. 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).
U
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
anti-radar missiles aren't terribly plentiful (we had shortages in 1999 already)
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)
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.
*: 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.
(I advise to first read this blog post. You'll later see why.)
Air-to-air missiles have commonly been grouped in short, medium and long range missiles. Short range was and is dominated by passive infrared seekers, medium range was dominated by semi-active radar seekers until AMRAAM (active radar seeker), which also blurred the distinction between medium and long range with its D version. Long range missiles have radar guidance (infrared seeker windows would be blinded by heating up much during long flights).
I believe that such categories are by now of little use. I propose a different system:
Pursuit missiles
Counter-Pursuit missiles
Close-In missiles
Low cost missiles
Pursuit missiles have the speed, range and seeker to reach hostile tactical combat aircraft even if they try to avoid the hit by running. Their no-escape zone is great. It happens that they also threaten and thus push back hostile support aircraft (AEW, ESM, ElInt, tanker, MPA, air/ground radar planes).
Examples are Meteor, PL-21, AIM-260 and AIM-174B
Their drawbacks are heavy weight, big size and very high costs.
Counter-pursuit missiles lack a no-escape zone large enough to force a kill. They can kill if the target is unaware, but not if it's aware enough to avoid the no-escape zone and running in time.
Examples are AIM-120, MICA RF and R-77-1
They can easily be carried by strike fighters and their cost is usually in the 1...2 million € range. This category started out as a replacement for the Sparrow/R-27 medium range air-to-air missile category and was the main weapon of fighters for about two decades, but the similar ranges mean that it's difficult to get an enemy fighter into the own no escape zone without getting into his missile's no escape zone. Tail-mounted radars and handing over the missile to another fighter to be able to give midcourse corrections by radio datalink to the missile while flying away from the threat help little if both sides use it. State of the art medium range missile air combat without decisive range (no escape zone size) advantage would likely end up as a Cannonade of Valmy; an expenditure of munition with little physical effect.
So the use for these missiles in high end air war is likely mostly in a counter-pursuit role - it's defensive.
Close-in missiles were "dogfight"and relatively cheap missiles in the past. Their infrared seekers have become smarter, wider field of view, more sensitive, capable of 'seeing' an aircraft from any angle and capable of lock-on-after-launch. You can now shoot such a missile at a fighter behind your aircraft and hit.
R-73 fired at target behind launching fighter
I do strongly suppose that their primary mission should shift from dogfight shot vs. a platform to hard kill defence versus an incoming missile. Fuse and warhead need to be designed accordingly. They may also be usable as short-time freeflying decoy if equipped properly.
These missiles need to (and short range air-to-air missiles do) cost much less than a million €, but I think so far the short-ranged missiles are still primarily designed to hit platforms. Thrust vectoring permits to minimise fins and rudders, so these missiles could be packed in compact multiple missile launchers.
I don't know how I overlooked these publicly known programs, but I still seem to have gotten it right. Nice.
Low cost missileshave recently been introduced to fight cheap drones over the Red Sea and Ukraine. So far they are unguided 70 mm Hydra rockets with a cheap guidance and steering nose section. Some fighters have 30 mm guns (example Rafale) and can make use of the new 30 mm HE munitions with proximity fuse to battle cheap drones, so they would not need a low cost missile for the job.
- - - - -
How do 'stealth' fighters fit in this? They may be very difficult targets for any kind of missile. IR-guided missiles might be main killers in a stealth fighter vs. stealth fighter combat. Or maybe stealth fighters avoid hostile peer ground to avoid detection by hostile long wavelength radars (which usually require big antennas and are thus not installed in fighters). They might end up as 'fleet in being', deterring deep incursions and serving as launch platforms for pursuit missiles (if those fit into missile bays). The Su-57 was meant to be a stealthy-enough fighter with DIRCM (dazzling laser that targets infrared seekers). This might prove to be much more formidable IF THE DIRCM WORKS than the interested public gives credit to the concept. Stealth-DIRCM vs. stealth-DIRCM might require a spam of missiles with seekers that have spectral filters to block out the laser - three missiles with three different filter setups would defeat a Su-57 even if the latter used two different laser wavelengths in its lasers. Then the killing blow missiles would be "pursuit missiles", but their required range would be driven by the demand for a no-escape zone as great as the own platform's (fighter's) effective sensor range against the opposing fighter.
I think these missile categories make more sense than the traditional ones. My categories guide attention towards the diminished lethality of AMRAAM et al when both sides have such missiles, guide attention towards the hard kill defence concept and towards the issue of defeating super cheap drones (/cruise missiles) with even less expensive munitions.
.
The Russo-Ukrainian War brought something to public view that wasn't obvious. Even I didn't really grasp it, despite having mentioned it years ago.
There's a huge range of targets for small, cheap cruise missiles with a rather small (~ artillery grenade size rather than aircraft bomb size) warhead.
The embodiment of this kind of cruise missile is the Shaheed-136.
Most air defence missiles are more expensive than such a cruise missile. The cheaper ones could largely be avoided by flying very low on well-planned (and varying) routes.
