamity befell innocent Ukrainians at the hands of the filthy Moskali. And with that, all pretense to politeness was done with.

The next day, the 18th, there was a new post up; “Ukraine – Switching the Lights Off”. At comment # 15, Petri Krohn echoes my concerns: “It is extremely unlikely that Russia would use S-300 missiles to attack ground targets. The missiles do not have the guidance system needed. Even if they had, Russia has other missiles and rockets far more suited for the purpose. This must be a Ukrainian lie regurgitated by Western warmongers. Civilian targets in Kiev have been destroyed by stray S-300 missiles. The Zelensky regime is lying to its people, that these are Russian missiles intentionally targeted at civilians.” 20 minutes later, at comment # 20, Peter AU1 pops up with the by-now-standard admonishment that ‘most Russian missiles are dual capability’. So there you have it – not just the S-300, but pretty much the entire Russian anti-air missile inventory also have a ground-attack capability. They repurposed the S-300 to add ground-attack to its repertoire way back in 2017, and liked it so much that they built the new versatility into their later designs. But the west did not discover it until March of this year.

Uh…I have a question. How much are we paying our defense intelligence agencies?

Petri Krohn reappears at comment # 49, to relay the information that the sources for the S-300’s alleged ground-attack capability are Euromaidan Press and the BBC, and the latter got it from social media. Which, depending on its origin, is gospel these days if it affirms a belief you want to gain acceptance for. A quote of the BBC article reports,

“Some of the pictures of wreckage posted online appear to show the debris of S-300 missiles on the ground in Ukraine.

These are weapons originally designed to attack targets in the air, not on the ground.

Posts on social media have claimed these S-300 missiles have been repurposed by Russia to hit land targets.

We’ve taken a close look at a series of images circulating online, and have verified three pictures of debris on the ground in Ukraine which are consistent with S-300 surface-to-air missiles.”

That’s actually pretty revealing. You can believe that whatever portion of an anti-air missile which is not destroyed in the explosion of its successful intercept just keeps on flying into the mystic forever…and still work for the BBC. Apparently if pieces of the S-300 end up on the ground, it naturally infers a ground-attack capability. Remarkable, I think you will agree. It certainly tells us something about the belief of many that the Ukrainians found the missile body of an SA-11 missile from a Buk system ‘in the wreckage of MH-17’ even though the actual explosion which crippled the plane took place some 13 km away from the crash site, and the missile body involved would have fallen back to earth there.

Now watch what happens. At comment # 71, a new voice in the Imaginary-Capability War appears: mo3. It might be a parody, it’s so silly, going on about the ‘sprinkler-head’ needing to be disabled and so forth, but interestingly, he claims to have been trained on the S-300 system between 1979 and 1984. So the S-300 had a ground-attack capability even then, but the numpties in the western intel services only found out about it in 2022!! However, the ‘secret’ capability was only on the S-300 PS!! Well, let’s look.

Uh oh – I see a problem for the narrative.

S-300PS (SA-10B Grumble): The oldest variant of S-300 still in service, the S-300PS is still used in Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine. The S-300 typically consists of four 5P85S or 5P85D launchers mounted to the back of a Maz-543 truck. It can fire four 5V55K or 5V55R missiles up to 75 km, and can track one hundred targets simultaneously while engaging up to twelve. The Grumble is designed to destroy low-flying aircraft, but is also capable of destroying ballistic and cruise missiles.

No mention of a ground-attack capability, but of course there would not be – it was a secret. But more importantly, the S-300 PS is no longer in service except for ‘Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine’. Not in Russia.

Plenty of other entertainment, such as if the wrong missile is loaded, it will not launch. This is a function of the rocket motor and proper umbilical connections to the TEL; it has nothing to do with the theoretical warhead type. And the range could be 75 km, which – amazingly – is what articles quoted about the secret capability say. It varies, however, with ‘the ballistic trajectory in ground mode’. No kidding. A short-range ballistic missile goes further the higher the angle at which it is launched. But the S-300 is and has always been a vertical-launch missile. So this anti-air-ground-attack missile goes straight up, and then pitches over to the appropriate angle in accordance with instructions loaded into it from ‘the pod’, and flies into the city to hit some hapless apartment building based on coordinates somebody phoned in. Either that, or the Russian army maintains a list of the GPS coordinates of every apartment building in Ukraine, for an anti-air-ground-attack missile it doesn’t have any more.

