NS Military Worldbuilding Thread No. 12

[Gallia-]

At low altitude you get killed by ZU-23-2 and Igla. At high altitude you get killed by... nothing. SAM's have historically a 1% hit rate on the greatest of days. Besides at 41,000 feet you do see the SAM site on ESM and can do something about it, don't you?

It's closer to 5 or 6 aircraft per 100 sorties or so against the deadliest SAMs-without-air-cover in history. A good fighter force would probably be about as effective, at least, but also be able to take offensive action.

Of course, a loss rate of ~1% per 100 sorties over the course of a fortnight is sufficient shut down a large bomber force for weeks in historical combat operations. With functioning fighters able to intercept the bombers (and weak to no fighter escort) loss rates would probably be higher, too.

High altitude losses would be pretty easily (as easily as ground air defenses can inflict them, anyway) inflicted by SA-5s and the PVO's fighter force guided by A-50 or Tu-126 AWACS. This is why the B-52s went low altitude in the first place: to escape the wandering electric eyeball of the Moss and the fighters it controlled. Going toe to toe with a handful of pint sized Strelas or Iglas that probably will never launch on your high speed super bomber of the 1950's (and even if they did, they'd only scratch the paint; plenty of A-4s were able to return alive in 1973 after being hit by Strelas) due to their radars' inability to warn them of the incoming bomber at 300 feet is a lot more reasonable than going against the fastest supersonic interceptors and airborne radars of the PVO.

I'll slap my Kinzhal's on my MIG-31's. Checkmate mig-31 haters.

They'll know you are coming from basically the moment you hit those afterburners to take off.

Not if it's cloudy SBIRS btfo.

[Kassaran]

What aspects of exo-skeletal armor systems could be reasonably incorporated into special operations missions sets over the course of the next thirty years? I'm thinking primarily SIGINT and Recon type operations, but curious if any of you can think of other creative ways. I specify Special Operations as obviously Engineers and Artillery forces will find a use in utilizing Exo-skeletal mobility and strength enhancing suits for rounds and weapons transportation.

[Gallia-]

Ammo handler at airbases.

[Kassaran]

Ammo handler at airbases.

Not really sure if that qualifies as a special operations type application, I'm thinking more in terms of Special Forces and Rangers, what mission-applicability and mission-set would such equipment assist in, or is that far too limited?

EDIT: Allow me to share my own thinking on the matter to see if we can't get some sort of conversation going here. My own thoughts on the matter don't come from more armor, but rather more ammo and more speed, but less endurance given the high energy needs of such a system. Additionally, the tied in ability to utilize perhaps larger-than normal communications and other specialty equipment which would naturally tie into the reconnaissance type mission-set. How would exo-suits be applicable to other types of missions such as boarding a ship at sea (Navy SEALS) or taking a hardened/reinforced enemy location/infrastructure (USA Rangers) and what would that take the form of?

[Gallia-]

Ammo handler at airbases.

Not really sure if that qualifies as a special operations type application

Do SOF not use airplanes?

[New Visayan Islands]

Not really sure if that qualifies as a special operations type application

Do SOF not use airplanes?

USSOCOM sure does.

[Kassaran]

Not really sure if that qualifies as a special operations type application

Do SOF not use airplanes?

You're being a bit obtuse about this and while I can see your point, Ammo handling in general could be classified as more a general military mission and not a special operation as Civil Affairs, Psychological Operations, Special Forces, and Rangers are in the United States Army, or PJ's, JTAC in the USAF.

[Gallia-]

Something that has a battery life of a couple hours at best, and makes you twice as wide, but lets you lift big boxes isn't very useful for shooting people. Which is about where exoskeletons are and will remain for the next couple of decades, barring some dramatic improvements in battery life or fuel cell infrastructure or whatever that seems unlikely to happen for now. In 30 years about the only thing you'll be seeing are probably ammo handlers on ships and at airbases, similar to how forklifts ended up being used for MHE.

