Liberty air defense system.

Lot of stuff there . . . but the most fundamental appears to be we have different definitions of what an IADS is supposed to do and far different takes on the '73 war.

IMHO, the purpose of any IADS (from WWII Flak to the present day) is not to shoot down airplanes; the mission of IADS is to prevent the enemy air force from achieving it's tactical/strategic goals. Certainly shooting down planes helps enormously with that goal, but it is not the primary goal.
  • In pre-PGM days, if AAA/MANPADS/Short-Range-SAM forced the enemy to attack from a higher altitude, then this was a huge success because higher altitudes meant much less accurate, inefficient air support and made CAS very difficult.
    • Yes, this would usually mean you have to shoot some planes down when they are operating low, but then when the air force adjusts tactics and flies higher, the air defenses are still going to fire with much lower hit probability. So if you measure kills per SAM or kills per thousands of rounds of AAA fire, then the statistics will be horrible but the air defenses are still having a huge operational impact by greatly reducing the effectiveness of the enemy air force.
  • We saw this in the '73 war, where a huge and effective IAF response was a key party of Israeli defense planning and that failed because of the unexpected effectiveness of the SAM envelope.
    • This doesn't mean that the IAF did nothing, just that it was much less effective and much less efficient (in terms of damage done vs. damage received) than had been anticipated.
    • This meant that the war became a contest between ground armies and this was the real goal of the IADS; how many missiles it took per plane shot down is irrelevant to that goal of enabling the Arab ground armies. It was only after the Israeli forces were defeating the Arabs on the ground, thus disrupting the IADS, that the IAF got back up to full effectiveness.
  • "Big missiles simply aren't good at killing planes when launched from big trucks." can similarly miss the point.
    • If the big missiles don't hit anything but force the planes down into the engagement envelope of smaller missiles and AAA, then the big missiles are doing their job and making a big contribution to the battle, even if shoot downs are rare.
    • Planes flying low and fast to avoid high altitude capable missiles have shorter ranges with lower payloads than "bomb trucks" which can cruise slowly at higher altitudes, so again, forcing attackers to change tactics has big operational gains even if few planes are shot down.
    • There is also the issue of degrading the efficiency of an attacking air force by forcing that air force to divert large amounts of resources to EW and SEAD. Every plane flying EW or SEAD is one less plane dropping bombs on operational targets.
 
I don't think big missiles force planes to fly lower. I don't think that has actually ever happened. Opposing fighters force you to fly lower, sometimes, but this was a reaction to a specific set of circumstances (lack of coherent pulse doppler radars in the MiG-21 and Su-15) that no longer apply and haven't for entire human generations. Employment of weapons forces you to fly lower, specifically below the cloud ceiling, or below the CCIP/CCRP error radius, whichever is lower, but this is also no longer the case in most modern air forces, and hasn't been since the development of JDAM and SDB in the 1990's.

I don't think we have any different definitions on what an air defense system does, rather how it achieves this and what it can accomplish perhaps. I think I read that you were arguing that SAMs are supposed to kill planes and so I wrote to argue against that. The rest of what you said is congruent with Soviet thinking, but it all hinges on having effective air forces, which no one has besides the USA and its allies as far as history is concerned, and the Soviets are not particularly good at employing the fundamentals of airpower. Whether that's a theoretical failing or a practical one is an open question I suppose.

That said, aborting a bombing run al a Package Q's successful defense of tertiary targets, is probably just the 1980s equivalent of 2030s shooting down a Brimstone with a MHTK from a mobile launcher. An IADS forcing a contest between opposing ground troops in 1973 OTOH is a victory for Israeli strategically and tactically. Israeli tankers are vastly superior to Egyptian ones, but not as much as IAF is superior to Egyptian Air Force ones, so it's a relative comparison of two victory conditions. 1973 only looks bad because it's compared to 1967, but it's still a tremendous military victory.

