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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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Thomas    RE:Sentinel   12/17/2003 8:39:25 AM
Thank You! I do not question the US Air Force power, but it remains my contention, that a well organised air defence can inflict losses on an attacker out of proportion to the cost. Fights between competent attackers and competent air defences are very rare indeed. One of my many provocations is that the soviets gave (ok lets say partly) in because especially the Northern European air defence was so strong, that the southern part of Denmark would have had a case of severe aluminium pollution.
 
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   RE:Sentinel   4/8/2004 10:58:19 PM
Its a silly contention. The essence of your claim is that the Air Force has not met a competent air defence system until said system has beaten the US Air Force. This is not an argument - this is absurdity..
 
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Darth Squirrel    USAF / USN under no illusions regarding modern SAMs   4/9/2004 4:42:26 PM
Look, the common American knows nothing but "US is the world's only superpower" and "all US weapons systems are the most technologically advanced in the world." Pentagon mission planners, on the other hand, are well-acquainted with the capabilities of modern SAMs and specifically the S-300 series of Russian air defense missiles. These missiles have a hit-probability of about 0.8 against countermeasures the United States could employ. The newer variants are particularly suited to tracking and knocking down Tomahawks. If the US knows an enemy has these missiles deployed you are not going to see F-18s performing classic attack missions in that theater. I'm thinking mainly of China along the Taiwan Straits area, where these missiles protect PLAAF and missile bases. Secondly, consider that a nothing country like the Czech Republic can manufacture radars capable of detecting a B-2. What I'm saying is that the most modern SAMs change things dramatically in terms of how the US would attack enemy targets. Basically, the US isn't planning on fighting anyone with advanced air defenses of an extensive nature. So, the real problem for the US is this: what to do about someone like Iran. If the US decides to take out Iranian nuke facilities, I believe we will have to deal with the S-300 (many are debating me about this on other boards but my research tells me Iran has the S-300 in limited numbers near critical targets). Well, the idea is to lose as few planes as possible, especially these days when they are expensive and take a long time to build. The US COULD handle Iranian S-300s but there would be real and tangible losses. In the case of an enemy employing limited, high-tech air defenses like Iran, I think you are going to see SOCOM missions attempting to disable critical units like radars. The point is that the newest Russian SAMs are damn good and Russia has always lead in this area. The US knows but won't publicly admit the lethality of these systems. The US isn't going to go charging in like they're up against Saddam's SA-2s.
 
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Thomas2    RE:USAF / USN under no illusions - Darth Squirrel    4/9/2004 5:17:35 PM
Good post, just a couple of questions: A. Can the USA afford NOT to plan a worst case scenario? B. If they plan - and I have no doubt they do - they will have to train for such missions. Special Forces might be part of the answer, but hardly the whole answer. So we would end up with old fashioned low-level coordinated saturation attack. They can be done, but involve a lot of training. How is the current thinking on that?
 
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sentinel28a    RE:USAF / USN under no illusions - Darth Squirrel    4/9/2004 5:46:55 PM
Contrary to popular belief, the USAF and USN are not filled with idiots. The S-300 has been around now for over six years. I imagine something has been come up with to counter or mitigate its effects. We don't hear about it, because the US military would prefer potential enemies not to know the flaws in their systems. Well, I hope so, anyway.
 
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Darth Squirrel    RE:USAF / USN under no illusions - Darth Squirrel    4/9/2004 10:10:14 PM
Yeah I wasn't implying that our air commanders are morons, sorry if it sounded that way. What I was saying is that they know what they are up against and will not act foolishly, as if the S-300 is an SA-5. Like you said, we can't know if effective countermeasures have been developed, but Russia has been marketing the new S-300PMU2 as BETTER than the PAC-3 and I think that it is. With the S-300V the Russians were violating the ABM treaty because it has a capability against ICBM warheads. Nonetheless, Russia is selling the missiles to countries likely to face the US AirForce and Navy, and has managed to convince them that the US has no counter. And Bush lobbied Russia hard not to sell them to Iran. I am interested to find out if Russia will sell the S-400 or not. One does realize that they can put an ER booster on the thing for a range of over 400 km. You need Over The Horizon radar for that but the Russians make good ones. The S-400 has such high expectations that Russia is developing an air-to-air variant for long-range standoff. Anyway, the SAM is suppossed to knock down a Tomahawk about 98 percent of the time and down a fighter about 90 percent of the time. By the way, a useful comparison of missile technology resides in the AA-11 Arrow. Like a Sidewinder, although the AIM-9X only JUST went operational and it was playing catch-up to a Russian missile that has been out for at least 10 years. And the Sidewinder is still not as good. Russians = excellent rocket scientists. With the advent of globalism, and "free trade" the Russians have been able to marry the one thing they lacked in their excellent missile designs - Western-standard computer technology for guidance systems.
 