OTOH, if you put a man in a PITMAN style suit you have a funny shaped Humvee. He is bulletproof, carries a machine gun, and runs at 30 miles an hour for a day or so. Thinking of him like an infantryman is a bit silly considering he would probably need three or four guys to help maintain his super man suit. It's not like a motorcycle or something. OTOH this would be dissimilar to a tank or armored car or something, depending on the protection level of the suit being worn. PITMAN considered 12.7mm ball to be adequate protection but this just means shooting him with an RPG or a MBT-LAW (or a 25-30mm cannon) is the order of the day, which ordinary mechanized infantry have in relative abundance. Whether that is true of ISIS or whatever is debatable but ISIS seems to be easily dispatched with no casualties by guys wearing Crye JPCs and bump helmets so they don't really need much armor to begin with.

You'd have more of a argument for giving commandos little robots to run around in houses. Or wall penetrating radars. Maybe the PITMAN suit could carry that I guess, but neither of those are terribly big objects in reality. The real problem is that most wall penetrating radars today are one dimensional (they can tell you something is in a room, just not where it is in the room) when you really want a two-dimensional radar, but that would probably require multistatic solutions. And they require a Humvee anyway.

[New Vihenia]

So i decided to finally make my TEL Killer.

This thing is "Phoenix" Bomber. Something like B-2 but the one without the low altitude penetration requirement tucked in. Instead of 4 engine it has 2 massive turbofans in her ass Which hopefully helps with infra red signatures. Her mission, penetrate and destroy anything that moves or trying to hurt her loved ones.



Where the weapon bay goes, no cover yet but no worries the bay door will be there soon.



Don't mind too much about those rotary launchers, i like cruise missiles.

and some fancy stuff.

So i actually plot the RCS in several frequencies... might be hard to read but basically the lower the frequencies, the higher the RCS and the "blob-ier" the plane looks.
In high frequencies, the shape works by deflecting the large RCS spikes to the angle other than the red line which my RFP's -20 dB. there are some spikes exceeding it tho but i havent put any RAM's.



This one is hopefully better clarity but only for X, C and then VHF band.

[Gallia-]

good and cute

[Triplebaconation]

Of course, a loss rate of ~1% per 100 sorties over the course of a fortnight is sufficient shut down a large bomber force for weeks in historical combat operations. With functioning fighters able to intercept the bombers (and weak to no fighter escort) loss rates would probably be higher, too.

It's impossible to say how effective air defenses will be in general, as it's very situational. Bombers over North Vietnam were supported by dedicated EW and defense suppression aircraft a strategic bomber likely wouldn't be able to carry along. On the other hand you can degrade air defenses with nuclear weapons.

We really don't have much data to work with, so perhaps people are placing too much importance on two incidents.

"Most losses in Operation XXX" occurred at low level so low-level flying is too dangerous!" This ignores that nearly all losses occurred over well-defended targets and aircraft were often forced to low-level by SAMs anyway. Were AA guns more effective than SAMs in Vietnam? A large proportion of AAA losses were suffered by aircraft suppressing SAMs!

You're not going to get ambushed by a random guy with a SA-7 penetrating a SAM belt in Northern Russia lol

The Al Kibar raid in 2007 seems to have given the impression that aircraft have a magic "turn air defenses off" button. However the Israelis haven't replicated anything like it since then and have generally denied engagement to more sophisticated Syrian air defenses by using tactics like popping up from low altitude to attack with standoff weapons.

It's curious that only land-based missiles are afflicted in NS thought - put a functionally identical weapon on a plane or ship and it becomes a death ray.

[Gallia-]

Of course, a loss rate of ~1% per 100 sorties over the course of a fortnight is sufficient shut down a large bomber force for weeks in historical combat operations. With functioning fighters able to intercept the bombers (and weak to no fighter escort) loss rates would probably be higher, too.

It's impossible to say how effective air defenses will be in general, as it's very situational. Bombers over North Vietnam were supported by dedicated EW and defense suppression aircraft a strategic bomber likely wouldn't be able to carry along. On the other hand you can degrade air defenses with nuclear weapons.

We really don't have much data to work with, so perhaps people are placing too much importance on two incidents.

"Most losses in Operation XXX" occurred at low level so low-level flying is too dangerous!" This ignores that nearly all losses occurred over well-defended targets and aircraft were often forced to low-level by SAMs anyway. Were AA guns more effective than SAMs in Vietnam? A large proportion of AAA losses were suffered by aircraft suppressing SAMs!

You're not going to get ambushed by a random guy with a SA-7 penetrating a SAM belt in Northern Russia lol

The Al Kibar raid in 2007 seems to have given the impression that aircraft have a magic "turn air defenses off" button. However the Israelis haven't replicated anything like it since then and have generally denied engagement to more sophisticated Syrian air defenses by using tactics like popping up from low altitude to attack with standoff weapons.

