Your Nation's Air Force Mark III: Best Korea Edition

[The Akasha Colony]

The main reason I doubt their necessity is that if used like in the good olde days to desrupt industry, most wars lately don't seem to last long enough for manufacturing disruption to matter, you just have what you started with and that's it.

Factory bombing was never particularly effective even in WWII.

But there are plenty of other uses. One of the most important is still infrastructure: if you can disrupt your enemy's strategic transportation infrastructure by bombing his deep inland rail or road hubs, you can severely impede his ability to bring additional forces to the front and to supply the ones already there. You can also target weapon storage facilities to reduce his stockpiles of replacement vehicles and ordnance, his fuel infrastructure to impede the production and distribution of fuel, and of course, his nuclear facilities and launch sites (if he has any).

The real question though is the scale of the war, because you don't really need a big bomber with a 10,000 mile range if you only expect to fight a nation the size of Israel that directly borders you. If you ever expect to need to strike targets at extreme distances on relatively short notice though, long-range bombers come into their own. The US may have a network of bases across the globe but it's still faster to dispatch bombers from their home bases in CONUS than to ferry them to forward bases along with all of their necessary support equipment.

The ones that do last, seem to mostly be mostly asymmetrical conflicts where there's no factories etc to destroy in the first place. The only times I can think of they would be useful, even VLO ones, would be during or after a nuclear exchange or if you just want to level a large urban area for whatever reason.

Strategic bombing has never really been about leveling cities. The Allies learned during WWII that this was largely a waste of resources, better results were had from more precise targeting of specific industries, rather than flattening a city or two. But strategic bombers proved quite effective at bombing German fuel facilities and rail hubs once this was realized. The range and payload such an aircraft can carry allows it to strike targets deep into enemy territory where lighter strike fighters cannot reach. They can also deliver heavy ordnance that lighter fighters may not even be able to lift, such as very heavy bunker busters to strike hardened command facilities.

[Gallia-]

Strategic bombing was always about leveling cities. If you aren't leveling cities, what economic damage are you really doing? What vital economic infrastructure exists outside cities? Houston, Texas and Ploiesti, Romania have oil refineries. St. Louis, Missouri and Kansas City, Missouri have vital rail and river links, and STL was the center of American military fighter production for over 40 years. Leningrad had LKZ tank factory and design bureau. Chelyabinsk Tractor Plant is named after the city it lives in. The point of strategic bombing is to destroy cities because cities, not coincidentally, are hubs of economic activity and generally appear in areas with good access to transportation and ability to marshal resources for production. They are not accidents, they are (or rather, were) aggregations of powerful expressions of economic production.

If you aren't leveling cities, you're the Luftwaffe or the Red Air Force. The Western Allies learned one thing in WW2: leveling cities takes too long with firebombs. Even then the USAAF realized this with the Strategic Bombing Survey. The point isn't "bombing factories is dumb". It's "bombing factories with conventional weapons takes too long to kill them". Thankfully this was solved during the same war with the atomic bomb. Now you could fit the destructive potential of about five years of all-out economic warfare into about 5-50 minutes of general nuclear war.

Strategic bombers have one "true" purpose (i.e. universally recognized as valuable; not everyone recognizes the TEL hunting mission of B-2) in life: dropping megaton yield weapons on cities. Preferably these megaton bombs are GPS or inertially guided so they can hit their targets, too, because you really want to turn that factory into a radioactive crater. A 250 lbs bomb might cause vital machinery to have some dents and dings. Make it a 2,600,000,000 lbs bomb. The factory literally has been vaporized into a few clouds of iron debris and dirt that is now lofting into the stratosphere, the surrounding area has been completely flattened, and the entire workforce has been annihilated by the blast, and it requires one bomber and not one thousand to do the damage. And that bomber will do that a half dozen times to a half dozen more cities in the next hour.

WW2 only proved one thing about strategic bombing: It works. This was proven in Operation Tidal Wave at least, if not every other major bombing attack. It just took longer and required a much larger force than planners said. The nuclear weapon solved the time and effort dilemma by making the effort minuscule (making one bomb is much easier and faster than making ten thousand) and the time factor compressed by something like half a dozen orders of magnitude. In a general war the VLO bombers like B-2 and B-21 would be assigned the very important mission of "dropping B83s on Moscow/St. Petersburg/Beijing/Shanghai" and obliterating millions with miniature stars.

Nuclear gravity bombs and their associated bombers are maybe cheaper, at least for the job of busting cities, than a silo-based force, whose accuracy and response time is generally best used to destroy enemy missiles and command and control centers (cities are not "time critical"). SLBMs can be assigned to either because they are usually not sufficiently accurate to target the hardest hard bases nor are they sufficiently inaccurate to not target factories or ports or airfields. That is their true purpose. TEL hunting would be assigned to long legged small attack jets like UCLASS, F-35, or A-12 or tactical fighters with thicc ABM missiles for BPI since these are more numerous. Cities are relatively rare, so are bombers, so bombers get assigned to the rarer targets instead of loitering over East Germany ~looking~ for lewds to take pictures of.

