After French President Emmanuel Macron announced the delivery of the Crotale NG (Next Generation) air defense system to Ukraine on October 12, 2022, since then the global defense equipment monitoring community has been waiting for the debut of the hare missile capability in response to air attacks from Russia.
Although it was not stated in detail, it was reported that the Crotale NG anti-aircraft missile system, donated by France, managed to shoot down a Russian cruise missile for the first time. It did not say what type of cruise missile was shot down.
However, a short video circulating on social media has shown the stages of launching to destroying the cruise missile target from the monitor screen of the Crotale missile controller.
According to the video that was first published on the Telegram account "Оперативний ЗСУ" on March 20, 2023, it was stated that the Ukrainian military using the Crotale NG anti-aircraft missile system donated by France managed to shoot down a Russian cruise missile.
Crotale NG is equipped with a multi-sensor suite, including passive electro-optics and a radar with built-in Electronic Countermeasures (ECCM) to engage air targets under intense electronic warfare stress conditions and hostile nuclear, biological, and environmental battlefield environments. , including in smoke and dust conditions.
Crotale NG began production in 1990. The Crotale NG system uses the latest version of the VT-1 missile with a speed of Mach 3.5. The VT-1 missile weighs 80 kg, including a 13 kg warhead (with an 8 meter kill zone), this missile can go up to a height of 6,000 meters.
In the French military, the Crotale NG is mounted on a 6×6 trailer equipped with a weapons station armed with two blocks of four ready-to-fire container launchers which can fire the VT1 missile designed to destroy air targets within a maximum firing range of 11 km.
The system on the Crotale NG module includes an S-band Pulse Doppler radar with a detection range of 20 km, a Ku-band TWT tracking radar with a range of 30 km, a thermal camera with a range of 19 km, a Daylight CCD camera with a monitoring range of 15 km and an Infrared localiser.
As a hanud system that has been in development since the early 1970s, Crotale produced by the Thales Group has been released in several variants, and the latest is the Crotale NG. Thales said the Crotale system could be used to intercept and destroy aerial threats such as fixed-wing aircraft, attack helicopters, drones, cruise missiles and ballistic missiles.
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