It's curious that only land-based missiles are afflicted in NS thought - put a functionally identical weapon on a plane or ship and it becomes a death ray.

Yes this is all fair, especially wrt predicting air defense performance a priori.

People also give too much weight to things like TB-2s slapping Pantsirs that have run out of ammunition or Tors that are turned off in these threads while ignoring the part that Turkey doesn't seem to be capable of capitalizing on its air supremacy to actually launch ground attacks against the Ba'athists (or the Kurds or ISIS lol), or that the Syrian air defense has actually not been defeated and is still fighting after several years of supposed destruction by Turkish drones or whatever, as evidenced by the fact that Turks are still losing gunships and drones in Syria as late as "a couple months ago", and are still bombing air defense vehicles.

Mentally I tend to assume SAMs aren't killers per se so much as energy sappers of jet aircraft. They force jets to take evasive maneuvers and dump their payloads, keeping them from striking targets, or be vulnerable to IR missiles or AAA while the pilot is distracted by beep boops and radar growls from his headset and dozens of missile contrails out the cockpit. Forcing a jet to dump its payload short of its target or abort an attack run is almost as good as killing the jet, at least in the context of defense against air attack, if not in the context of actually destroying the enemy air force.

Package Q was arguably a very effective SAM defense in an otherwise uncontested airspace, in difficult circumstances, since a few primary targets (and several secondaries) were spared by aborts from F-16s, TBH.

Unf. it's all a bit nuanced and I'm not good at translating the internal nuance into words; tho I think the Soviet idea of air ambushes used in combination with AAA, high performance SAMs, and tactical fighters, are all pretty good. Shame no one has ever really put it into action with all the pieces outside of the Battle of Britain maybe.

[Triplebaconation]

Mentally I tend to assume SAMs aren't killers per se so much as energy sappers of jet aircraft. They force jets to take evasive maneuvers and dump their payloads, keeping them from striking targets, or be vulnerable to IR missiles or AAA while the pilot is distracted by beep boops and radar growls from his headset and dozens of missile contrails out the cockpit. Forcing a jet to dump its payload short of its target or abort an attack run is almost as good as killing the jet, at least in the context of defense against air attack, if not in the context of actually destroying the enemy air force.

In a strategic sense this is even more true, substituting "offensive capability" for "energy."

Imagine that the B-2 was completely immune to Soviet strategic SAMs. Does that mean they were worthless? Well, they forced USAF to concentrate capability once held by hundreds of purely offensive bomb trucks into dwindling numbers of aircraft increasingly burdened by more and more expensive defensive systems.

Similarly they've turned the A-7 into the F-35.

Modern Russian SAMs may be completely defeated by a well-planned air campaign. How long does it take NATO to plan that air campaign? Probably longer than Russia can roll across a border and dig in giving NATO a fait accompli situation.

I guess none of this really matters on NS where budgets are unlimited and planning and logistics happen instantly in the background - but realistically modern force structures are poor models for large-scale NS warfare anyway. Doesn't stop people from basing World War IV tactics on Afghanistan or whatever.

[Miku the Based]

They'll know you are coming from basically the moment you hit those afterburners to take off.

But have you considered belkan space magic? That and the fact belkan ones can go 2,147,483,647 km/h

[Gallia-]

Mentally I tend to assume SAMs aren't killers per se so much as energy sappers of jet aircraft. They force jets to take evasive maneuvers and dump their payloads, keeping them from striking targets, or be vulnerable to IR missiles or AAA while the pilot is distracted by beep boops and radar growls from his headset and dozens of missile contrails out the cockpit. Forcing a jet to dump its payload short of its target or abort an attack run is almost as good as killing the jet, at least in the context of defense against air attack, if not in the context of actually destroying the enemy air force.

In a strategic sense this is even more true, substituting "offensive capability" for "energy."

Imagine that the B-2 was completely immune to Soviet strategic SAMs. Does that mean they were worthless? Well, they forced USAF to concentrate capability once held by hundreds of purely offensive bomb trucks into dwindling numbers of aircraft increasingly burdened by more and more expensive defensive systems.

Similarly they've turned the A-7 into the F-35.

