US Anti Aircraft defences

[niall78]

But real men started with Gunship and Gunship 2000 from Microprose back in the day 

 

Don't forget about LHX Attack Chopper for those of us old enough to remember it!

 

 

 

 

 

Happy days indeed.

Edited February 21, 2015 by niall78

[Combatintman]

YES! Runway strikes!...I honestly don´t know how anyone has the nerves to do that kind of mission in real life...I´m not sure if that kind of deep strike, ultra fast, low altitude thing is doable anymore in a modern setting, given all the sensors and and MANPADS going around, is someone still training for that? My sincere condolences

 

And also, never managed to do a proper loft bombing...and anyone that says it is possible is lying! 

Early RAF Tornado losses in GW1 were down to this attack profile making them vulnerable to point air defence.

 

RAF information on Tornado losses:

 

http://www.raf.mod.uk/history/RAFTornadoAircraftLosses.cfm

 

Gratuitous footage:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lw-Cb_3MR50

[Splinty]

I loved Longbow 2, it was the first game I bought a quality joystick for because I liked it so much. :cool: The Kiowa missions were my fave.

[Codename Duchess]

Nostalgia-ing hardcore for Longbow 2. Is there any way to get it working on Win7? I managed to get Jane's F/A-18 working.

Back on (off? There are two full conversations going)

John you bring up valid points but Panzer did point out the apparent assumption that Russia stronk, HATO incapable of any air defense you presented. Yes Russia has upgraded and focused on hard counters, but meanwhile in your mind the US is still in the 80s. I understand that is when you were heavily involved in research and what not, but without wanting to go too far above my clearance, the US has been upgrading and developing counters too. At that point cold hard numbers will matter, which NATO wins.

I would like to see you so mercilessly pick apart the Russian system. As for mistakes, why are you assuming that Russia isn't capable of making them either?

[jspec]

Longbow 2 really was one of the all time tops, I think.

 

Most likely you can run it on Win7, although there can be hoops to go through depending on your hardware. A good place to look would be here, lots of info

 

http://simhq.com/forum/ubbthreads.php/forums/2/1/Helicopters

 

This might be a good place to start

 

http://simhq.com/forum/ubbthreads.php/topics/4075535/

[Pablius]

Nostalgia-ing hardcore for Longbow 2. Is there any way to get it working on Win7? I managed to get Jane's F/A-18 working.

 

 

I imagine it would be very difficult since it used 3DFX as it`s 3D standard if I remember right, a dead standard as it is, don´t even know how it looked without it

 

Best bet would probably be a Virtual Machine with Win98 or WinXP and no 3D effects, but a VM has a truck load of issues on it`s own, another route is building a PC out of late 90s pieces, cheap but not for everyone, hunting for drivers alone could be a nightmare

 

The best source of legal and working old titles is GOG.COM, of course most people here probably already know this, sadly Jane´s series is not there...yet...we can only hope

 

 

EDIT: here is a guy that claims he has done it, there are some instructions:

 

Edited February 21, 2015 by Pablius

[LukeFF]

We were talking about something cool, and then nooooooo, another student of military history knows better.

 

Just in short, I do enjoy how impenetrable Russian IADS is, and how NATO will struggle with it, but supremely unstealthy last generation Russian fighters will zip on through NATO/Ukrainian IADS and kill  all the mens.

 

Carrying on in good order though! 

 

[snip]

 

That was one of the best eviscerations of a John Kettler post I've seen in a long time. Good job, sir. 

[Apocal]

John you bring up valid points but Panzer did point out the apparent assumption that Russia stronk, HATO incapable of any air defense you presented. Yes Russia has upgraded and focused on hard counters, but meanwhile in your mind the US is still in the 80s. I understand that is when you were heavily involved in research and what not, but without wanting to go too far above my clearance, the US has been upgrading and developing counters too. At that point cold hard numbers will matter, which NATO wins.

I would like to see you so mercilessly pick apart the Russian system. As for mistakes, why are you assuming that Russia isn't capable of making them either?

