Iranian minister of Defense Brigadier General Amir Hatami said the domestically-made, long-range air defense missile system “Bavar-373” will be displayed on August 22.

Bavar 373 air defense missile system (Picture source: FARS)

Brigadier General Hatami said the state-of-the-art air defense system will be displayed on the National Day of the Defense Industry, which falls on August 22 this year. He had said that the Defense Ministry would put on display some of the latest air defense achievements of the country on this occasion.

A feature of Bavar-373 is its vertical launching system with square launchers, mostly used for air defense on warships. Bavar-373 uses a long-range, phased array fire-control radar, dubbed Me’raj-4.

Bavar-373 is a long-range road-mobile surface-to-air missile system unveiled in August 2016. Iran describes it as a competitor with the Russian S-300 missile system.

In April 2015, Iran unveiled some of Bavar's subsystems, which include the Fakour commanding and smart control system which has the ability to collect information from all sources relevant to air defense, including passive and active military radars (such as the Mersad), signal surveillance, missile systems and commanding and control systems.

The Rasoul advanced communications system is for encoding information, connecting the country’s infrastructure and transferring radar information from the battle scene to commanding centers.

Bavar-373 will utilize Sayyad-4 missile, which are contained in two rectangular launch canisters. In fact, the air defense system employs three different types of missiles to hit targets at various altitudes.

No formal information was given about this missile but it appears from news photos that Sayyad-4 is similar to Sayyad-3 in wings and control surfaces, however, it varies lightly in frontal shape. Bavar-373 uses a phased array radar for tracking aerodynamic targets and ballistic missiles in medium to long ranges, mounted on the ZAFAR heavy truck. One of the radars used in Bavar-373 is Meraj (Ascension), a phased array radar with a range of 450 km which uses fuzzy logic techniques to spot targets. Meraj can track up to 200 targets simultaneously.

The canisters containing the Sayyad-4 missiles are to be carried on the Zoljanah 10×10 truck but pictures show they are also carried on semi-trailer.