Talking bollocks thread #3

Isos wrote:F-14 with the phoenix was a real danger for Tupolevs.

F-18 and f-35 are jokes compare to it.

Russia can also use now long range supersonic drones imitating tupolevs so that the carrier launches its fighters and after the interception of those fake targets, they would be left with no fuel so that big part will need to land on the carrier complicating the launch of new aircraft while the real tupolevs will be 20-30min away from the drones attacking when the hornets and f-35 will be landing.

Irony would be that US tries this sort of tactics against russian AD. Intercept fake target and be left without defences against the real threat.

The problem is, with the KH-22 the standoff range exceeded the detect, deploy and no escape range of the F-14, so it was essentially useless for its primary purpose of fending of air attacks on the CBG from the USSR. This is why they turned it into the Bomcat.

You can expect all kinds of chicainery to be part of an attack on a CBG, it is still the most formidable naval target. Most likely mode of attack will be by planes backed up with submarine launched ASMs. Perhaps the air attack will draw out the planes and the subs will launch once they are a few hundred KM out, At this point the bombers will pull back and wait for sattelite intelligence on the strike. They will fall back and refuel form tankers, and then head back and unload. There are endless permutations of this type of tactic.

what if the VMF is sent to help Cuba, Venezuela, Argentina or China in & around the Caribbean, S. Atlantic & the SC Seas? The VKS planes will be there anyway as well, & both service branches will then complement each other.
Tu-95/160s longer unrefueled range will reduce the # of tanker planes needed. Besides, there r many older IL-76s that can be converted, like those 4 that Pakistan got from Ukraine.

If the VMF is sent to help cuba or venez or Arge  so what... the VMF has no Bears and has no Blackjacks and currently AFAIK don't even have their Backfires which all seem to be under control of the VVS. The Tu-142s of the VMF  AFAIK has never carried anti ship missiles like the Backfires and Tu-16s did.

How on earth could the VKS get there in any useful numbers?

Sorry garry but this obsession with carriers is a bit dated. They used F-14s because they had them.

This delusional belief that some magic weapon suddenly makes something obsolete is ridiculous. The whole purpose of long range high speed missiles was because Tupolevs would have been shot down if they had to get closer.

The missiles they have now are a direct result of the US having large aircraft carriers and F-14s and Phoenix missiles... the fact that the US got fat and lazy and the Russians kept making their systems better is no reason to say the aircraft carrier is dead.

If Iran had the new engines of the F14D and modern avionics, radars and missiles it could easily hold its own against modern US jets.. unfortunately that is not possible.

And if they updated all the EW systems so the Americans didn't know them inside out they would be quite effective...

Upgrades would be interesting, but replacing it with an Su-35 would make rather more sense...
If you are trying to say long range super fast missiles can't be intercepted or stopped, what you are saying is that large ships are obsolete... but also small ships are obsolete, also large military airfields and bases are obsolete and so are ports and capital cities and large factories and mines... all fighter planes are obsolete because big long range missiles with nuclear warheads should be able to obliterate everything... so cancel Su-57 and Su-35 because they are useless because anything you need to destroy you just build a land based ground launched scramjet powered hypersonic missile.

Like any platform there were people in the Navy that wanted to keep their beloved Tomcat, heck I think its a cool plane too.

The Aircraft itself is not important... and honestly I don't give a shit what the US does, The US can scrap all their big carriers for all I care... that would make their forces even weaker than their decision to go to the Hornet and AMRAAM missiles for air defence... Russia needs to defend its surface ships and its subs away from Russian controlled airspace... some argue that a helicopter carrier of 30K tons is the biggest ship they should be making so make some Yak-141s or their new equivalent, but as you and others point out short range weak fighters make no difference when your ships have longer range anti aircraft missiles than your fighter planes can reach...

I am suggesting an aircraft carrier bigger than the Kuznetsov (the Russian Navy has said as much itself BTW)... which is clearly too small for Flankers, so their new carriers will need to be bigger to carry Su-57s, which will give them excellent flight range and a range of new AAMs being developed for it will make it rather potent against anything the west can come up with.

Its purpose of course is not to fight WWIII but to escort and protect Russian surface ships promoting and protecting Russian trade with her international partners.

With the US tanker fleet there is really no reason to use F-14s, as long as you don't mind paying $120/gallon for jet fuel (DOD does not mind).