The attacker has the advantage because it can funnel a salvo of a thousand cruise missiles through a 10 km wide corrider within minutes, while defenders with cheap missiles would need to have them spread out over a defensive belt because those cheap defence missiles will have poor range unless they are very similar to their targets (a kind of unmanned kamikaze interceptor plane). Being too similar leads to an insufficient or no speed advantage, so there's stills some advantage of the attacker. Moreover, the defender may suffer damage on critical infrastructure, military equipment or economic installations on the ground, while the attacker doesn't (save for accidents).*
Aircraft on the ground are vulnerable high value targets, but they may be moved during the hours of flight of such a drone. Infrastructure and certain industry installations are more interesting and more reliable (backup?) targets.
There are about 300 high voltage transformer stations in the German power grid; a rich country of approx. 82 million people. Several thousand more transformer stations are in the medium and low voltage grid (source, more here and a list here). One of the largetst German cities, Hamburg, has only three major transformer stations.
The sizes of such transformer stations range from small & elegant to huge. Permanent damage is particularly easy to inflict when you can hit the control building with a warhead, such as a single 50 kg high explosive warhead.
A handful of such transformer stations can be switched to simplistic controls or be repaired, but hundreds or thousands hit within hours or weeks would vastly exceed the short-term repair capability of the entire Western world.
The locations and network are published. Aerial photography is available (Google Maps and similar) as well and everyone can do a bit of aerial scouting with a cheap consumer drone. The damage potential of even tiny payloads such as a molotov cocktail was shown to the public when the power supply of the new Tesla factory near Berlin was cut for days with a small fire.
So basically a wave of 5,000 drones costing each less than 200,000 € (total value 1 bn € only!) would stand a near-100% chance to destroy the German economy with little chance of repair within months or even one or two years. The damage could be trillions of Euros. Quadruple that budget to a mere 4 bn € and you can switch off the European economy.
We aren't even close to having any defence against that. Most likely we couldn't even tell our own Galileo global positioning satellites to stop providing service in time.
The electrical grid isn't the only essential asset that could be targeted and ruines by small payload cruise missiles. The entire chemical and petrochemical industries including oil and gas pipeline pump stations, oil refineries, oil storage sites, airport kerosene tanks is extremely vulnerable.
It's an enduring mystery why the Ukrainians don't apply the main effort concept and knock out one sector - railway, power grid, gas grid or fuel supply of Western Russia. They could, but they're sending their drones out as if all they were mentally capable of was spray & pray (most likely the damned "escalation manager" scum in Washington, DC and Berlin are at fault for this).
Such cheap and light cruise missiles aren't the only kind of cruise missiles that was neglected until recently. The old V-1 would be very much viable if equipped with hobbyist-grade computer, navigation and altimeter equipment. 850 kg warhead to 250 km or 250 kg to 500 km? That's clearly feasible, and all you need for survivability is distraction, flying extremely low (accurate navigation, accurate route planning, calm weather and an accurate altimeter suffice for flying between treetops) and saturation. The price of a V-1 was about the price of a sedan car at its time (with forced labour). We could produce such missiles in a car factory by the ten thousands in a year. The supply of enough explosives would be the only actual challenge in my opinion.
250...850 kg warheads can thus be deliverd to several hundred km depth at about Mach 0.4 for very little cost. The biggest expense of an accurized treetop altitude flight V-1 would probably be the explosives, which could be plain TNT or even cheaper Amatol. A quantity production on a conveyor belt assembly line could keep the cost per missile without explosives below 15,000 € even if we install a Starlink interface, a thermal camera, good intertial navigation, radio or laser altimeter and a military grade GPS/Galileo receiver.
The cruise missiles as we know them since the 80's, but in conventional form especially by Americans bombing Muslims since 1991 are based on a nuclear cruise missile paradigm. The high cost of a nuclear warhead and the need to deter by credibility did lead to that kind of cruise missile. Some later tactical aircraft-launched cruise missiles were essentially the same with less fuel and thus less range.
To leave this high end paradigm allows for cheap small warhead good range cruise missiles and for cheap big warhead short range cruise missiles. Both could be launched in saturating attack waves of hundreds of missiles and could be built to be very resilient to electronic countermeasures.
There's no lack of important yet vulnerable targets for such missiles.
I really wonder why anyone thinks we should invest in expensive strike packages, expensive stealth bombers or pays attention to nonsense such as Oreshnik. Luxembourg could afford airpower that could bring Russia to its knees within weeks!
BTW; it takes three freighters (cost less than 300 million dollars) loaded with three billion dollars worth of such cruise missiles in Pacific Ocean, Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic Ocean to crash the U.S. economy in a strategic surprise attack. The ANG could not stop enough of them. Even a shadowing USN destroyer would not be able to do much, as the rocket-assisted launches could be compressed into a minute or less.
(1) Missiles such as Iskander, LORA et cetera can and should substitute and complement strike by combat aviation, particularly early in a conflict.
They require much lower operating costs due to no flying hours required
for training. At the same time they don't serve the officer corps'
interests well because they're not 'sexy' like fighters and missile
units require few officers.
This looks very fine, even though the recent reports about GPS guidance issues after two years of conflict restrict a bit what can be done with missiles.
