Layers of the Air Shield: Surface-to-Air Missiles from the Strela-2 to the HQ-9

Start at the bottom layer. The Strela-2, NATO name SA-7 Grail, was the first Soviet man-portable surface-to-air missile: a light shoulder-launched weapon with passive infrared homing and a high-explosive warhead, aimed at low-flying aircraft.

The Igla, NATO name SA-18 Grouse, carries the same shoulder-fired idea forward as an infrared-homing system, with a simplified earlier variant, the Igla-1, and a later one, the Igla-S.

Not every shoulder weapon homed on heat. The British Blowpipe served the British Army and Royal Marines from 1975 to 1985 and was manually guided: the operator steered it with a small joystick that sent correction commands over a radio link.

Moving up a layer, the French Crotale is an all-weather short-range system developed by Thomson-CSF Matra to intercept cruise and anti-ship missiles, helicopters, drones and low-flying aircraft, and it exists in both a mobile land version and several naval versions.

The Franco-German Roland is a mobile short-range system that entered French Army service in April 1977, and it is one of the few foreign-built surface-to-air missile systems the United States Army bought for its own use.

The Soviet Tor, GRAU designation 9K330 and NATO name SA-15 Gauntlet, is an all-weather short-range system for low to medium altitudes, and a naval variant was fielded as the 3K95 Kinzhal.

The Pantsir combines missiles and anti-aircraft guns in one system built from three vehicle types, a missile launcher, a radar truck and a command post. It is made by the KBP Instrument Design Bureau of Tula as the successor to the tracked Tunguska-M1.

The Soviet 2K12 Kub is a mobile surface-to-air missile system designed to protect ground forces from air attack at low to medium altitude, a step up in reach from the short-range vehicles before it.

The American MIM-23 Hawk was designed as a more mobile counterpart to the Nike Hercules, trading range and altitude for a much smaller size and weight. It entered United States Army service in 1959 and was superseded there by the Patriot by 1994.

In the Russian layered network the Buk, a self-propelled medium-range system, sits below the longer-range S-300 and S-400 and above the short-range Tor and Pantsir, and it was built to counter cruise missiles, smart bombs, helicopters and drones.

NASAMS, developed by Kongsberg Defence and Aerospace with RTX Corporation, is a short to medium range ground-based system that can fire any of a wide range of existing missiles, so it is as much a network as a single weapon.

At sea the layer belongs to the RIM-66 Standard, known as the SM-1MR and SM-2MR. It replaced the RIM-2 Terrier and RIM-24 Tartar that Navy ships had carried since the 1950s, and the extended-range RIM-67 added a solid rocket booster stage.

The S-350 Vityaz was developed by GSKB Almaz-Antey to replace the older S-300PS. Its design traces to a joint South Korean and Russian medium-range project, and it fires mainly the 9M96 missile also used on the S-400.

Barak 8, also called LR-SAM or MR-SAM, is a medium to long range system developed jointly by India and Israel, with both maritime and land-based variants, aimed at aircraft, helicopters, drones and anti-ship, cruise and ballistic missiles.

SAMP/T is a mobile Franco-Italian system built around the Aster 30 missile, designed to defend against aircraft, cruise missiles and tactical ballistic missiles, which makes it a bridge between the medium and long range layers.

The top of this path is the Chinese HQ-9, a long-range semi-active radar homing missile produced by the China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation, with a naval variant fielded as the HHQ-9.