Agiel
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Posts posted by Agiel
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I see that the doubts of our eastern comrades capabilities are still strong on battlefront forums
I think it comes more from analysis of cost and result.
If Lada said they could build a car that has equal if not superior performance, comfort, and utility to a Mercedes-Benz E-Class coupé for only half the cost, one would rightly be skeptical. Right now, Uralvagonzavod has potentially made a design that can be "very good," but all that performance very likely has come at great cost in development, so the idea that anyone other than a country for whom money is no object (i.e. India) could afford it in operationally significant quantities is a bit suspect. Might even be that to rein in the cost the version that eventually enters service will be somewhat less impressive than initially advertised.
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The amount of PGM howitzer rounds you need to destroy an MBT are quite variable. Sometimes you'll get lucky and knock it out with just the one. Other times you need the whole battery to nail it, and even then you might get _only_ an immobilise for your troubles.
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I suppose it illustrates the point that an excellent _platform_ and and excellent _program_ are not necessarily the same thing.
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Though I certainly cannot 100% excuse the Vincennes incident, during the Tanker War the US Navy was basically in a non-declared state of war with Iran (and to a lesser extent, Iraq). There was already a case where acting imprudently lead to lethal consequences with the USS Stark (apparently the "Gun Boss" who had the key to arm the Phalanx was in the head at the time), and the US Navy had just finished the largest single naval engagement since WWII with Operation Praying Mantis.
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As an ELINT aircraft the Su-24MP does not operationally carry any weapons (apart from two AA-8 Aphid/R-60 missiles with 6lbs blast frag warheads), so it was likely that as soon as it was determined that that was what it was (likely when the Fencer turned on its OECM pods), they figured there wasn't any real reason to treat it as something overly belligerent.
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Well, <<une armée marche à son estomac>>.
There's a guy on Youtube who does taste tests of MREs from all over the world:
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I think there's been cases of A-10s in Afghanistan being loaded with inert training rounds since there was barely anything worth using even HE-I anti-personnel rounds over.
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Honestly the presence of the Su-25 does seem incongruous to me. We have seen in both Syria and the real-life Ukraine how those fleets were rapidly depleted against even a third-rate air-defence environment. Some might attribute it to low to mediocre training standards of the pilots (that said, I cannot claim to know for certain just how affected the Ukrainian Air Force was by their country's "Peace Dividend"), but that doesn't change the fact that there is a technical limit to what you can do with these aircraft when it comes to survivability. After all, in the times seasoned vets in Zeroes went up against newbies in F6F Hellcats, they got worked all the same.
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Excellent piece from the pre-eminent Richard Aboulafia of Teal Group:
Dear Fellow Cromnibus Scrutinizers,
Teal Group’s aircraft reports cover about 135 planes. Having written or edited these reports for 25 years as of January, I’ve come to know these planes like friends. But I never wrote a report on the iconic A-10 because it ended production about seven years before I started my job. As a relatively simple plane, there were few upgrade opportunities. There was no reason for us to cover what we expected to be a slow but steady cruise to retirement.
The A-10 has been in the news lately because the Air Force has proposed retiring the fleet. They say they can’t afford to operate single-mission aircraft, and that the cash would be better spent on multi-role fast jets (F-35A, and F-15/F-16 sustainment). Congressional opponents of this move say the Air Force neglects the vital mission of supporting ground troops. Since I can’t offer anyone a Teal A-10 report, I’m going to give the A-10 it’s very own Teal Monthly Aircraft letter, to provide some context for the debate.
A bit of history may be useful. A year after I started at Teal, the A-10 got an unexpected big break. In Operation Desert Storm, A-10s helped strafe and destroy a long column of retreating Iraqi tanks. This was a bizarre combination of circumstances that were perfect for the A-10: the enemy had thousands of tanks, but absolutely no air force, no integrated air defense system, and only a few surviving surface-to-air weapons. The A-10, along with its pal the Army’s AH-64, became TV stars, loitering like those Skynet robots from The Terminator over tons of dead metal. But, I wondered, could this combination of circumstances happen again in the A-10 fleet’s remaining decade or two of life? Thinking about that, I figured there’d be no point in writing a Teal report.