(2) MEADS is overpriced nonsense. The IRIS-T-SL addition is actually interesting, but I greatly favoured the SAMP/T
area air defence system (with by now substantial missile defence
capability) as it could have been bought military off-the shelf after
its introduction by France and Italy. VL MICA could have complemented it the way IRIS-T SL is a short(er) range missile component in MEADS.
MEADS has a ridiculous program cost: batteries planned for purchase ratio.
The CAMM ground variant may become another alternative if we regain senses and finally cancel MEADS after all.
MEADS was cancelled. Patriot looks better than I expected in Ukraine because PAC-3 actually performs well against SRBMs and the Russians are too stupid or too cowardly to effectively go after large air defence radars.
(3) Air power will compete with ground forces for airlift capacity,
particularly early on in an unplanned hot conflict. It will also be very
busy with its counterpart and ground-based air defences early on, and
likely possess little ability to decisively affect ground operations in
the first days or weeks. I think air power fanbois such as British folks
who point at the theoretical load carrying capacity of 18 Brimstones
under a Typhoon - theoretically enough to wipe out a tank company -
would be very disappointed if modern combat aircraft were ever used in
the anti-tank role against a great power's army.
The air/ground has certainly been unimpressive over Ukraine, but they don't use Western weapons. Brimstone was delivered to Ukraine for ground/ground use, but I have not seen much effect or praise for it.
6x3 Brimstone missiles under a Typhoon
Actual airbases in German: Path dependency rules!
(4) The German Luftwaffe isn't a necessity for NATO or EU or even only
Germany, but -if done well- it can be useful because it would be (a)
barely at a safe distance to survive a surprise attack and (b) barely
still close enough to the Eastern frontier to help Poland and Lithuania
from German airbases. The usefulness of airbases and auxiliary airfields in Eastern Germany is much higher than the West German ones'.
The Russians weren't able to fully suppress the Ukrainian Air Force. They waste missiles on irrelevant targets and had for two years of conflict a too long process from collecting sensor data to strike a fleeting target (such as a parked operational aircraft) on the ground. So I underestimated the usefulness of Polish airbases, but my point about the desirability of airbases in East Germany and Czech Republic stands.
(5) It's still up for debate whether the next fighter generation will be manned, unmanned or optionally manned,
but this is missing much of future air war anyway (in my opinion).
Traditional air war is about growing aircraft flying high and fast,
while in future much of the air war may or will be about small,
low-flying and short-ranged drones that may even mimic birds. Thousands
of these could be unleashed into an area for attack and/or
reconnaissance. It's not apparent that ground forces have adapted to
this with appropriate changes in battlefield air defences, but it's
astonishing to me how Western air forces appear to ignore the entire
possibility and thus cede this probably more decisive air power element
to the ground forces. Current fighter types and designs certainly don't
incorporate counters; the missiles in use cost 10-100x as much as a
small drone needs to cost.
I was proved correct.
(6) Air combat will consume a terribly high quantity of expensive
missiles. The kill probability will be terrible (AMRAAM has a 50% pk
track record, and that was gained in very advantageous situations). We
may need more than 30 air combat missiles in stocks to kill a single top
quality fighter, which means we should purchase 40+ missiles per air
combat kill expected to be necessary. Foreign powers that shall be
deterred are likely aware of this, and they're likely aware that such
munitions purchases have a low priority in air forces that stare on
aircraft quantities and where the officer corps in control doesn't
benefit from higher ammunition stocks directly.
It appears that both Ukrainian and Russian combat aircraft have little air combat, as S-300 and S-400 area air defences repulse them so far back (above 200 ft) that they rarely come no escape zone ranges with hostile aircraft.
(7) It should be obvious once again by now, but let's spell it out: I
think of air forces as bureaucracies. The caste in control is the
officer corps. The junior officers are typically fine, but beginning
approx. at Lt.Col. the officer corps begins to follow the descriptions
of the principal-agent problem when it comes to resources.
I moved my blaming for poor decisions from the industry profit motive to
the principal-agent problem in the bureaucracy (and its political
overseers) years ago already.
The wars give no evidence in this regard IMO.
(8) The public is poorly informed about air power matters because
important info isn't communicated (mostly for obvious reasons). We learn
how many aircraft of a particular type were purchased and in service,
but we rarely learn how many daily sorties
they could generate, for example. The difference between two and eight
daily sorties changes the utility of the aircraft in question by very
much, of course. Higher sorties rates can be generated with aircraft
meant for shorter ranges and of more simple technology - that is,
aircraft that run against the actual procurement trends.
The wars give no evidence in this regard IMO.
(9) Many mistakes have been made in procurement
by air forces. There's no reason to trust the bureaucracy's expertise
in future procurement projects, even though we don't learn about many
important variables.
The wars give no evidence in this regard IMO.
(10) The trend towards using air bases far away (much farther than 500
km) from the targets and the thus exaggerated need for tanker aircraft
is worrying. NATO appears to be so lazy that it rather adds a 500 km
transit than to move a wing or detachment to a less fully developed but
much better located airfield.
The wars give no evidence in this regard IMO.