The new dilemma is now no longer "can we destroy the enemy" but "can we destroy the enemy before he destroys us" and the answer is an open question. It is perhaps possible to completely neutralize the Russian nuclear missile deterrent through a very complicated and difficult to coordinate all-out attack but the marshaling of this sort of military power would be obvious. It is possible to completely neutralize the Chinese nuclear arsenal with an all-out attack and perhaps America could simply eat the losses because it is a large country given adequate redundancy, preparation, and geographic separation of vital industries like cement and steel foundries, but America lacks the manufacturing base necessary to do this and the historical experience that would give it impetus.

HGVs solve the problem of offensive nuclear first strike, though, being functionally equivalent to the sort of one-shot wonder atomic Ultrabombers that Tu-2000 and HSVS Recce/Strike were in the Cold War. Ground Based Interceptor's future upgrades will include a lightweight KKV that would give it some ability to defeat the hyperglide threat but its fixed basing is problematic and the USA would need a mobile version (or a smaller missile) to defeat the HGV threat ultimately. Or it could build GBIs in Europe as part of the NATO missile shield. The real solution will be to forward base powerful radars on both sides of the Slave World and in the Arctic and Antarctic, though, since these sort of intercontinental distances would be just about adequate to alert CONUS based interceptor troops to an incoming HGV attack. Then you only need extremely high energy weapons to intercept them.

This reminds me that I need to draw Galla's hyperglide interceptor missile. It will be the size of Midgetman I think.

[Kanugues Wed]

Do your airforces have special insignia or flags or something?

Here's the flag of my airforce:

The stylized falcon is the same one as on the national flag, with the airforces red star roundel on the wings. The two red stars on the wings also represent the two directors who died while serving (one early in the civil war when the airforce was like 50 captured royalist and ww2 era soviet planes and one died in a plane crash in the 80's). The ten stars represent the ten directors the airforce has had that have since died peacefully (the flag with an extra star is only unveiled at their funeral, folded on their casket).

[Iltica]

If you add a star every time a director dies, that insignia's going to get really cluttered after a while. Not really something you want for a roundel which is supposed to be quickly recognizable.

*squeeze*

Strategic bombing was always about leveling cities. If you aren't leveling cities, what economic damage are you really doing? What vital economic infrastructure exists outside cities? Houston, Texas and Ploiesti, Romania have oil refineries. St. Louis, Missouri and Kansas City, Missouri have vital rail and river links, and STL was the center of American military fighter production for over 40 years. Leningrad had LKZ tank factory and design bureau. Chelyabinsk Tractor Plant is named after the city it lives in. The point of strategic bombing is to destroy cities because cities, not coincidentally, are hubs of economic activity and generally appear in areas with good access to transportation and ability to marshal resources for production. They are not accidents, they are (or rather, were) aggregations of powerful expressions of economic production.
If you aren't leveling cities, you're the Luftwaffe or the Red Air Force. The Western Allies learned one thing in WW2: leveling cities takes too long with firebombs. Even then the USAAF realized this with the Strategic Bombing Survey. The point isn't "bombing factories is dumb". It's "bombing factories with conventional weapons takes too long to kill them". Thankfully this was solved during the same war with the atomic bomb. Now you could fit the destructive potential of about five years of all-out economic warfare into about 5-50 minutes of general nuclear war.
Strategic bombers have one "true" purpose (i.e. universally recognized as valuable; not everyone recognizes the TEL hunting mission of B-2) in life: dropping megaton yield weapons on cities. Preferably these megaton bombs are GPS or inertially guided so they can hit their targets, too, because you really want to turn that factory into a radioactive crater. A 250 lbs bomb might cause vital machinery to have some dents and dings. Make it a 2,600,000,000 lbs bomb. The factory literally has been vaporized into a few clouds of iron debris and dirt that is now lofting into the stratosphere, the surrounding area has been completely flattened, and the entire workforce has been annihilated by the blast, and it requires one bomber and not one thousand to do the damage. And that bomber will do that a half dozen times to a half dozen more cities in the next hour.
WW2 only proved one thing about strategic bombing: It works. This was proven in Operation Tidal Wave at least, if not every other major bombing attack. It just took longer and required a much larger force than planners said. The nuclear weapon solved the time and effort dilemma by making the effort minuscule (making one bomb is much easier and faster than making ten thousand) and the time factor compressed by something like half a dozen orders of magnitude. In a general war the VLO bombers like B-2 and B-21 would be assigned the very important mission of "dropping B83s on Moscow/St. Petersburg/Beijing/Shanghai" and obliterating millions with miniature stars.
Nuclear gravity bombs and their associated bombers are maybe cheaper, at least for the job of busting cities, than a silo-based force, whose accuracy and response time is generally best used to destroy enemy missiles and command and control centers (cities are not "time critical"). SLBMs can be assigned to either because they are usually not sufficiently accurate to target the hardest hard bases nor are they sufficiently inaccurate to not target factories or ports or airfields. That is their true purpose. TEL hunting would be assigned to long legged small attack jets like UCLASS, F-35, or A-12 or tactical fighters with thicc ABM missiles for BPI since these are more numerous. Cities are relatively rare, so are bombers, so bombers get assigned to the rarer targets instead of loitering over East Germany ~looking~ for lewds to take pictures of.
The new dilemma is now no longer "can we destroy the enemy" but "can we destroy the enemy before he destroys us" and the answer is an open question. It is perhaps possible to completely neutralize the Russian nuclear missile deterrent through a very complicated and difficult to coordinate all-out attack but the marshaling of this sort of military power would be obvious. It is possible to completely neutralize the Chinese nuclear arsenal with an all-out attack and perhaps America could simply eat the losses because it is a large country given adequate redundancy, preparation, and geographic separation of vital industries like cement and steel foundries, but America lacks the manufacturing base necessary to do this and the historical experience that would give it impetus.
HGVs solve the problem of offensive nuclear first strike, though, being functionally equivalent to the sort of one-shot wonder atomic Ultrabombers that Tu-2000 and HSVS Recce/Strike were in the Cold War. Ground Based Interceptor's future upgrades will include a lightweight KKV that would give it some ability to defeat the hyperglide threat but its fixed basing is problematic and the USA would need a mobile version (or a smaller missile) to defeat the HGV threat ultimately. Or it could build GBIs in Europe as part of the NATO missile shield. The real solution will be to forward base powerful radars on both sides of the Slave World and in the Arctic and Antarctic, though, since these sort of intercontinental distances would be just about adequate to alert CONUS based interceptor troops to an incoming HGV attack. Then you only need extremely high energy weapons to intercept them.