The US does not have the capacity to operate anywhere just using land based aircraft and inflight refuelling tankers.

There is NO REASON a cruiser should be able to see further then a corvette..expecially a largish one.

How many corvettes currently have AEGIS radars on them?  And even if they did how close to the water would they be?

AEGIS cruiser AESA radars are not good enough for this century... Russian Cruisers will have enormous radar sets bigger than those for the S-500 system, which will give them exceptional range and performance...

There are planes that can haul 500 KM radar so no reason a corvette cannot haul a powerful radar, and drone recon platforms.

If every Corvette had such a radar they would not be able to do much else... if you specialise your Corvettes to roles then you add the management problem of always needing one available for every mission/fleet...

When laser weapons arise they will be easily installed on smaller ships. The Chinese laser cannon test platform is not very large at all.

Wrong end of the spectrum... you are talking about close range systems to dazzle optically guided anti ship missiles... using such a weapon against Zircon would be like holding up a sheet of paper to stop it.

To shoot hypersonic missiles flying very high and very fast for long enough to do serious damage enough to make it break up and destroy itself in flight is going to have to be rather big and rather more powerful than any laser previously deployed.

If you say 12 zircons can sink 12 corvettes then I would say 1-2 will sink a cruiser. But that assumption is the ships are all defenceless

The difference is that 12 Corvettes on their own will be defenceless against a hypersonic missile because at best they will have short and medium range missiles.... a Cruiser on the other hand has a full set of short, medium, long and anti satellite/anti ICBM type missiles, which means it has much more chance of defending itself.

Yes and with the right recon info they can even strike a carrier group from outside the attack radius of its airplanes. So the carrier can send out F-18s to 5-600KM maybe launch LRASM with 800 km range. They are still shy of Kaliber M maximum range. Anyway a group of corvettes will not be seeking combat with a CBG, the Russians will use airpower and subs and surface ships, but the Corvettes will not be defenceless if HQ provides the proper intel.

I don't care about US carriers... they can scrap them all for all I care. I am talking about what the Russians need going forward and Strategic bombers and inflight refuelling will not be an option to support Russian ships operating away from Russia.

Russia can learn from the clear mistakes of the USN and build aircraft carriers that are not 100K ton... they don't need to be that big nor that expensive. They need to put their best fighter on board, which means a naval Su-57, and a fixed wing AWACS aircraft that also has an inflight refuelling model on board would be ideal.

They can take the gloves off too... a hypersonic missile designed to fit in their internal weapon bay with a range of 3,000km at a speed of mach 10 and a nuclear warhead as standard is what they need to make it clear it is for US and HATO targets and they wont be playing nice if the brown stuff hits the air conditioning appliance.

R the IrAF F-14s real danger to the USAF B-1B/52s?

Do USAF often overfly Iran with B-1Bs and B-52s?

The F-14 is now obsolete... technology has moved on... if the USN had any brains a naval carrier capable F-15 would be something they should be looking into.

The Tu-22/95/160s can can also use nuclear tipped CMs to knockdown/vaporize swarms of Ash/LACMs long before they reach anywhere close to their targets.

Those planes will be busy doing other things. Any US carrier group or HATO group of ships detected will be engaged with MiG-31s armed with Kinzhal missiles or Tu-22M3Ms with Kh-32s and perhaps Su-30s with Kh-32s... many of which will likely be nuclear armed as a matter of course... there would be nothing left to lose by that stage...

Nuclear cruise missiles means carrier have no more value and US will use its own nuks. Its totally stupid to include nuclear weapons when comparing conventional weapons. And you are comparing a war scenario involving all the stuff when I compare f-14 use against tupolevs with f-18/35 use against them. There is no point in doing so.

To be fair if US carriers are threatening Russia directly I don't think they will be nice... not taking out the carriers means strike aircraft launching standoff munitions at Russian targets. Most would be stopped by ground based air defence I would expect and also land based fighters would also make things hard, but I suspect the carriers and the ships operating with them will be dealt with using MiGs and Kinzhals and Backfires with Kh-32s.

It is what they are for.

I disagree: they r still cheaper than the CV/Ns & can be used to defend them!

Nuclear armed cruise missiles cannot support Navy operations around the world like aircraft carriers can.

the US had 2 SSBNs in the Indian Ocean during the Desert Storm ready to nuke Iraq, & now have low yield nukes on at least 1 SSBN to counteract Russian hypersonic CMs/IRBMs.