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USN-MID    RE:USAF / USN under no illusions - Darth Squirrel    4/10/2004 2:34:48 AM
You're both right and wrong in many many ways. Saddam had SA-2s but he also had plenty of modern French AND Russian radars and missiles as well. Writing off Iraq's AD network as weak is bull. Those same people would probably have predicted another aerial N.Vietnam immediately prior to Desert Storm One. I mean nobody thought Iraq was inferior until the battles had been fought. Just about anybody who says different is probably lying. The real lesson of DS1 for the less dense is that integrated air defense relying on air to ground weaponry is inherently flawed. Long story short, air power will rip through air defenses by virtue of initiative and mobility. As a sample scenario, you could shoot Tomahawks on day one for a crippling strike, then when the radars light up the sky, hold a Wild Weasel+Prowler party to give those radar operators a really friggin bad day. Also, the AIM-9X is not inferior to the AA-11. I don't what could possibly have given you that idea...although it is definitely a catch-up missile. The B-2 remains pretty damn near impossible to detect. I don't know what makes you think a Czech radar could detect it at high altitude. You're probably getting confused with the F-117 incident, where there's no reliable information on what really happened. And if we needed to blow up Iran's reactors, we WOULD use B-2s or Tomahawks, at night when pilots and ground crew are in their racks.
 
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displacedjim    RE:What will USAirForce and USNavy do if confronted with a competent Air Defence?   4/10/2004 10:02:15 AM
If the scenario is limited to a single or a few airstrikes, we'd primarily just suppress individual SAM sites and EW Radars as necessary using standard SEAD tactics. If the scenario is an extended air campaign supporting something like an occupation of the enemy country, we'd decapitate it by attacking the critical links and nodes of the enemy's air defense command and control network. After that, we would then perform SEAD as necessary to suppress local air defense assets while striking the individual targets. The SA-10/20 can be an awesome SAM system. Thank God so far only the Chinese and Cyprus have managed to buy any so they're not a threat right now except in Russia and China. We'll definitely make use of lots of long range weapons and stealth in an initial attack against an IADS equipped with them. Yes, passive detection systems like Kolchuga and VERA-E are another useful tool for early warning. Once again, thank God so far hardly any countries have managed to buy any so in most cases they're not a threat right now. Similar to idle musings about the MiG 1.42 or Su-47, talking about the capability of the SA-20 or of VERA-E is hugely different from talking about the threat we face today (except maybe from Russia and China). In the meantime, we have several thousand intel analysts and engineers who spend all their time assessing the capability of what is already out there, what is coming down the pike, and what we need to develop and acquire in order to defeat it. Displacedjim
 
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Darth Squirrel    RE:USAF / USN under no illusions - Darth Squirrel    4/10/2004 5:04:23 PM
Bill Gertz has been reporting since 1999 about the radars manufactured in the Czech Republic, and how some are capable of detecting F-117s while other more advanced systems they make are, according to Gertz, capable of detecting B-2s but of course the range is not known. Ukraine makes some passive radars they claim can detect B-2s long-range and the US cut off aid to Ukraine when they found out some Kolchugas were sold to Iran - it was a serious diplomatic incident. All I am saying is that there is no way you can compare what was in Iraq, Serbia, or Iraq 1990 to a modern air defense network of S-300s - the US just hasn't gone up against it and none of us can say what would happen if they did. The Russians put tremendous faith in their SAMs and defense anaylysts across the spectrum agree that the update of the Russian air defense network has been one of the rare post-Soviet military successes there. Finally, I don't have access to DOD classified material but everything I can come up with on the AIM-9X, which is in very limited supply because it is so new, does not surpass the newest versions of the AA-11 which also has serious range advantage. I don't think the US has been able to copy the AA-11s transverse control engine that makes it the world's most maneuverable AAM. The Russians are pretty good at designing weapons that cannot be reverse-engineered. Look, maybe you're a Felix or something. I'm just a regular guy who from childhood spent his time reading Jane's, National Defense Weekly, stuff like that - industry insider publications and such. Lots of colleges have subscriptions to out-of-reach resources like Periscope where students can get access to material that is otherwise too expensive. I don't REALLY know but I can only make an educated guess based on experience and research. Cheer up - I just like to face how bad things are and prepare for them - maybe I go overboard in that direction sometimes but it's better than your average moron who thinks the US is invincible. Right now the conventional military power of the United States is insufficient to assuredly achieve it's stated objective of being able to Win 1 Hold 1 (in terms of major regional conflicts). If Korea blows up tomorrow we could handle it, with severe casualties, as long as no one else did anything, which they would. Besides I doubt we'll ever find out - Bush doesn't have the guts to handle Iran and he wants to buy off Korea just like Clinton did.
 
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USN-MID    RE:USAF / USN under no illusions - Darth Squirrel    4/10/2004 6:05:46 PM
I won't tackle the political issue because there's nothing I hate more than an online political debate. My point is improvements in technology never change overall strategic advantages and disadvantage. The hard fact is that mobility and initiative are TREMENDOUS advantages. You gotta realize the inherent problem SAM systems face. They can't flee from air power and practically light off a beacon advertising their presence when operating. Even the best of missiles isn't going to have an easy time against a fighter, as long as its detected, be it visually or electronically. It then faces the hard task of gettings its missile going up within lethal range of a rather fast moving target deploying countermeasures and maneuvering aggressively all while a HARM is streaking down on it. Another problem defenses face is mobility. I will not deny that a SAM site placed directly under the flight path of a four plane section can do considerable harm. Unfortunately, an alpha strike is going to be absolutely massive, with jamming support etc. The principle is concentration of force...you can send a massive force down a lane which will be lightly defended relative to the incoming threat.
 
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