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Subject: What will USAirForce and USNavy do if confronted with a competent Air Defence?
Thomas    6/12/2003 9:00:29 AM
The dominance of the US air power has been so overwhelming, that it has made a lot of issues unimportant. But it has been characteristical, that the hostile air defence has been non-existent, degraded or inefficient. To what extend does the USArmy and Marines depend on a total absense of hostile air defence? To what extend is the ground forces dependent on the F-22?
 
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Worcester    RE:Aussiegunner - Down South   11/26/2003 8:58:19 PM
Sov may not have the Falkland details to hand. The Falklands is a good "yardstick" for naval air against land air - 200+ Argentinian land air against 27 Brit Sea Harriers; threat reduction (range and poor Argentine maintenance) got that down to a max sortie rate of 30 per day. As you say, out of 87 ships deployed (40+ in the fleet RARO and landing areas) to lose five is good. In the 6 months prior to embarkation RN 801 Squadron took on the US Aggressor Sqn (Heyford) and an F-15 Sqn (Bittburg) and racked up kill ratios of 5-0 and 4-1 ; USAF couldn't handle the Sea Harrier. The Argentines admit 16-0 air-to-air. The "Black Buck" Vulcan raids at least kept people awake; but recent Argentinian reports show they kept at least 1 fighter squadron over each mainland city because, so they claim, they thought the Brits would bomb Buenos Aires or Cordoba, esp if they lost a carrier. All the Brit losses and damaged (except Sheffield and Conveyor) were within SIGHT of land and succumbed to fighter attack from land. Its all about balance: you KNOW your landing ships and escorts of the Amphibious Group will be close to/surrounded by high, broken land which gives them almost zero reaction time for guns or SAMs. You must keep fighter cover over them but you cannot risk your carriers because the enemy KNOW your carriers must be close by and the Argentinians were recording the radar tracks of Sea Harriers in order to get the carrier positions. The real lesson (again) was AEW - airborne early warning radar, but NOT as much as the Hawkeye community claim; even with airborne early warning, you still need CAPS on station and you wouldn't pick up and intercept all of those 30 tracks coming in below 50 feet over the land/islands/water. Lesson: if anyone does any opposed amphib landing against a land-based air force which is still effective, you'll lose ships. Exocet is now so old the Brits decoy electronically - they say they can make it do aerobatics! A Brit T42 destroyer shot down 4 Chinese Silkworms in under 2 minutes at 18-25 mile range in GW1; guess pratice makes you good!
 
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Worcester    RE:Aussiegunner - Down South #2   11/26/2003 9:18:34 PM
Should have mentioned Sea Wolf missiles - awesome. Only two Brit ships had them - Brilliant was attacked 1 mile from land by 4 Argentinian Sky Hawks, line abreast, wing-tips almost touching, skimming the water...shot down two, third crashed into sea avoiding a Sea Wolf and fourth turned and ran like hell; all at 4-6 miles range. Brits seem to have them on every ship now. Trialled with US Navy and shot down a 15 inch shell from USS New Jersey in flight! But way too expensive and "foreign" - so we've still got the crappy 40 year-old Sea Sparrow!
 
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ChdNorm    USAF over North Vietnam   11/26/2003 9:32:41 PM
"The last time the us air force and navy confronted a competent air defense was over Former French Indochina. It was a disaster and they were complaining about French Air Force performance there 10 years prior to that (given the fact that WW2 had just ended and France had to get by with a lots less" I'm just wondering what the disaster was? It seems like if I remember things correctly .. It was "bombing the north back into the stone age" that forced the North back to the conference table. Not that it spelled voctory in totality ... but far from a disaster.
 
