Future hi tech weapons that they are actually building. Link from 2008 so must have added some more.
The problem with mounting a laser in a C-130... is that a C-130 can be shot down.
Any laser you can put in an aircraft, you can put in a ground vehicle but with a lot more power because it can be plugged in to the local electricity grid. More importantly a ground vehicle is easier to protect from the airborne laser than the aircraft can be protected from the ground based laser.
Regarding the rail gun, I remember them working on them decades ago, they had gotten to mach 5 and claimed in no time they'd have it well beyond mach 12. The problem was they thought all they had to do was increase the power and the extra speed would come. What actually happened is that they increased the power and the railgun started melting. So instead of accelerating a small aluminium puck to mach 12 it was accelerating a small aluminium puck and lots of plastic and bits of metal from the inside of the weapon to mach 4.
The plastic was the insulation from the wires and when the bare wires started shorting out they got even worse performance.
The main problem is that these systems launch very very light projectiles at very high speed. Try throwing a helium filled balloon and you will work out that air has density and for a projectile to travel through the air it needs both mass an energy to push aside the air in front of it. An aluminium puck has plenty of energy at mach 12, but its lack of mass means it wont keep it for long.
The other problem is that objects at such speeds tend to shatter in their first impact.
Experiements in shielding satellites from rocks from space found instead of one really thick sheet of metal that two relatively thin widely spaced sheets was the best solution as the projectile hits the first sheet and is literally vapourised, so having a large space behind it lets the material spread out so when it hits the second sheet it covers an area of about a metre and spreading tiny fragments over that area means it doesn't have the energy or mass to penetrate the next sheet... and this is with an object that will penetrate a single sheet 50mm thick.
Military robots?
Even the Russians have those in development and production... they have actually been in use for years in demolition and fire fighting.
BTW these rods of god I did not know about, the US has been talking about putting DU rods in ICBMs and SLBMs to have a global capability within a reasonable time frame.
The problem with dropping them from satellite, is that like pennys from the empire state building that the earths atmosphere will slow them down.
7,000 mph is nothing like the speed of a meteorite.
Satellites orbit the earth in about 90 minutes, so if there is only one satellite with these weapons then it might take days for it to pass over the spot on Earth they want to hit, and it will be known by everyone when the satellite is overhead and in a position to launch... being inside a large building would be protection enough as the impact damage would be restricted to an area of a fairly small room.
And the disc thing is just a variation of a cruise missile/anti tank missile.
The cost of making thousands of them, but also making them intelligent enough to recognise friend from foe and target vs innocent civilian, or statue for that matter will drive up the cost.
To fly, they will need to be relatively lightly constructed, plus I rather suspect that models designed to kill humans would actually violate landmine agreements.
It would be a great day out with the shotgun however...
Shot down 1 F-117 by flight path information and then flooding the area matrix with missiles............and that proved the ability to see stealth for the end of time.
If the missiles didn't guide why use SA-3s? Wouldn't it have been much more efficient to use Grads... with barometric fuses operating at the height the F-117 flew at?
I could tell you the flight path of an civilian airliner and let you control a thousand SAM batteries that weren't allowed to use their search or tracking radars and you could launch all of those missiles, with some before the plane should arrive and most during and then some after to cover for the chance it might be late or early and your chances of hitting the target would be so low as to be zero.
The thing is that you can't launch an SA-3 without a lock in the first place.
It wasn't luck that a missile killed an F-117.
Flying the same route over and over again is not a mistake if no one can detect you.
Missiles don't hit by accident.
It is not an accident that the F-117 has been withdrawn from service.
It is also not an accident that the first mission of Desert Storm was to send in Apache helicopters to take out some long range radars before they even sent in their F-117... why send in slow vulnerable helicopters if the F-117 could have done the job much faster... unless of course that radar could spot the F-117s and could have alerted fighters to go up and shoot them down with cannon and IR guided missiles...
Best counter point is 'if so, the why did not FRY shoot down more Stealths' and why did not they develop technologies to export to others who are on the list of 'bad guys' for the US.
The US had full recon info about where the SA-3s were and planned their stealth flights around them. After a few bombing raids in a row by aircraft that were not tracked the Serbs worked out it was probably stealth aircraft and secretly moved a few SA-3s to where they thought the flight path was.
On the night in question during the period the previous raids took place they turned on their new SAMs and got enough of a lock to launch some missiles... one of which got the kill.
Not luck, good planning and tactics.
With much more advanced SAMs and radars, and of course a functioning airforce NATO wouldn't have even started.
End of it, the most vulnerable items like Tanks, BMDs, Troop trucks, Artillery, mobile AAA, Mobile C2s etc. need to be protected in order to do their jobs well. With laser/INS/GPS guided bombing taking place from 40K feet, there is a limit to how much Tor/Buks can do to protect columns on the move.
