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Russian tech firm fine-tunes Tor air defense system to fight US-made HIMARS rockets

The Tor air defense system can control the designated airspace on its own and independently shoot down all air targets that are not identified by the friend-or-foe system

MOSCOW, February 8. /TASS/. The Izhevsk-based Kupol Electro-Mechanical Plant (part of the Almaz-Antey defense manufacturer) has fine-tuned the Tor surface-to-air missile system to effectively fight US-made HIMARS rockets, Company Deputy Chief Designer for Repair and Upgrading Ilya Rykov said on Wednesday.

"The targets that we began to work on, never encountered before and had no possibility to test are the notorious HIMARS systems. Now that we have encountered them, we can fight them. Some fine-tuning has been done and now these targets are engaged more effectively," he said in a live broadcast on the Zvezda TV Channel.

The Tor short-range anti-aircraft missile system is designed to shield the first echelons of ground forces against strikes by anti-radar and cruise missiles, gliding air bombs, aircraft, helicopters, and unmanned aerial vehicles, including a swarm of UAVs.

The Tor air defense system can control the designated airspace on its own and independently shoot down all air targets that are not identified by the friend-or-foe system. The Tor consists of 16 vertically launched surface-to-air missiles with a striking range of up to 12 km and an altitude range of up to 10 km. An upgraded locator is capable of detecting aircraft based on the technology of reduced radar signature.

The Tor-M2U as one of the system’s latest modifications is capable of detecting and tracking over 40 targets and simultaneously engaging four of them, firing four missiles one by one. The latest modification is the Tor-M2KM. The system also exists in its Tor-M2DT Arctic configuration based on the DT-30 two-link tracked transporter.

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