Which just shows you how retarded they are... the Russians wont reduce the power of their nuclear weapons to make them more acceptable to use.

The problem is, with the KH-22 the standoff range exceeded the detect, deploy and no escape range of the F-14, so it was essentially useless for its primary purpose of fending of air attacks on the CBG from the USSR. This is why they turned it into the Bomcat.

The original Kh-22s had a range of about 460km which did not exceed the range of the F-14 and Phoenix. The Kh-22M had a range of about 600km and a flight speed of about mach 3.

It is only the Kh-32 with its 1,000km range and its mach 4.5 flight speed at 40km altitude that is a problem for the F-14/phoenix comb to deal with, which is no great surprise because they spent very little money improving the F-14 once they decided they were going with the Hornet and F-35.

It would not take a huge amount of money to upgrade the Phoenix... even just a solid rocket booster on its rear end to get it to climb to that altitude and take on the target. The ABM models of the Standard SAM should also offer some problems for the missile.

You can expect all kinds of chicainery to be part of an attack on a CBG, it is still the most formidable naval target.

And the point is that the inclusion of a carrier makes a group of surface ships much much harder to defeat than getting rid of all large ships and replacing them with Corvettes.

BTW the most powerful navy in the ME must be the Iranian navy with all its bog hammers, and the americans called them. Problem is that the easiest solution to a swarm of such targets is ship launched ATGMs like Hellfire or Kornet and they are not a problem any more.

Most likely mode of attack will be by planes backed up with submarine launched ASMs. Perhaps the air attack will draw out the planes and the subs will launch once they are a few hundred KM out, At this point the bombers will pull back and wait for sattelite intelligence on the strike. They will fall back and refuel form tankers, and then head back and unload. There are endless permutations of this type of tactic.

They are, but the options for that carrier group are just as large... they will have plenty of anti sub helicopters and subs of their own and any ship that strays in range can be shot down because of its suspicious activity... as long as war is declared that carrier group can go hunting for anything it likes... and all the communications needed to organise the sort of attack that would be needed to be successful would also be easy to detect and they can start attacking your forces before you even form up ready to attack.

You can say aircraft carriers are obsolete, but aircraft are not obsolete and ships without aircover are vastly more vulnerable than ships with air cover.

Nothing is invincible, but compared with the cost of all your cruisers and destroyers... buying two new aircraft carriers and putting modern aircraft and weapons on them is good insurance to keep your ships safe and ensure you can do what you need to do where you need to do it.

If the UK had a fixed wing carrier in the Falklands instead of those piece of shit fishing boats, they likely would not have lost any ships at all. With Phantom fighter jets and AWACS and Buccaneer strike aircraft they wouldn't have needed the very long range very risky Vulcan raids to disable the airfields on the islands so the Argentines had to operate their fighters from Argentina.

Equally if Argentina had a longer ranged fighter with BVR missiles the British would have failed. Even just MiG-23s with R-23R and R-23T AAMs and R-60s, the Brits would have been seriously on the back foot.

What are you smoking ? You really have an issue with nuks. They are not normal weapon and you don't use so easily.

We are talking about attacking a US carrier group and potentially Russian carrier groups expanding and promoting Russian interests around the world... if Russia is attacking US carrier groups or the US is attacking Russian carrier groups then nukes are not far away.

BTW I find it amusing that carriers are dead because the US has shit air defences and have hobbled their own fighter options for their carriers... Russia can put their best fighter and all their best air defence systems... missile gun laser and EW equipment on these ships and aircraft but they are automatically obsolete too?

No, but IrAF F-14s can shoot them down if they carry LRAAMs.

Iranian F-14s would certainly be a threat, but I would expect they would use F-22s as well as bombers against a country with a working air defence system and fighter planes rather than just send vulnerable bomber in and hope for the best.

if it was worth it, it would've been done a long time ago; navalizing F-15C /D/Es would make them heavier & therefore = or < performing than the F-18E/F s,

Rubbish. The F-15E is a structurally strong design that can do 9g at full weapon and fuel weights... it would become an 8g limited aircraft when they added folding wing mechanisms, and more robust undercarriage might add a little bit of weight too, but they could just take a ton off the max payload... not a big deal really.

& would cost as much or more to make & operate, not to mention integrating all naval weapons & retraining legacy F-14/18 pilots & maintainers. The same for the F-22 s.