I got back into the conversation at comment # 244, reiterating the absence of a guided ground-attack capability in the S-300 system, drawing some analogies and asking for an explanation of how such a capability would acquire and fly to the target, in the lack to that point of any credible reference cited by the ‘ground-attack’ flat-earthers which supports such a capability. The rebuttal was directed to Peter AU1, who put in his plug for S-300 ground-attack skilz a day earlier. But the first reply came from Outraged about an hour later, schooling me on how ground attack really works with an air-defense missile.

“Yet no AD missiles nor radar, nor detection, nor engagement, nor tracking, nor SAM missiles are used in the secondary ground attack role.”

Mmmm….yes; I see it now. No radar, no detection, no tracking. Likewise no SAM missiles, although what we are supposedly talking about is a ground-attack capability in a SAM missile, not a whole different missile. So we are back to talking about ballistic firing, presumably by uploading GPS information to the guidance system – I suppose that’s what he means by the ‘command and control module’ – and then you just blast away at your ground target. Except there is no – repeat, no – GPS capability in the S-300 system except to tell the command vehicle the precise location of the system. None of the missile variants used with the S-300 system features GPS input; that’s cruise missiles, like the Kalibr. You could not do hit spotting with ground-attack missiles; “Good, Mikhail!!! Now up 80 yards, and left one hundred!!” because you only have four missiles in total and hopefully you had the forethought to leave at least one SAM available in case you get bounced by a MiG. I’m afraid by this point I started to run out of patience a little, since I had repeatedly asked for a simple description of how it works and gotten back a bunch of self-contradictory pseudomilitary mumbo-jumbo. So I asked, one more time, at comment # 251. Spare me all the comic-book gobbledegook and just tell me, in simple terms, how it works.

Outraged replied right away, in only ten minutes, and it probably took him at least three to type his reply. Then Peter AU1 and I-am-an-actual-S-300-operator mo3, less than a minute apart. These are probably all the same individual, using different identities. Mo3 reports that the target is ‘calculated ballistically’ – remember, for a vertical-launch missile, where you can’t just crank an extra degree or two of elevation on to adjust your distance, because the missile fires straight up – and the subsequent accuracy is dependent on the IQ of the lead officer. I couldn’t have asked for a more comprehensive explanation than that.

Remember, in the article I cited earlier from the old blog, about the Trolls-R-Us legions working out of Savushkina St. in St Petersburg to bring the whole world under Putin’s iron hand? Marat Burkhard, the ‘former troll who went straight’, claimed the trolls of Savushkina St. worked in teams of three:

“According to him, one person provides the original comment, the second plays the “villain” and disagrees with him (ostensibly to provide the appearance of balanced opinion), while the third affirms the rightness of the first person’s opinion. He agrees all three sit together, agreeing on who is going to answer who, but then says they do not talk much because everyone is busy.”

I pointed out then, as I will again now, there is no reason one person could not represent as three or more – nobody can see you, and whether or not they can detect common elements in your speech or other suspicious ‘tells’ among your various personas depends on your skill. But there is really not much separating dorks who troll for fun and to make people lose it who were trying to be serious about a particular topic, and working disinformation operatives present to derail the conversation and drive contributors away, as Annie Applebaum lamented. And what did Goebbels teach us about propaganda? It is not the job of propaganda to be intelligent. It just has to be persuasive. Is it working? You tell me. Here’s Forbes, from just a couple of weeks ago, hammering on the S-300 ground-attack capability, and getting all his information from Ukraine. Take a look at the photo of the destroyed building featured about two-thirds of the way down. The whole midsection of the building is gone. Think that was a pre-fragmented SAM warhead? I realize the (Ukrainian) photographer claimed it was a multiple-missile strike, but how many? Ten? Which brings us to the question that begs to be asked – if the S-300 can be easily modified to a ground-attack role…and the Ukrainians have the S-300….why haven’t the Ukrainians done it? I mean, they’re always begging for more weapons. A thus-repurposed S-300 battery would slightly outrange the HIMARS that makes Ukrainians weak with lust, using the rockets the USA lets them have so far, because the State Department knows if they are given 300-mile rockets they will strike targets in Russia and escalate the conflict. So, what’s stopping them from lobbing S-300’s at Russian ground targets?

Why deny the obvious, child?