It just seems like the obvious thing to do. If the enemy SAMs are getting harder to evade, shoot them down instead of trying to outrun them. As I understand it, the radar controlled gun mounts were removed from B-52s to make them fly faster and higher. But the Soviets soon developed ever faster SAMs and interceptors.
If the guns could shoot down SAMs and air to air missiles, at a minimum it would force enemy interceptors to close to gun range, where they could be shot down by the same defensive weapons as well.
Now, muzzle velocity is a problem. I don’t know if they developed prototypes during the cold war, but there are various ways to improve muzzle velocity for conventional firearms I’ve read about. There’s some method to ignite the propellant using electrical plasma for greater control and higher velocities. There’s hybrid weapons where an electromagnet at the muzzle accelerates the bullet further.
My WAG: Shooting down an incoming missile, from the tail of a B-52, is considerably harder than a phalanx CIWS on a warship shooting down an incoming antiship missile. And even the CIWS might have a hard time.
With modern AESA or EW, maybe instead of using a tail gun, the B-52 could use directed energy to fry the seekers/electronics of the incoming missile. Lasers might work, not to melt the missile but just thwart its electronics.
Cannons and machine guns from that time period were unlikely to shoot down and incoming missile.
The air force did develop a system for shooting down incoming missiles for the B70 the initial bomber developed to replace the B-52. It was called Pye Wacket. Initial tests were very promising but the program was canceled when the B70 program was canceled.
Nah, a B-52 is too small for a laser. :eek: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_YAL-1
I saw what I guess was an early concept where the laser was built into the side of the 747. The plane looked even smaller in that configuration.
Now, on that one the laser “blew up” the missile, not just blinding it. Don’t need as much energy to blind it, but a few major problems.
A SAM is probably smaller & faster than an ascent-phase ICBM, so harder to hit
You can fit a handful of “rounds” into the plane. (IIRC there is a chemical reaction producing the laser energy, so each chemical batch is single use). How many SAMs in one location?
What is the specific model of this missile, and where are the sensors this time? A much much smaller target than “the whole missile”
At the time the decision was made, shooting down SAMs with a cannon was beyond the realm of the possible.
As well, the tail-mounted guns could traverse and elevate only so far whereas a SAM could come from any direction including ahead, above, etc. So instead of just upgrading the existing gun turret, they’d be looking at covering the B-52 with several automated turrets *a la *the B-29.
EW, plus chaff & perhaps flares was at that time the defensive measure of the future, the only one likely to work. Gunfire, even automatically aimed gunfire, was yesterday’s solution to yesterday’s threats.
Today we can do more with EW, plus we’re at the point of fielding laser dazzlers to defeat IR missiles which can come from enemy ground troops, ships, or aircraft. A true DE weapon for a hard kill on an incoming radar-guided SAM is still a few years in the future. But will still suffer from the installation challenge of needing 360 degree spherical coverage for detection of incomers (counter-radar, EO, IR, ???) as well as 360 degree spherical coverage for laser apertures to fire back.
With the massive improvements in high end air defense since the 1960s, the way you protect a B-52 today is to not send it anywhere the enemy has any high end air defense. You need to kill that first using other means. Against a determined opponent equipped with late-model air defense the current situation is pretty simple: you’re either stealthy or dead.
You’d be reducing the bomber’s payload and range. It would effectively spend much of it’s time up there just preserving itself. The best way of suppressing an air defence system is a fighter-bomber attacking the missile launch sites or radars.
Just to add, the removal of tail guns from B-52H’s was comparatively recent, 1991. The ascendant threat of SAM’s and AAM’s was the late 1950’s. However as has been said and obviously, shooting down missiles with the tail guns was not feasible back then, and radar guided SAM’s from the get go were as likely to approach the a/c from ahead as from behind, maybe more likely. Early IR AAM’s would likely come at the a/c from behind, but later ones eventually could come at the a/c from all angles as well.
The guns were removed when viewed as too much of a maintenance chore, dead weight to haul around and extra personnel to keep when unlikely to be used in the standoff mission the a/c was by then emphasizing. B-52’s had stopped high altitude tactics for nuclear missions decades earlier, so the guns were not removed so they could fly higher per se. B-36’s had most of their guns (except tail guns) removed specifically (along with other weight reductions) so they could fly higher, ca. 1955 when it was potentially plausible for them to fly too high for subsonic jet fighters, or too high for the fighters to maneuver effectively at least, or in any approach but a tail chase. By the time the B-52 had been in large scale service for long, afterburning supersonic interceptors were becoming likely opponents, which when added to the emerging SAM threat made SAC switch to low altitude nuclear strike tactics ca. 1960.
B-52’s flew high against North Vietnamese defenses in 1972, relying on ECM against radar guided SAM’s (with partial success, would have been more than good enough on nuclear missions, but painful losses in the circumstance) and night cover plus friendly fighter barrier patrols against enemy fighters. The .50 cal tail guns of B-52D’s claimed 2 Vietnamese fighters in those raids though neither is confirmed in Soviet/Vietnamese accounts.
Besides, the B-52’s in a nuclear war capacity, being slow, long range bombers, were basically coming in to bounce the rubble and anything that escaped the land and sea launched ICBMs. Hell, given the radiation clouds in the air after a few thousands nukes go off, I would expect their missions were pretty much one-way. They’re just man-guided final wave weapons.