Tanks and other vehicles get protected with decoys and Nakidka camouflage, and the fact that the recon assets used by the other side to find targets will be shot down, and there will be no aircraft at 40K feet because BUK and Favourite, and soon Vityaz will be shooting them down too.
I am talking about end stage CIWS and cheap and small enough to be installed on each tank, BMD and offer protection of 1 km radius.
Every Brigade has its own organic air defence vehicles, and there are larger longer range air defence units higher up the chain.
The Russian Army has the best air defences in the world... and they are getting better.
At what speed do JDAMs fall? I bet several Machs, so there has to be a way to kill or deflect them before they hit the intended target.
JDAMs glide and are subsonic... the whole idea is horizontal range, not speed.
With this in place the overwhelming advantage of USAF to 'bomb at will' will be mostly gone.
You are confusing Libya with Russia my friend.
The US wouldn't intervene in Georgia what exactly would it attack Russia over?
I would suggest nothing.
F22s can take out S-200/300/400 SAMs and then Tor/Buk and even Pantsirs.
No, it can't. There are simply not enough F-22s to both attack Russia and defend all of NATO and the US from retaliation attacks. Even if they did have enough they don't have a large enough force of them to fly with impunity in Russian airspace without inflight refuelling. Even assuming the S-400 can't shoot down F-22s, and that is not proven, the F-22 doesn't carry a weapon that can reliably penetrate Russian air defences.
However, in next 5 years, US will be fielding robotic warriors good enough to put a dogged fight and meeting full or partial ground objectives.
Technically they are not robots. They are controlled directly by operators... cut the datalink or artillery strike the operators vans.
In 1995, Pavel Grachev the Russian Defense Minister
He is not the first to underestimate their enemy. The second chechen campaign was fairly different from the first however.
So for now, a squadron of F22s can eat up, digest and spit the bones out of............any legacy air force and that includes airforces with Su-35s fielding 60 Km IRST capability.
Where has this fixation with 60km come from?
What makes you think a squadron of F-22s deployed to Europe would go unnoticed by the Russians?
A supercruising F-22 will have an enormous IR signature from its skin from heating via friction with the air it is moving through...
The most revolutionary change which the wide deployment of SAR/GMTI capable radars will bring is the contraction of the targeting cycle.
That article is from 1997 and yet Israel and the US still do everything in their power to stop Russia selling S-300s to Iran... Odd don't you think?
Especially considering synthetic apature radar and ground moving target indicator technology is actually quite common.
The obvious problem of course is that a bombing radar needs to get closer than 250km from the target it is going to find and bomb.
Do not even want to discuss "1 Glory" kill of F-117 which was a result of a shot gotten more lucky than the megamillion lottery ticket.
If it was luck then why aren't B-2s shot down too?
They are much larger than F-117s so it should be much easier to be lucky with them.
The fact is that the F-117 was detected and shot down because the Serbs used tactics against it.
Normal flightpaths for the F-117 will skirt around radars that will detect it and by having mobile radars planning flightpaths becomes near impossible.
That S400 can track subsonic stealth cruise missile at 60kms is somewhat of a relief.
60km is actually unlikely because of the curve of the earth meaning a low flying cruise missile would be hidden behind the ground between the cruise missile and the S-400 system.
The thing is however that an AD network shares information between ground, air and space based sensors.
The primary weapon of F-22 is AMRAAM... a weapon that has a combat record of less than 50% kill probability against unaware targets that don't have ECM or ESM.
As such I suspect its performance against an Su-35 would be something like 5%.
Now factor in the number of missiles the F-22 can actually carry at once and considering the numbers of Su-35s are likely going to increase over time, while F-22 numbers are not, and that T-50 will be entering service shortly as well, which will not even need to jam AMRAAM as its RCS will be too small for AMRAAM to get a lock at any range and then I start to ask the question of why bother with F-22... it is little to no threat and it is walking through a minefield of ground based SAMs and radars that will rip it a new one.
The west builds something and after a very short break, goes onto further improving and devicing mode.
Yes, the west is always coming out with brand new revolutionary things... but the M16 is older than the AK-74, their Harpoon is older than most Russian in service anti ship missiles, the Abrams tank is from the early 1980s, and the Bradley is a copy of a BMP-2 with a weaker armament and no amphibious capability.
BTW the French and Germans planned to make the ANS in the 1980s and they still haven't made it.
Ironically its specs... 700-800kgs, flight speed of mach 2, combined rocket ramjet propulsion, 100km range... in other words for the last 30 years on and off they have been planning to build a Kh-31.