Sure enough, the A-10 had little relevance in the ‘90s, with little or no presence in the Somalia and Serbia conflicts. Even in the Second Iraq War and the Afghanistan war, it has played a relatively small role. A lot of the fighting has been done by the Marines, who have their own organic Close Air Support (CAS) capabilities, but absolutely no interest in the A-10 or an A-10-like plane.
After the invasion became the counterinsurgency, the A-10 flew 19% of all Air Force CAS sorties between early 2006 and October 2013, compared with 33% for the F-16. But these figures exclude Marine and USN sorties, and of course they exclude attack helicopter sorties. They also exclude UAV Hellfire strikes. And even this limited A-10 role was only made possible by having an enemy with no air assets and very limited anti-air capabilities.
A-10 supporters believe that it’s the best plane for CAS. It’s very good at CAS (particularly against tanks), but the advent of precision munitions, coupled with better ISR and targeting, has made fast jets just as relevant and far more survivable. Attack helicopters have gotten better too. The real reason the A-10 is loved by ground troops and their political supporters is because it guarantees an Air Force commitment to CAS, even on Day One of a war. After all, an F-16 could be tasked with many days of air-to-air missions before the air war had been won. Only after that, the Army believed, would F-16s be tasked with air-to-ground missions.
An A-10, by contrast, is good for exactly one thing: CAS. This fact also means that it is utterly defenseless against enemy fighters, and not particularly survivable against decent anti-air weaponry either.
So…why was this vulnerable plane built in the first place? Consider its Cold War origins. Better still, consider Steve, a friend and Dungeons And Dragons comrade from my home town who joined the Army after college and flew an AH-1 Cobra in central West Germany. After grad school in the mid ‘80s, I got a Eurail pass and paid him a visit. He had a great life in a delightful Bavarian town, with a lovely German wife and plenty of opportunities for day trips and fun hobbies. He took me up in a glider and we spent a terrific day looking at storybook castles. For him, it was just another weekend away from the base.
There was just one hitch. If the day came and thousands of Warsaw Pact T-72s started pouring through the Fulda Gap, his life expectancy would be measured in minutes. NATO forces were expected to take horrible casualties, just as long as the kill ratios were sufficient to erode the enemy before they reached the English Channel. The A-10 was slow, low-flying, and again, defenseless against other aircraft. Despite all that blather about a titanium bathtub cockpit, it wasn’t expected to last much longer than Steve’s Cobra, or any other weapon that made contact with a giant wave of steel. As long as each Cobra or A-10 killed six or a dozen T-72s before it was shot out of the sky, well, they did their job. And until that day, pilots’ lives in Germany were idyllic.
Our notion of war was different back then. The line between War and Peace was thick. Today, it’s almost non-existent. Since 2001 the US has been continually strafing or bombing someone or another, and the opposition never seems to have much by way of an air force or air defense capabilities. The ISIS campaign means another few years of this, at least.
In short, when we discuss the A-10, there’s a much broader political debate here, one that’s way beyond a mere aircraft. On one side of this debate are people who think the US military should primarily be reserved for fighting existential threats to the US and its allies, like the one my friend Steve prepared to face on the Fulda Gap, or against an increasingly aggressive China. On the other side are people who think our military should focus on brushfire wars, counterinsurgencies, and Black Hawk Down-like interventions.
In the first scenario, the A-10 no longer has any relevance. The Asia Pivot, for example, involves no possible role at all for the A-10. When A-10 supporters propose sending the plane to Eastern Europe as a bulwark against Russian expansion, they presumably hope that the Russian Air Force sportingly recuses itself from the conflict. Otherwise, most of the A-10s die in the first minutes of a war. But in the second scenario, as long as the bad guys have no air force, or just a few AK-47s for air defense, the A-10 still has tactical relevance.
These are two very different views of the US’s strategic direction. I’m starting to regret not doing that A-10 report 25 years ago. There’s much to discuss.