(11) Equally disturbing is the obsession about bunker-busting. I suspect
that many "bunker buster" munitions are secretly meant to penetrate
into reinforced concrete pillars of river bridges to blow them up from
the inside, but even this enlargement of target options doesn't really
justify the obsession with bunker busting. To penetrate aircraft bunkers
on airfields would typically not even require a standard-sized bomb, much less a dedicated bunker penetration warhead as in the Taurus missile.
Bunker busting was so far quite irrelevant in the Russo-Ukrainian War and bridge pillars weren't blown up.
(12) Western air power military theory and campaign plans/command are utterly unimpressive. Strike choreography has been rather impressive since the 1960's,
but the typical answer of air power to problems is still to throw more
resources at the problem, to bomb more. I'm utterly unimpressed by
supposed stars of air warfare theory, such as Warden whose theory is an
utterly useless fig leaf for incompetence campaign ideas. I tried to
criticise constructively, of course.
The Russian air power strategy appears to be so dumb that they could do better if they asked ChatGPT for help. The Ukrainian air power strategy appears to be on about the same level, albeit there are rudimentary signs of a counter-oil strategy.
(13) I don't like the assassination-by-drone campaign, but most of the
time the country's government appears to have green-lighted it. Cruise
missile diplomacy on the other hand is much worse; it's plain arrogance
and aggression most of the time.
The wars give no evidence in this regard IMO.
(14) Western air forces don't need bigger budgets. They should make
better use of their budgets, oriented at (collective) defence and
deterrence.
The impotence of Russian air power in face of old (and totally known to them) air defences as well as the ability of Ukrainians to conduct 1,500 km long strike missions with cheap improvised cruise missiles kind of proves my point.
(15) Close air support is overrated
because it was available in a much bigger ratio to ground forces in
contact than this would be the case in Europe. In Europe, individual
platoons wouldn't be heard by the air force; maybe individual reinforced
battalion battlegroups would be heard. CAS was also exaggerated because
air defences haven't distracted and impeded CAS after 1991 any more.
Close air support was not very important or very effective in the Russo-Ukrainian War until recently, when guided Russian glide bombs began to pound known Ukrainian field fortifications in an effort to do what Russian artillery is apparently too impotent to do. Still, it's only relevant at main efforts. Meanwhile, the classic CAS as Westerners think of it is absent and there's instead a drone plague in effect at up to 20 km depth. I consider such short-ranged drones to be more akin to artillery, not air force-like assets.
(16) I'm no fan of large airlift capacity. I understand that the
Americans need it to deploy past the oceans quickly, but Germany doesn't
need any military transport aircraft in my opinion. Most needs can be
(and many are being)
covered by chartered aviation, some can be eliminated by doctrine and
others are merely imagined. The A400M project was an embarrassing de
facto subsidy to a most ungrateful (and unexpectedly incompetent)
industry.
The wars give no evidence in this regard IMO.
(17) Long-range radar aircraft (E-3 and E-8 as examples) are impressive,
but would likely be pushed back if facing modern Russian technology.
Once pushed back by fighters and batteries with long-range missiles,
they could look barely or not at all into 'hostile' territory any more,
and thus wouldn't play their huge potential roles in attacks and
offensive operations on the ground. A possible countermeasure would be supersonic businessjets
turned into radar aircraft since these could survive 50-100 km farther
forward, but no such businessjets ever seem to reach the prototype
stage.
Electronic countermeasures add another big question mark behind the utility of air and ground surveillance radar aircraft.
The Russian A-50 Mainstay AEW aircraft was able to operate for a long time, but a few losses in the air and attacks on their airbase appear to have neutralised these assets. They would sure love to have a survivable AEW aircraft, but they did generally neglect AEW and had too few of the ordinary AEW aircraft to begin with. ECM effect against Mainstay and electronic intelligence aircraft was not published AFAIK.
(18) Maybe - contrary to Brimstone fanboyism et cetera - tactical air support of the future (CAS) will primarily be about detecting and identifying targets
for ground forces' artillery that grew very much in range and precision
during the last 20 years. This means that the old (since early 80's) Brevel/KZO or Aquila approach for an artillery spotter drone may still prove to be the way to go.
This is what drones did and do; originally the TB-2, nowadays quadcopter/multicopter drones.
(19) Airspace deconfliction has gotten out of hand.
This event looked scary, but did no harm. I have not read about or heard of any losses due to lacking deconfliction between artillery and airpower. There weren't terribly many aircraft over the frontlines, though. The biggest deconfliction issue appears t be 'friendly fire' against drones (especially with jammers) and of Russian air defences against Russian combat aircraft.
So overall, I think my theses look pretty good, kind of above average compared to most publications about modern war in the air.
The Russian air defences face a double problem; they are stretched thin and they don't get sufficient support by the flying air force, especially not by AEW aircraft (colloquially a.k.a. AWACS).
Being stretched thin means that there is no redundancy; a radar forced to shut down out of caution by an incoming anti-radar missile means that there's a temporary gap in the area air defences. It also means that the area air defences have insufficient coverage of the front line against very low-flying targets. Cruise missiles can slip through such gaps, and mission planning of cruise missile missions based on passive electronic warfare (triangulating and identifying radar signals plus satellite data) can almost ensure a safe passage of high quality cruise missiles such as Storm Shadow.