UK is soon launching Sea Ceptor missile by 2015 that would be an answer to Moskits and Yakhonts.
hahahahaha... It is British... they will cancel it.
Besides it is a replacement for Seawolf... which was supposed to be able to shoot down all Russian AShMs anyway...
This means even a small CIWS type gun can kill these at a distance that exploding bomb does no harm.
More likely TOR will have destroyed them 10km away from the ground unit they were likely being used against...
Look at the article above from ausairpower. Killing off the weapons launched from birds at 40K feet is becoming real real requirement. Otherwise, in half an hour a whole moving coloum of 500 soldiers and two dozen tanks will be reduced to rubble.
Air power has been promising to be able to win wars on its own since WWII. They are wrong.
Camouflage, jamming, decoys, and of course enemy air power will all be working against them.
Remember this is the same group that promise surgical strikes are possible... when was the last time a surgeon used a hand grenade as a tool?
They have certainly come a long way from WWII where the target was a ball bearing factory and the result was 50,000 dead in the nearby town of women and children and old men, but even today to get one guy they end up killing everyone on the city block.
The thing is that it is more than just weapon specs, your intel needs to be accurate too... and we know how pathetic western intel can be.
I need a weapon system that can kill/deflect the JDAM/JSOW SDBs type items at a safe distance. F15/F111/F16 etc. can bomb all day and night and return home all depleted and tired........while the troops coloumn moves on to........GET THE JOB DONE
And you have been told, Pantsir-S1 or Tor plus a decent long range SAM like S-300 against the planes you list above or S-400 for F-22 and F-35. The F-111 is no longer in service. F-15 and F-16 wouldn't last 10 minutes over an S-300 battery.
Speaking from the perspective of nations like Iraq, Serbia and others.......In last 40 years, US via USAF has time and again proven its ability to gain total air supremacy and win 90% of the war from air alone.
The skies over Serbia and Kosovo were as dangerous from day one to the last day... something like day 74. The guy running the air power for NATO said they had run out of targets and could nothing to stop the ethnic cleansing... they would see a fire start in an albanian village in Kosovo and watch it spread to every house and there was nothing they could do.
In the end the US had to trick the Russians into asking the Serbs to surrender by letting the Russians think they would be involved in the peacekeeping operations.
I believe Madeline Allbright said before the conflict that it would take less than a week for NATO to defeat the serbs.
Listening to news reports during the conflict the NATO airpower wiped out the Serbian Army and air defence forces several times over, yet at the end they had lost very little.
So either develop a capability to deny this total supremacy or develop a way to kill off the bombs and missiles that this supremacy launches. I believe later is more practical and cheaper method.
That is the fundamental flaw in your logic. If big strong bullies could be easily defeated then they would be.
The US and the West has spent hundreds of trillions of dollars on being able to go places and destroy military forces. It is a necessary thing for them to be able to install friendly puppet states and control resources to keep the gravy train flowing.
You don't think some magical shoulder launched missile is the solution to all these problems do you?
Instead of building this magical and impossible missile, what real air forces have actually done is develop ways of defending their larger SAMs like using decoys, and jammers, and locating smaller SAMs able to shoot down weapons that might be used against the larger SAMs, and lots of other things like making everything mobile and moving every once in a while.
The real thing that stops F-22s and F-35s is the ability to nuke the US... tried and true for 50 years.
However, this logic does not ward off the imminent dangers that F22-F35s pose to RF. If the US wants and is willing to accept the 'ALL' types of costs invovled, then it is in position to launch attack on RF and throw few surprises.
But that is the point... the US has been in a position of superiority over the Soviets a couple of times but is not ready or willing to take the plunge.
A war with Russia would economically kill the US... no one will trade with the country that starts WWIII.
The F-22 has neither the range or weapon set to be able to significantly effect Russias nuclear deterrent. Even if they shot down every Russian aircraft the nuclear retaliation would destroy the US completely as a functioning country. And for what? What does the US benefit from shooting down a few Russian fighters?
I would repeat my point made earlier, that ICBMs are the ONLY source of offensive threat that RF has now, which is taken seriously by the West.
So ultimately your problem with Russian forces is that they are not able to invade Europe or the US?
If that is the case then I am glad, because the problem of keeping up with the US and NATO is that it would bankrupt Russia and is simply not worth the effort.
Your suggestion that Russias nuclear forces are the only thing standing between safety and US invasion is naieve.
The US liking not being radioactive will suffice to make Russias nuclear forces sufficient for the role... the cost to get the same effect with conventional forces would require Russia to invest at least 75% of what NATO spends and that is simply not an option.
Russia is not communist any more and has no political system to spread.