Would still not cost 1.5 trillion like the F-35 does, and it is a reliable effective aircraft. Lets just say the Soviets managed to create the Su-33 from the Su-27 so it can be done without spending billions. The Ford class carrier cost 14 billion dollars... modifying and producing 300 odd naval F-15s would be cheaper than that.

Make sure there is proper accounting and oversight so they don't try to break cost records and they should be fine...

Some could still be detached to land bases overseas & dedicated to defend VMF ships;

No, they couldn't. They have primary jobs that are vastly more important that flying with ships... and for goodness sake when was the last time the US had a ship in trouble and sent B-52s to help? WTF? What are they supposed to do?

Tu-142/IL-38/76s could also be modified to carry ALCMs.

An-124s could carry ALCMs... they don't because it would be stupid... those Tu-142s and Il-38s are supposed to be looking for enemy subs near Russian waters, and Il-76s are transports with other jobs to do as well.

Tu-160s... even when they have 60, are never going to be able to perform CAP for Russian Naval surface groups, that is just stupid... it would need 20 inflight refuelling planes to keep it flying there for more than a few days, and even if those ships were attacked WTF could a Blackjack even do?

An EMP burst would drop planes &/ missiles out of the sky & mission kill a CSG.
I would gladly add: that would be in line with the Russian mentality.

EMP burst weapons have been suggested for decades but there is no evidence that anyone is actually using them as a standard weapon, and honestly there really is no way to tell how effective it would be against enemy forces until actually used, which means it might be amazing, or bloody useless and no way to tell one way or the other till the day you use it.

And I think for the millionth time Russia is not building aircraft carriers to fight the US or EU in WWIII, so who gives a fuck if an EMP weapon disables it, or wipes out the entire human race for that matter.

Russia need global reach and a global presence and she can't get that from aircraft or ground forces.

Only time will tell if she'll need it &, if so, be able to sustain it.
By the same token, there were gaps in American CVN deployments in W. Pac/Gulf during which the USAF sent its fighters & bombers to bases there to close those gaps & make a political statement.

Do you not understand that talking about the US trying to dominate the entire worlds oceans with carrier groups and then filling in any small gaps with their 800 bases around the world and aircraft assigned to support them is more like Russia wanting to defend its entire territory and the gaps in ground based radar it uses AWACS and MiG-31s and Su-35s to fill, but they have never had any intention or delusion that they could ever do the same with the whole worlds oceans... with carrier groups, with strategic bombers, with lollypop sticks...

Russia will never have and does not want nor does it need global coverage with naval power.... it wants global reach... to get anywhere on the globe that can be reached by sea they want to be able to do that, but for that they just need one aircraft carrier and ships to operate with it. To get Global Coverage, as you say with 10 carrier groups the US covers the rest with its 800 bases and their aircraft support to fill the gaps, which means if Russia wants the same they will probably need 10 operational carrier groups which means bare minimum 24 aircraft carriers, which will mean 8 would be in overhaul and upgrade at any one time and the other 12 available to be deployed world wide doing what they do....

Russia does not want that, Russia does not want to be the world police, it does not want to bully other countries or rob them like the west does... they just want free and open trade, which the west clearly opposes... just look at their sanction lists and the trade agreements they rip up or force others to sign...

If the RAF had a few Tu-160Ms in 1982, the UK wouldn't even need a CV to retake the Falklands & wouldn't have lost all those people & ships.

On topic and relevant and totally wrong.

The RAF used Vulcan bombers to take out the airfields the Argentinians had built on the Falklands Islands and to stop them extending it to allow their shore based fighters to operate from the Islands so they would have more time in combat and less time wasted transiting from Argentina to only have five minutes on station till they had to fly back to land and refuel.

If the RAF had Blackjacks there would have been very little difference because their Vulcans merely forced the Argentines to base their defence fighters in Argentina rather than forward deploying them to the islands where they would have been much more effective.

Hey... I hear you say... they had Sea Harriers on their carriers... why not just use them to destroy the airfields on the Islands... much quicker and easier and cheaper than flying a big bomber that enormous distance... a SHAR could carry cluster bombs with runway penetration munitions and would be much more effective... instead the British did with their Vulcan what the Russians did with a Backfire bomber in Georgia... drop a great big long string of relatively small bombs in a line at an angle to the runway, to assure you got the runway at at least one place rendering the entire length of the runway unusable.

