Assuming an attacker is within range of your fixed defenses, will fighter aircraft be any more effective than the ground-based batteries, aside from their maneuverability (can cover blind spots, disperse clusters of attackers, etc.)?
There’s a scene in Thor: The Dark World when the city is being attacked by enemy spacecraft*. The asgardians defensive batteries respond almost immediately and shoot several down by the time they can get their own craft up and fighting. Was there really any benefit to this, or was it just a way to bring more forces to bear?
*The asgardian ships could have been atmospheric-only vessels, since they didn’t appear to have a sealed cockpit/flight deck.
I have only an opinion, not a factual answer, but I would say not. You can always put heavier, more accurate, and better supplied weapons on the ground, served by better computers and not troubled by being on a swerving tumbling platform.
The point of a fighter defense, I believe, is to defend against threats well before they come over the horizon, so you have much more time to become aware, formulate plans, make mistakes and recover from them. By the time your enemies are within range of your AA batteries, you are down to your last ditch defense and trusting in superb reflexes and luck.
They work together, with aircraft providing the outermost perimeter defense. It’s not like in Thor where fighters scramble at the last minute. There’s always a few flying around on patrol, both AWACS radar planes and fighters already in the air. Then there are ship or ground-launched missile systems for what the planes miss. At the very last layer you have auto-targeting gatling guns mounted on ships or vehicles.
In the Thor scenario, presumably their radars didn’t detect the stealthed alien ships in time for either missiles or warplanes to react. And the turrets that did fire kinda sucked too and didn’t lead their targets very well. Probably should’ve spent more money on domestic defense rather than empire-building across umpteenth billion worlds.
It’s harder to hit a moving target; heck, it’s harder to find it. A ground base may have a helluva lot more firepower, but it’s in a fixed location that often can be pinpointed by reconnaissance before hostilities even start. I guess with either type, it depends on (a) how many do you have and (b) how likely that one missile/bomb will get through and how much damage that will do.
I’d argue that ground based AA batteries can be much more mobile and easier to hide than an airfield.
That’s really the main weakness of fighters, they need this large, open and flat surface to operate.
As other have noted, the traditional value of fighters is the flexibility to cover a large area. With fixed AA (regardless of technology), you can defend only what it can see & reach. So one is an area weapon, the other a point weapon.
When trying to defend a large area, say stopping incursions along a long border, EW radars & fighters can cover more area more affordably than fixed short or medium range AA.
When defending a high value point target, say a HQ or industrial complex or airfield or port, you can’t beat massive ground based AA. Although current practice would still place sets of fighters between your high value item and the enemy’s likely axis of approach.
I’ve been out of the business for over 20 years now, and the relative lethality of AA has gone up a bunch since my day. If we get to the point of networked space based radars & staring EO systems tied to widespread SAM belts of mixed long- & short-range weapons, I’d be seeing the end of aircraft as effective offensive weapons. At which point they sorta become obsolete as defensive weapons too.
True, but fighters have a poor record defending armoured formations from air attack.
You would know better, but did’nt Syrian Gunship helicopters take a major toll onIDF armour in 1982 despite complete superiority and from memory lack of good organic AD was one of the reasons given.
What are staring electro-optical systems? What does “staring” mean here?
Also, don’t ground/sea-based radars have an advantage in terms of emitter power, receiver size, concealability and affordability for a given technology level?
Isn’t the same true for missiles vs planes when it comes to speed, altitude, concealability and affordability?
Back in your days, how able were you to detect passive IR missiles, semi-active radar guided missiles or command guided missiles before they would get close enough?
It certainly provides a lot flexibility, but it is still one big, immobile target. You don’t need to actually destroy the airplanes to cripple someone’s air force, and you can’t always place your airfields beyond the reach of your enemy(ask the Egyptians!).
Also the further away the airfield is from the area you want to protect the more restricted the fighters become due to fuel limitations and response times.
Not a great example. You are basically asking for apples, oranges, and pears.
Air superiority fighters have their role in intercepting enemy aircraft… but they are also the most visible, slowest to respond, and have the least time available for patrolling.
SAM sites are useful for permanent or long-term defensive installations. Whether they can engage a particular target or not depends on a lot of factors, including the type of aircraft, altitude, capabilities of the radar, and capabilities of the missile. Check out accounts of the Vietnam War to see the fascinating game of cat-and-mouse (or rather, cat-and-cat) that went on between the fighters and SAM sites.
Anti-aircraft artillery, in the sense of flak guns and phalanx systems, are IMHO the least useful on a modern battlefield. Unlike the movies, most modern aircraft will be engaging their target from far outside the range of these guns. One thing the movie got right is that AAA tends to expend a LOT of ammunition without hitting anything.
There is a Rhaw threat receiver in the aircraft that would detect a radar guided missile, depending on the radar emissions, it would classify it as an air to air missile, or a ground or sea based surface to air missile.
IR missiles would be detected via the mark one eyeball.
Seems to me you could look at WWII, Korea and Vietnam experiences to get a pretty good idea of the relative utility of fighters vs AAA in various scenarios.
In the case of an active radar-guided missile, sure.
How would a plane distinguish between:
A) Being lit up by a ground/sea-based radar
B) Being lit up by a ground/sea-based radar while being pursued by a semi-active radar missile or passive radar missile or command guided/beam-riding missile
In the latter cases, the missile does not emit anything.
Or if the plane is using its jammer, a radar-guided missile can switch to Home-on jammer where the missile only receives and does not emit anything (or at least, need not)
In the movie, the relevant question isn’t “Which is better, ground-based defenses or aircraft?”, it’s “which is better, ground-based defenses or ground-based defenses and aircraft?”. In a situation like the Asgardians found themselves in, it only made sense to throw everything they had at the attackers.
