Personally I find this all a bit fascinating from one specific aspect: this is the first time in recent air warfare (i.e. post-Vietnam) that a truly modern, capable SAM system has been employed in combat. From the way it sounds, the Buk would appear to be proving itself as a very capable system. It sounds like they actually managed to smack a Tu-22MR with one, not an M3. If Russia is to be believed (and in this case why not, they aren’t hiding the story) then the BACKFIRE was flying a recon sortie, which implies an MR not an M3. That also makes you wonder why an MR was used instead of an Su-24MR, but that’s another issue. The point is that regardless of the variant, the BACKFIRE does have a decent ECM fit, and if they got it with an SA-11 then that speaks very highly of the missile system.

Has there been any reports of USor Israeli techs working with the Georgian AD systems? I find it strange that soviet made SAMs was able to bring down Russian planes at all. You would have thought that the Russians would have put in back doors to their sytsems or could have tailored their ECMs to counter soviet stuff at the very least.

Loosing frogfoots (frogfeet?) to MANPADS and AAA could have been unavoidable, but the radar guided stuff should never have had a prayer.

This is beginning to look very much like the Sudetenland or Anschluss, all over again. And just as then, nobody is willing to stand up in opposition. 🙁

You either need to brush up on your history or news, because the reality is nothing like the Nazis starting WWII. :rolleyes:

The Georgians started all this, on the opening day of the Olympics when most of the worlds most important heads of state were in Beijing, including the unofficial head of Russia, probably in the hope of the Russian ‘peacekeepers’ not getting directly involved in the fighting so Georgia can overrun South Ossetia before the world (or the Russians to be more precise) could react.

If the Russians wanted to annex Georgia, Gerogia would have been annexed already. Everything so far suggests the Russians are reacting instead of being proactive.

plawolf,

First I have to acknowledge what you wrote above. Respect from ones adversary being the greatest accolade etc. Sincerest of appreciations, sir.

I only spoke the truth. 🙂

I knew someone would pick me up on that. For me its difficult to calculate the effect fighters would have on a TLAM strike. Many hundreds of TLAM’s and dozens of CALCM’s have been fired operationally and, whilst a number have been brought down by ground defences, I’m not aware of any that have been shot down air-air. TLAM is still a small radar-target thats flying very low against background clutter (how good is a J-8’s radar against multipath reflection?).

Well, I feel that there is a certain degree of false statistics there. I suspect the fact that the past recipient of cruise missile attacks have all been totally outclassed and their air force destroyed, crippled or forced to go into hiding in the opening stages of the conflicts might have something to do with the ‘poor’ record of past fighters v cruise missiles engagements. You can’t very well go hunting cruise missiles if you pick up a squadron of F15s immediately after take-off now can you? :p

As for the J7 and J8’s radar. Well I feel that they would be used like the interceptors that they are. AWACS planes would vector them in and engagements would most likely be WVR where the fighters would use short range AAMs and guns. Under those conditions, radar performance is going to be secondary. Although in the event of bad weather, the J7s and early block J8IIs could have serious difficulties.

Also, bare in mind that cruise missiles would be coming in waves, so there is going to be large clumps of cruise missiles in the sky, so the low endurances of the J7s are going to be less or a problem as they would be able to find new targets without needing to travel very far after a kill.

Then there is the issue of Alert status and how many aircraft the PLAAF could actually generate in the few minutes from detection to the TLAM’s entering the targets SAM engagement zone?. Obviously there would be a CAP up and alert-status fighters spotted at various airfields, but, only certain airfields alert fighters would be in position to be able to vector on the inbounds. Theoretically the number of interceptors able to engage the TLAMs may not be all that high!

Well, unless we are talking about a surprise attack by the Americans, all PLA untils would be on a war footing by the time a carrier is in any position to launch attacks. Thus we should expect very high readiness. What more, in effectively all remotely possible scenarios, both sides would want to limit any conflict as much as possible since escalation is in no-one’s best interest. Thus the PLA would be able to concentrate much of their forces in a fairly small area, namely near and around Taiwan. Any American strikes would also mostly be aimed at bases used to attack Taiwan, thus would also be similarly concentrate in that area. The Americans can attack elsewhere, but that would merely force retaliation with no advancement of American military aims.

Also, one needs to consider that SAMs would not be fired as soon as a target gets within range, this is especially true of long range stuff like he S300 and HQ9s. In a co-ordinated defence, SAM batteries could easily choose not to engage targets that have fighters heading to intercept them and instead focus of groups of missiles the fighters can’t get to and any that get past the missile screen, since they have a relatively long engagement window.

But all in all, it should be pretty self evident that fighters will play a major role in any cruise missile defence and thus it would yield an inaccurate outcome to exclude them from consideration.

Information Warfare ‘wolf. If there is one thing that sets the USN apart from everyone else its their ability to exploit passive and offboard sensors to develop the plot whilst remaining silent. They realised this after Midway and they have spent decades refining fleet manoever to an operational art. I’m critical of the USN in some areas, I think they ridiculously over-man their ships and they have strange ideas on engineering officers being suitable for operational commands (and I say that with my engineering background!), but their fleet ops are light years ahead of EVERYONE else.

A fleet can play its own IW game perfectly and not give a byte of data that an enemy can use to track its location, but that does not mean it cannot be found using other means. I was merely pointing out that to play the IW game at all, a carrier battle group must first give up its own powerful sensors, thus in the event of the fleet being detected, it could easily find sever layers of its defences breached before it even knew it was under attack. That is a gamble with very high stakes, and may be one an admiral does not want to play.

