A real period piece, pity the RAF doesn’t have any old Lightnings they can polish up and send after then for a photo op.
Exactly. It’s far better to kill the carrier before it launches. To date cruise missiles have not been all that fast. Hence the name “cruise”. But once launched they’re darn hard to find, much less kill. And that’s beyond the simple numbers game that killing five is 5x as hard as killing one.
As we’re starting to see intermediate range supersonic cruise missiles the game changes again. A US ALCM or Russian equivalent can be launched hundreds or even a thousand-ish miles from the target. But once launched it takes a long time to get there.
A 400 mile range M2.0 “super-cruise missile” would be a very different problem. The good news is the carrier has to get closer before firing. And the spread of missiles covers a smaller circle of potential targets. The bad news is once the missile is in the air it becomes all but impossible to intercept with a traditional manned interceptor. Now you’re counting on terminal area anti-missile defense systems to stop the incomers. Which themselves are expensive, leaky, bleeding edge tech. And which by their nature leave negligible reaction time between failure to intercept and ordnance landing on the friendlies.
As you say, they’re testing response times. There’s no ‘tail between legs’ about it. The whole *idea *is to get caught, to see how long it takes them to get caught. All sides do this, it’s not peculiar to the Russians.
Point taken, but I still like the idea of showing up 2 minutes earlier than expected should a shooting war break out.
You greatly overestimate the precision with which shooting wars are fought. 
You can factor in strength, and find a way to negate it. While presenting a weaker side, may work to your advantage by channeling the enemies strength to were you want it.
Given an actual conflict, the requirement for visually ID’ing a target is a political expedience for the most part, with making sure that your not shooting down enemy drones emitting an enhanced electronic signature, being a close second.
Declan
And no one has mentioned it, but scrambling is good training for the response folks. The Russians are providing unscripted / unscheduled training events for the interceptor teams, which is not a bad thing.
And when countries start losing response time due to maintenance/finance issues, it can show up - which is good intelligence for the probing country.
A couple of sites with information on air reconnaissance losses.
https://www.nsa.gov/about/_files/cryptologic_heritage/publications/coldwar/dangerous_business.pdf
Early losses from 1945 to 1958. Includes bonus feature of US nuclear weapon accidents.
http://www.americancoldwarvets.org/cold-war-casualties
This little game of tag was once quite common - as was the US practice of always having a flying strategic command aircraft aloft.
Both games were cancelled after the collapse of the USSR.
Putin is doing his damnedest to re-start at least a COLD war. The Ukraine is a mini Hungary 1956.
VID is part and parcel of the semi-conflict environment we’ve been in. Events like this (Korean Air Lines Flight 007 - Wikipedia, Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 - Wikipedia, Iran Air Flight 655 - Wikipedia) demonstrate that shooting at blips in a mostly-peacetime environment can have unexpected adverse consequences.
WWIII or any other full up tooth-and-nail-to-the-death struggle between governments will not be like that.
Putin sees this as a big game. His latest adventure is sending troops to Syria. the game is to announce to the world that Russia is still a superpower. On the way, he plans to keep the Syrian regime from collapse. This is actually a good thing, as ISIS needs to be defeated. the question is: will Tsar Vlad I spend the lives needed to destroy ISIS?
If he does so, he will :
-humiliate Obama
-establish himself as a credible power
-save the Christians of the ME
this will be interesting-stay tuned.
With regard to Iran Air Flight 655, that wasn’t really a “mostly-peacetime environment”.
Is the plan to make the other guy laugh so hard that he loses control of his aircraft?
Don’t underestimate the military power an aircraft carrier can project. Even the Swiss Navy knows this:
Would not landing would require very experienced pilots? :dubious:
You think the Tu-160 and its crew are the only assets the Russians would have in the game when it shows up near Alaska or Greenland/US East Coast? They would doubtless be observing the USAF’s response through long range sensors, listening in on radio traffic, using satellites to see US bases. They would figure out the subterfuge very quickly.
In any event, its very likely that their own warplans are predicated on the US response being best cased (for the Yanks).
Rather awkward to explain that when it turns out the bombers you’re intercepting are actually hostile and Edinburgh and Aberdeen are destroyed because you wanted to get cute with your interception strategy.
Edinburgh? Aberdeen?
Godless Commies want to blow up Britain, too. :dubious:
Doesn’t really make what happened any more defensible