 

Probably because the latest Russian military thinking is that they'd get rolled, hard, by an all-out NATO assault at which point the nukes come out.

[Apocal]

Just to quote someone else who cued me onto it:

Actually the modern Russian doctrine is completely new, and very different from their Cold War theories.  In the Cold War, the Soviets assumed conventional superiority, and intended to use nukes to assist and safeguard that, and preempt NATO use of nuclear weapons to reverse battlefield defeats.

 

Modern Russia on the other hand recognizes that NATO has a massive conventional superiority, and in a purely conventional war would win, and win quite handily.  Modern Russian doctrine however also theorizes that there are levels of damage ("predetermined damage") that an enemy will be willing to suffer to achieve their objectives, and that if the Russians can exceed that damage, then the enemy can be deterred from seeking to complete those objectives.  We actually saw this at play in Ukraine.  Russia continually increased the pressure on Ukraine, and then when Ukraine's Anti-Terrorist Operation (ATO) was in danger of succeeding, rather than launch a full scale invasions as most people expected (and the Soviets would have done) the Russians instead launched a small scale invasion with just a handful of battalions covertly slipped across the border, smashed some of Ukraine's best units, and then withdrew.  This allowed them to maintain a fig leaf of deniability for western governments who weren't eager to militarily intervene, but it also carefully scaled to the amount of damage they calculated was enough to get the Ukrainians to cancel the ATO.

 

What does this mean for Russia's use of nuclear weapons?  Well, Russia has always seen the west as willing to suffer far less for victory than Russia.  The idea goes that countries like Germany, the UK, and the US value their cities and civilians much more than Russia does.  It is thus practical for Russia to threaten strikes on NATO cities, while daring NATO to retaliate against its own, in a situation where vital interests of the West are not at stake.  Zapad 2009, a major military exercise the Russians ran in September 2009, followed this template.  After anti-Russian riots by ethnic minorities in Russia's Kaliningrad enclave, NATO invaded from Poland with the intent to "liberate" the enclave.  The defending Russian forces were quickly overwhelmed by NATO conventional forces. . . at which point the Russians nuked several targets in Poland.  In the exercise, this led NATO to frantically reassess exactly what the hell it was doing invading Russia, and whether the anticipated gains were worth escalating to a nuclear war.

 

The fact is, the Russians think that, in it's current incarnation, NATO is a mindless expansionist mass with very little geopolitical sense.  Actions in Libya and Syria where the Russians feel that NATO helped their enemies with a knee jerk reaction of "democracy!" do not help that perception.  And of course the Russians still remember Kosovo and Serbia, and trot that out occasionally as evidence of NATO's basic hostility to Slavs.  They really do think that we might just plunge into a war against them without careful consideration of what we might gain, and the consequences we might face in the process.  A good nuking (of some third party ally mind - not someone who actually possesses nukes themselves) might wake us the **** up - so goes the thinking.  It should be noted that there's a difference between "predetermined damage" and the older idea of "unacceptable damage."  Unacceptable damage looks to inflict damage on a nation that is completely unacceptable, and thus deter it.  Predetermined damage looks to inflict potentially lesser harm that may well be acceptable (thus also mitigating against a nuclear counterstrike that might result in unacceptable damage in return) but would still exceed the level of harm the nation would be willing to suffer to achieve it's current objectives.

 

So it's a very current doctrine, and the Russians have practiced it recently.  It's one of the reasons NATO wouldn't touch Ukraine with a 10 foot pole during the annexation of Crimea, and then again during the height of the Russian invasion back in late August and early September last year.  If all we were concerned about was Russian conventional forces, we'd have been all over Ukraine like white on rice to score another glorious victory for democracy.

 

 

Now, chemical and biological weapons on the other hand aren't really a thing for modern Russia.  That is more of a Cold War legacy.  The Russians maintain stockpiles, but they don't practice using them much, and I doubt they'd put much, if any, stock in their use against NATO.  Against NATO it's a case of go big or go home.