As for off-board sensors, well, there are few sensor platforms as surviverable as an US carrier battle group. Its not like the PLA does not have the means to disrupt or even destroy space based sensor assets. With satellite networks degraded or even destroyed, will a carrier be willing to risk going into range of hostile strike assets completely blind? America’s greatest strength it also its greatest vulnerability, and China has realised this some time ago.

Everyone can make mistakes. The USN isnt infallible and they have been caught napping under exercise conditions. My point would be though that you cant rely on the other side making a mistake for your nations defence!. Either the capability is there to find and track a carrier group before it could initiate land-attack operations or its not. For the PRC at the moment, going purely from open source, its not.

I fail to see how what I suggested would be relying on the Americans making a mistake. The Americans can do everything they can perfectly and still be detected. That was my point. Fair enough the chances of this happening before a US fleet gets within strike range is pretty remove going by open sourced stuff, but that is the bare minimum level the PLA would be at, and the reality could be very different, since developments in information warfare is very hard to observe from photos, and solid open source info on the matter is pretty patchy to say the least.

But even just assuming open source level capabilities on the part of the PLA, as our earlier discussion on anti-cruise missile operations shows, the US would need to be exceedingly lucky to be able to majorly degrade the PLA’s war fighting abilities with an opening salvo stand-off attack. The game is only just beginning when the carriers attacks. Since as soon as it launches an attack, it suddenly narrows its location significantly for the PLA, and assets the carrier used to launch the attack could then be used to try and hunt it down.

Its an enormously complicated discussion about carrier and anti-carrier ops from this point on. My question is, do we really want to go down this road again? 😮 Or should we agree our own ‘red lines’ to limit this discussion somewhat for the sake of our social lives and keyboards? 😉

Such a fighter has to be aware targeted already otherwise it will not behave in an unpredictable way. By the way it does not matter, who will update the AIM-120 before the terminal phase, when an advanced data-link-system is at hand. The Swedish intercepters where positioned CGI-system with “unlimited” range in the area of intrest. Just one of several interceptor will go active, all interceptor radars are on standby since take-off. A few seconds from that single fighter radar are enough to get the desired range data, which were shared on the fighter displays of every fighter via datalink. To cut time, that data were fed in each weapon-computer too. The targets were split between the interceptors. At optimum release point an interceptor goes active for a last update or when equipped with semi-active AAM all will go active. The intended victims are in trouble to figure out, who is targeting whom, when the time runs down.
The name of the game in BVR-fights is positioning and superior SA from every source of info possible.
In NATO-exercises Red and Blue forces are tasked to bring down or to defend the AWACS with all at hand. Tactical surprises are most welcome.
The AWACS itself is no cooperative target. It can go high-subsonic, slow-down, direction and height. Equipped with latest sensors and EW-suit and enough installed electric-power to overpower every fighter installed system. All its defenders are aware, that it is the main figure in every Chess-Game or arial-engagement. 😉

A load of irrelevent regurgitation thrown out as verbal chaff to try and give the impression of knowledge and to distract from the issue at hand.

Raising all of the above is just a waste of time and is a pointless excerise in regurgitation that does nothing but pointlessly complicates the situation, since you would use different tactics in a group furball compared to a 1-on-1 fight.

One-on-one, as was the original premise, all of the above is irrelevent. Not only does using a ‘snapshot’ course update method reduce the chance of a kill since the missile will only be heading to the guessed location of the target based on dated data, it will also almost certainly reduce the range at which the missile is advised to be fired at, since a missile getting periodic updates is almost certain to be using a less efficient flight path then a missile getting continuous updates. And of course, once you add in the mix an inforced ‘time out’ for your guidence radar, the odds get even longer.

Okay – but where are the dispensers mounted?

http://www.defencetalk.com/pictures/showphoto.php/photo/15272

That picture looks PSed, or at the very least, was cropped in a way to try and make it look like it was the J10 that dropped the flares when in fact it was something else. The scale is all wrong, and so is the position of the flares compared to the fighter.

Fact of the matter is that we just won’t know for sure where the flares are kept until we see a picture of them emerging from a fighter, or if there is an offical cut-away diagram that marks its location. Since niether of these things have happened yet, to the best of my knowledge, the answer to your question on the location of the flare dispensers is: Your guess is as good as mine.

State of the art AAMs are programmed to go to a cube of space, where the intended target will show-up and it will most of the time.
Most of the time there is no more than 60 seconds between release and impact.

And that is a far from optimal means of weapons control, especially at the extreme range of the missile’s range, since a fighter can easily get out of that cube of space with time to spare. Whereas it would be a lot harder to do so against a missile that is getting good mid-course updates to keep its flight path up to date and optimal.

Sorry plawolf – I was talking about something that was completely different to what you were trying to say – a result of not following the conversation properly. But as to an anti-radiation LRAAM vs the fighter – it depends on a number of factors I suppose.

LPI based radars such as APG-77 – by fooling ARLRAAMs.
Guidance of BVR missiles through passive means as the F-22 is capable of apparently through ALR-94.
Team work such as handing off responsibility of BVR targeting data to other fighters while you go passive. Etc.

No worries, it happens. I know there are many ways to counter a passive AAM, I was just pointing out that turning off your own radar would not be one of the more effective methods.