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WDDavenport    Thomas, your anti-Americanism is showing -- competent is an innuendo   11/29/2003 12:46:06 PM
Thomas, your anti-Americanism is showing -- "competent air defense" is an innuendo, implying that the USAF and USN only fight incompetent air defenses, such as Fatty Goering's Luftwaffe in 1943-45. If you continue making sneers such as that against American armed forces, Americans at strategy Page will stop taking you seriously. The question is too broad and vague. One must define "competent air defense" more specifically. I'll suggest a more specific question: how would any foreign air force deal with a SAM system such as the Patriot GEM2 and PAC-3 air defense equipment used in Iraq in 2003? Please, replies such as, "A Eurofighter Typhoon would outmaneuver a PAC-3" are unacceptable in the absence of any detailed evidence or technical reasoning."
 
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ChdNorm    RE:Thomas, your anti-Americanism is showing -- competent is an innuendo   11/29/2003 2:02:33 PM
"I'll suggest a more specific question: how would any foreign air force deal with a SAM system such as the Patriot GEM2 and PAC-3 air defense equipment used in Iraq in 2003?" Thats really very simple WD, send in a task force of LeClercs and Merkavas to destroy everything single handedly..... havent you been reading how things are done around here?
 
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Heorot    RE:Thomas, your anti-Americanism is showing - Davenport.   11/29/2003 2:35:30 PM
You seem to be new to this board so I spring to Thomas' defence. He has been posting among the most thoughtful and neutral remarks since the beginning and doesn't make posts that are gratuitously biased against the US forces but takes a clear analytical view of things. In this case, there is no doubt that his statement is true; the US has NOT met any competent air forces since Vietnam (and perhaps not even then).
 
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Horsesoldier    RE:Thomas, your anti-Americanism is showing - Davenport.   11/29/2003 2:56:53 PM
I stand by my earlier answer to this question, "Destroy it." It seems to me that WDDavenport makes something of a point -- I don't think Thomas was being anti-American in his statement -- but it seems like the question presupposes that if the USAF and USN meet an air defense network and blast the bejesus out of it, then it must not be "competent." Iraq's air defense network was talked up nicely prior to the 91 war, and was dismantled pretty handily. Does this therefore make it "incompetent" or does it indicate the skill of US, British, and allied aviators and planners when it comes to killing such a system?
 
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Worcester    RE:USN or USAF?.   11/29/2003 3:47:50 PM
Big difference perhaps? We dismantled the Iraq defences mostly from land bases; what would have happened to all those huge bases if Saddam had gone into Saudi? A sea-based strategy alone has got to be more exhausting and difficult.
 
