SAMs are ultimately a pointless weapons system. They are single task, assume you are on the defensive, and are absolutely useless in striking back at your enemy. If you buy planes to shoot down planes, you at least have the option of using those planes to haul bombs at the enemy once you’ve shot down the incoming hostiles.

Think for a moment how much money the USSR invested in SAM systems. Untold billions of roubles. How many more Su-27s could they have built for the cost of developing all those SAMs?

You can rise the price-tag for any attacker and it is comperably cheap, especially if you don’t have to finance it. To rely your airspace defense on it has some drawbacks: The UdSSR invested unbelievable amounts in the late 50s. The North Vietnamese at one time got 40% of the Soviet SAM production with the success of an average 1-2% hit rate. To have a tight defense you have to invest incredible amounts of money. GarryB might dispute it, but a low-level SAM system (not the mighty S-300) usable against cruise missiles doesn’t have the bandwidth to fight 30 or 40 incoming missiles at once, especially not if they are going low and therefore reducing the effective range (for detection and tracking) of the system.
I wouldn’t rate defensive SAM systems as useless. But it is more a strategic weapon to deny the enemy free travel in your airspace. It partly resembles the German Flak in WW2: It always took its toll on the bombers, but it never prevented any attack.

GarryB,
as always you either don’t want to understand or I didn’t make myself precise enough. I don’t doubt the ability to destroy cruise missiles with MiG-31 and SAM systems (while the S-300 is not really the most cost-efficient system to accomplish it). But, the real disadvantage for the nation that wants to defend against these kind of attacks is that they are less predictable.

Example:
In order to have a massive strike on targets without cruise missiles (and let me take Iran as example) you need massive air power. The build-up doesn’t go undetected. You are aware, somehow. Every aircraft can fly just one sortie at a time, you need CAP, AWACS, tankers, SEAD. To have 60 Strike aircraft you’ll need at least 120 aircraft total. More realistic would be 180.

If you stick to cruise missiles you can deploy a high number of warheads with just half a dozen B-52H (which take-off somewhere sometime and come on normal civil airline routes) and one or two SSNs or modified SSBNs. There is no possibility of being aware, only by closely watching the political “weather forecast”.

So, in order to defend you need not only good defence in terms of capability, you need the means to defend against 100 targets in a time-frame of 10 minutes. That is clearly unachievable (no matter if you take MiG or F-14). Carrier Battle groups were the only targets with such defense, but only by combining all means at the same time and they were still in need of at least some luck. Of course one can deploy a similar defense for a land-based target. But the disadvantage for a country like Iran is that it has to pay tremendous amounts of money for it.

And ground units don’t have any electronic capability, from artillery spotting radars to equipment to jam enemy proximity fused artillery… not to mention mobile decoys.

Cruise missiles against sea targets need radar homing. It can be jammed or confused. A pre-programmed cruise missiles cannot be jammed, only if GPS is jammed. And then they still have INS-guidance with some precision.

The best way is to build a huge wall (the modern chinese wall) or, my suggestion, make the target big and hard enough. A cruise missiles can succesfully strike dense targets like a “communications center” or a radar station, but a industrial facility strechting over square miles with dozens of building (preferrably made of good concrete) is hard to take out. You don’t need to dig deep.
Even the American bomb raids on German factories often did not damage the factory too bad. The problem of a cruise missile is that you cannot destroy some targets with a 500kg warhead.

failure at 1.46 really ain’t bad……..I think this is better than the 340 static failure tests.

However, at least it failed where it should fail, and I think, from what I have heard at work, it failed in the expected way.

That is consistent with my information.

Right on both counts – you’re not safe and you’re not deterring anyone with even the fanciest anti-cruise defense network. And even if the AA lethality is very high, the attacker can simply start to mix in large numbers of decoys and other countermeasures to help swamp it. IMO, the better investment for the weaker nation is in precision guided munitions with an eye towards defense via deterrence.

That is the strategic background of equipping you air force with unimaginable expensive weapons. Scare your enemy and let him know you can hit him anytime anywhere. Of course, there must be something worth defending. Other option for defending is the North Korean approach: They dug lots of military sites deep into the mountain.
A mandatory thing before having any successful strike is to identify your target. Best way to reduce the effectiveness of cruise missile attack is to build fake factories, put the most important equipment in in the barrack outside the Uranium Enrichement Facility. Plants high trees! After all, these measures are cheap and much more effective than S-300, MiG-31 and all the others.

@Attendants: Please leave the capability of the MiG-31 out, it would mess this until now pretty interesting thread.

Since cruise missiles are usually subsonic and straight-line flyers, is it possible to intercept them with fighter aircraft. While they usually have low RCS and fly very close to the ground (and thus able to hide in ground clutter), but assuming that this issue can be resolved to some extent, what may be the probability of success.

I guess the problem is more to be on the right place at the right time. Additionally, you will most of the time deal with a cloud of missiles. Imagine an B-52H attacks a pricy target (for example an uran enrichement complex :diablo: ). It can carry 12 cruise missiles. There are 2 B-52s. They launch all missiles at once and target is expected to be destroyed with 4 cruise missiles reaching it (so, interception of 20 missiles is acceptable). The defense has to deal with 24 targets, going low and subsonic. To intercept at least 20 cruise missiles, you need more than 3 MiG-31, perhaps rather 6 because they can hardly go after them with SRAAMs. How many MiG-31 does anybodt have available? One MiG-31 probably costs the price of all cruise missiles.

Even SAM will be a little bit stressed out. 24 targets low level, how many missiles are on station and ready?

So, happy uranium enrichement facility was lucky and all cruise missiles were downed. So what? Mighty USAF sends next B-52H 20 minutes later and look if they can intercept the next 24 Tomahawks.

That all is a big dollar-burning spectacle, but the guy with most dollars will probably win. Compare to similar scnearios like CVBG against Russian Tu-2x or National Missile Defense.

Edit: That is not unlike the strategic bomber campaign against Germany. Just change “cruise missile” to “B-17” and “MiG-31” to “Luftwaffe” and adjust the price-tag of the systems.

Something I actually found on this forum:

M88-2 SFC of 0.78 TWR of 8.5:1 Pressure Ratio of 24:1

EJ200 SFC of 0.80 TWR of 9:1 Pressure Ratio of 25:1

F100-229 SFC of 0.74 TWR of 7.9:1 Pressure ratio of 32:1

http://forum.keypublishing.co.uk/archive/index.php?t-17525.html

I would like to know at which altitude and Mach number these SFCs are measured. As all engines have a bypass ratio of about 0.3 to 0.4, the SFC doesn’t change too much over Mach number. In terms of altitude same applies so that we can take it as cruise figure.