I only see two alternative suggestions
1. Hitting non protected targets - maybe? Kyiv is hit often enough and I bet there's a Patriot there.
2. Severe interceptor shortage - but as the article says, the shortage is not new. The dive in interception rate is. FTA:
So, a nothingburger of an article then, 2 alternative suggestions, 1 new to me, hitting lower value targets with BM is a reasonable but rather stupid idea, but none explains it away. I mean, the lessons and implications block literally says
And this is exactly what I was saying - Russia gets to test a fresh batch every few weeks and check if their tweak worked. Lockheed Martin, Raytheon needs Trump to say okay and someone to fund it before they can send over a new hardware patch. This asymmetry favors the Russians. But at least they get telemetry so it's not totally hopeless.
You like to throw out claims like they are obviously true without any supporting material. Care to drop a link?
What is known
PAC-3 MSE has a ring of 180 tiny solid fuel rocket motors near the nose for course correction. It has crazy agility, but no sustained Delta-V required to hit something that changed course and you are already at Mach 5+. The original intercept course must be valid and bring it near, it cannot chase.
THAAD is more like a conventional rocket. It has a
Liquid Divert and Attitude Control System for control, but it doesn't do snap high g direction changes.
The problem
To intercept something, you need to pull 3-5x the G-force of the target.
PAC-3 could pull 100g+ for a split second, solid rocket motors in the nose are good for that, but you have limited shots, fire and it burns until it runs out, and you can't relight it. You don't want them to burn for too long either - you don't want to U-turn, so fuel per rocket is very limited. If you are lucky, you can hit one if it doesn't wiggle too much, but it sure sounds like a challenge.
THAAD has the fuel to correct, but its airframe and sensor loop are designed for smoother exo-atmospheric adjustments, not the violent 90g snaps required to counter a hypersonic jink inside the atmosphere.
THAAD has the disadvantage that it engages outside the atmosphere, or at least where air is thinner and fins won't help -> no fins. You can't nudge the nose and let the tail do the hard work, you need boosters big enough to dump Delta-V into course corrections. It is designed against mostly ballistic threats with 5-10g of agility, so ~40g total would easily defeat them (seems like a lot for liquid motors but probably the design spec, they know the x3 rule). Now Iskander / Kinzhal pulls 20-30g, THAAD as it is, is doomed, and v6.0 upgrade is moved up from 2032 to 2027. This alone signals the gap in capability, you don't rush an order (2032 to 2027) if all is well.
But THAAD is useless for a different, super simple reason: it has an operational floor of 40 km, below which its infrared seeker is blinded by air heating up the nose. It's for exoatmospheric interception, for real ballistic missiles. It launches using a booster, stage separation at t+17, wait a bit, and then ditch the shroud protecting the sensitive IR seeker when you reach 40000 meters or ~0.2% of sea pressure level or "flight level 1300".
Iskander, Kinzhal's paths peak at 50km and is specifically designed to fly mostly between 40-50km. It flies just high enough to be out of reach of lower tier systems but low enough that THAAD / SM-3 often cannot engage.
So, THAAD = no go by default. They found a nice gap in the missile defense.
Aster 30's PIF-PAF is designed to pull 60-100g continuously during the terminal phase, something PAC-2/3 cannot do, but we don't have enough of those.
There's also a second problem, you can't hit what you cannot track, and some trajectory changes are specifically meant to break the radar track - by moving outside "where it should be" and where the radar is looking. The 30g maneuver is meant to glitch outside the radar's search gate. To add insult to injury, each missile has
up to 6 decoys with a thermal signature (for IR seekers), a thermal generator,
active EW, and is probably shaped to reflect brighter or just as bright in the bands used for AD radars (easiest of all 3, enlarging radar cross section is far easier than minimizing it / stealth). Jerk, release 6 decoys and the radar blinks (loses contact, goes to wide beam) suddenly sees 7 things flying towards it and need to calculate new tracks. But this may be an easier fix than physics of the interceptor - it's an AESA, just program it to look wider and accept a fainter return, now you know it can and will glitch with 30g.
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The fix in THAAD v6 is actually pretty simple in concept. Drive a Patriot M903 launcher next to the big THAAD system, plug it in. If stuff comes flying below the 40-50km minimum altitude, it can shoot a PAC-3 at it instead, but with much improved guidance and hopefully a better hit rate. It's stop gap, and explains why it can be fielded this quickly. By seeing the missile much earlier, you can track and hopefully predict its path faster, and with a much more powerful radar, you can scan wider to not lose track.
The real fix is a third layer - SM-3 kills in space (> 100km), THAAD > 40 km, SM-6 has a ceiling of 30km, Patriot 20km. Glide Phase Interceptor targets stuff in the 20-70 km range, so Iskander, Kinzhal, but also several of the Chinese not-quite-ballistic missiles with glide capability. But that's a 2029+ project, with remote sensing (Hypersonic and Ballistic Tracking Space Sensor) as primary guidance, land/ship based radars can't see far enough because of the earth is a sphere.
Once it is deployed, you're golden. Ukraine
knows where the damned Iskanders and Kinzhals are, there are plenty of maps with incomings including ballistics, but you can't hit them until the last 60 seconds and ~100km range. Spend a few seconds establishing target, calculating track and determining if it is a credible threat, and you have not much left for 20s flight time to intercept. Lose track once and you're almost too late. But with GPI, you can hit it in cruise and minutes earlier, and in a phase it cannot glitch, no air, fins don't work.
Ukraine sped this up. HBTSS was a science project with no deadline, then Russia launched a Zircon and scared US planners into action and got funding for it. GPI was aiming for mid 2030s deployment, and FY2024 NDAA mandate ordered initial operational capability by end of 2029. The race is on and we're reacting to already deployed weapons with future upgrades but once delivered, I don't see cruise missiles / low flying ballistics winning this, there's not much they can do except releasing decoys.
If you are wondering why not use SM-6 against Iskander - it uses fins to steer, but lacks the nose cone rocket motors of PAC-3, so it cannot pull that many G's. It still can't hit Kinzhal / Iskander during cruise, and in terminal dive phase, it's a big question if it can get near enough to blast it with its fragmentation warhead. Block IB with a bigger rocket motor is supposed to make it fly much higher and faster, possibly hitting these silly 40-50km missiles during the cruise phase, where they also cannot pull many g's due to lack of air. But that is another future upgrade and a much needed one, quasi ballistic missiles are a threat with no answer at sea.
