And how many amphibious landing brigades does Argentina have? Are those tanks going to drive over the sea bottom? Presumably they have some dug in artillery and shore defense positions now which would be enough to prevent an uncontested landing. The submarine is the real killer, I don’t imagine any Argentine ship could get close enough to land troops without getting torpedoed.
“Nuke their airfields”
What kind of 60’s movie do you think we’re living in?!?!
The most powerful parts of the Argentine Air Force consists of the following
14x IAI Dagger. ( Fighter that first flew in 1971 )
7x Dassault Mirage 5 ( Ground attack aircraft that first flew in 1967 )
8x Dassault Mirage III ( Fighter that first flew in 1956 )
34x A4 ( Ground attack aircraft that first flew in 1954, admittedly heavily upgraded )
The bulk of the Argentine Air Force combat power is aircraft that were designed close to SIXTY years ago.
Their more modern aircraft are designed around forty years old.
The Eurofighter Typhoon is a modern multirole aircraft, armed with modern long range air to air missiles, capable of destroying Argentine aircraft way outside the range they can strike back. Not to mention the Typhoon does have some minor stealth features and an LPI radar, so the Argentine aircraft would be detected by the Typhoon long before the Typhoon was detected by the Daggers or Mirage IIIs.
Four typhoons could be reinforced with a lot more in twelve hours, plus tanker aircraft to add to the one already down there, AWACS aircraft, electronic warfare aircraft, etc.
The RAF could literally sweep the sky clean of Argentine aircraft, and bomb their airfields if they wanted to. The Argentinian equipment is too old to pose a significant threat to the best of the RAF. The Eurofighter has quite long legs, and a large part of Argentina is in range of Falkland islands based Typhoons even without tanker refuelling!
But hey, let’s forget about that and get back to “nuke their airfields”.
There is no way in hell, on earth or any possible imaginable universe that the UK would perform a nuclear first strike on Argentina for invading the Falklands.
What the UK would do in a sane universe if Argentina somehow magically took the Falklands,would be to use cruise missiles fired from submarines. The UK has enough submarines to put conservatively 90 Tomahawk cruise missiles on targets in Argentina. If they went light on the number of torpedoes, they could double that numbers of Tomahawks to nearly 200. And when they’ve fired them all, and levelled Argentina’s air bases close to the Falklands, they can sail back to the UK and rearm with some more missiles, go back south and do the same thing over again, because there’s not a thing in the Argentine armoury that can pose a serious threat to the UK’s submarine force.
Well, according to Wikipedia (underlining mine):
So it doesn’t sound like it.
That is presuming that the UK always has multiple subs in the region, which I frankly doubt. And a single submarine is not going to make much difference.
Reinforced in 12 hours? In 1991, 2001 and 2003 it tooks weeks to get significant forces in situ for operations and with logistic tail 100 times easier than the Falklands is and without the added complication of the field itself being attacked (as it undoubtedly will be). Remember additional aircraft are not just pilot and planes, they need ordnance (most of which will have to be shipped in) spares (ditto) support personnel etc, bringing them in takes a lot more time than 12 hours. And The UK submarine most of whom are in the N Atlantic or the Indian Ocean and have a top-speed of around 30 knots will magically appear 1500 km of the coast of Argentina?
A single Trafalgar class submarine is pretty much all thats needed, it has up to 30 armaments, any combination desired of cruise missiles and torpedoes. How many ships are going to be left to land on the Falklands when it’s fired off it’s full load? The UK doesn’t confirm positions of it’s Nuclear submarines but it’s widely speculated they keep one in the South Atlantic at all times.
Those cruise missiles have a range of 2400 km, so it doesn’t need to be that close to stop a hostile landing.
Exactly.
Argentina has exactly 2 amphibious’s ships,
One is a converted Destroyer, with two Sea King helicopters and 238 marine infantry, and
The other is a converted civilian cargo ship, and is a ‘amphibious cargo ship’, so it doesn’t land itself, but carries smaller landing craft onboard. I can’t find a reference to it’s carrying capacity apart from 120 cargo containers.
So I’d be curious as to how they intend to get those armoured and mechanical brigades to the Falklands.
And as another poster has already said, the air force is 40+ year old aircraft, which are primarily fighter/bombers, with their most high tech weapons systems being old spec Sidewinders.
According to wikipedia, the British lost 255 men, 6 ships and 34 aircraft, with an overall estimated cost of 3 billion pounds in the 1982 war. Knowing that, would the British people support doing it over again (assuming, for the sake of argument, that Argentina could re-capture the islands)?
