It would have to be a conventional threat then. I don’t believe any navy that could threaten Russia from the north has any nuclear armed cruise missiles.

I wouldn’t expect anyway that the nuclear threat is realistically still the primary threat as it could quickly escalate and bring mutual destruction while with the improved precision of the newer cruise missiles, it’s probably possible to deal a severe enough blow with conventional weapons only (e.g. by targeting important infrastructure targets like power stations, refineries, etc.).

I don’t really see any reason to believe the Mig-25/31 had better sensors than its Western competitors. It certainly had a big radar, but the Soviets consistently lagged the West in both radars and computers.

You can’t really put both 25 and 31 into the same context. While the radar of MiG-25 was nothing to write home about (IIRC the later PD variant had an enlarged MiG-23 radar to put it simply), the radar of the 31 was quite the achievement for the time as it was the first electronically scanned radar on a fighter plane and it could guide 4 SARH missiles to their targets simultaneously (the Tomcat Phoenix missiles used active radar for terminal homing).

How does the polar ice cap melting make the cruise missile threat more Significant?

It’s just an assumption developed while writing that response – with the ice cap melting, I assumed it would allow cruise missile armed subs to operate close to the huge northern Russian border which was so far mostly vulnerable to bombers only as most of the time of the year it used to be covered by a thick layer of ice (except e.g. area around Murmansk).

A quick search on net shows that the ice free area is rapidly increasing:
http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2014/01/18/as-global-warming-melts-the-arctic-who-will-build.aspx

Another factor is a possible conflict over the exploitation of resources hidden under it which might take place there then. Admittedly, I haven’t really put much thought into it.

No set RoEs, no matter how well thought out, are gonging to survive contact with the confusion of combat. Sooner or later you are going to have some pretty severe blue-on-blue incidents unless you have IFF systems that can pretty much guarantee you aren’t shooting at your own people and that is very, very bad for morale. The USAF outnumbered the NVAF over Vietnam pretty severely and thus the odds of blue-on-blue kills in that kind of an environment is very high in the absence of proper IFF systems so there was a very good reason for those RoEs specifying visual identification before launch. The Soviet air force or any other air force back in the 1970s and early 80s would have had the exact same kind of problems with the MiG-23 in BVR engagements unless they had a reallly good IFF set-up.

IMHO that’s generalizing as it depends on the situation at hand. If the RoEs were always so fixed over Vietnam, they would have barely fired any Sparrows then, rather than over 600 of them (though, only about 10% seems to have hit smth). Depending on the timeframe and service, they had ground control which tracked the flights with radars and radar picket airplanes (e.g. EC-121s later also equipped with Combat Tree systems and Vietnamese GCI communication surveillance) and ships which would guide them to the enemy formations. Later on, they also had a number of Combat Tree equipped F-4s.

So, you won’t fire in case of merged groups, of course (unless perhaps you’re in a Combat Tree equipped F-4), but if you’re flying a CAP and a group identified by ground control is approaching from the enemy direction and where there were no allied flights whatsoever, you’d be vectored towards it and be authorized to use the Sparrows without VID.

Clashes: Air Combat over Vietnam is a great source of information on this, but this is getting way off topic.

The Soviet doctrine relied almost completely on ground control even then, so the Vietnamese GCI did use IFF rather exclusively which backfired once those systems were compromised and could be read and even actively interrogated by American systems (started appearing already in Operation Rolling Thunder). Since these were run by the NSA and they didn’t want the other side to realize this it was not fully exploited till the Vietnamese figured out something was wrong and than reduced their IFF interrogation usage by the GCI or pilots switched off their IFF transponders.

I can’t say how chaotic the air war would have gotten in Cold War, but with the GCI system and tactics (e.g. corridors, altitude limitations, etc.) working as expected, the interceptors would be OK firing the BVRs at their vectored targets. But, with those stations taken out or jammed (as what happened to Syrians over Bekaa in early 80s), it might have quickly degraded into what you’re describing.

Totally agree here. AIM-7Fs will probably be replaced with basic versions of the AMRAAM. This is a good deal for Iraq. Important not to look at this just from an air defence perspective. With Sniper pods and PGMs these birds will help greatly in fighting the insurgency in addition to defending Iraqi air space.

Yes, but the AMRAAMs are not available NOW and for some time and that’s the whole point the others are trying to make. Yes, it is a good plane for their needs POTENTIALLY and if the Iraqis need them ASAP, perhaps they don’t really have time to play to the U.S. tune for e.g. a decade to maybe get some approved. Which they’d have to do kind of anyway as they’re also not allowed to add other weapons without U.S. approval and have to use U.S. contractors to service all advanced systems, not to mention that they’ll also need spare parts.

Regarding the insurgency, it’s a complicated political matter to be solved diplomatically, not through bombing. Besides, they only have rather heavy LGBs at disposal and using them on their cities would not be a popular decision..