The lack of coverage by airborne radars (A-50 Mainstay AEW aircraft were few, had questionable readiness and were decimated during the war. Fighters cannot easily maintain a good coverage with look down radar searches because their radars are built in for forward search only), even though MiG-31 and Su-35 have (on paper) impressive radars.
This means that modern cruise missiles can slip through and are most unlikely to be intercepted behind the frontline as well. It's thus not unreasonable for NATO to trust very low-flying cruise missiles for strike missions on stationary and semi-stationary (rarely moving) targets, including ships in port.
The Russian air force's deficiencies extend to the defence against cheap cruise missiles (Shaheed-136 has become the embodiment of these after it was introduced to the Russo-Ukrainian War by the Russians themselves). The costs of such cheap cruise missiles appear to range form the price of an ordinary new car to the price of a cheap family home. This is less than the costs of area air defence missiles, which range from cheap family home price to small new mansion price. The Israeli Tamir missile appears to be the only exception, combing a Porsche's price with a low end area air defence footprint.
Future small cruise missiles may be able to do what was envisaged in a West German combat drone program of the late 1980's already; patrol along roads, find and identify vehicles, engage high-enough value vehicles autonomously. This would add considerable battlefield interdiction ability (against mobile/moving targets).
As a conclusion, cheap cruise missiles are also worthwhile, even if some or many get intercepted. Targets at ranges greater than 1,000 km can be hit by cheap cruise missiles. The warhead is usually rather small and their cruise speed is rather low (or very low), so the target categories for cheap cruise missiles should for now be stationary and semi-stationary targets that can be defeated by a warhead no bigger than 50 kg and require no high impact speed. V-1-styled cheap cruise missiles (pulse jets engines are super simple and cheap) could strike at short ranges (less than 500 km) with much bigger warheads, but impact only at about Mach 0.5 speed. Hardened aircraft shelters would thus largely be ruled out, but Russia doesn't have many of those anyway. Autonomous cheap cruise missiles might have a suppressive battlefield interdiction effect.
All kinds of quasi-ballistic missiles appear to penetrate Russian (area) air defences at acceptable success rates. This means that (quasi)ballistic missiles are promising means of attack against time-critical targets such as aircraft on a tarmac, large radars, headquarters or ships that are just briefly in port. They may also be the most promising choice for very heavily defended point targets such as the pillars of an important bridge. A 'hypersonic'-ish behaviour of terminal manoeuvring from a near-vertical to a more horizontal approach for a pillar hit from the side might be advantageous for this, but many suspended bridges can be cut with a expanding rod warhead cutting steel cables as well.
The poor performance of Russian air defences also requires them to be sited quite far back, as they cannot defend themselves well-enough against small quasi-ballistic missiles such as GUMLRS (colloquially a.k.a. as "HIMARS"). GUMLRS-ER has about 150 km range, so Russian area air defences will either be unable to protect forces at the front or will be limited to ambushes (no radar/radio emissions until briefly before firing to avoid getting found & hit) or will permanently be deployed forward at a high attrition rate. This gives NATO some hopes that the post-Cold War approach of bombing with precision munitions from too high for short range air defences would work against Russia.
Finally, there's still the sophisticated and expensive capability of strike packages, an invention of mid-World War Two that got refined to almost its modern version over Vietnam in the early 70's. There's little reason to believe that the Russian air force could resist such strike packages for long, if at all. The quality displayed by its flying and land-based forces is so low that the Russian air force is probably not even on par with the French one overall. Strike packages can be considered cost-inefficient, though. They're furthermore merely a 'pulsing' capability. There would be strike aircraft over Russian ground for some hours of the day, but not for most hours. Ordinary high frequency radio transmissions would suffice to alert Russian forces on the ground to hide rather than move on roads when such a strike package is nearby. So in the end, all that effort for strike packages is redundant to the abilities of cheap cruise missiles, cruise missiles and quasi-ballistic missiles (in the high value point target-busting role, not in regard to quickness).
I should mention that some if not most problems of the Russian Air Defence appear to be the result of poor training and poor maintenance.
What should Russia do to make its air defences fit?
improvement of training
improvement of maintenance, especially through large stocks of spare parts
introduce in quantity cheap area air defence means against cheap cruise missiles and drones, ideally Tamir-like and capable of taking on some quasi-ballistic missiles (such as GUMLRS-ER) as well
create a survivable (!) AEW platform, preferably a supercruise aircraft with decimetric AESA radars (possibly one rotating AESA antenna front and aft each for twice hemispheric coverage)
rely on battlefield air defences that can be hidden easily (and require no on-board radar)(example)
create area air defences specialised on ambushing (to protect the land force sin the field) rather than built for near-permanent observation of the sky
increased use of passive radars or multistatic radars with cheap emitters
plentiful use of believable decoy emitters and fake radio transmissions to make it hard to identify gaps in the air defences
localized on/off jamming of satellite navigation (GPS, Galileo, Beidou, even the own Glonass) to force the use of more expensive navigation and targeting electronics in cheap cruise missiles
use many cheap jammers to deny aerial and satellite radar reconnaissance
use lasers to dazzle photo and thermal imagery reconnaissance satellites
have long-range surface-to-air missiles to keep NATO AEW, tanker, standoff jammer, ELINT and air/ground radar reconnaissance aircraft at a long distance
minimise the need for radio communication by the air defences
I doubt that Russia can do most of these within the next 15 years - before autonomous drones become dominant almost for certain. Cheaper forms of air defence, some passive radars, more and better decoys, distributed cheap jammers (untypical for Russia, but feasible especially with Chinese input) and laser satellite dazzling appear to me as the most probable measures till the mid-2030's. A series production of the Su-57 won't make much of a difference regardless of the quality of the aircraft type and its missiles.