[Jammersix]

Kettler, you remind me of William Shatner. Or Gilligan. I get them mixed up.

[Nerdwing]

There need to be more flight-sims with mutliple players in the same airframe.  Longbow 2 was one of the very last to do that.  DCS has it planned, and God knows Im looking forward to getting a friend to man the guns on my Huey, or (even further down the road) sling TOW-2's from my Supercobra.  Until then, its been a consistent gap in combat sims that has yet gone unsated since Longbow

[Apocal]

There need to be more flight-sims with mutliple players in the same airframe.  Longbow 2 was one of the very last to do that.  DCS has it planned, and God knows Im looking forward to getting a friend to man the guns on my Huey, or (even further down the road) sling TOW-2's from my Supercobra.  Until then, its been a consistent gap in combat sims that has yet gone unsated since Longbow

 

You could do this in the Operation Flashpoint/ArmA series. It was so baller with the ACE mod as well, I felt like a real gunship badass the day I first did a pop-up Hellfire attack under the noses of SPAAGs and MANPADs then got away clean.

[Nerdwing]

Thats true.  Plus, Nod-unit and Franz just ported their AMAZING Apache Longbow to ArmA3.  That thing's a damn beauty!

 

Firing Hellfires from behind this hill in LOAL mode?  Why dont mind if I do!!!

Edited February 22, 2015 by Nerdwing

[Jammersix]

What do your Operators tell you, John?

[nsKb]

Must....... Not...... Post...... On...... Topic...... aarrrggghhhhhhh.

 

 

The US went into GW I with not merely with superlative intel on Iraq's IADS, it went into battle with a direct conduit right into the IADS situation center, thanks to a physical hack into the fiber optic trunk line from the front, a hack put into place by a brilliant US SpecOps mission. Reportedly, the US was able to show, or not show, IADS HQ whatever it desired, but the hack is believed to have been used as a generator of enormous numbers of false targets. I firmly believe it's dangerous to draw sweeping conclusions without a fundamental understanding of what was going on to begin with. I recall the mighty MOD himself came out from Russia with his experts to figure exactly this out. One such insight was a demand for a weapon capable of downing a HARM attacking a defending SAM site. Pantsir, anyone? Tunguska itself has substantial capabilities vs things like GBU-15, LGBs, JDAM, JSOW and Tomahawks.

 

Pantsir and Tunguska cost 15 million USD+ and are only available in limited numbers, if wikipedia is to be believed Russian less than 300 Pantsirs and Tunguskas total. The systems have very small radars which means the engagement distance vs PGMs and HARM is small (~10 km or so, maybe even less against weapons like JSOW and JASSM), they can only engage something like 2 targets simultaneously. These two facts mean they can be saturated pretty easily.

 

 

For a more informed view of Russian SAM operational effectiveness than what I've seen in this thread, please see Carlo Kopp's analysis here. Kopp has some scathing things to say about how the Arabs not only fundamentally disregarded a throughly thought out Russian doctrine, but did some things which would've been comedic had they not been so hurtful to the using force! Suggest interested parties also look at what specific threats the newer generation SAMs were designed to defeat, what their tactical-technical characteristics are and how that applies to the ability to detect, localize, engage and kill them. Makes rather sobering reading. A Serbian captain with his ancient SA-6 unit not only survived a major SEAD/DEAD campaign, but also cost the US the stunning loss of an F-117, damage to a second one and an F-16.

 

Lets be real, Carlo lost his mind sometime in 2002. His work was pretty good before that (go read his original AIM-120 article), now he descends into incoherent rants where Su-35s somehow detect F-35s at 100 km and shoot them with R-77s. But since this is Carlo they are probably fantasy ramjet R-77s that have finally made the small and insignificant leap from being a scribble on a napkin to being a fully operational weapon. Seriously did anyone see those simulations they had up on youtube, it's too bad they took them down because that was some funny stuff, the Su-35s had like a 10:1 exchange rate against F-35s. Pretty sure they even presented that stuff to the Australian government. 

