Russian military intervention and aid to Syria #13

Actually for every flight over enemy territory (which has shrunk down to a fraction of the size it used to be) 90% of the time it will just be monitoring... ie cameras looking at movement on the ground and antenna detecting communications traffic to try to locate enemy forces and comms centres and HQs... so most of the time they don't hear aircraft flying over because they are at 10km altitude they wont be getting bombed anyway.

So hang on, you are making a lot of claims here... first you are claiming Russian planes are noisy and are therefore easy for the terrorists to detect and watch... of course without any evidence to prove that... just opinion.

Then you claim NATO is passing on information about Russian flights to the terrorists... well if that is the case then WTF does it matter whether they are noisy or not?

Then you say the Russians want to use Iranian bases to be stealthy in their attacks... but surely the bases in Syria itself are much closer to the targets you are engaging and give even less warning...

If you are trying to say drones are good for taking out toyota utes then so is Krasnopol 152mm artillery shells directed by UAVs with lasers...

Drones operating at 5,000km altitude would be very silent... there is no sound in space...

by surprise terrorist ,when moving in the open for an operation. Terrorist spread over large areas
and is not practical to use a million dollar $ missile to kill 2-5 terrorist in the open..

What do you think they do... fly aircraft over Syria and look for people on the ground wearing "I am a Terrorist" T shirts and then pass that info on to the cruise missile planners who then look up a phone book and find his address and launch a missile at the place where he lives in the hope he gets a kill?

Most of the time it will be A-50U and Tu-214R aircraft flying around collecting electronic intel... cell phone calls, satellite link calls, locations with a lot of power cables going in to it in a country where there are not many powered devices actually working.

Didn't you notice money was found for the A-100?

When they find a building that has a lot of communications coming in and out they will watch it and see who goes in and out... for a period of time... and when there are quite a few people in there you bomb them... not with a hellfire... with a couple of 500kg dumb bombs.

And aircraft armed with bombs might fly several times across enemy territory... satellites can observe locations too as well as currently used uavs used for observation... seeing which locations get emptied first gives you an indication about who is important enough to get warning and who isn't... so you can watch them leave and see where they go to and bomb that instead... NATO can help the enemy but Russia can apply intelligence and tactics to nullify or even take advantage of their cowardly support for terrorists.

It is not an accident that they want their attack helos to be able to carry 500kg bombs too...

Personally I think Shturm and Ataka and Krisantema type supersonic anti tank missiles would be ideal... they don't trail any wires so fired from an altitude of 4-5km means a much higher flight speed than a ground launch, but the cheap and relatively simple command guidance makes them accurate and easy to mass produce... they are not heavy and you could probably give them small wings to improve their ability to manouver at extended range.

No complex or expensive terminal guidance and dircms wont work to stop them.

I would suspect with a command guidance control method you could lase the target to find the precise range and then command the missile to seriously overshoot the target until the last few seconds and make it dive near vertically on the target too...

The launch tubes are small and compact and as the Mi-28 shows it is easy to carry large numbers on a conventional weapon pylon.

From a good altitude we are talking Hellfire or better performance at a fraction of the cost... the 6kg payload should easily deal with vehicles and bunkers or rooms of a building... with a standard weapon already in production.

You could make a wire bundle with say 8-10 launch tubes fused together as one sort of munition to hang from one weapon pylon and when all the missiles are launched the bundle can be dropped... the point is that you can spend more money on the avionics... very good optics and processing power can be used to make the missiles more accurate especially if a laser can track the missile and another laser can accurately track the target to provide precise tracking information for both... the payoff will be cheap and simple missiles that are effective.

The optics and brain of the UCAV can be modular so after a dozen flights or so the expensive stuff can be kept and anything getting worn out or damaged can be replaced. Redundancy to allow damaged or failed parts to not stop the UCAV from making it back to base means twin engines that are good quality but allow for them to be recycled into a new platform if the platform is damaged during use.

Modular design allowing damaged of faulty parts to be easily replaced so it can keep working in the field...

Interesting but I would have shifted the missiles to be mounted on the side of the turret instead of the back rear of the turret in the way of the radar and the optics...

Having two boxes of four missiles... one on each side of the turret means more ready to fire missiles but also moves them out of the way of the radar and the optics... keep the missile tubes horizontal until they are ready to be fired by turning the turret towards the target... raise the missile boxes and fire.

They could have Kornet-EM on one side and Igla-S/Verba on the other for a better selection of targets... or perhaps they could use SOSNA-R missiles which are small and compact...

I would probably increase the height of the turret to give more room for more ready to use cannon rounds and more room for the crew...

I think this upgrade is a waste of time simply because keeping this vehicle in service means keeping 23mm cannon shells in use at a time when most other platforms that use that calibre are getting fewer and fewer.

It would make sense to perform minor changes and upgrades that improve performance... like ripping out most of the old technology electronics the Shilka came with and replacing most of it with what is practically a few small electronic boxes and a couple of lap top computers which would be vastly more powerful and effective than the old systems... mainly because the old model stuff would no longer be in production and would therefore be hard and expensive to maintain, yet performance would not be great.

The GSh-23 uses a totally different round with nothing like the performance of the original weapons and would shorten effective range rather than improve it.

What you could do is simply fit a single 2A38M 30mm cannon, which would extend its effective range from about 2km to about 3km against air and ground targets and would eliminate the 23x152mm calibre ammo from the inventory, which saves money in lots of ways... because you don't need to keep those weapons or that ammo ready in storage. Anything that currently uses the 23x152mm calibre weapon can be replaced with a 2A38M cannon including towed mounts...

Instead of turret mounted missiles, you could simply attach a platoon of Igla operators for each vehicle who could travel in an APC like a BTR-82A, who can deploy around the Shilkas with their missiles to find targets and engage them. The BTRs will use the same 30x165mm ammo as the upgraded shilkas too...

There is no point spending good money upgrading a Shilka when it is about to be replaced again... Tuguska started replacing it in the mid 1980s and then the M1 model Tunguska entered service in the early 2000s, and soon either a Pantsir model or perhaps a 57mm gun armed vehicle will be supplementing it in service.

Even a fully upgraded Shilka with new radar and new electronics and new missiles doesn't out perform a 1980s level Tunguska so what would be the point?

If those missiles on the upgraded shilka are manpads then the SA-19 of the 1980s tunguska already outrange them by 2km and the new models reach 20km range targets so have pretty much 4 times the range, while the 30mm guns have twice the effective range and much more hitting power than the 23mm guns.

The problem there is that the Strela-10 system is about to be replaced with the SOSNA-R system, which is a much better performing system by the look of it, and it has much cheaper missiles with much better performance...

In terms of aide to syria the 23mm calibre weapons would be fine, and for export upgrades of Strela-10 is fine too... foreign countries will be using Shilkas and Zu-23-2s and SA-13s for quite some time... I remember in the 1990s South Africa offered an upgrade that mixed the SA-9 and SA-13 so it could launch either missile, so for easier targets you used the simpler cheaper lower performing SA-9 missile and for harder targets the SA-13 was there ready to go...

In terms of value for money the Strela-10 relies on a missile nose mounted seeker for its terminal performance, which is destroyed every time the system is used... with SOSNA-R the optics are in the launch platform and the missiles are laser beam riding, which is much simpler and cheaper than IR homing.

In addition to cheaper missiles, the system has much longer range with much faster missiles... hitting a target 10km away in about 12-14 seconds is a potent SAM system...