Allanea wrote:Regardless and getting back to the point of the conversation, the best defense isn't actually a forward defense in this case (unless you're killing shooters): It's units of automatic guns and MPADS teams that can be placed around threatened targets. That is generally adequate to handle cruise missile threats, if you're careful about relocating the guns so they're not targeted by dispensers or other SEAD.
Here's the question, then:
Virtually every country that the US has shot Tomahawks at has had automatic guns, and sometimes fairly advanced MANPADs and other air defense weaponry. But the amount of Tomahawks lost to any kind of anti-air fire is negligible.
So what could be done to improve the success rate of these weapons?
It seems to me that the simple answer is some kind of RADAR to give them warning time, but clearly that's not the actual answer.
What is to be done?
Something like this:
1) Fighters are used primarily for conducting offensive counter-air. So basically bombing airbases and killing launch systems before they can attack.
2) Air defense systems like MPADS and AAA fight the air defense battle, with whatever (if any) aircraft that can be spared from the OCA battle supporting them in air defense.
3) AEW supports both.
The confusing part I guess is that these are being done simultaneously and sometimes by the same planes. The move from OCA to DCA can be done mid-flight by a fighter if it's loaded up with air-to-air weapons, but also fighters basically exist to destroy other air forces, which should be the first objective of any war. Destroying cruise missiles isn't really conductive to destroying the enemy's air force per se, it's just conductive to preserving your air force in the immediate future. The only permanent solution is to destroy the enemy air force to keep him from launching attacks. A defensive air force is a worthless air force.
So you basically want your fighters to kill the enemy air bases so the air attacks stop. You also want to kill the missile launching platforms. If that's not possible, you kill the cruise missiles and fighters themselves, but the latter is just slowly losing. Since cruise missiles generally tend to be part of an integrated counter-air campaign, destroying the enemy air force takes priority. Going after the missiles from the start implies that you've already failed in the previous two steps, or are incapable of conducting an equivalent OCA campaign, and are basically waiting to lose the war.
Once you've bombed/missiled/shelled the enemy air force to smithereens you can get on with actually winning the war by bombing enemy ground troops with impunity and taking his clay.
For most people in real life, "winning" in a military sense isn't really possible because of the huge power disparities that preclude switching from DCA to OCA. Ideally you're also able to conduct OCA right off the bat, too. If you're already being bombed, you're starting with an existing deficit too. If you're still able to conduct OCA even then, that's great, because it means you're not slowly dying. OTOH if you have to task all your fighters to DCA, you've already lost the war, because you're 1973 Egypt.
Posted: Wed Apr 19, 2017 9:53 am