NATO may decide whether it's going to trust its ability to strike with stealth aircraft through gaps, to wear down air defences in a DEAD (destruction of enemy air defences) campaign or punch through defences with strike packages. The Cold War-style confidence in terrain following flight of manned strike aircraft appears to be the most risky and least favoured approach.
Alternatively, we could skip all those expenses for F-35's, dedicated anti-radar aircraft ('Wild Weasel'/ECR) and anti-radar missiles. We could use long-range container-launched cruise missiles (turbojet, 3000 km x 500 kg warhead), container-launched quasi-ballistic missiles (solid fuel rocket single stage, 1000 km x 250 kg warhead), long-ranged cheap cruise missiles (piston engine, 3000 km x 50 kg warhead) and cheap cruise missiles (pulse jet, 500 km x 500 kg warhead) and combine this with (survivable!) passive electronic warfare assets + proper mission planning (separate planning teams for hasty and for deliberate strike planning). This would cover our deep strike needs pretty well.
P.S.: The question remains how to do battlefield interdiction against vehicles on roads. Their movement maybe dispersed rather than in convoys, and it's near-impossible to render a road network unusable for offroad-capable motor vehicles.
The Ukrainian approach is to engage motor vehicles at up to 20 km depth with drones. This poses a persistent threat. Strike packages cannot persist like that. Aerial sensors (or sensors on very high vantage points such as mountains) could enable land-based fires (dumb HE, DPICM, 'smart' artillery munitions, drones) within their effective surveillance range (including ability to sufficiently ID targets as military targets). That would likely not be much farther than 20 km because the longer-ranged SAR/GMTI radars can be jammed and deceived cheaply. So how do we impede hostile ground forces & supply movements beyond attacking (semi)stationary targets? Can't we do anything about dispersed lorry movements 500...20 km forward of our troops? We used to have battlefield interdiction aircraft for this in Western Europe (Tornado IDS, Jaguar).
Regarding geography: This means Houthis attack ships that are on the far side of their domestic Yemeni enemies. They do clearly attack without any line of sight between territory controlled by Houthis and the targeted ship.
Well, one of the Houthi targets bombed by the U.S. was a radar installation that monitored maritime traffic from onshore. It appears the Houthis can attack ships without such a station. One could argue that they could attack more easily with such a radar installation, but wasn't the purpose of the bombing to end the attacks rather than to make them just a bit more challenging to the Houthis?
Frankly, here's how I imagine the bombings came to happen:
Houthis commit piracy in Red Sea and send missiles towards Israel.
Sustained attacks on ships by Houthis, mostly defeated by naval air defences.
How can they be so disrespectful?
We need to do something!
What's "something"?
Out of the box answer is to bomb some brown people.
CENTCOM gets tasked to create a target list for air strikes.
CENTCOM cannot exactly offer a strategy with a perspective to achieve much of anything, but it creates a target list with items plausibly linked to the attacks on ships and/or Israel.
Some targets of the target list get bombed.
CENTCOM declares success, invents a figure of by how much the Houthis' attack potential was reduced.
Houthis continue to attack ships.
More Houthis targets get bombed.
Houthis continue to attack ships.
Sounds kinda like the Kosovo Air War escalation and two decades of assassination-by-air phony war on errorists campaign.
It's almost as if the establishment was only mildly intelligent.
I don't know much about how the Soviets intended to attack Western air defence radars. I know they had a couple radar jamming helicopters that were highly effective against IHAWK and they had a MiG-25 version that would fly at very high altitude at very high speed and launch some big anti-radar missile before running away.
The Americans developed their sophisticated and expensive SEAD/DEAD (suppression enemy air defences / destruction ...) over North Vietnam. It included dedicated wings with specialised antenna-laden two-seat aircraft and two different anti-radar missiles (one of which was terribly expensive and the other had a variety of seekers against different radars). Standoff Elint and jammer aircraft supported all this. The dedicated anti-radar aircraft would find and engage radars, but the actual destruction would often be left to accompanying fighter-bombers that went close in and bombed the air defences similar to how American fighters of WW2 strafed and bombed Japanese air defences to reduce the threat tot he following bombers. This American approach was developed further and they now have a versatile anti-radar missile, satellites help with finding radars and they mess with the radio communications of an integrated air defence. The American approach excelled over Iraq in 1991, but it failed to destroy most of the old Yugoslavian air defences in 1999.