Let’s be clear here. The wiki article **Calder **cited shows a picture of a subscale model shape being tested in a wind tunnel.
Your article shows pix of the “FFG 3” which is some hobbyist’s unguided model rocket toy that’s more or less the same shape, has a top speed of ~100mph and has zero to do with XB-70 high speed defensive missiles.
The second photo of that link shows another pic of the same device as in the wiki article installed in the same wind tunnel. With the human there for scale we see it’s about the size of a serving platter, ~24" diameter. Which is a fine size for a model in a wind tunnel, but is much smaller than any operational missile would need to be just to carry enough explosives to make a warhead, much less carrying rocket motors, 1960s guidance electronics, etc.
The assumption in 1960-something was that these flat plate designs *might *have value over the tube & fins design. Nobody has seen any such thing in public since then. All the publicly disclosed high speed missiles and hypersonic research vehicles since have looked nothing like Pye Wacket.
My bet is this was simply more wacky 1960s defense contractors having fun on the public’s money. They didn’t (and couldn’t) know it would not work until they tried it. But having tried it, they found it didn’t work.
It’s not unrelated… they built the FFG3 as a proof of concept for the Pye Wacket (see the second link). Yes, it’s not the full-size model (which was supposed to be around 2m in diameter, apparently), but it still captivates the imagination.
Did they? The links just say that the plane program was canceled, so the missile went with it.
The final tactic to get the Buffs to their targets in the USSR was to use ICBMs as Wild Weasels suppressing AA defenses ahead of the bombers with thousands of kt of Fire and Fury. Shows how batshit crazy the USAF has always been when it comes to manned bombers.
I recall reading in one of Freeman Dyson’s books (he was involved with them during the war) that the guns were mostly just psychological props as far back as WWII. It was known at the time that they slowed down bombers and increased casualties, but Command thought that being able to shoot back made the bomber crew feel better.
Yeah I mean why not just use the ICBMs on the target directly. The way I hear it went, the deal was that if you told the Pentagon your branch of the military could deliver nuclear weapons, you’d get more funding. So everyone did it.
Somehow the military, instead of just investing in a large number of ICBM packing submarines and mothballing everything else, has instead argued that it has to maintain a “triad” of 3 different forms of nuclear attack, in case an enemy somehow manages to counter one or two.
Even if submarines and silos were better options for nukes delivery, it was a reasonable decision to keep aircraft as a third option, in case unforeseen technological or tactical developments made silos and subs suddenly far less effective. Given the severity of nuclear warfare, having that third option was wise.
I’ll admit that I still have difficulty thinking of many advantages of a/c as nuke delivery platforms compared to silos and submarines. Perhaps it was that a/c offered the possibility of many platforms sneaking up close to their targets for a first strike, thus providing little advance notice to the enemy. Or that a/c could do their own target acquisition of mobile targets. Aside from that, what did a/c offer as nuke delivery platforms?
A modern twist on the OP might be the possibility of arming modern bombers with anti-missile missiles (AMM). It wouldn’t make much sense to give AMMs to fighters but bombers cannot rely on speed or maneuverability to defend against missiles yet they have much greater payload affordance which may enable them to bring on a few AMMs without sacrificing too much of their offensive payload capacity. If you also equip those AMMs with DRFM, you could turn them into decoys and have the enemy missile head towards the AMM.
Yeah, but a submarine launched missile fired from off the coast of the enemy nation can have under 5 minute flight times. In Command and Control by eric schlosser, he cites studies pointing this out, that it was physically possible for the soviets to find (from watching tv, lol) exactly where the President, vice president, and other personal with the nuclear launch codes physically were, and kill them both in 5 minutes.
There’s no realistic escaping - the soviets could bracket each target location with multiple MIRV warheads that are hundreds of kilotons each. Doesn’t matter if there’s a chopper on standby, even if you got in the air you wouldn’t escape the blast radius. Even standing there and reading off the launch codes would probably take too long.
Yeah, it wouldn’t be stealth - as the ICBM leaves the submarine, it would emit a flare visible from space, but it would take crucial time for that information to be detected, analyzed, and the executives called. In the 1960s it was probably unrealistic to expect an alert to reach the President before it was too late.
While it would be unwise, couldn’t a soviet submarine theoretically fire from inside Chesapeake Bay? That’s true point blank range. There would be no possible response before the nukes go off.
If you think about it, the logical iteration on this would be submarine launched cruise missiles carrying nukes. They wouldn’t be detectable by satellites and would be much cheaper to maintain than bombers. I think one of the arms control treaties banned them for this reason? (because terrain following semi-stealthy submarine launched cruise missiles, you’re fucked. There’s no realistic chance to intercept them and if they are stealthy and flying low enough, the first sign you’d get of an attack is when they start detonating on key targets)
Doesn’t long range stand off increase its effectiveness? A 1000 km stand off ALCM can
theoretically threatens 1.5 million sq KM. Now the defender has to cover all of that rather than place AD at likely avenues of approach. Not to mention launch from further away reducing or eliminating time in envelope.
You mean four hours after all the ICBMs and SLBMs have impacted? Yes, their ability to be recalled before dropping their bombs is one of their officially stated capabilities by the USAF for why they need to be part of the nuclear triad; but seriously its just trying to justify the reason we ‘need’ a nuclear triad.