 

Riddle me this, how many sorties did the F-117 fly before one was shot down? Every time the F-117 shootdown is brought up I think of the internet stories I have read about the brilliant Serbian captain who modified his X-band SA-3 FCR to work in the L-band or something. It inspired my to modify my CBR 600 to be a submarine. 

 

 

US AAA threat is risible, so there's no real dense AAG penalty for operating in the weeds to make it really hard vs both fighters and Patriot to engage it, and SU-25s have survived hits by things much worse than MANPADS. Russia's not going to sit idly by and let the US/NATO gin up its air power before striking, so the force ratios, for a time, at least, are not going to be pretty. Contrary to popular opinion, the AWACS supply is quite limited, and people need to remember that these vital birds can stay aloft only so long before they have to be replaced to keep a given area in coverage.

 

Really hard seems like a bit of an exaggeration, at least when it comes to fighters and AEW&C vs NOE aircraft. 

 

The numbers seem to be on the side of popular opinion. panzersaurkrautwerfer already posted the numbers but lets recap, USAF has 32 E-3s and the USN has 52 E-2Cs plus some number of E-2Ds. This is without counting the AEW&C aircraft of other nations. 

 

 

Jammers vs the E-3A, the TR-1's SAR, JSTARs. I used to have some SECRET diagrams of the E-3A radar display under jamming. Thanks to steerable antenna nulls, the system performed very well in the face of one or two jammers, but after that things progressively fell apart. It was entirely possible to jam the E-3A so effectively that entire (pizza slice wide) sectors were blind. Additionally, the more jamming energy received, the shorter detection range becomes, totally compromising the vast volumetric region a Sentry ordinarily controls.

 

How long do you expect those jammers to survive, Russian airspace will be significantly more porous in 2017 than in 1987 due to US's use of stealth technology which means those expensive jammers are going to be shot down or blown up. 

 

No doubt an E-3 can be jammed, but anything can be jammed, the tactical usefulness of this depends on the details. 

 

 

 

 The Russians also have the Il-76 MAINSTAY, their Gen 2 AWACS. Nor, as a look at page 3, #46 in that thread will show, is that by any means the limits of what's going to be faced. The Russians are building a combined function aircraft able to handle everything but undersea warfare from an AWACS perspective. I'd argue that Russian force effectiveness will be greatly enhanced by even the vanilla MAINSTAY of the Cold War period, never mind what it's evolved into since.

 

Speaking of Russian AEW&C, how will the Russians protect their AEW&C from super cruising F-22s? By the time they realize what is happening the AIM-120s would have hit and F-22s will be hauling ass in the opposite direction. 

 

 

What are the MCRs (Mission Capable Rates) for the F-22A under high sortie conditions?  We already know the F-35 is compromised practically across the board when it comes to just about every combat metric, so why should MCR  or sortie generation rate be any better? It'll probably break a lot, not least because it'll be anything but a mature system. We know how those tend to be. As a mature system, the F-14 Tomcat was running ~65% MCR. This meant a two-carrier CVBG could use only one CVN on a given day for strike--because the other could do nothing but conduct FAD to keep both alive! Doubtless the numbers these days are better, bit I think they nicely illustrate the main issue. Complex things, and the F-35 is super complex and broken to start, are iffy at best to depend upon. The more you stress a complicated system, the faster it breaks, not necessarily in ways anticipated, either. Given this incredibly important issue, does it really make sense to make campaign success dependent on breaking the Russian Air Force via aerial combat, as seems to be the general expectation?

 

What are the MCRs for the Russian birds under high sortie conditions? I would be very surprised if they were higher than NATO's.

 

Don't turn this into an F-35 thread, we don't need any backseat engineers coming on here to show us how much smarter they are than the boys at Lockmart. 