All this is public knowledge. So what do the Russians do over Ukraine?
They sometimes targeted air defence high value targets with a precisions trike by ballistic PGM Iskander.
They provoke air defences with cruise missiles and drones.
They sometimes use remotely piloted vehicles (Lancet drones) to attack air defence high value targets close to the front
Some of their fighter patrols and strike fighters carry a (rather big) anti-radar missile, ready to shoot at targets of opportunity and presumably hoping that this capability also protects the aircraft itself.
Stills from a new Izvestia clip that show a VKS Su-35S multirole fighter returning to Baltimor (Voronezh Oblast) from a combined CAP/SEAD sortie armed with two R-37Ms AAMs, two R-73/74Ms AAMs & a single Kh-31PM ARM. Interestingly, no R-77-1 AAMs (possibly launched during sortie). pic.twitter.com/TH2d57mVii
They fail to overcome Ukraine's Soviet-era air defence systems even though they know them to 100% detail and had 30+ years time to train against them.
No published information (AFAIK) about effective airborne jamming of Ukrainian air defence radars
No published information (AFAIK) about effective airborne jamming of Ukrainian air defence communications
No published information (AFAIK) about effective use of satellites (presumably because the Ukrainians change positions briefly after certain Russian reconnaissance satellites passed them)
Even the German air force might be more effective than that in DEAD (using its few Tornado ECR, a couple radar satellites, commercial photo/IR satellites, GUMLRS PGMs, Taurus and a small stock of old HARM missiles)!
I could draw up a fantasy force with an extremely resilient yet still affordable air defence. It would be necessary to deny the Americans effective use of bomb runs, even against their strike package tactics. Yet it's entirely unnecessary against the Russian armed forces, which are so crappy that they fall well short of meeting expectations based on a 1991 air campaign that lasted a few weeks. They had one and a half years.
We need not look further than the 40 years old Buk-M1 system if we want to see what an effective counter to Russian combat aviation looks like. You'd at most need some gun-based system to keep them from being effective at terrain-following flight (less than 200 ft altitude).
Meanwhile, the Western military-industrial complexes focus on gold-plated cutting edge air defences. This makes sense to some degree (you need lock on after launch missiles to engage targets at very low altitudes and modern datalinks and processors sure make sense), but it's also very expensive. I'm guilty of this as well, but in my defence; at least I saw the need for some cheap missiles to defeat munitions (cruise missiles, smart glide bombs) in the mix.
Saddam Hussein's survived the 1991 Gulf War, and so did his regime. The Americans weren't satisfied with accomplishing the UN-authorised mission of liberating Kuwait. They wanted the whole Saddam regime gone despite it being hostile to the favourite bogeyman Iran and despite them being just fine with Saddam gassing his own people and shooting Scuds into Iranian cities just a few years earlier.
The USAF thought that it could do its part easily in the future if only it had some super fast precision missile that it could use to kill another country's politician based on intelligence. The whole process from intelligence gathering to giving the order to shoot would last hours, so at least the missile would have to be super quick to assassinate before the perosn is somewhere else.
This led to the 1997 FastHawk program. Nothing came of it, but the USAF stayed fixated on the idea, and the incredible 100% every time failure with 'decapitating' strikes attempts at Hussein's life in 2003 did not change this.
The 'hypersonic' missile saga went on and on, much money was spent, additional rationales (hypersonic missiles manoeuvre more and are supposedly harder to intercept than normal cruise missiles or (quasi)ballistic missiles) and very recently the USAF had to cancel its ARRW program.
Don't worry, they're continuing another program (HACM), so they're going to spend more money.
Meanwhile, the army is buying a quasi-ballistic missile (LRPF) and both air force and navy keep using subsonic cruise missiles, all of which are supposedly effective enough to justify thier spending. I wonder what hypersonic missiles are needed for if the other missiles work as advertised? The 'decapitation' strategy never really worked due to poor intelligence and slow process, after all. A quicker missile won't fix that.
The normal ideas for a 6th generation fighter / combat aircraft follow the established triad of air dominance fighter (F-22 continuation), strike fighter (F-35 continuation) and bomber (B-21?).
The usual expectation is that more gadgets will be added (including lasers powerful enough to at least damage optical and thermal sensors). It's also widely believed that a 6th generation combat aircraft will be optionally manned if not outright unmanned, and cooperate with drone 'wingmen'.
I have my own thoughts about what would be sensible instead, and I only really pay attention to defence of Europe. So the scenarios are either an air power-supported land war in Eastern Europe (worst case vs. Russia, PRC and Turkey at the same time) or an air/sea war with land-based air power and air defences facing seaborne aerial threats (including quasiballistic missiles). The latter scenario is of lesser importance, as it relies on the U.S. turning full-blown fascist and hostile and they could alternatively use SpaceX Spaceships to haul warheads into low orbit for bombarding Europe (by the 2030's). So the main scenario is a land/air war in Eastern Europe.
There are many land-based, non-manned aviation alternatives to manned air power and even many ground alternatives to most unmanned airpower, such as firing quite cost-efficient surface/surface missiles at targets within 120...500 km.