*squeeze*
You misunderstand the point about the factories/cities. It's not that the bombers do a bad job destroying them, but that the war probably isn't going to last long enough for them to make enough replacement vehicles/equipment/whatever to affect the outcome. If the major fighting is over in just a couple months or less, there's barely any time for them to make anything anyway so why bother?
Wars with extremely large countries like the Russia or China might be able to draw out the conflict long enough for it to matter, but that would almost certainly be a nuclear exchange. I was just talking about conflicts between non-nuclear powers (or at least those where they aren't using their nuclear weapons) more along the lines of the Falklands War or when Iraq invaded Iran.

Preemptively destroying the rails, roads, and stockpiles Akasha mentioned still seems useful, can things like Su-24s or bomb-laden Fillets do that or do you need something bigger?

[Kanugues Wed]

If you add a star every time a director dies, that insignia's going to get really cluttered after a while. Not really something you want for a roundel which is supposed to be quickly recognizable.

It's not a roundel (we use the bog-standard commie/russian red star roundel). It's the flag of the airforce and is flown above AF buildings. Sure it'll get cluttered in a few years, but we'll cross that bridge when we get to it. Maybe we'll change the meaning of the stars to something about heroic pilots or something like it.

[Zhouran]

Preemptively destroying the rails, roads, and stockpiles Akasha mentioned still seems useful, can things like Su-24s or bomb-laden Fillets do that or do you need something bigger?

Since you're talking about air-interdiction, any supersonic strike aircraft like the Su-34, Tornado IDS, and F-15E would be fine.

Do your airforces have special insignia or flags or something?

Here's the flag of my airforce: (Image)

The stylized falcon is the same one as on the national flag, with the airforces red star roundel on the wings. The two red stars on the wings also represent the two directors who died while serving (one early in the civil war when the airforce was like 50 captured royalist and ww2 era soviet planes and one died in a plane crash in the 80's). The ten stars represent the ten directors the airforce has had that have since died peacefully (the flag with an extra star is only unveiled at their funeral, folded on their casket).

Mmhhhh, to make the flag look less complex, instead of ten stars you could have bird wings behind the main symbol. I know the ten stars are symbolic, but a military flag should symbolize the military (or specific service) branch as a whole rather than symbolize certain individuals.

[The Manticoran Empire]

Strategic bombing was always about leveling cities. If you aren't leveling cities, what economic damage are you really doing? What vital economic infrastructure exists outside cities? Houston, Texas and Ploiesti, Romania have oil refineries. St. Louis, Missouri and Kansas City, Missouri have vital rail and river links, and STL was the center of American military fighter production for over 40 years. Leningrad had LKZ tank factory and design bureau. Chelyabinsk Tractor Plant is named after the city it lives in. The point of strategic bombing is to destroy cities because cities, not coincidentally, are hubs of economic activity and generally appear in areas with good access to transportation and ability to marshal resources for production. They are not accidents, they are (or rather, were) aggregations of powerful expressions of economic production.