They cross the runway to make sure at least some bombs actually hit the runway... it you dropped bombs in line with the runway a bad crosswind might mean all your bombs land beside the runway and it remains usable.

A Sea Harrier (SHAR) could carry half a dozen cluster bombs and zip over the airfield at high speed nice and low and scatter thousands of anti runway munitions all over the place and do a much more effective job of taking out the runway.

The problem was they had SA-7 Grail MANPADS and I seem to remember a ROLAND SAM system and so thought a low flying SHAR is too vulnerable... the fuselage side mounted engine nozzles of the Harrier make them particularly vulnerable to IR guided missiles and they can't fly very fast either... making them horribly vulnerable to MANPADS.

The point is that even after the bombing they still needed fighter aircraft, it was only because they had a little carrier with short ranged vulnerable SHARS that they needed Vulcans. If they had proper carriers with F-4s and Buccaneers they would not have needed the Vulcan attack they could have done that themselves.

So their best solution was not a better strategic bomber, it was a proper aircraft carrier than no strategic bomber can replace....

Enough about aircraft carriers in this thread.... I will be moving it shortly to a more suitable place.

Russia has a very different strategic scenario then the USA. Russia spans the entire Eurasian continent. Naval dominanace is an existential issue to the US just like it was to the UK. China's Road and Belt initiative is designed to make US naval dominance irrelevant. All they need to do is deny US dominance in key regional theaters, same with Russia.

Tsavo Lion wrote:
not all of it, but being between the Baltic, Bering, White, & Black Seas & having internal waterways, the NSR, & now expanding roads, she controls most of it. 
The USA will never dominate the whole World, even if they build a 10K ship navy & deploy space weapons.

they have land access to vast stretches of it, and can launch major military operations from the entire span as well as essentially unlimited natural resources.

Road and Belt has the potential to make the entire Americans irrelevant. The Americans will be just fine but no longer "indispensable" as America likes to think of itself.

Russias moves to dominate the Arctic will also allow it to dominate a global sea supply chain that the US simply cannot match. It would take a very long time for the US to build nuclear icebreakers. All they have is nuclear subs and the Russians have those as well and god knows what else.

u didn't get it: from the Ascension Island, the Tu-160M could bomb HQs & AF/Naval bases on the mainland as well, even with missiles & bombs of the 1982 vintage.

I did get it... no strategic bomber of any kind can attack HQs and AF and Naval bases in Argentina without escorts, because even the slowest lightest cheapest fighter plane they have can shoot down a bomber like a Vulcan, and the Tu-160 using conventional bombs would not be too much safer.

In 1982 the Blackjack didn't exist.

The Vulcan could bomb an airstrip on an island out in the middle of the ocean, but it could not fly over mainland Argentina and bomb targets that are defended by fighter aircraft and SAMs... but even assuming they could this is not a 1,000 bomber raid to wipe out the entire Argentine air force and navy... this is one or two bombers in a desperate attempt to make their pocket carriers and slow fighters useful.

the RAF tankers & bombers still helped them take the Falklands back; the VKS can't replace, but compensate a lot more for the lack of CVNs.

If Argentina had extended the runways on the islands and were operating real fighters like the Mirages and Skyhawks from the islands instead of operating all the way from the mainland those bombers would have been shot down and rather more British ships would have been sunk... probably enough to make the entire exercise a failure.

Russian bombers would never be used for such a role simply because put in that position they could send any one of a range of submarines armed with Club subsonic land attack cruise missiles with submunition warheads designed to crater runways and programme them to fly 5m above the round down the length of the runway releasing cratering submunitions as it flew... much safer much easier and likely vastly cheaper too.

Russia has a very different strategic scenario then the USA. Russia spans the entire Eurasian continent. Naval dominanace is an existential issue to the US just like it was to the UK. China's Road and Belt initiative is designed to make US naval dominance irrelevant. All they need to do is deny US dominance in key regional theaters, same with Russia.

Russia needs to ensure it can go anywhere at any time, they don't need to own the seas, but they need to be able to operate in them away from land based Russian air power and missile support. Otherwise the US and the west can simply impose sanctions and blockades on any country that trades with Russia and not them... after a few regime changes Russia will be totally isolated with no international trade partners and will have to deal with the EU or US or both.

