S-400 vs THAAD: How Russia’s and America’s Missile Shields Compare

The S-400 defends the sky against almost everything that flies, while THAAD defends against one thing: ballistic missiles coming down from high altitude.

The S-400 Triumf, built by Almaz-Antey and in Russian service since 2007, is designed to shoot down aircraft, drones, cruise missiles and, at shorter range, ballistic missiles. Its main 48N6 interceptor carries a 143 kg blast-fragmentation warhead that explodes near the target.

THAAD, short for Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, is a US Army system built by Lockheed Martin. It is meant for short-range, medium-range and some intermediate-range ballistic missiles in the last phase of their flight. Its interceptor carries no explosive at all: a kill vehicle steers into the incoming warhead and destroys it by the force of the collision. THAAD does not shoot at aircraft or cruise missiles. That job falls to Patriot, which we compared with the S-400 in S-400 vs Patriot.

Against aircraft, the S-400 reaches farther; against ballistic missiles, THAAD does.

The S-400’s 48N6 missiles reach aircraft up to about 250 km away, and its newer 40N6 missile is credited with up to 400 km, although how widely the 40N6 has been deployed is unclear. Against ballistic missiles, the S-400’s engagement range shrinks to about 60 km, and it is credited with handling warheads falling at up to about 4.8 km per second.

THAAD engages ballistic missiles at about 150 to 200 km, roughly two and a half to three times the S-400’s anti-ballistic reach. The United States keeps THAAD’s exact performance classified, so every public range figure for it is an estimate.

THAAD intercepts much higher. It can hit targets inside or outside the atmosphere, with a ceiling commonly estimated at about 150 km and a floor of roughly 40 to 50 km, while the S-400 fights inside the atmosphere, far lower down.

Altitude is what separates the two. Hitting a warhead 100 km up gives defenders a second chance: if THAAD misses, a lower-tier system such as Patriot can still fire. A warhead stopped that high also keeps its debris, and any chemical or nuclear payload, farther from the ground. The S-400 has no upper tier of its own; that role belongs to Russia’s newer S-500, whose first regiment went on combat duty in December 2025, Defense Minister Andrei Belousov said.

THAAD’s radar, by a wide margin. Its AN/TPY-2 X-band radar is credited with detecting and tracking targets at about 870 to 3,000 km, depending on how it is set up, and the United States also uses it on its own as an early-warning sensor.

The S-400’s 91N6E long-range search radar is credited with detection out to about 600 km, and the battalion adds a separate fire-control radar to guide its missiles. That is a long reach against aircraft, but well short of the AN/TPY-2’s view of a missile rising from far beyond the horizon.

THAAD, by several times. One THAAD battery with 192 interceptors is estimated at about $2.73 billion, and each interceptor costs about $12.7 million, the Missile Defense Agency’s fiscal 2025 price, as we detailed in How Much Does a THAAD Missile Cost? Its radar alone runs to roughly $330 million.

An S-400 battery costs a fraction of that. Turkey agreed in December 2017 to pay about $2.5 billion for four batteries, or about $625 million each, and India signed a $5.43 billion contract for five squadrons in 2018, about $1.1 billion a squadron. Russia does not publish the price of a single S-400 missile.

Both have only a handful of users. THAAD serves three countries: the United States, with eight batteries as of October 2026, the United Arab Emirates, with two, and Saudi Arabia, which commissioned the first of seven planned batteries in July 2025. A US battery is also stationed in South Korea and another on Guam.

The S-400 has four confirmed operators: Russia, China, which agreed in 2015 to buy six battalions, India and Turkey, which took its first delivery in July 2019. Ethiopia would be the fifth. Turkey’s purchase came at a price: Washington removed it from the F-35 program in July 2019 and sanctioned its defense procurement agency in December 2020.

THAAD has the clearer record, because its intercepts have been confirmed by the governments that fired them. The UAE made the system’s first combat interception in January 2022, against a Houthi ballistic missile, and a US Army battery in Israel shot down its first Houthi medium-range missile in late December 2024, a US official confirmed. In the 12-day war between Israel and Iran in June 2025, American crews fired about 92 THAAD interceptors, close to a seventh of an estimated stock of 632. The production system had hit its target in all 14 of its intercept tests between 2006 and 2019.

The S-400’s record rests on claims. In August 2025, India’s air force chief, Air Chief Marshal A.P. Singh, said Indian S-400s shot down five Pakistani fighters and one large surveillance aircraft in May 2025, one at about 300 km; Pakistan has not confirmed the losses. The system has also proved vulnerable on the ground: Ukrainian military intelligence said its strike at Dzhankoi in Crimea on April 17, 2024 destroyed or crippled four S-400 launchers.

Neither is better, because they are not rivals for the same job. A country that wants to keep enemy aircraft far from its borders gets more from the S-400, which is why India values it against Pakistan and China. A country under ballistic-missile attack gets more from THAAD, which is why the UAE and Saudi Arabia bought it to face Iranian and Houthi missiles.

The closest Russian answer to THAAD is the S-500, not the S-400. THAAD’s own weak point is quantity: the United States has eight batteries and a few hundred interceptors left, which our estimate of how many missiles Iran has left shows is a thin margin.

The S-400 entered Russian service in 2007, and the US Army activated its first THAAD battery in May 2008. The S-400’s 48N6 missile reaches about 250 km against aircraft and about 60 km against ballistic missiles. THAAD engages ballistic missiles at about 150 to 200 km, at altitudes estimated up to about 150 km. THAAD’s AN/TPY-2 radar sees about 870 to 3,000 km, against about 600 km for the S-400’s 91N6E. A THAAD interceptor costs about $12.7 million, and a battery with 192 of them about $2.73 billion. Turkey paid about $2.5 billion for four S-400 batteries in 2017. THAAD has three users and the S-400 four confirmed operators as of October 2026.