If you aren't leveling cities, you're the Luftwaffe or the Red Air Force. The Western Allies learned one thing in WW2: leveling cities takes too long with firebombs. Even then the USAAF realized this with the Strategic Bombing Survey. The point isn't "bombing factories is dumb". It's "bombing factories with conventional weapons takes too long to kill them". Thankfully this was solved during the same war with the atomic bomb. Now you could fit the destructive potential of about five years of all-out economic warfare into about 5-50 minutes of general nuclear war.

Strategic bombers have one "true" purpose (i.e. universally recognized as valuable; not everyone recognizes the TEL hunting mission of B-2) in life: dropping megaton yield weapons on cities. Preferably these megaton bombs are GPS or inertially guided so they can hit their targets, too, because you really want to turn that factory into a radioactive crater. A 250 lbs bomb might cause vital machinery to have some dents and dings. Make it a 2,600,000,000 lbs bomb. The factory literally has been vaporized into a few clouds of iron debris and dirt that is now lofting into the stratosphere, the surrounding area has been completely flattened, and the entire workforce has been annihilated by the blast, and it requires one bomber and not one thousand to do the damage. And that bomber will do that a half dozen times to a half dozen more cities in the next hour.

WW2 only proved one thing about strategic bombing: It works. This was proven in Operation Tidal Wave at least, if not every other major bombing attack. It just took longer and required a much larger force than planners said. The nuclear weapon solved the time and effort dilemma by making the effort minuscule (making one bomb is much easier and faster than making ten thousand) and the time factor compressed by something like half a dozen orders of magnitude. In a general war the VLO bombers like B-2 and B-21 would be assigned the very important mission of "dropping B83s on Moscow/St. Petersburg/Beijing/Shanghai" and obliterating millions with miniature stars.

Nuclear gravity bombs and their associated bombers are maybe cheaper, at least for the job of busting cities, than a silo-based force, whose accuracy and response time is generally best used to destroy enemy missiles and command and control centers (cities are not "time critical"). SLBMs can be assigned to either because they are usually not sufficiently accurate to target the hardest hard bases nor are they sufficiently inaccurate to not target factories or ports or airfields. That is their true purpose. TEL hunting would be assigned to long legged small attack jets like UCLASS, F-35, or A-12 or tactical fighters with thicc ABM missiles for BPI since these are more numerous. Cities are relatively rare, so are bombers, so bombers get assigned to the rarer targets instead of loitering over East Germany ~looking~ for lewds to take pictures of.

The new dilemma is now no longer "can we destroy the enemy" but "can we destroy the enemy before he destroys us" and the answer is an open question. It is perhaps possible to completely neutralize the Russian nuclear missile deterrent through a very complicated and difficult to coordinate all-out attack but the marshaling of this sort of military power would be obvious. It is possible to completely neutralize the Chinese nuclear arsenal with an all-out attack and perhaps America could simply eat the losses because it is a large country given adequate redundancy, preparation, and geographic separation of vital industries like cement and steel foundries, but America lacks the manufacturing base necessary to do this and the historical experience that would give it impetus.

HGVs solve the problem of offensive nuclear first strike, though, being functionally equivalent to the sort of one-shot wonder atomic Ultrabombers that Tu-2000 and HSVS Recce/Strike were in the Cold War. Ground Based Interceptor's future upgrades will include a lightweight KKV that would give it some ability to defeat the hyperglide threat but its fixed basing is problematic and the USA would need a mobile version (or a smaller missile) to defeat the HGV threat ultimately. Or it could build GBIs in Europe as part of the NATO missile shield. The real solution will be to forward base powerful radars on both sides of the Slave World and in the Arctic and Antarctic, though, since these sort of intercontinental distances would be just about adequate to alert CONUS based interceptor troops to an incoming HGV attack. Then you only need extremely high energy weapons to intercept them.

This reminds me that I need to draw Galla's hyperglide interceptor missile. It will be the size of Midgetman I think.

No. The goal of Strategic Bombing of cities wasn't to hit factories, though they were fine with it. The goal was to break the will of the enemy population.

[Gallia-]

You misunderstand the point about the factories/cities. It's not that the bombers do a bad job destroying them, but that the war probably isn't going to last long enough for them to make enough replacement vehicles/equipment/whatever to affect the outcome.

That's what they said about WW1. And WW2. And Korea.

If the major fighting is over in just a couple months or less, there's barely any time for them to make anything anyway so why bother?

Because the only thing ending "the major fighting" is nuclear bombardment. Maybe.

but that would almost certainly be a nuclear exchange.

Which is the whole purpose of the ""strategic" "bomber""...

