CAS over Ukraine

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So far the most effective* close air support (CAS) over Ukraine appears to be toss bombing of guided bombs.

It's similar to the graphic below, save for greater range with glide kits and greater accuracy if the guidance does its job.

The aircraft arrives very low (maybe 100 ft), pulls up, releases flares and chaff, releases the bomb, escapes at very low altitude (again maybe 100 ft).

 

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The advantage over artillery is mostly that the munitions are much heavier. Huge craters by delay-fuzed heavy bombs can destroy underground field fortifications or sewers, a single bomb can destroy a large building.  

The speed of the vehicle should be high subsonic in order for the munition to have much kinetic energy (and thus range) upon release.

 

This doesn't look like the "Americans bomb brown people" guided bomb attacks from above ManPADS ceiling (at about 15k ft) or dive-bombing from such safe altitude and it doesn't look like the A-10 concept of CAS, either.

 

Post-WW2 versions of toss bombing were initially developed for free-fall nuclear bombs, as the pilot wanted to get away from the blast in time. Later on, the skills were used by Israelis in 1973 and the British in 1982 when they faced effective air defences and didn't dare to fly in range and in line of sight to said air defences for more than a few seconds.

 

We could dismiss the Ukraine CAS experience as irrelevant to NATO because NATO would go after the air defences, but

1. anti-radar missiles aren't terribly plentiful (we had shortages in 1999 already)
2. even radar-based air defences survive anti-air defence campaigns for long if the air defence officers are smart (see 1999 Kosovo Air War and 2022-2025 Ukraine air warfare)
3. not all air defences require radar (examples IRIS-T SLM and VL MICA IR missiles) and radar-independent air defences are very difficult to suppress.** In fact, medium range air defences based on thermal cameras may be more useful than ones based on x-band radars because of RF stealth aircraft. 

So what should we do based on the observations from Ukraine?

 

I stick to my opinion that we need eyes in the sky, but fires can come from the ground. Air/Ground bombing does not seem to promise a good overall package (cost, uncertainty, rapidity of effects) in peer wars in my opinion. That being said, Russia is no peer to NATO. We can deal with Russian air defences well-enough to rip open gaps in the SAM belt or we would find enough gaps between dispersed air defence umbrellas to bomb enough  (even with unguided 'iron' bombs) for decisive effect.

So we should look at Chinese air defences, really. They haven't been exposed to war and are thus of unknown quality, but a couple of their air-to-air missiles proved to be effective over Pakistan.

 

related:

/2008/11/wurfgert.html

/2010/07/first-week-of-peer-vs-peer-air-war.html 

/2018/03/luftwaffe-f-35-or-typhoon-for-airground.html

S O

defence_and_freedom@gmx.de

*: There were also super-inaccurate unguided missile attacks and unguided bomb attacks with approx. toss bombing profile and at least some guided glide bombs appear to have been released at high altitude where no area air defences made that intolerably dangerous. 

**: Radars are active emitters. These emissions can be detected, direction finding to the emissions' origin can be used to find the emitter. Triangulation by aircraft (or detector on the surface), detection by satellites and anti-radar missile simply flying towards the emitter are frequently used options. To search for a thermal camera (imaging infrared sensor) in a large area is futile by comparison.

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