A 6th generation combat aircraft would thus have to be able to hide on airbases and airports 500+ km away from the ground combat and it could best justify its huge expenses by filling unoccupied tactical niches. I will probably later publish a draft text on what can substitute for manned air power in what roles. For this blog post I'll just state that I think about a survivable radar platform for about 60,000 ft altitude, using radars both to find air targets and ground targets, albeit this may be done by different aircraft versions with different radar bands.
The platform would be roughly similar to the X-44 concept, albeit with more spaced turbofan engines and consequently a single centreline underbelly air inlet (to still have S-duct).
I chose the X-44 concept as a starting point because the entirely
tailless design helps much with radar stealth.
The spacing would be necessary to enable having the same radar in the tail as in the nose (thrust vectoring might be limited by the radome). The radar would use a rotating ~45° angled AESA antenna, enabling semispheric coverage for each nose and tail radars and thus full spherical overall radar coverage. The aircraft could freely manoeuvre at 60,000 ft with supercruise speed (afterburners not needed, actually).
All missiles would be kept in a central rotating magazine weapons bay (or two) between the turbofans, similar to what some bombers have. There would be at least six missiles and a few free-flying DRFM decoys in there.
The missiles would mostly be dual purpose missiles, capable of hard-killing incoming rockets and killing pursuing aircraft at similar ranges as today's best infra-red guided missiles. This entire aircraft's purpose would be more similar to today's AWACS (AEW) and J-STARS aircraft than to a F-22.
Munitions would primarily be fired from the surface, but the bird's view at 60,000 ft is an important niche capability to make full use of such surface-based munitions.
The idea is to feed radar data from bird's view perspective into a networked air and ground war effort. This includes air contact data (detection by L-band radar) and ground contact and ground mapping data (X-band). A detected hostile fighter would not be engaged by this aircraft, but by ground-based missile launchers at command of a ground-based air war command. This aircraft concept would not be meant to fly over hostile ground, but it would be able to venture out to sea (Baltic or Black Sea, for example) and its stealth, flying performance (altitude, speed) and missile countermeasures would enable it to fly close enough to the ground battle for a useful field of view into hostiles-controlled terrain.
The X-band radar version (not both radar versions on one plane) could use leads given by the longer avelength L-band version to determine the vectors of aerial contacts more accurately than even the combined contact info of multiple L-band version aircraft. The X-band radar would still mostly look at the ground (or surface at sea) and at what flies or floats below the surface radar line of sight, though.
The countermeasures would include at least one laser powerful enough to render infrared, UV and visible light seekers on missiles near-useless and possibly even to badly damage the seeker of active radar-guided missiles. The dual purpose missiles would try to trigger the fuse of hostile missiles, but also try to damage or destroy said missiles (maybe even with EMP warhead against radar-guided missiles?).
The aircraft would transit about 500 km per sortie, so a useful on-station duration of one hour would require about 3,000 km range in a high-supercruise-high flight profile with full missile load. This range, the survivability features, the munitions bay and the two big radars would lead to an aircraft rather a bit larger than the F-22. This causes huge challenges on the ground, as hiding would be difficult. Moreover, such a highly complex aircraft would rather not permit sustaining more than one such two-hour sortie per day, and midair refuelling wouldn't help much to extend flying hours per day, but require much extra effort and permit more distant basing.
So assuming we would need 10 on station, that would be a total requirement for 240 aircraft + reserve for not ready aircraft (another 100 maybe) + attrition reserve. The required total might be 500, difficult to afford for such a niche capability. 10 on station might not even suffice to satisfactorily cover the entire span from North Cape to Suez Canal or Caucasus region for NATO. Maybe the cost would be prohibitive, ensuring that an approach with only low altitude drones and ground-based equipment replaces the air war even if the opposing forces still insist on air power as we know it.
edit: You may have read that L band is no magic bullet against RF stealth and requires huge antennas to create a narrow beam main lobe. Wavelengths longer than X-band are not much used in fighters because they are indeed not so good at accurate 3D measurements. Whatever band would be used (could be UHF for LO air threat detection, actually) doesn't matter so much. Longer wavelengths are worse for angular resolution, but fine for ranging. Two radars may detect and track a target over time getting just 10...20° angular resolution, but accurate distance readings. Their own position would be known accurately. Fusing thee two tracks allows for computing the position of the contact even if there are many contacts at the same time in the same beam. The algorithms for this are fairly straightforward; you just need to rule out implausible movements. Finally, you get a position accurate enough that a high-powered X-band radar can stare at it, switch off filters for a short range band in its narrow beam and even a tiny echo would suffice to detect a LO cruise missile at a useful distance. Moreover, LO aircraft contacts can be confirmed with zoomed IIR cameras.
Finally, long wavelength radars can move their main lobe to determine when the contact doesn't generate such a strong echo any more (because the main lobe ends), they do not just get the binary info whether contact is detected by main lobe or not. (See here for basic info on radar lobes: https://basicsaboutaerodynamicsandavionics.wordpress.com/2016/08/11/radar-fundamentals-part-ii/ )
The requirement for having two long wavelength radars 'seeing' the same contact does add to the quantity of radars that need to be in action (and thus radar aircraft on station), of course.
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