As the name implies, its raison d'etre is dropping nuclear weapons on cities. If you aren't doing that then there's no real point to bringing it out except for maybe offensive minelaying or you need a really large cruise missile truck.

But that's just taking a strategic bomber platform and shoehorning it into one of the primary roles of the maritime patrol aircraft.

Do your airforces have special insignia or flags or something?

Here's the flag of my airforce:

The stylized falcon is the same one as on the national flag, with the airforces red star roundel on the wings. The two red stars on the wings also represent the two directors who died while serving (one early in the civil war when the airforce was like 50 captured royalist and ww2 era soviet planes and one died in a plane crash in the 80's). The ten stars represent the ten directors the airforce has had that have since died peacefully (the flag with an extra star is only unveiled at their funeral, folded on their casket).

Tying things to specific people instead of impersonal ideals, and using falcons, are both extremely reactionary concepts. You can get away with the falcon but once you start adding stars for "individual directors" you are literally a Stalinist or Maoist reactionary anti-revolutionary state. The only thing that saves your flag is the part where Maoism and Stalinism are so unstable that they die out within one human lifespan, or three to four human generations, or a dozen career cycles between political purges; then they get replaced by Dengism or something that upholds at least partially timeless ideals instead of dated and highly topical personality cults.

If you add a star every time a director dies, that insignia's going to get really cluttered after a while. Not really something you want for a roundel which is supposed to be quickly recognizable.

It's not a roundel (we use the bog-standard commie/russian red star roundel). It's the flag of the airforce and is flown above AF buildings. Sure it'll get cluttered in a few years, but we'll cross that bridge when we get to it.

Probably when the government reorganizes itself once the Supreme Leader dies/is ousted by a clique of Party Internal Security and Dark Horse Chairman/gets nuked by an iron lady.

The goal of Strategic Bombing of cities wasn't to hit factories,

Yes it was.

The goal was to break the will of the enemy population.

For the completely incomprehensible England Brain, sure. For the pragmatic Americans, aka the people who actually won the Combined Bomber Offensive, it was about destroying the economic capacity and output of the enemy by attacking his production facilities directly. The British, I suppose, think that if someone goes without a home they will not show up to work or something, which is silly to think and probably a result of Bomber Fear on part of the British chiefs more than anything based in reality. The Americans think that if someone goes without a workplace they cannot show up to work. Because their work is a crater. I'm not even sure if the British really cared about dehousing insofar as much as it would have been easier to hit a bunch of suburbs and flatten flimsy homes than it would be to destroy machinery in factories that practically requires a direct hit, considering they were happy enough to attack "large" and "highly vulnerable to explosion" oil refineries.

The Americans were right they just didn't have the right tools for the job until very late in the game. And they have their own problems.

Basically the ideal/most effective conventional strategic bombing plan attacks things like oil refineries, which although large, are also vulnerable to catastrophic damage from a small quantity of conventional weapons; power generation and electrical substations; and railroad infrastructure. These things are the most important things that can be relatively easily destroyed by conventional bombs. Hitting a railway bridge with a laser guided bomb or attacking an electrical generating plant or transformer bank is not hard and they would shut down a lot of things besides just factories. The oil refinery really needs no explanation or elaboration.

If you want to kill factories themselves (permanently), or larger area targets like airports or shipping ports, you probably need nuclear weapons. Otherwise it's a waste of effort.

But it really depends on what your opponent puts stock in first and foremost since people adapt poorly to the catastrophic failure of their best laid plans cf. German invasion of Russia.

[Theodosiya]

How about attacking the workplace (factories), residential area, government offices and infrastructure (roads, bridges, hospitals, powerplant and power lines), all in one bombing run of a city, instead of targeting one of them?

[Gallia-]

Now you're thinking with portals.

[The Akasha Colony]

How about attacking the workplace (factories), residential area, government offices and infrastructure (roads, bridges, hospitals, powerplant and power lines), all in one bombing run of a city, instead of targeting one of them?

At that point what aren't you attacking? The local water park?

The only way to even consider striking all these targets at once is with nuclear weapons. Although I guess if you gathered every combat aircraft in the Western world and loaded them with every iron bomb you could find, maybe you could get something vaguely similar.

You misunderstand the point about the factories/cities. It's not that the bombers do a bad job destroying them, but that the war probably isn't going to last long enough for them to make enough replacement vehicles/equipment/whatever to affect the outcome. If the major fighting is over in just a couple months or less, there's barely any time for them to make anything anyway so why bother?
Wars with extremely large countries like the Russia or China might be able to draw out the conflict long enough for it to matter, but that would almost certainly be a nuclear exchange. I was just talking about conflicts between non-nuclear powers (or at least those where they aren't using their nuclear weapons) more along the lines of the Falklands War or when Iraq invaded Iran.

The Iran-Iraq War lasted eight years.