Modern Russian SAMs may be completely defeated by a well-planned air campaign. How long does it take NATO to plan that air campaign? Probably longer than Russia can roll across a border and dig in giving NATO a fait accompli situation.

I guess none of this really matters on NS where budgets are unlimited and planning and logistics happen instantly in the background - but realistically modern force structures are poor models for large-scale NS warfare anyway. Doesn't stop people from basing World War IV tactics on Afghanistan or whatever.

Yeah the "soft" effects of high performance SAMs tend to be overlooked by armchairs. Sad.

It's also really the missing component on "NS forum". There's no coherent world or actual limits on resources, especially annoyingly practical and eminently important ones like time or political will, that can be enforced except by group agreement, which breaks down easily enough even in curated threads. And no one on NS RP who actually RP's has the real world experience (or general understanding, really) to seriously consider these things either.

To some extent even the people you'd expect to have the real world experience tend to miss certain issues, like the overly optimistic AAN wargames, but that's a thousand times more realistic than NS RP since it only thought giant helicopters and mega Predator drones would be able to survive Congress, and being able to oogle through walls with your SWAT team using a cell phone is better than Koolaid man outside of action movies and pro wrestling soap dramas.

I guess if I want to do some "NS stuff" I just fire up Harpoon or CMO these days and usually stop halfway through because my PC chugs when I have more than 600 active units and that's nowhere near enough to model the average civil air-sea background clutter needed for my battlegroup to hide in plain sight near the Kyushu-Honshu-Kurils-Sakhalin island chain.

RIP.

[New Solaurora]

So i decided to finally make my TEL Killer.

This thing is "Phoenix" Bomber. Something like B-2 but the one without the low altitude penetration requirement tucked in. Instead of 4 engine it has 2 massive turbofans in her ass Which hopefully helps with infra red signatures. Her mission, penetrate and destroy anything that moves or trying to hurt her loved ones.

(Image)

That's really cool lookin! Did you model that yourself?

[Triplebaconation]

It's also really the missing component on "NS forum". There's no coherent world or actual limits on resources, especially annoyingly practical and eminently important ones like time or political will, that can be enforced except by group agreement, which breaks down easily enough even in curated threads. And no one on NS RP who actually RP's has the real world experience (or general understanding, really) to seriously consider these things either. r the Kyushu-Honshu-Kurils-Sakhalin island chain.

Actual experts don't know the answers either.

When you're living in an epochal shift technological sophistication is actually a sign of obsolescence but the future is impossible to predict.

Your options are:
1) Become reactionary (Pierre Sprey)
3) Become stubborn (140mm tank guns, F-35)
2) Become over-enthusiastic (Transformation-era)

In the end 1914 always comes.

[Gallia-]

ye

[Austrasien]

No time for full post but,

1. Aircraft losses in Vietnam but helicopters are aircraft too.
2. I'm not really sure why the PVO could not have used the Strela 10, that IR SAM with a direction finder for detecting terrain following radar.

[Triplebaconation]

Yes, helicopters take heavy losses at low level because they engage in inherently dangerous missions at low level - reconnaissance, air assault, sar and casevac, etc. These missions bring them close to troop concentrations and defended targets. Some of them can't be performed from medium altitudes at all.

I'm not sure how Russia could materially affect strategic penetration tactics with short-range battlefield missiles. I can see ways in theory but they still feel silly.

I'm not saying low-level is better than flying around at 40,000 feet. However I'm unconvinced stealth and EW have advanced to the point where aircraft are consistently safer at high altitudes in contested airspace. In some circumstances taking advantage of terrain may be better. In some circumstances it may be safer for a helicopter to fly at 50 feet than 2000 feet (at both altitudes they're relative safe from small arms fire at speed but certainly at 2000 feet you may be more exposed to other threats which don't exist in say Afghanistan.)

The trick is knowing when these circumstances are but good intelligence and mission planning is critical for every air operation.

Anyway, the exact height some aircraft flies at isn't very interesting to me. The point is as battlefields become more complex the less likely the one-size fits all solutions favored by some in this thread are to be ideal.

Of course as battlefields become more complex the less fidelity NS RP will have! To get back to the original question, in reality the best countermeasures to an SDI system would probably depend on esoteric technical knowledge that neither side is likely to possess.