Without question, yes!
moot point, since the UK is currently spending 365 million pounds a year on the Falklands military forces to make sure that they can’t re-capture them.
The question is, will the UK public support spending that much indefinitely? As it’s just part of the UK’s defense budget and if those troops weren’t at the Falklands, they would probably be stationed at Ascension Island or another UK overseas base anyway, I think the question is probably yes.
Nitpick: Three completely dumb torpedoes actually.
I reckon so, as it’s easily portrayable as a) a war of defence, and b) a war for sovereignty for the islanders. A classic good guy/bad guy war.
Yes, but all those tanks, just like all those tanks that the British have, have one serious flaw: they’re not on the Falklands.
I’d say so. One reason being because we spent that much money and blood in 1982, “Having done all that we’re not going to give up now”.
Everything the British have is fully independent. What you are thinking of is the sale of Polaris and Trident missiles (missiles, not warheads) to the UK from the US.
The US made the missiles, and sold some to the UK. These missiles carry nuclear warheads on US and UK submarines.
I don’t know about the rest of you but I’m sick of watch 21st Century western air forces running amok over 1960s air defences. I really want to see the 1960s era Argentine air force try to penetrate a 21st Century western air defense network. How would we even know that all those British ship and land based SAMs are even real?
The British should withdraw the Typhoons and refrain from pre-emptively wiping out the Argentine air force on the runway with submarine and ship launched cruise missiles in order to make this happen.
Throatwarbler, you could always model it in Fleet Command, or some such. Has a modern IADS even been tested? I guess Iraq counts, sort of, though the lesson there is that if you let your enemy develop an EOOB for 6 months, you’re going to lose. We could look at Red Flag/Green Flag results, were those public. I’d certainly find it interesting. Not a lot of cites for GQ, I apologize in advance. Absent data from a good series of sims, I’m not sure there is an actual answer to the OP’s question.
IMHO, the big thing if Argentina were serious about retaking the islands, and stupid enough to do it by force, instead of by emigration then later plebiscite, for the Brits would be to get enough advance notice of the invasion. It only takes ~1 day for a ship to get from Rio Gallegos to Port Stanley. Use an ocean going ferry or series of them if you need—this gets around the need for the amphibious assault ship. Land enough guys to take the port—or hell, do an airdrop to seize it—send ships to the port to unload the rest of the kit (APC’s/SAMs’/beans/bullets.)
Sure, if there’s an SSN in the passage, it can interdict the vessels, but what’s the likelihood that one’s there? Or is stationed within AK84’s 1500 km of the Islands? Now, it can certainly interdict future attempts to resupply the garrison, but to stop it from occurring? I don’t know.
I doubt the U.K. is maintaining full time maritime patrols (with a/c or ships) of the passage between the Falklands and Argentina, absent some alarm/intelligence that Argentina is planning something. The U.K., might not even see the invasion force until it was disgorging troops.
If we suppose that Argentina completely loses its mind, yet gains complete strategic surprise and manages to land ~2000 troops + 50-100 assorted vehicles (the capacity of two ocean going ferries like those used for the BA/Montevideo run. Yes, they’re LNG fueled, and probably don’t have the bunkerage for a Gallegos/Stanley voyage. I’m just using them as an example of a large ocean going RO/RO ferry.),
I think the Brits will have one hell of a time getting them off the islands. I guess they could be sieged off. Or cruise missiled, if you don’t mind the collateral damage from dead islanders. Would they make the effort? Probably, even considering the cost that Blank Slate mentioned, considering it’s going to cost a hell of a lot more since they don’t have CVEs, and that things just cost more now. It’s a great way to get the electorate to rally around the flag. Could the Argentines stop a re-invasion? I doubt it. I don’t think their air force or navy could get through the bubble a U.K. Aegis-equivalent equipped amphibious assault group could put up. I think the SAG would have enough precision firepower from itself and attendant subs that it wouldn’t need airstrikes. I do think though that the invasion would be bloody and a giant mess. Moreover, the PTB in Argentina are probably well aware that the screwed up invasion in 1982 was largely responsible for their military junta cratering.
I’m not an expert on the jumping-out-of-planes business but trying to do it over airspace that is defended sounds like a really bad idea. Transport planes aren’t that much better today than they were in WW2, but SAMs are.
oh Jesus Christ, they’re not. And the fact that you wasted waxing eloquent for 7 paragraphs on something that will never happen is just… Erm well sad. In fact, what’s up with this chippy mutual masturbation going on around the forums lately? Sheesh.
I would be surprised if the british had not snuck in lots of sam air defense onto the island, about the cheapest way to make it not worth it for argentina.