But, back to what we do cover, this month’s updated Teal reports include the F-16, A350XWB, B-1, B777, B787, Bombardier’s Challenger 300/600/Global Series, and the Special Mission Aircraft overview. Have a great month.
Yours, ‘Til I Get A Titanium Clawfoot Bathtub,
Richard Aboulafia -
Unfortunately many of the *successful* UN peackeeping operations were contingent on both of the belligerents already having very little stomach to continue the fight, and were looking for some diplomatic "out" to the predicament. The presence of UN peackeepers, who may or may not seem militarily impotent, offers them a way of bowing out of hostilities with some degree of "dignity" by making it seem like they were acquiescing to the authority of a higher organisation that represented the world community.
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A lot of PGMs of that vein usually have a back-up INS mode that keeps track of GPS data from either the launching platform (assuming that it wasn't in a communications denied environment) or the last time the round itself had a good GPS fix, and would switch to INS guidance mode if it figures out that "something is wrong". That said, it *is* INS guidance, so circular error probability might suffer given the accumulated deviations that result from minute errors, changes in atmospheric conditions, and so forth.
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I've found this excerpt to be shockingly relevant these days:
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I wouldn't give myself too much credit
. Was just condensing a document by Andrew Jaremkow.He and Willi Odermatt are those guys in my head who have equations scribbled all over their household walls and floors in chalk figuring this stuff out. Generally, my knowledge extends to the historical development and qualitative aspects of weapons systems and platforms and the mathematical things fly over my head.
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Are DU munitions and armour really best choice?
I've read some where that wolfram sabots are better but more expensive.
There are four primary reasons why dU is used over Wolfram Heavy/Tungsten Alloys:
1. Density: In their purest forms depleted uranium has a density of 18.6 grams per cubic centimeter vs 17.5 to 18.5 grams per cubic centimeter for Tungsten. That said, how much it comprises the actual composition of the penetrator varies.
2. As you have said, cost: Depleted uranium is ostensibly "free," being a waste product of the uranium enrichment process. Superpower countries like the US, Russia, France, the UK, China, and so forth have long and established nuclear industries, so they had plenty of the stuff lying around. Using depleted uranium also potentially frees up a country's supply of Tungsten for non-combat purposes (for instance, edges of machining tools).
3. The pyrophoric effect: When a depleted uranium penetrator gets through the armour plate, shards of it get shaved off and spontaneously combust, which can be especially deadly if it touches off the ammunition storage.
4. (Most importantly) Adiabatic shearing: When the rod strikes plate, narrow bands of weakness form throughout, and bits off the tip get shaved off to form a chisel like point that punches a more energy-efficient hole. Apparently the Germans have replicated the effect with the 120mm DM53/63 series of rounds, but they expended a considerable amount of money and effort in doing so, which brings us back to point 2.
Of course dU catches a lot of flak because of the belief that it is a "nuclear" material. Uranium in all its forms *is* a carcinogen, even in its depleted form, but in that case it is totally derived from the fact that uranium is a heavy metal, not from it being radioactive. In that respect, it is identical to Tungsten, which is just as bad for you if you somehow eat a piece of it or it enters an open wound.
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According to Steven Zaloga's book on the Bradley, there was an instance in ODS where an Iraqi tank was using a dazzler against a TOW launched by a Bradley, only for the missile to veer off and impact another tank next to the one the Bradley was aiming for.
However, there was a guy on the Steel Beasts forums who presented a fairly convincing case of why he wasn't too sanguine about the chances of IR dazzlers spoofing particularly advanced missiles and TIS systems:
http://www.steelbeasts.com/sbforums/showpost.php?p=256925&postcount=36
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I'll have to ask him where he got the North Korean OOB. Might well be a mix of looking up the systems that are known to be in North Korean service, Google Maps imaging, and a spot of extrapolating based on terrain (ie places an at least reasonably competent air defence battalion commander might put a SAM complex).
I'll concede when it comes to North Korea, you can't take anything at face value. What the North Koreans say is a tank regiment is more likely three duty NCOs and a park of mothballed APCs.