The west can do a lot of economic damage to most countries around the world so to choose to trade with Russia is an enormous risk... if Russia can't turn up with muscle to help then why risk it... just because they offer free and fair trade without demanding law changes that give their companies unfair advantages even over local companies like the west does.

Russias moves to dominate the Arctic will also allow it to dominate a global sea supply chain that the US simply cannot match. It would take a very long time for the US to build nuclear icebreakers. All they have is nuclear subs and the Russians have those as well and god knows what else.

Moves to dominate the arctic... Sorry... I must have been mistaken... I thought it was Donald Trump who wanted to buy Greenland, but it must have been Putin I guess.

Russia isn't dominating the Arctic... they are opening up a shipping trade route along their territorial waters... just like Canada are trying to do on their side of the Arctic... but for some reason we don't hear about Canada trying to dominate the Arctic... sounds like a fucking double standard to me, but what is new...

Russia is trying to expand its influence and access to its own territory... the alarmism from the west is amusing because the US has expanded its influence around the world including its own so called allies which it spies on and influences for its own needs... but it is the aggressive Ruskies that are bad... right.

they r not easy to intercept in wartime & can outrun all fighters except MiG-25/31s. Even with Tu-22 weapons of 1982, they could've hit targets all over coastal Argentina w/o much danger to themselves.

You are not getting it are you?

Vulcan is a subsonic bomber... most fighters even then could catch it and blow it out of the sky VERY VERY EASILY.

In 1982 the Tu-22M3 able to fly short bursts at mach 2 would have been a much more difficult target to intercept but it is not stealthy and they would detect it on military and civilian radar from enormous distances.... certainly plenty of range to see it coming and it would be subject to air traffic control... unless it approached at supersonic speed meaning it was obviously a military bomber and not on a friendly visit.

As it approached a military airfield to destroy it so military aircraft on that air field could not fly to the islands it would be very obvious what it was intending to do... I would expect only a few land based airfields would be closest to the islands but a bomber approaching at high speed would alert fighters to get airborne... the Tu-22M can't fly anywhere near as high as most fighters and is not faster than most fighters, so a Mirage could load up with IR guided AAMs and take off and climb to the altitude the incoming bomber is flying at... or slightly higher, and fire multiple missiles at it as it approaches and as it flys past with an excellent chance of shooting it down.

oh yes she does: her restored/new bases will allow patrols & A2D all over the former Soviet Sector. Alaskan, Canadian & Danish controlled areas have less bases, coastlines & shelf extensions. It will take decades for others to build as many icebreakers/strengthened ships; even if they sail across the N. Pole to bypass the NSR, there's still need for local ice recon route support, & ports/airports for emergencies.

OK then... Russia has also built up forces in Kaliningrad and the Crimea and the Pacific and is upgrading its facilities in the Antarctic, so are they dominating the Baltic Sea, the Black Sea, the Pacific Ocean and the Antarctic too?

Restoring bases is not about domination, because they are still a little bit behind the US and her 800+ bases around the world. Other countries have neglected the region boo fucking hoo, that is their problem. Russia is creating a viable shipping lane in the far north... it has nothing to do with bullshit about trying to dominate it... for fucks sake it is their territory they are building stuff on, not neutral ground they are taking over.

It is just western bullshit.

GarryB wrote:

Russia isn't dominating the Arctic... they are opening up a shipping trade route along their territorial waters... just like Canada are trying to do on their side of the Arctic... but for some reason we don't hear about Canada trying to dominate the Arctic... sounds like a fucking double standard to me, but what is new...

Russia is trying to expand its influence and access to its own territory... the alarmism from the west is amusing because the US has expanded its influence around the world including its own so called allies which it spies on and influences for its own needs... but it is the aggressive Ruskies that are bad... right.

You never hear of it because Canada does not have the necessary strategic need NOR the technology and industrial base to do it. We don't even have nuclear subs or large ice breakers. Russia has a whole fleet of massive  nuclear ice breakers under construction, some of them armed with Kaliber missiles, and the Northern fleet has some pretty excellent nuclear subs. The US has a tiny ice breaker fleet. You will probably start hearing more about the Ice Breaker Gap at some point. Russia pretty much already dominates the Arctic. There was some NATO presence there in the summer but in the winter FORGET IT. That is Russian territory. They are the only ones that can navigate in the worst ice conditions in the Arctic.

