Roughly how complicated a task is deploying and firing a "Buk" SAM?

Factual Questions
1

I’ve never seen the interface for a surface to air missile battery, though I hope at least some posters here have. How difficult is it to actually set up and fire a modern SAM? I mean, you aren’t having to do the intercept calculations with slide rules any more.

The Buk system apparently consists of 4 tracked vehicles : the radar, the missile launcher, the command truck, and a logistics vehicle.

Is it just a matter of parking all 3 vehicles within 50 feet of each other and connecting the interface cables?

Just how many switches and settings and things have to be set properly in order for the system to properly interface up and run? There’s no technical reason the system couldn’t be almost fully automated for this process.

Once it’s running, and the radar is on, and it detects a target aircraft, now what? Is it just a matter of turning one key to engage, or are there dozens of extra steps?

Would the Russians have the quickstart manual that explains all this stuff just lying around on a checklist in the control cab?

It’s unlikely that anyone here has firsthand knowledge of this particular missile system, I’m just trying to get a rough idea of how involved a task it really is. There is no technical reason at all it can’t be almost completely automated, but I know that many military systems end up having a lot of “gotchas” that have to be hurdled and tons of switches and buttons that have to be in the right positions. For instance, there might be all kinds of locking pins that have to be removed in order to prepare the system for operation.

2

The gist of descriptions I have read is that someone could, with a few days of training, know enough to target a cooperative aircraft (that is, not maneuvering, using electronic countermeasures, etc). Being able to discriminate between targets and more advanced scenarios takes a lot more training, apparently.

If you scroll down about 80% of the way, there are youtube videos showing which switches need to be flicked, and so on.

3

Yeah that doesn’t look simple at all. That’s a lot of switches, and it seems that a fair number of them need flipping. Also they all have incomprehensible labels.

4

Is it not the case that until recently, everyone over there had to do military service if male? So it’s quite likely the operators were trained.