[Husseinarti]

Mentally I tend to assume SAMs aren't killers per se so much as energy sappers of jet aircraft. They force jets to take evasive maneuvers and dump their payloads, keeping them from striking targets, or be vulnerable to IR missiles or AAA while the pilot is distracted by beep boops and radar growls from his headset and dozens of missile contrails out the cockpit. Forcing a jet to dump its payload short of its target or abort an attack run is almost as good as killing the jet, at least in the context of defense against air attack, if not in the context of actually destroying the enemy air force.

This is how I've treated air defenses because historically this is what they do best, they aren't raw killers of aircraft, but instead make the jobs of pilots harder to do, which is just as good.

The best way to kill something is to kill it with another thing like it, tanks kill tanks, ships kill ships, and jets kill jets. Ground based air defenses are reactionary like anti-tank guided missiles, something you don't like shows up and you engage it with your reactionary weapon system. Air defenses force air forces to engage in attrition fights if they choose to engage them. Ideally a jet just flies around an air defense radar or air defense system when it finds it, however you put those air defenses around important things like a factory, a bridge, or a divisional HQ, which that jet has to blow up. You ideally augment them with your own jets who do things.

Denying an attack run is pretty much equally as good as destroying the jet. You keep your asset and they have to rearm and refuel to try for another run.

[Austrasien]

Yes, helicopters take heavy losses at low level because they engage in inherently dangerous missions at low level - reconnaissance, air assault, sar and casevac, etc. These missions bring them close to troop concentrations and defended targets. Some of them can't be performed from medium altitudes at all.

I'm not sure how Russia could materially affect strategic penetration tactics with short-range battlefield missiles. I can see ways in theory but they still feel silly.

I'm not saying low-level is better than flying around at 40,000 feet. However I'm unconvinced stealth and EW have advanced to the point where aircraft are consistently safer at high altitudes in contested airspace. In some circumstances taking advantage of terrain may be better. In some circumstances it may be safer for a helicopter to fly at 50 feet than 2000 feet (at both altitudes they're relative safe from small arms fire at speed but certainly at 2000 feet you may be more exposed to other threats which don't exist in say Afghanistan.)

The trick is knowing when these circumstances are but good intelligence and mission planning is critical for every air operation.

I don't really disagree, however...

As of now it's economical to outfit combat aircraft with sensitive and accurate radar warning receivers. This is a pretty high hill for medium-long range SAMs, which at present are almost totally dependent on radar, to climb. Aircraft have always been most susceptible to destruction when they are caught unaware and its rather tricky to catch an aircraft unaware when several minutes will likely pass between when an aircraft enters the range its RWR can detect a SAM sites radar and when the first shot is fired at it - let alone when the first shot actually arrives.

This seems like the single most important consideration to me ATM. The success of any other defensive technique depends mostly on the ability to detect the threat in a timely manner.

A common failing of SAM operators in post-1973 conflicts has been failing to achieve surprise and usually having their SAM sites consistently taken by surprise. Serbia is perhaps an exception here but for them it came at the cost of achieving low lethality. Their success with very strict EMCON suggests relying more on alternative search sensors, IRST/ESM/Acoustic, to cue fire control radar is a promising approach but so far land-based SAMs have been more or less evenly split between Russia which has mostly stuck with the radar-heavy designs (though Russia's perceived needs are not necessarily the same as its clients who mostly use their SAMs, notably Russia tends to place more emphasis on cruise missile and ballistic missile interception) and the US-NATO-Israel which have (until very recently) been almost completely focused on land-based SAMs for missile defense.

Though you could have fun imagining a world where Russia more thoroughly absorbed the lessons of Serbia and perhaps their air defense products would be more suited to the Drone War 202X.

[Miku the Based]

tanks kill tanks, ships kill ships, and jets kill jets

You know what else kill tanks, jets, rockets and missiles (although it's much more easier to attack the supply trucks supplying them (and not with other supply trucks for that matter)). More Anti-ship missiles kill other Ships than other ships (exception ship launching anti-ship missile) nowadays. Jets I don't know, I guess you're right, just don't expect to get into a dogfight.
Something being reactionary does not mean it's bad. Mustn't attach Ideological connotations to that word in this context.

[Gallia-]

The best way to kill something is to kill it with another thing like it, tanks kill tanks, ships kill ships, and jets kill jets.