It can certainly take a larger role internationally but I doubt they want the role of world police that the US so eagerly takes when it wants to have its way somewhere.
Do you think US will want to fight alone, nopes, it will bring with itself the whole of NATO plus Australia plus Canada and others like Saudi Arabia, Israel, Georgia, Japan, S. Korea etc. Who will come to help Russia out?
NATO is a defensive organisation that is at its heart a bureaucracy. In the regime change conflict against Iraq the NATO member Turkey chose not to take part, and I rather think in a conflict against Russia that the majority of NATO countries will also refrain from taking part too.
Ironically the states most likely to be keen would also be likely to decline because they have the most to lose like the Baltic republics that could have Russian forces marching onto their territory in hours.
Goergia joining is unlikely too as it will likely be invaded by the forces Russia has already positioned in South Ossetia and Abkhazia.
Russia wouldn't need help... it would simply launch a nuclear strike at all the parties ranged against it before they could take out its nuclear strike capability.
The good news is, there are already cracks in NATO as seen in Libya to some extent. Also, fear of punishment by Russia should make NATO nations in Europe think twice as they are much near to be repeatedly nuked upon.
Perhaps you are viewing things from an alternate reality... the US and EU are on the brink of economic collapse... with the EU situation absolutely hilarious because all those countries that are in enormous debt are in enormous debt to France and Germany! In other words the best off countries in the EU are owed by the worst off countries and the solution of financial aid further shifts that imbalance!!!
The EU is a house of cards where the poor owe the rich enormous amounts... which makes you wonder even if the poor could pay are the rich considered rich because of what they already have or because of what they are owed.
If they cancel all the debt is the EU rich or poor?
And you think they will try to invade Russia?
They can't even work up the gumption to invade Syria let alone Iran... but you think they might invade Iran.
Russian military situation is only a grade better than 90s. From D grade to C at best. Generals in Georgia 2008 were talking via cell phone and an fast advancing VDV squad had to be chased by a jeep to let them know that taking Tbilsi was not to be taken over anymore and they should turn back to Ossetian theater.
At a tactical level there were problems. Many were using civilian GPS for navigation, but the US turned off the civilian signal in the region for the period of the war. Didn't effect the Georgian side as they were using the military signal. Reminded the Russian forces why they invested in Glonass though.
However it was clear that the investment had to be more than just putting up satellites. They also had to equip their forces with sat nav in their vehicles and hand held devices.
Having said that major NATO countries are in the same boat at the moment... Germany, France, the UK, rely on GPS and for any reason the US might turn it off or turn it down.... depending on their interests.
Despite all the deficiencies in C4IR the rag tag thrown together 58th Army cut through the better prepared NATO trained Georgian forces like a knife through hot butter... against all western forecasts.
Western forces were surprised they even mobilised that quickly in the first place.
Many such small operational chinks in armor show the level of preparedness and depth which is in bad shape.
The region... operationally is a backwater. It would be like complaining that the USAF is crap because the ANG failed to shoot down any of the planes that were hijacked on 11/9.
The South Ossetia issue was settled in 5 days... whether the VDV were critical to that success is moot... that is like saying Desert Storm took 8 months for air power but x number of days with ground forces therefore air power is useless. Or Kosovo took NATO air power alone over 2 months to sort out with the loss of a 2 hundred million dollar stealth bomber and most of NATO.
strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil
Different militaries draw different conclusions from similar incidents.
For instance the claim in the blurb was that the VDV was saved from reform by the relationship between its commander and Putin.
I would say the VDV evaded cuts in the reforms because the VDV is basically the sort of force the Russian Army needs and many parts of the reform are designed to turn the Soviet Army from a huge slow force into a lighter more self sufficient, and mobile force with heavy firepower... like the VDV.
The west doesn't have anything like the VDV, the VDV is fully motorised and armoured and this armour and mobility sets it above western airborne forces that have to be dropped much closer to their target, which makes them orders of magnitude more vulnerable.
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First of all, you are mixing guns and missiles. If F-117 was hit by AA gun, than yes, it is lucky hit, because the old guns, which Serbs used could only make barrage artillery fire, because they could not see target at night. Missiles are not fired in that way. SAM's radar or optical system have to track the target, that missile could be launched. Missile launch is only final act in the chain of air defense procedure, which air defense personnel have to do before launching. SAM-3 battery hit F-117 three times, ones it was shot down, twice it was damaged. Missiles were old, so we do not know if in those cases warheads and fuses worked correctly, that F-117 was only damaged. It's true, that Serbs worked in the most heavy electronic warfare environment with heavy SEAD/DEAD support, that no other opponents ever see. Of course they also use visual observation posts and optical system in SAM-3, but this is part of strategy and tactics and it works.