GarryB Fri Jul 12, 2019 3:33 pm
There are tactics you can use against any defence... you just have to look at upgrades to Soviet air defence systems to work out what they were... the Kub/Buk family which are related is an excellent example of development...
The SA-6 KUB was used in the Middle East and was very effective initially, but Israel realised it could send in drones and when the radars detected and were tracking the drones wild weasel aircraft could launch anti radiation missiles to take out the single radar of the battery and then while the battery was down they could send in F-16s with bombs to take out the now defenceless TELs.
The next generation system is the BUK, SA-11, and every TEL has its own tracking and engagement radar so even if the main radar is hit each missile vehicle can still engage aircraft. The SA-11 also increased the number of ready to fire missiles by having four missiles per launcher instead of three.
The BUK and also the KUB were upgraded with optical guidance channels too in case of serious jamming or lots of ARMs.
The next BUK upgrade was the SA-17 with shorter fins and improved flight performance that allowed the missiles to engage ARMs as well as aircraft and drones and cruise missiles... range was also increased.
The current new model BUK has 6 ready to fire missiles on the launchers and 12 missiles ready to launch on the reload vehicles... so clearly they fear the response to their previous upgrades would simply be an overwhelming attack of greater numbers.
It sounds flippant... just use more missiles... but there is a reason they never previously planned to launch hundreds or thousands of missiles or drones at each air defence unit, but it becomes orders of magnitude more expensive, rather difficult to manage and organise, and to be honest it becomes a very serious counterstrike target... if you want to launch hundreds of ARMs then you need a lot of planes and to maximise the number of ARMs those planes will be mostly carry ARMs and not other weapons to fight with... which means a long range SAM attack or a pre-emptive attack with armed drones like the S-70 could ruin your attack before it even starts costing you a lot of assets.
Imagine an attack on an S-400 battery... satellite images show what is there so they know they need at least 500 targets to overwhelm the system comfortably, so they prepare... they have tomahawks from ships and subs, and they have 10 B-1Bs, and they also have 50 F-35s that are going to deliver just over 500 munitions at the battery... but defensive radar detect the aircraft forming up so several S-70s are launched out into international airspace towards where the B-1Bs are forming up and the F-35s are detected... the ship and sub missiles have to travel the furthest and are launched first so they all arrive together and those launches are detected so it is weapons free... each of the 10 or so S-70s then selects aircraft and starts engaging them at long range with RVV-BD missiles... which can outmanouver 8 g targets so the F-35 and B-1Bs with missiles have no chance at all to dodge... four missiles per drone means the B-1Bs are probably dead meat, and a good portion of the F-35s are going to splash down too... this is a very serious loss just to take out one S-400 site... and the early warning of the attack provided by satellite and S-70 means aircraft can be mobilised to help defend the S-400 base which might come out of it without a scratch...
Obviously I idealised that in favour of the defender, but I ignored things like GPS jammers rendering the tomahawks inaccurate, active jamming and decoy systems to deal with ARM based weapons and of course any other air defence unit that might be activated between the S-400 battery and the attackers that could also pick off incoming threats... but knocking down the B-1Bs would serious reduce the attacking force of missiles... they would likely be carrying 24 munitions each so that halves the attack strength alone...