The tendency toward quick wars a la ODS and the Arab-Israeli conflicts may be misleading, and may no longer be the case. Recent conflicts in Syria and Ukraine have lasted many years and continue to be waged. And despite the presence of mechanized forces on both sides in Ukraine, there has been little in the way of large-scale mechanized assaults.

The quick resolutions of the Arab-Israeli wars are due largely to scale (small) and the fairly weak will of the Arab governments to seriously continue the fight. Despite all their rhetoric, the Arab governments generally rolled over pretty quick when things when poorly, mostly to preserve their own domestic political standing. The quick resolution of ODS came mostly from the coalition's overwhelming superiority in basically every aspect, but even that took months of preparation.

Preemptively destroying the rails, roads, and stockpiles Akasha mentioned still seems useful, can things like Su-24s or bomb-laden Fillets do that or do you need something bigger?

Can all of these targets be hit within the ~600 km combat radius of a strike fighter? If the answer is "no," then you need something bigger that can go farther.

[Gallia-]

https://www.sto.nato.int/publications/STO%20Educational%20Notes/STO-EN-AVT-261/EN-AVT-261-05.pdf

also i forgot to say how absolutely f r e s h this is btw

[Zhouran]

So apparently during the Yom Kippur War, the Israelis used ambush tactics in which two aircraft would fly at medium altitude and act as bait while more aircraft would fly at lower altitude and then zoom up towards enemy fighter jets. In a hypothetical, more-modern scenario, if two sides employed AWACS support, would this ambush tactic be rendered moot if assuming the enemy AWACS can detect my low-flying fighters? The Israelis did use the ambush tactic before the Yom Kippur War, with my personal favorite being Operation Rimon 20 when the Israelis shot down five MiG-21s with only one of their own aircraft being damaged.

[New Aeyariss]

So apparently during the Yom Kippur War, the Israelis used ambush tactics in which two aircraft would fly at medium altitude and act as bait while more aircraft would fly at lower altitude and then zoom up towards enemy fighter jets. In a hypothetical, more-modern scenario, if two sides employed AWACS support, would this ambush tactic be rendered moot if assuming the enemy AWACS can detect my low-flying fighters? The Israelis did use the ambush tactic before the Yom Kippur War, with my personal favorite being Operation Rimon 20 when the Israelis shot down five MiG-21s with only one of their own aircraft being damaged.

There are many variables here to consider. For starters only few air forces actually posses AWACSes. Assuming that your OpFor would have them however, it would depend on altitude the AWACS would fly on. Very often anti-AWACS weapons and long range air defenses can deny AWACS access to certain areas or force it to fly at lower altitude, thus limiting it's observation range. In this case, it would depend how high would the AWACS fly. Terrain features that could obstruct the view of AWACS's radar (mountains for example), quality of the employed radar and RCS of the fighters are another issues that need to be addressed.

But assuming your enemy AWACS has a capability for free, unobstructed flight on high altitude and the fighters don't have some kind of RCS reduction - most likely the AWACS will see them and thus render the tactic moot.

It's also important to remember that if you are flying low, you tend to eat fuel faster - and limit range of your flight.

[The Akasha Colony]

So apparently during the Yom Kippur War, the Israelis used ambush tactics in which two aircraft would fly at medium altitude and act as bait while more aircraft would fly at lower altitude and then zoom up towards enemy fighter jets. In a hypothetical, more-modern scenario, if two sides employed AWACS support, would this ambush tactic be rendered moot if assuming the enemy AWACS can detect my low-flying fighters? The Israelis did use the ambush tactic before the Yom Kippur War, with my personal favorite being Operation Rimon 20 when the Israelis shot down five MiG-21s with only one of their own aircraft being damaged.

AEW&C would render the tactic moot. US E-3s could detect Iraqi aircraft the moment they took off in ODS.

More importantly though, proper training and more experience would also render the tactic moot. This is the biggest reason for the lopsided kill ratios in the Arab-Israeli wars.

A group of fighters ambushing from low altitude is also at a severe energy disadvantage relative to a medium-altitude attacker. The Israelis had the skills to overcome this disadvantage but ceteris paribus, an experienced pilot would much prefer to avoid such a situation. Low altitude flight is also rather dangerous and generally results in much higher attrition rates.

There are many variables here to consider. For starters only few air forces actually posses AWACSes.

AEW&C systems are now quite common. They are no longer the bespoke systems they were in the era E-3 first entered service. Business jet-derived AEW&C systems like E-99 and G550 CAEW are publicly advertised at defense exhibitions and can be bought essentially off the shelf. Any nation that can afford to buy even just a squadron of fourth-generation fighters can afford to buy at least some form of AEW&C aircraft to support them.

[Zhouran]

AEW&C would render the tactic moot. US E-3s could detect Iraqi aircraft the moment they took off in ODS.