Not really though. The Battle of Khafji was won by USAF, USN, and Marine Corps jets bombing hundreds of trucks, tanks, and APCs while a few BMPs and T-55s of a division's forward vanguard were annihilated by a LAR company, some AMXs, and a few attack helicopters. If the Marines had 100 tanks they might have won the slug match but the airplanes with Paveways and AGM-65 won it for them.

Ground based air defenses are reactionary like anti-tank guided missiles,

I wouldn't say they're reactionary. They can certainly surprise pilots, but they're defensive. There are very few targets that a SAM can attack offensively (maybe a small boat or being fired ballistically at a fixed ground target) but aircraft aren't one of these. They're more like land mines in that if you're aware of their presence, or suspect it, they can be completely nullified, but if you're caught unawares they can be very dangerous and the only option is to turn tail and flee the way you came, or bull through.

Something like RBS 23 would be good if it had a passive RF search and IIR attack mode, like RIM-116, than the ACLOS radar guidance it uses ATM, at least against certain things, like cruise missiles. OTOH the ACLOS is probably better against relatively slow, maneuvering targets like helicopters. And if you're aware of high performance SAM systems you generally have to take them into account by making yourself vulnerable to other forms of attack.

An F-15 can fly with impunity in the electric eye of a MIM-104 and attack things from much higher levels of energy/altitude if the enemy plane is flying at a very low altitude because it is trying to avoid a high performance SAM. It would be more worrisome to be spotted by a fighter that's 15,000 feet above you than it would be in the reverse situation, even if both sides are aware of the other, because you have much less room to fly your plane without being shot by an AMRAAM or something. If you have a flying radar that makes it worse since it reduces the size and number of radar shadows that the enemy planes can hide in.

OTOH given the relatively crummy performance of BVR systems in combat (most "BVR" missiles tend to be fired within 5-10 miles in practice) it is a bit overzealous to say that a F-15 at 30,000 feet can stop all planes within the kinematic range of its rockets because once they burn out they effectively waste a lot of potential maneuver energy. It's enough to make me think that if a MAWS could tell you when a missile that is attacking you has run out of energy that would be up there with telling you the direction and type of radar locked onto you, because it opens an airplane up to much greater possibilities for evasive maneuver if the rocket stopped burning 10 seconds ago (a dead weight glide bomb can't outclimb twin F110s).

something you don't like shows up and you engage it with your reactionary weapon system. Air defenses force air forces to engage in attrition fights if they choose to engage them.

Again, not necessarily.

Saddam's or Sadat's air forces couldn't fight the American or Israeli ones, even under the cover of their own SAMs (plenty of MiGs were wiped out by Python toting Mirages in 1973 because the pilots were badly trained). They were defeated easily, but the SAMs were still able to successfully defend targets until they were blown up by commandos or nullified by use of new technologies or whatever. That neither could necessarily take advantage of the SAM's strengths is no more an indictment against air defense systems than Turkey being unable to take advantage of their total air supremacy and Drone Death Stars, or America's total control of the skies in Vietnam, is an indictment against the advantages of air supremacy on being able to make it easier for ground troops to attack and take land. The fact that neither the USA nor Turkey could invade their opponents successfully doesn't really mar the advantages of air supremacy, it just means that is the current state of things in those times and places.

Turkey is probably injured more by the fact that its pilots are kinda bad (like Sadat's) and the drones are more a crutch than anything, since they can't effectively fight enemy air forces, and there isn't really any reason to believe that drones will somehow turn into autonomous superkiller 400-hours-per-year-tacair-fighter-pilots in a couple years either.

SAMs can't turn over an air defense battle by themselves anymore than a dozen planes bombing a tank division 50 miles away can stop it from stealing their airfield. Much like how the dozen planes usually ends up needing to be hundreds, most SAM defense nets tend to be relatively small versus the threats they face. They increase the amount of resources needing to be committed to win a battle. In 1973, Israel and Egypt were roughly equivalent, but Israel was prepared in a fashion to fight a major ground war against multiple opponents of the Arab armies, while Egypt was prepared to keep the army from couping Sadat, which would have naturally skewed the priorities of the establishments in a war that benefited Israel and harmed Egypt, and the USA had an economy 2.5-3x larger than the Soviets, so the relative support from the Soviets was limited vis-a-vis the Americans, even excluding the Vietnam techno-industrial-war experience.