Their strategic need is to transport their resources to market year round. The USN can only operate with subs in winter. Anti submarine warfare in the Arctic winter will be an interesting subject.

true, but I'm talking about the Tu-160 capabilities & what it could do to help the RN in that war. It's hypothetical but similar situations between claimants may develop in & around Antarctica, Arctic, or the S. Pacific.

OK, lets do that... ignoring the fact that the Tu-160 was not in service in 1982 anywhere at the time if the Brits had, say 20 of them... would that mean they could get away with not needing an aircraft carrier?

No.

Ignoring the fact that 20 Blackjacks plus the 80-100 inflight refuelling tanker aircraft they would need to get them down there would probably cost more on one operation than a decent aircraft carrier would have cost to build back then, the Blackjacks are big heavy aircraft and their fuel capacity is enormous.

You would need to base them somewhere in the region that wasn't too far from the target area, but it would have to be somewhere friendly to Britain and either indifferent or hostile to Argentina.

The main problem would be that flying some Blackjacks down to South America would not be cheap and you would have to send long range fighter escorts to escort them on their missions because despite being able to fly fast, they don't fly faster than AAMs and SAMs, so as I said, most fighter aircraft would detect them and be able to climb to the altitude they are operating at and launch lots of IR guided missiles at them as they fly past... with a pretty good chance of hitting them.

On the other hand being fired upon and having to fly at top speed will likely render their bombing accuracy down to a pretty poor level.

If anything the plane they would find most useful would probably be the MiG-25RB to zip over the border and drop large heavy bombs and just hope you get a hit in the right place...

They would have just as much chance of sending 300 Scud missile launchers to a country nearby and firing all of those as fast and as often as they can and just hope they get some near the runways they wanted to disable.

The obvious problem is that in the time the invasion took they could build new runways and repair damaged runways on the mainland easily enough... it was the runway on the islands that was the real threat and the reason why they targeted it.

Leaving working airfields on the mainland however would leave all the British ships vulnerable to attack and relying only on ship based air defences they would have been in serious trouble.

For Russia, their ships are better protected but would still benefit from having carrier based fighter and AWACS support... something no strategic bomber of any kind could provide.

The VKS may have a version (or modified Tu-22M/3) with MiG-31 radars, ECM gear & AAMs escorting Tu-160M2 bombers- lets say 2-3 interceptors + 2-3 bombers to ensure their targets r hit & they all return home. Or they could have a couple IL-76s with dozens of UCAVs to engage enemy interceptors. Time will tell!

Not likely. The new 9M100 missile is supposed to be a self defence missile for internal carriage in fighters and bombers, but it is a self defence missile... you wouldn't want to take on enemy airpower whether it is ground based or carrier based with nothing else.

ur logic sucks. The bottom line is that Russia's position in the Arctic is stronger than all others combined- if she dominates in her own EEZ & claimed shelf arrea & along the NSR, the rest of the Arctic not under her control isn't going to put a dent in it as far as for her interests & defence r concerned.

Claiming Russia is dominating the Arctic is western propaganda they will use to justify spending and the movement of military equipment and bases into the region.

The facts are that Russia is rebuilding bases all over her territory because they have been neglected. Russia is developing a shipping route through Russian territorial waters, which requires upgrading ports and building runways and military bases along the way so if ships get into trouble that help is not 5,000km away.

The expansion of ports and airfields and rail links is good for Russia... and has nothing to do with taking over the Arctic or any such bullshit.

Have a look at Youtube and search for Arrow and you will see videos made in Canada showing how those Russians want to take over the North West Passage... a route through Canadian territorial waters, and those videos will show how the F-35 is unable to cope with MiG-31s and Tu-160s the Russians will be sending to destroy Canadian bases nearby so they can claim the NWP as their own... and how Canadians only realistic way of defending themselves from this blatant Russian aggression would be the Avro Arrow... a Canadian bullshit wet dream... Russia dominating the Arctic isn't Russia developing their own ports and building airfields and military bases on their own territory... Russia dominating the Arctic is invading Canada and Greenland and what the Arctic needs is a US and UK invasion to prevent Russia from doing it first...

Rather long... and part two is:


Part 1


Western bullshit really, but includes White Swans... and a lot of delusion and denial...

Canadians have dellusions of grandeur for sure. There is really no scenario where Canada could cope with a determined Russian military without nuclear weapons. Even if we find a Russian nuclear submarine, what are we gonna do about it? Sink it? Its idiotic. Canada is a US client state, nothing more.