More importantly though, proper training and more experience would also render the tactic moot. This is the biggest reason for the lopsided kill ratios in the Arab-Israeli wars.

A group of fighters ambushing from low altitude is also at a severe energy disadvantage relative to a medium-altitude attacker. The Israelis had the skills to overcome this disadvantage but ceteris paribus, an experienced pilot would much prefer to avoid such a situation. Low altitude flight is also rather dangerous and generally results in much higher attrition rates.

Would the ideal tactic be to have my fighters fly at medium altitude? Also, if I have fighters flying at higher altitude, would that give them the advantage to strike against lower-altitude enemies? I'm trying to find ways like tactics that would allow a powerful air force like the USAF to defeat an equally-powerful opponent in battle. The reason why I used the Israelis as an example is because their skills are impressive especially against numerically-superior opponents that flanks them on multiple sides.

Very often anti-AWACS weapons and long range air defenses can deny AWACS access to certain areas or force it to fly at lower altitude, thus limiting it's observation range. In this case, it would depend how high would the AWACS fly. Terrain features that could obstruct the view of AWACS's radar (mountains for example), quality of the employed radar and RCS of the fighters are another issues that need to be addressed.

I kinda have strong skepticism towards long-range AWACS weapons, especially ones that are essentially based off of anti-radiation missiles (like the supposed AWACS killer variant of the Kh-31).

But assuming your enemy AWACS has a capability for free, unobstructed flight on high altitude and the fighters don't have some kind of RCS reduction - most likely the AWACS will see them and thus render the tactic moot.

It's also important to remember that if you are flying low, you tend to eat fuel faster - and limit range of your flight.

Fuel shouldn't be too much of an issue if my fighters carry drop tanks and conducted aerial refuelling prior to combat.

[Gallia-]

So apparently during the Yom Kippur War, the Israelis used ambush tactics in which two aircraft would fly at medium altitude and act as bait while more aircraft would fly at lower altitude and then zoom up towards enemy fighter jets. In a hypothetical, more-modern scenario, if two sides employed AWACS support, would this ambush tactic be rendered moot if assuming the enemy AWACS can detect my low-flying fighters? The Israelis did use the ambush tactic before the Yom Kippur War, with my personal favorite being Operation Rimon 20 when the Israelis shot down five MiG-21s with only one of their own aircraft being damaged.

Arabs are so bad at fighting wars that any tactics used against them are extremely suspect and likely to be unworkable against a competent foe.

The U.S. Army was unable to do what it did in Desert Storm against the Serbs and they were marginally competent.

[Zhouran]

Arabs are so bad at fighting wars that any tactics used against them are extremely suspect and likely to be unworkable against a competent foe.

The U.S. Army was unable to do what it did in Desert Storm against the Serbs and they were marginally competent.

I'm always perplexed as to why Arab militaries perform so poorly in combat, even when receiving support from big nations they still somehow manage to fail. When the Iraq-Iran War happened, Iranian fighter pilots performed better than their Iraqi counterparts, ironically the Iranians were isolated and lacked support while the Iraqis were receiving weapons and support from nations like the Soviet Union and France. The Libyans themselves have lost in wars against both the Tanzanians and the Chadians, and the Chadians themselves effectively used technicals against the mechanized, armored Libyan forces.

But you are correct. Any tactic used against an Arab military wouldn't fare well against competent opponents.

[Hayo]

Another thing about strategic bombers:

At least in the case of the US, they seem pretty damn vulnerable to a first strike or any kind of counterforce strike.

AFAIK all of the B-2s are based at Whiteman AFB in Missouri, though you sometimes see some of them fly out to Andersen AFB. The B-1B wings are at Dyess and Ellsworth. The B-52s are at Minot and Barksdale. They aren't kept on alert like in the old days. Their readiness rates are also pretty bad (especially the B-2).

If I was Russia, I know where I'd aim some of my missiles.

[Gallia-]

I'm always perplexed as to why Arab militaries perform so poorly in combat,

Low IQs, institutional laziness, and lack of incentive to improve either problem through superior breeding selection and socio-political reforms.

Egypt did OK in 1973. If all the Arab armies did as well as Egypt in '73 or Jordan in '48 they could probably beat Israel if they'd worked together.

[The Akasha Colony]

Would the ideal tactic be to have my fighters fly at medium altitude? Also, if I have fighters flying at higher altitude, would that give them the advantage to strike against lower-altitude enemies? I'm trying to find ways like tactics that would allow a powerful air force like the USAF to defeat an equally-powerful opponent in battle. The reason why I used the Israelis as an example is because their skills are impressive especially against numerically-superior opponents that flanks them on multiple sides.

There is no magic bullet. A conflict in which a large and competent air force fighting another large and competent air force will almost inevitably come down to attrition in the macro scale, assuming important things like technology and pilot training are at least generally equal.