I guess had the Israelis tried to fight 1973 by making Egypt turn itself into a liberal democracy through internal revolt, instead of marching on Cairo, they would have failed as bad as the Egyptians had because their war strategy would have been a mismatch of their pre-war priorities.

What we actually see in practice is that tiny countries, whose GDPs are smaller than the state of Texas and often poorly managed for protracted industrial warfare or other mitigating circumstances like being the epicenter of a civil war, are being mogged by 50+ Texas-sized economies and would have had no hope of seriously challenging their opponents even if they had actual Nazi UFOs or something. The fact that a few high performance missile systems, or even moderate performance ones, are being smothered shouldn't be surprising.

Maybe the last time where the small-but-noticeable effect that SAMs have against two countries fighting an air war would have tipped the balance was the Battle of Britain. In every other case they were capable of winning the battle before it starts, or the relative economic-industrial strengths of the opponents (and their marshaling of the strengths they possessed) were too large to be overcome by a single weapon. The fact that a lot of the data points are effective war marshaling economies (NATO) fighting siloized and disparate organizations in authoritarian regimes doesn't do the latter any favors, nor does the fact that they tend to be international pariahs with relatively lower industrial capacities.

Ideally a jet just flies around an air defense radar or air defense system when it finds it, however you put those air defenses around important things like a factory, a bridge, or a divisional HQ, which that jet has to blow up.

In practice, what happens is that the thing being defended by AAA suffers significant damage anyway, or the thing being defended forces the enemy to change tactics entirely. Sometimes both. Had America not had F-117s in Desert Storm and Package Q were its only options it would have been seriously limited in its ability to conduct combat sorties over downtown Baghdad. Luckily America had a big enough economy and sufficient political will to build an airplane who's sole purpose was telling Gainful and Guideline to vacate the premises.

What SAMs really do is that they divert excess industrial resources towards breathing room, giving you more time to push additional Me-262s out the door, at least in the strategic sense.

In the tactical sense they force aborts of bombers and tac fighters and push them to lower levels of energy, making them more vulnerable to additional air defense systems during the egress or during defensive jinking. As planes maneuver they come closer to Earth, so setting up a "ambush" with deliberately positioned machine guns, AAA, and Strelas, and forcing a tac bomber force down to the ground by a combination of high performance SAMs and mediocre fighters is eminently viable provided everything goes correctly. Naturally this is much more complex than it was in WW2, and there are more parts that can be assembled wrong, but it's usually something widespread like your tac fighter pilots simply can't get enough flight hours because the KGB is in charge of the country and keeps giving money to the strategic rocket forces, or the tac fighters are kept grounded because Erdogan is afraid that they will bomb him instead of the Syrians, or whatever. Sometimes it's justified sometimes it isn't, but regardless it happens.

You ideally augment them with your own jets who do things.

Friendly planes in the context of an air ambush keep the ambushees from, to continue the land mine analogy, simply bulling through the AAA/SAM net at supersonic speeds and eating the losses in radios [url]or helmets[/url] or whatever. You can fly straight if someone shoots a SA-7 at you because it's a tiny rocket and you will probably outrun it if your flares don't distract it. This is what Allied tac bombers like Strike Eagle and Tornado did in Desert Storm when hitting Saddam's airbases with Durandals. It worked alright.

This is a different matter if you have a Mirage F.1 or MiG-23 on your tail because you need to start maneuvering, which bleeds energy and speed, and makes you vulnerable longer in the kill zone of the ambush. Tac bombers are like HEMTTs. They drive through ambushes and keep going where they're going. Tac fighters/escort are tanks. They attack into the jaws of the ambush and try to distract enemy AAA by strafing and shooting missiles.

Saddam's Mirages and MiGs were shot down in less than 72 hours though and even when they got on the tails of Allied bombers the Allied pilots were well practiced at low level flight in their F-111s or whatever and could make them crash anyway.

Denying an attack run is pretty much equally as good as destroying the jet. You keep your asset and they have to rearm and refuel to try for another run.

It's virtual attrition. Stopping a bombing run today is good if you can destroy the bomber tomorrow. If you can't destroy the bomber ever it will just keep coming until you surrender. It only costs them fuel and ammo.

The people who can usually resist such campaigns the longest don't actually care much if the bomber hits its targets or not.

[Hrstrovokia]

What would be the military police component at division level? Battalion sized?