Iskander Missile

The Iskander is a family of Russian mobile short-range ballistic missile systems, developed to replace the older Soviet-era OTR-21 Tochka missile in Russian military service, with the goal of retiring the Tochka from front-line use by around 2020. The standard 9K720 Iskander-M variant, mounted on a wheeled transporter-erector-launcher vehicle for mobility and rapid deployment, has an operational range of roughly five hundred kilometers, giving Russian ground forces a mobile, hard-to-track precision strike capability against high-value targets well behind an adversary's front line. The system's name renders the Persian and Arabic form of Alexander, but the missile bears the name independently as a Russian military designation rather than any direct reference to a historical figure.