The Israeli performance against Arab pilots is mostly a matter of how bad Arab pilots are. Israeli pilots are (or at least back then, were) good, but they've never fought anything resembling a similarly-competent opponent, and how they would fare against such an enemy is an open question.

I'm always perplexed as to why Arab militaries perform so poorly in combat, even when receiving support from big nations they still somehow manage to fail. When the Iraq-Iran War happened, Iranian fighter pilots performed better than their Iraqi counterparts, ironically the Iranians were isolated and lacked support while the Iraqis were receiving weapons and support from nations like the Soviet Union and France. The Libyans themselves have lost in wars against both the Tanzanians and the Chadians, and the Chadians themselves effectively used technicals against the mechanized, armored Libyan forces.

But you are correct. Any tactic used against an Arab military wouldn't fare well against competent opponents.

Wealthy Arab powers have always tried to make up for their enormous deficiencies in human factors by acquiring expensive weapons. This used to mean affiliating strongly with the US or USSR during the Cold War to get handouts, while nowadays it means using oil money to buy the shiniest new toys from KMW and Lockheed Martin. It is easier for them to try to paper over their serious deficiencies by buying fancy weapons than by actually undertaking the sort of deep societal change that would improve their military performance for the better, especially because these changes would likely weaken the ruling regimes' grip on power.

The problems are largely institutional and societal, on top of the lack of any real training or exercises which also plagues a number of other ostensibly powerful militaries. Tribalism, stubbornness, a lack of any real personal investment in their service, poor morale, huge gaps between the officer and enlisted ranks, and strong resistance to any attempts at real change. All of these factors contribute to militaries that are generally not willing to actually fight hard when required to.

And very often, the ruling regime would prefer things stay this way so that their rule is not threatened by a suddenly-competent and powerful army.

[Austrasien]

Would the ideal tactic be to have my fighters fly at medium altitude? Also, if I have fighters flying at higher altitude, would that give them the advantage to strike against lower-altitude enemies? I'm trying to find ways like tactics that would allow a powerful air force like the USAF to defeat an equally-powerful opponent in battle. The reason why I used the Israelis as an example is because their skills are impressive especially against numerically-superior opponents that flanks them on multiple sides.

Assuming they also have capable pilots the best option is to pursue new technologies.

In air combat technology sets the ceiling and pilot skill defines the floor. If they have raised the floor to the same level as you and you have already hit your ceiling, you must raise the ceiling to gain an advantage.

[The Manticoran Empire]

Arabs are so bad at fighting wars that any tactics used against them are extremely suspect and likely to be unworkable against a competent foe.

The U.S. Army was unable to do what it did in Desert Storm against the Serbs and they were marginally competent.

I'm always perplexed as to why Arab militaries perform so poorly in combat, even when receiving support from big nations they still somehow manage to fail. When the Iraq-Iran War happened, Iranian fighter pilots performed better than their Iraqi counterparts, ironically the Iranians were isolated and lacked support while the Iraqis were receiving weapons and support from nations like the Soviet Union and France. The Libyans themselves have lost in wars against both the Tanzanians and the Chadians, and the Chadians themselves effectively used technicals against the mechanized, armored Libyan forces.

But you are correct. Any tactic used against an Arab military wouldn't fare well against competent opponents.

Arab armies are handicapped by their politics. Arab leaders don't want their armies to be too powerful in order to protect their own power base so they rarely conduct combined arms operations. Arab officers believe in the term "Knowledge is Power" and are unwilling to share information, even if that information is of immediate strategic or tactical importance. Arab soldiers have limited flexibility, with every movement having to be authorized by a higher authority. High command positions in Arab armies are often given out to the most politically reliable as opposed to the most competent. To sum it up, Arab armies have poor combined arms training, poor communications, little to no flexibility, and incompetent command staffs.

[urlhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZk4Yu42g0I]He does it better than I can.[/url]

[The Technocratic Syndicalists]

https://www.sto.nato.int/publications/STO%20Educational%20Notes/STO-EN-AVT-261/EN-AVT-261-05.pdf

also i forgot to say how absolutely f r e s h this is btw

Having designed my own h i g h m a c h jet I have like a bajillion more pdfs just like those. Personally I prefer heat pipe cooling along the leading edges using cryogenic fuel (assuming an air-breathing, reusable vehicle) but film cooling and/or transpiration cooling has potential as a method of cooling the sidewalls of your ramjet/scramjet engines.

[Iltica]

Can all of these targets be hit within the ~600 km combat radius of a strike fighter? If the answer is "no," then you need something bigger that can go farther.

Crap, missed that part :/ Well there's always in-flight refueling but there's probably something wrong with that too.

Ok, so if you do need a really long range bomber, how do you get a decent one without building your own? The only one I can find that got exported widely is the Tu-16/H-6 which are about the same age as the ghosts in your basement.