Yeah, that’s what I was thinking too, but wanted to be sure I wasn’t missing some benefit of mobile defenses.
For the dopers who haven’t seen the movie, in this particular scene, enemy craft* have reached the city of Asgard undetected (thanks to some sort of cloaking technology). By the time they’re detected, they are within range of the city’s fixed defenses. They proceed to attack the city and drop a landing party on the palace.
think alien spaceships of the one-man fighter variety, all launched from a much larger command vessel.
Thats why both the USAF and USN have spy planes, so that they can record the active emissions of a particular radar, so getting painted by a flashdance radar or square pair radar would indicate the platform.
Search and fire control radar emissions would be different, thats why there is X band radar, J band and so forth, if your getting painted by something, there will be a corresponding threat in the book, unless your unlucky enough to be the first to be painted by something new.
I would imagine that it would depend on if you had AWACS support, or enough airplanes in the area to visibly ID a threat.
I remember reading about a story in the Vietnam war, when a certain type of electro optical sam system was being used by the NVA , the air was swirling with airforce, navy and marine fighters, and someone calls out Phantom break right, and thirty phantoms broke to the right.
Dont really have an answer for that, other than someone would be having a bad day.
Staring: observing continuously vice taking momentary snapshots. Imagine a geosync satellite with nearly a complete planetary hemisphere in view and the resolution & computing power to see & track everything that moves. On a smaller scale, staring arrays are used in things like optical missile warning systems. They observe a scene continuously & track the changes in it over time. Very fast changing elements of the scene are noticed, tracked, and interpreted as (probably incoming) missiles.
Ground/sea based radars have an advantage vs what? Airborne? Or spaceborne? Certainly ship-based and fixed land-based systems can be large & powerful and do not need as much attention paid to miniaturization. Truck-mounted portable systems suffer from size & weight limitations but intermediate to space & airborne.
The critical distinction is that sea based systems generally can’t see beyond the horizon. And ground based systems can’t see beyond the horizon or the nearest hill, whichever is closer. Whereas the range of airborne systems can be hundreds of miles farther, and spaceborne systems can see half a planet. That extended range is a huge tactical advantage which can offset the other challenges.
To be sure, a geosync radar satellite able to see and track a hemisphere’s worth of aircraft would be spendy. But perhaps cheaper than a complete network of ground-based radars to watch the same area. If I was tasked with defending, say, Russia from aircraft and cruise missile attack from any/every axis I might easily decide space-based was the way to go if the technology was up to it. Which, as far as the open press has said, it isn’t quite yet.
Missiles vs. planes: A complex & somewhat emotive topic. Planes loiter. Missiles don’t. Planes (though not their munitions) are reusable. Missiles are not. Cost may or may turn out cheaper for missiles once you have enough of them.
The critical distinction *today *is aircraft have better detailed sensors & better real-time decision-making than missiles do. Ultimately a missile system shoots at a piece of computer data. Which data blob is *believed *to represent a hostile aircraft. Whereas in most cases today an aircraft shoots at something that a (supposedly trustworthy) human has seen with eyeballs and *verified *to be a hostile aircraft.
In a full bore WWIII scenario aircraft would sometimes be shooting at blips too. But by and large a positive visual ID on at least the leading edge of an enemy formation is/was required before unleashing a volley at every blip being tracked.
Today we are on the verge of unmanned air combat fighter-type aircraft. Certainly the human is now the weak link in terms of aircraft performance; roll rate, G loading, mission duration or missions flown per day, etc. But so far we don’t have the sensor technology to replace the eyeballs in the cockpit augmented by radar or EO cueing. Nor to replace the real-time decision making and improvisation against the ever-present fog of war.
Another issue is network robustness. Back in WWI Richtofen was a law unto himself. Once airborne he flew around till he saw something that needed killing and then did so. Nowadays we’re more much connected, and much more effective as a team because of it. But today we are not rendered 100% useless if we lose contact with HQ. A networked missile system or unmanned vehicle is totally dependent on that network staying up & un-intruded upon. When the network dies, the weapon is a dud.
We are not yet ready, technologically or socially / ethically, for unmanned *autonomous *robot killing machines. Although the DoD ethics dept. (yes, there is one) is actively exploring that decision space.
Detecting incoming back in the day: As other said above, we had / have warning receivers with detect incoming radar emissions. Different hostile radars emit different signals. And an EW radar signal is recognizably different from a SAM or AAA scanning radar vs. a SAM / AAA radar tracking you versus a SAM radar guiding a missile to you (or somebody very nearby). I’ll not say more than that.
Detecting a pure optical launch against you (IR or EO guidance) used to rely solely on eyeballs. Nowadays there are staring EO gizmos which can detect incoming IR guided missiles and then do any or all of a) lase them to fry or mislead their guidance systems; b) trigger warnings to the pilot; c) trigger decoy flares
As I said last time, lethality of counter air systems has gone a up a bunch since I was squared off against the Soviets. Nowadays a non-stealth tactical aircraft is in deep kimchee flying anywhere within range of modern SAM/ADA systems. Which is why suppression or destruction of same is Job #1 for any air arm. Killing the enemy affordably requires you to largely neutralize his SAM ADA systems first.
As an aside, ground forces find themselves in a similar place vs. artillery. Attempting a massed tank or mobile infantry thrust against an enemy with serious artillery assets is pretty much doomed. Take out their artillery and now you’ve got a fighting chance.
The general rule is that fixed defenses are stronger on an individual basis: not needed to move around, they can have more power, more ammunition, more shielding, and more accuracy.
But the downside of fixed defenses is their lack of mobility: they’re reactive forces that require the enemy to come to them. An enemy can defeat a fixed defense by either avoiding it or concentrating against one point in the defense and overwhelming it.