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WDDavenport    Air Force magazine: Electronic Warfare is Dragging    11/29/2003 4:38:59 PM
print friendly pdf April 2001 Vol. 84, No. 4 The problems begin with too few jammers and go on from there. Electronic Warfare is Dragging New and Old. The new EGBU-15, shown here on an F-15E aircraft, is a GPS-enhanced version of a guided bomb. At right, an F-16CJ with HARM Targeting System (under intake) and AGM-88 HARMs, carries on the "Wild Weasel" SAM-killer tradition. (Staff photo by Guy Aceto) What follows is extracted from "Airborne Electronic Warfare: Issues for the 107th Congress," a 26-page paper released Feb. 9 by the Congressional Research Service of the Library of Congress. The principal author is Christopher Bolkcom, a CRS national defense analyst. Electronic Warfare has been an important component of military air operations since the earliest days of radar. Radar, EW, and stealth techniques have evolved over time as engineers, scientists, and tacticians have struggled to create the most survivable and effective air forces possible. ... The downing of an F-117 Nighthawk in the 1999 conflict in Yugoslavia by a Serbian surface-to-air missile illustrates that the struggle for control of the electromagnetic spectrum is an ongoing endeavor for US air forces. Operation Allied Force may be an important watershed in the debate over current and future US airborne EW. It appears that every air strike on Serbian targets was protected by radar jamming and/or SEAD [Suppression of Enemy Air Defenses] aircraft. ECM [Electronic Countermeasures] self-protection systems such as towed radar decoys were credited with saving numerous US aircraft that had been targeted by Serbian SAMs. Gen. Wesley Clark, the operation's military leader, described how critical a role EW played in the allies' success. He testified that "we couldn't have fought this war successfully without the EA-6B contribution. We really need the Electronic Warfare capacity that we have there." The value of the F-16CJ SEAD aircraft was also widely touted. [The 1970s-vintage Navy/Marine Corps EA-6B Prowler is currently the US military's sole tactical radar-jamming aircraft. USAF assigns crews (pilots and EW officers) to serve in five joint Navy/Air Force Prowler squadrons. USAF has equipped F-16C aircraft with High-speed Anti-Radiation Missiles for the SEAD mission-designating them F-16CJs.] Table 1 suggests the impact of EW and SEAD on NATO aircraft survivability during the Kosovo campaign. By using this metric, one can assert that DOD's EW and SEAD efforts effectively protected US aircraft from Serbia's integrated air defenses. Yet, despite the low number of NATO aircraft destroyed during Allied Force, concerns have been raised over a number of EW and SEAD issues. Few and Overworked In the area of Electronic Attack, the main concern raised by the Kosovo conflict is that DOD currently has too few jamming aircraft in its inventory to support more than one conflict simultaneously. Although Allied Force was considered by many to be a small-scale contingency, [an Oct. 14, 1999, Pentagon statement said that] "US systems such as RC-135 Rivet Joint electronic intelligence aircraft and EA-6B tactical airborne Electronic Warfare aircraft were employed in numbers roughly equivalent to those anticipated for a major theater war, and even then were heavily tasked." Further, the number of aircraft that could be fielded at any one time may have been unnecessarily decreased by several operations and maintenance shortfalls-such as a shortage of spare parts and too few aircraft trainers. Also, the effectiveness of jamming aircraft may have been degraded by their lack of key technologies such as night vision devices and advanced communications. Finally, experience in Allied Force suggests that the Electronic Attack community would benefit from additional training and experience in supporting Low Observable aircraft. There are 235 F-16CJs in the total active inventory, and this number appears to have been sufficient to adequately pursue the SEAD mission in Kosovo. However, Allied Force did suggest some numerical shortfalls that may have hindered SEAD operations. According to the commander [Col. Daniel J. Darnell] of the Air Force's 20th Fighter Wing, the lack of HARM Targeting System (HTS) pods (a key system on the F-16CJ) in Kosovo may have reduced the Air Force's ability to generate SEAD sorties. "In Allied Force, there were more F-16 aircraft capable of carrying the pod than there were pods to go around." He also said that a lack of personnel also limited SEAD operations. Perhaps a greater SEAD concern [in] Kosovo was the great difficulty US forces had detecting, tracking, and destroying Serbian SAMs that minimized their radar emissions or used "shoot and scoot" tactics. Part of the challenge is that the primary SEAD weapon, the HARM, quickly loses its guidance once an adversary turns off his radar, even for a short period of time. A compounding problem is that the targeting cycle for mobile SAM sites take
 
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gf0012-aust    RE:Air Force magazine: Electronic Warfare is Dragging    11/29/2003 5:06:25 PM
JED (journal of electronic defence) , ISR (intel, surveillance and recon journal) have all done articles recently hilighting problems in the US mix of SAM suppression. The biggest bogey has been the new SA-300's which are currently being viewed as probably the most lethal SAM system deployed to dare. I was under the distinct impression that outside of Moscows SAM system of the cold war era, Bagdhad had a far more complex layered and integrated anti-air system than was ever present in Vietnam. Comparing Hanoi to Bagdhad is a bit of a "stretch". In the case of Bagdhad there was an integrated solution, dumping spurious data into the ATC systems, active suppression, hunter killer teams looking for Iraqi air assets and surface to air systems etc etc... All this was happening in a saturated environment. Whats interesting is what capability exists if parts of the suppression layer are compromised. eg u can't get specops into neutralise defences, you can't deploy E3's RC's, AWACs etc due to the threat of a long range SAM threat. How does the USAF/USN/USMC cope with an SA-300 threat. - Longer range stand offs??
 
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