S-300 Missile System: Old, Expensive, and Delayed

The potential delivery of the S-300 missile defense system from Russia to Iran comes at a time when its primary purpose for purchase, which was to defend Iran's sensitive nuclear facilities, has effectively diminished following the signing of the nuclear agreement on July 14. Iran considered the purchase of the S-300 missile defense system when it abandoned the 2003 Saadabad nuclear agreement and resumed uranium enrichment in its nuclear development activities. The main application of this system is to defend factories, sensitive industrial centers, and economic infrastructure against aerial attacks. Iran's known nuclear facilities in Natanz, Arak, Isfahan, Tehran, and Karaj are generally located above ground and are completely vulnerable to aerial attacks. Fordow is the only declared nuclear facility in Iran that is built into a mountain and has a degree of natural defensibility. The former Soviet Union first used the S-300 missile defense system, which has a forty-year-old technology, in a limited capacity during the Iranian Revolution in 1979. The customers of this system were generally former Soviet satellite countries or countries leaning towards Moscow. Former Soviet republics including Azerbaijan, Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, as well as several Eastern European countries and former members of the Warsaw Pact including Bulgaria, Slovakia, and Algeria each possess some variant of this system. Greece, a NATO member, has this system, and Turkey, another NATO member, received a version of the system for testing from Belarus in 2007. Russia previously offered to sell the advanced version of this system directly to Turkey, but Ankara refused to purchase it and instead received the American-made Patriot missile defense system. The American-made Patriot missile defense system, which was first used in the early 1990s against Saddam's regime and Scud missiles, has been regularly improved over the past 20 years and is now available to all Gulf Arab countries, in addition to Israel and Turkey. The Russian state factory 'Almaz', the manufacturer of the S-300 defense system, had previously announced that it had ceased production of this system and replaced it with a more advanced system. Several countries that possessed these missiles, including Croatia, have either retired them or replaced them with newer systems like Russia. After retiring the S-300 system, Russia equipped its missile defense with the more advanced S-400 system. Compared to a similar model provided to Vietnam, it seems that the price previously received from Iran for its sale is higher than the price sold to other countries. Vietnam paid $300 million to Russia for two sets of these missiles, while Iran committed to pay about $800 million for four sets. During Ahmadinejad's administration, Iran filed a legal complaint against Russia seeking $4.7 billion in damages from Moscow, which will effectively be dropped with the acceptance of the missile system. Russia has previously used the sale of the S-300 as a political tool. In 2009, after then-President Medvedev's agreement with Obama to halt the deployment of the U.S. missile defense system in the Czech Republic and Poland, Russia announced that it would refrain from selling this system to Iran due to UN Security Council sanctions. In 2013, Putin threatened that if the U.S. intervened militarily in Syria, Moscow would provide the S-300 system to Bashar al-Assad's government. In April of this year, after the expectation of signing a nuclear agreement with Tehran became certain, and even before any new resolution was passed in the Security Council regarding the lifting or extension of arms sanctions against Iran, Putin announced that he had lifted the ban on selling the S-300 to Tehran. During the ten-year delay in delivering the S-300 to Iran, Israel has received advanced F-35 aircraft from the U.S., which are capable of neutralizing the S-300 system and targeting its launch pads before they can operate. More importantly than the U.S. and Israel being equipped with weapons capable of countering the S-300 during the ten-year delay in delivery to Iran is the change in the system's utility and its reduced significance as a result of the signing of the nuclear agreement with Tehran and the elimination of the need to defend facilities that have either been voluntarily shut down or are under the supervision of international bodies. In this regard, the delivery of the old and expensive S-300 missile system is somewhat reminiscent of a remedy after the death of Sohrab.