 

 

 

Summing up, I believe the expectation that the US would almost immediately own the skies over Ukraine to be on the scale somewhere from delusional clear up to clinically insane. Such expectations seem to be predicated on a largely incompetent opponent who hasn't a prayer of prevailing vs western military might and training. Additionally, this seems to be predicated on the notion that Russian pilots are no better than Arab pilots and would be flying planes just about as capable relative to US combat aircraft. Does the US have some nice toys? Absolutely. But how many will actually be usable--and stay usable--over the course of the envisioned campaign? Is it reasonable to assume that other US foes are going to lie doggo so the US/NATO can fight Russia absent other military crises? I think not. And has anyone here bothered to look at the Russian approach to BVR aerial warfare in a very heavy jamming and rapidly maneuvering target environment? Once you have, consider this notional engagement, but with as many as 4 x AAMs targeted on each Raptor. This engagement presumes, too, that AWACS isn't attacked and downed or badly crippled. Nor does it recognize the existence of a technology called forward pass, in which missile shooters simply salvo missiles on command of aircraft whose far superior sensors allows guidance of those weapons even though the shooters can't see the target. All of a sudden those numerous not Stealth planes become a real threat, making the already enormous missile loads of Russian Stealth fighters many times larger than can be carried. 

 

 

It's pretty clear that NATO has massive advantage in training, equipment, and numbers. How many modern aircraft are in the VVS? Original MiG-29s and Su-27s with their 1970s at best electronics don't count as modern. 

 

That Kopp article is a nice mix of extremely basic statistics, super sketchy assumptions, and fanboy fantasy numbers. If the statistics on the R-27's combat performance in the Ethiopian Eritrean war are true than its a pretty crap missile. From what I understand India is unhappy with the R-77. Is the R-77 deployed in any sort of significant numbers by the VVS? 

 

 

Back off topic

 

Did anyone here play on the United Operations ARMA2 ACE server, had some good times there. It is too bad they switched to ARMA3 since there is no ACE mod for that. Red vs Red scenarios were so much fun. 

[Nerdwing]

I played there for a bit.  Was the last survivor (I thought) in a PVP scenario, and was told to hold a hospital.  At the time of the assignment, we had a good 12 guys left.  15 minutes later, with me guarding a doorway into the janitor's closet, a friendly comes in unannounced and I smoke em due to reflexes and just the scenario being tense as hell.  Got yelled and ranted at in chat after, but w/e!  Still fun overall.

[Wicky]

The US ...went into battle with a direct conduit right into the IADS situation center, thanks to a physical hack into the fiber optic trunk line from the front, a hack put into place by a brilliant US SpecOps mission. Reportedly, the US was able to show, or not show, IADS HQ whatever it desired, but the hack is believed to have been used as a generator of enormous numbers of false targets. I firmly believe it's dangerous to draw sweeping conclusions without a fundamental understanding of what was going on to begin with....

 

 

There were SAS/SBS missions (joint with US special forces) to destroy fibre optic cables linking Scuds to control centres along with other missions to sever communication cables beween Iraq and Jordan.

 

http://www.eliteukforces.info/special-boat-service/operations/gulf-war-1/

 

Is your claimed hack another Kettlerian April fools confabulated fantasy... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AF/91 http://www.securityfocus.com/columnists/147   http://www.wired.com/2008/05/kill-switch-urb/

[sburke]

Uh oh, next up a dozen nukes used in Ukraine. nsKb, your first instinct was best. Should have stuck with it.

[panzersaurkrautwerfer]

Lizardian Vampires are great at cleaning up nuclear fallout so it seems legit.  

[LUCASWILLEN05]

Uh oh, next up a dozen nukes used in Ukraine. nsKb, your first instinct was best. Should have stuck with it.

 

And so the world ended!

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7VG2aJyIFrA

[John Kettler]

Target options for attacking Iraqi AD via its own fiber optic trunks. Note it's not just Kari under discussion. On the other end, a widely reported story regarding cyber warfare vs Saddam's AD does indeed appear to be a myth. For sure, I never heard anything about a virus infected printer. A bit bulky to drag along for digging up fiber optic trunks in the desert! 

