U.S. Marines Train Against S-300 and HQ-9 Style Air Defense Decoys in High-End Nevada Drill.

U.S. Marines from 1st Radio Battalion trained against full-scale S-300 and HQ-9 style air defense decoys during Resolute Hunter 26 1 at Naval Air Station Fallon. The exercise strengthens joint kill chain integration and prepares forces for modern long-range air defense threats.

According to the U.S. Department of War via DVIDS on November 21, 2025, U.S. Marines from 1st Radio Battalion, I Marine Expeditionary Force Information Group, trained against full-scale decoys of S-300 and HQ-9 style long-range air defense systems during exercise Resolute Hunter 26-1 at Naval Air Station Fallon, Nevada. The imagery shows foreign-looking launchers in desert camouflage on the Fallon ranges as Marines and U.S. Army elements maneuver around them.
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U.S. Marines from 1st Radio Battalion train at NAS Fallon against full-scale S-300 and HQ-9 style air defense decoys, using desert terrain to replicate real-world Iranian and regional threat environments while refining joint ISR and electronic warfare targeting during Exercise Resolute Hunter (Picture source: U.S. DoW).

The DVIDS photo set, shot by Cpl Manuel Rivera, dates the activity to November 10 to 13 and locates the Marines squarely in the Nevada high desert around NAS Fallon. Vehicles are staged facing a broad basin with low ridgelines, while multinational personnel, including Australian Army signals officers, move through the training area. The Marine Corps notes that the 1st Radio Battalion used Resolute Hunter to certify Marines on mission essential tasks, trial new concepts, and integrate with joint and allied partners in a live environment.

Resolute Hunter has quietly become one of the most important kill chain exercises in the U.S. inventory. Hosted by the Naval Aviation Warfighting Development Center at Fallon, it is the Department of Defense’s only dedicated Battle Management, Command and Control, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance event and the capstone for the Navy’s Maritime ISR Weapons and Tactics Instructor course. Across three intensive weeks, U.S. Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, Army, and allied crews practice the full find, fix, track, target, engage, assess sequence in both maritime and overland scenarios.

Within that framework, the 1st Radio Battalion is a key node rather than a supporting extra. The unit’s mission, as defined by I MEF, is to establish and operate the intelligence information architecture that delivers signals intelligence, electromagnetic warfare, and computer network exploitation to Marine Air Ground Task Force and joint commanders. In practical terms, at Fallon, that means dispersed small teams collecting and geolocating hostile emitters, forwarding data to an operations control element and a rear analysis center, and then feeding targeting quality information into the wider joint fires network. Exercise reporting from earlier Resolute Hunter iterations already shows the 1st Radio Battalion using this construct as a test bed for new command arrangements tailored to multi-domain operations.

The choice of threat surrogates is not cosmetic. The Russian-designed S-300PMU2 Favourite, which forms the template for many of these decoys, typically fields an 83M6E2 command structure with a 64N6E2 long-range surveillance radar, a 30N6E2 X-band phased array engagement radar, and up to a dozen 5P85 series launchers, each carrying four long-range missiles. In operational terms, such a battery can hold aircraft and some cruise missiles at risk out to roughly 150 to 200 kilometers, depending on missile variant, and it can manage multiple simultaneous engagements across a large defended footprint.

China’s HQ-9 family, mirrored in other decoys on the range, offers similar capabilities with its own electronics suite. The HQ-9 and later HQ-9B variants combine long-range missiles, reported maximum engagement ranges up to roughly 300 kilometers against aircraft, with active or semi-active radar homing, and are tied to modern active phased array search and fire control radars such as the HT233 and newer Type 305 series. In export form, marketed as FD2000 or FD2000B, the system has spread across North Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia, making it a plausible reference threat for many theaters.

Training against decoys rather than live foreign systems reflects both classification and practicality. Modern threat surrogates are built to replicate not just the silhouette of a launcher or radar, but its radar cross section, thermal outline, and electromagnetic behavior using instrumented emitters and reflectors. U.S. test and training ranges increasingly rely on such high-fidelity threat emitters to expose aircrews and ground teams to genuine double-digit SAM signature patterns without needing actual Russian or Chinese hardware on the range. At Fallon, this allows the 1st Radio Battalion to practice detecting search and fire control radars, fusing that data with airborne and space-based ISR, and passing precise coordinates into the kill chain, all while instructors can reconfigure battery layouts, camouflage, and emission control to mimic different foreign tactics.

The Fallon Range Training Complex sits in the high desert terrain of open basins, sparse vegetation, and surrounding hills that closely resemble many military sites in Iran and across Southwest Asia. The Navy’s own environmental documentation notes the use of remote desert training areas fitted with communications towers and electronic warfare emitters to create realistic threat environments. From a technical perspective, that means long radar horizons, intense ground clutter, strong diurnal temperature gradients, and dust effects that alter infrared signatures, all factors that shape how an S-300 or HQ-9 battery actually appears to sensors.

This is where the Iran hypothesis comes into play. Iran publicly received S-300PMU2 batteries from Russia in the mid-2010s and deployed them around high-value sites such as the Fordow enrichment facility in central Iran, with launcher vehicles and radars dug into semi-arid basins similar to Nevada. More recent reporting indicates that Chinese HQ-9B export variants have entered or are expected to enter service with several regional states, and open-source debate continues over whether Iran will eventually field HQ-9-class systems alongside its domestic Bavar 373 and Khordad 15 batteries. Viewed through that lens, Desert Painted S-300 and HQ-9 style decoys at Fallon look very much like an unspoken rehearsal for breaking open Iranian integrated air defenses, even if no U.S. official will say so on the record.

Suppression of enemy air defenses has traditionally been associated with U.S. Air Force assets, but the Marine Corps is repositioning itself as a forward, stand-in force that can sense, target, and help dismantle high-end SAM networks in support of joint aviation and naval strike. Exercises like Resolute Hunter show the 1st Radio Battalion and emerging multi-domain task units learning to spot a foreign battery from its radar pulse, camouflage pattern, and network behavior, then plug that insight straight into long-range joint fires and cyber and electronic attack options.

Seen against the backdrop of Israeli and Western concern about Iran’s nuclear and missile infrastructure and the rebuilding of Iranian air defenses after Israeli strikes in 2025, U.S. Marines quietly learning how to unpick S-300 and HQ-9-style networks in a Nevada desert takes on clear strategic weight. The decoys at Fallon may be fake, but the kill chains built around them are very real, and they are being refined with a specific set of arid, long-range SAM threats clearly in mind.