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Just to toss in two bits, the Chinese are equally likely to be shooting at the North Koreans in the event of a new Korean War, as they are to be resisting the US/ROK
On the other hand there's no reason why we cannot have a branching campaign, or just two separate ones that assume either invasion friendly or invasion hostile Chinese intervention.
The end of Larry Bond's "Red Phoenix" comes to mind.
A good friend of mine in the C: MANO community is currently working on a scenario that involves the Chinese trying to "secure" (see: "drop a 500kg GPB down the ventilation shaft of...") the WMD storage facilities of the DPRK in the midst of a succession crisis. While ground combat is a bit undermodelled (though you can't expect much in that regime in a game that has a distinct lack of "Land" in its name), his research on both the Chinese and DPRK OOBs is, to use understatement, impeccable.
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Polygon ran a piece on the game, though it was more commenting on how prescient it was in its premise (as well as that of Shock Force) than actually telling you about the game systems and what have you.
http://www.polygon.com/2014/10/23/7052023/game-predicted-war-in-syria-and-ukraine
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Would have been interesting to see the OH-58D Kiowa in the game with its ability to peak over terrain features with its mast mounted sight (and to a certain extend the AH-64E and the Mi-28N's mast mounted radars) and engage targets that way.
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The discussion of inter-service wrangling does remind me of this bit from Yes, Prime Minister:
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My father was in Afghanistan, 1981-85' volunteer. Fought in a few battles, Lost his middle toe from shrapnel and shot in the leg. He also participated in Chechnya so did my uncle I heard horrible stories from them about their service. Makes me feel ashamed that I couldn't go through what they did...
Don't be. I don't think many veterans expect much from those who stay civilians (or if one is from a country that has conscription/national service, has not been in combat) except probably a little bit of deference. Don't give them unnecessary lip over the smallest things, and lend them an open ear *when* they want to talk about their thoughts and experiences.
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Essential watching:
Second video (here) was nominated for an Oscar for best documentary.
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In general, you can assume that russian ATGMs are the best for the russians, while US ATGMs are the best for the americans. Modern anti tank missiles are all able to take out every tank on the battlefield with one shot. Russian and NATO doctrines though, tend to employ these weapons in different ways; based on the different doctrines the militaries of those countries employ.
This. Nearly every ultra-modern system is the best it is *for* the requirements specified by the organisation that ordered them. A T-90, which was the result of a doctrine that emphasised the attack, might be pretty crap at fighting from prepared defenses as a result of its poor gun depression, but their good power to weight ratio, *relatively* smaller size, APS, and their on average greater quantity of more developed HE and multi-purpose rounds makes it solid on the attack.
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We're having a similar discussion on the Baloogan Campaign Chat (currently down, since Bal is moving to his new job, but check back in after the weekend). As said before, the primary weapon the A-10 would use in a high-threat environment with a properly-equipped adversary would be the AGM-65 series of weapons which gives it some measure of stand-off capability against SHORAD such as the SA-15, the SA-19, and the SA-22. However, both the F-16 and the F-15E also employ this weapon as well. We'll also see the proliferation of even longer-legged PGMs come ~2017 like the SDB II and newer block JSOWs (potentialy dispensing CEM and BAT/SFW submunitions) with the 2-way common data-link, maybe even with the JASSM in due course, so theoretically FACs can uplink new co-ordinates for the weapon with about as much precision as we had with organic CAS aircraft of yore. About the only thing you probably lose is the "put the fear of god" factor of the GAU-8 opening up.
I think there's a common misconception that the USAF loathes the A-10. If they could help it, they'd love to keep them (most institutions, military or otherwise, are loathe to give up capability). But as long as they have other missions that need to be fufilled (nuclear deterrent, electronic/information warfare, satellite and UAV operations et al.) and Air-Sea Battle and the A2/AD dilemma gain primacy, something has to give.
. Was just condensing a document by Andrew Jaremkow.
Armata soon to be in service.
in Combat Mission Black Sea
Posted
Just goes to show that the "General's tank" and the "Tanker's tank" are quite often two different things