 

http://archive.org/stream/AirpowerAdvantagePlanningTheGulfWarAirCampaign1989-1991/AirpowerAdvantagePutney_djvu.txt p. 299

 

"Only about a week before the start of the air war did new intelligence reach
campaign planners about Iraq's new copper telephone cables and a fiber-optic
communications network. The intelligence surprised its recipients because the
fiber-optic cable network was not, as originally thought, associated with oil
pipeline operations but was indeed a fundamental component of Saddam's mili-
tary C 2 system. A DIA analyst working with the Leadership Facilities Team
broke the news to Checkmate, and Colonel Howey immediately passed it to
Deptula. Meanwhile DIA began to prepare and send messages reporting the
information, which carried the caveat, "not finally evaluated intelligence." 147

When Captain Glock studied the incoming messages identifying elements and
facilities associated with landline communications, he informed Glosson that he
would have to consider targeting the Baghdad bridges. One message indicated that
cables were attached to the underside of the roadways of two Tigris River bridges
in Baghdad. Buried fiber-optic lines connected C 2 sites and the al-Rashid Hotel
and linked the Iraqi capital with the KTO. 148 News reporters from around the
world, including CNN, stayed at the hotel, a component of the military C 2 system.

Information on January 11 revealed new, ominous information about the
fiber-optic system: it transmitted Scud launch commands. 149 Because of the asso-
ciation of landline communications with Scud missiles, a raw truth confronted
the planners: some high-value military targets also had a clear, overt civilian
function, the targeting of which could kill many noncombatants, including for-
eigners, generating an international outcry and undermining the Coalition's
cohesion. "We weren't allowed to hit either the Babylon Hotel, which was where
a lot of leadership was staying, or the al-Rashid Hotel," Deptula noted. 150
Intelligence during the war did, indeed, reveal that fiber-optic cables ran beneath
bridges in Baghdad, and air strikes hit the structures to cut the C 2 landlines. 151"

 

Wicky,

 

Was unaware of that SBS op, which I thank you for bringing to my attention. The presence of the super secret even to SpecOps ISA makes no sense, since I'm sure SBS was quire capable of blowing up fiber optic trunks absent such assistance. ISA would make sense, though, if something either intelligence gathering related or information injecting were involved. In turn, this suggests not all the trunks were destroyed. If you think about it, wrecking most, but not all, the lines forces the Iraqis to put more data through the pipeline that's left and/or use alternative means, probably radio. 

 

Schwarzkopf also talks about the "snake eaters" and their "crazy plan" involving the fiber optic cables. I came across it in researching this, but got distracted by the sea of info in the Gulf War air attack planning history.

 

Guys,

 

I again appeal to you to stop bringing in prohibited topics. If I can't so much as mention them, why should you have any such license?

 

Regards,

 

John Kettler

Edited February 22, 2015 by John Kettler

[Codename Duchess]

John, let's get somewhere even remotely close to the original topic.  Why is the US air defense system (including aircraft) so  vulnerable (as you said earlier) while the VVS and air defense troops are untouchable?  How can you so easily rule out fewer numbers, worse equipment, and worse training?

Edited February 23, 2015 by Codename Duchess

[Jammersix]

 

 If I can't so much as mention them, why should you have any such license?

 

Because ours are real.

[panzersaurkrautwerfer]

<HUMOR BASED ON FORBIDDEN TOPIC REDACTED> 

 

Additionally those high tier C2 nodes, if they existed, would have still only done so much, more relevant to the degrading of the Iraqi system was more kinnectic strikes against the node/sensor assets themselves as wire repair is hardly something complex or long term, but new swimming pools where radars and bunkers used to be are harder to undo.

Edited February 23, 2015 by panzersaurkrautwerfer

[sburke]

Because ours are real.

No he is right, he has been warned about certain comments and has obeyed the restriction.

Sorry John. It is one thing to disagree with the viewpoint you presented, another to go into subjects that have been prohibited.