In order to actually make use of an effective IADS you kind of need an advantage over your enemy. Which is rare if you're fighting against Western-aligned countries like America or Israel. Their advantages lie in the industrial aspects of warfare, involving mechanical weapons, but that's what a lot of people aspire to be at to begin with.
 
What Kat Tsun inflates in his argument is a premise for perfect layered air defense which is non-existent. The US Army has classifications for air defense based largely upon known threats. Is it perfect? Absolutely not. But it is sustainable, affordable, and effectively garauntees the enemy suffers an attrition rate that makes operations unsustainable. The assets involved in this program wasn't just one or two deviations in cost, they were several fold more expensive than the path they chose. Modern wars are about logistics at the core. Liberty did not fit the plan but it allowed US contractors to get experience with real hardware and to play out the numbers. Never underestimate their science behind the decision.
 
MadRat said:
What Kat Tsun inflates in his argument is a premise for perfect layered air defense which is non-existent. The US Army has classifications for air defense based largely upon known threats. Is it perfect? Absolutely not. But it is sustainable, affordable, and effectively garauntees the enemy suffers an attrition rate that makes operations unsustainable. The assets involved in this program wasn't just one or two deviations in cost, they were several fold more expensive than the path they chose. Modern wars are about logistics at the core. Liberty did not fit the plan but it allowed US contractors to get experience with real hardware and to play out the numbers. Never underestimate their science behind the decision.
Click to expand...

Yet, ADATS ceased production in 1993, while Crotale NG/VT-1 Liberty is still in production today...

ADATS wasn't based on "known threats" (whatever that means), it was based on a combination of laser guidance being (ostensibly) hard to jam and hypervelocity being (ostensibly) hard to escape for gunships, to the detriment of growth potential, because of the rather bizarre choices Oerlikon made in its design. Besides that, the designated threat by ADA was the Mi-24V/P with the 9M114 Kokon, which was already a decade out of date by the time ADATS was tested at White Sands, and its much more impressive successor 9K121 had already been tested in the USSR with the Ka-50 gunship.

Kokon mandates an 8 km engagement range, plus a 25-mm cannon to compensate for the dead zone, and even FIM-92 barely covers this, but only because it is slow. Which is why the Linebacker went with the FIM-92: it was marginally effective against the threat, mainly with a degraded pop-up target capability. The ADATS went out to 8 km as well, but was faster, and being laser guided and radar cued, it could deal with the pop-up threats better.

At least until the pop-up threat becomes the Ka-50 in 199X, with 9K121 and the then-elderly Mi-24V gets a similar system, then you're back to square one and ADA is looking like it sent a bunch of money chasing after bad.

It would be a poor choice for swatting modern aircraft, such as the Mi-28 or Ka-50/-52, which were then appearing in the 1990's and should have been the actual threat chosen as the exemplar. This is because they have NLOS, fiber-optic guided weapons that defeat the laser guidance outright, or they require ~15 km range missiles (to counter 9K121 Vikhr's ~12 km launch range) more comparable to VT-1 Liberty, or both.

EFOG-M was supposed to handle the long-range threats. That is the thing that ADA didn't buy, but at least were smart enough to keep going, because even if ADA Branch has a bit of a blinkered threat analysis they aren't totally incompetent and realized ADATS was outmatched by the Ka-50 and Vikhr system by 1992. Not that that factored into their decision: it was purely financial, but people do the right thing for the wrong reasons all the time.

It's rather telling that when Oerlikon Contraves ceased to exist, unlike Thomson-CSF's acquisition/merger with Thales, the production of the ADATS missile did not resume to contest the Diehl IRIS-T. Conversely, the Oerlikon Skyshield was adapted into Rheinmental's MANTIS for the SysFla program around the same time.

Before you mention it, ADATS was already integrated into, and offered in Oerlikon catalogs, as an addition to the Skyshield air defense complex. It would have been trivial to upgrade, were ADATS worth anything at all, into a missile system for local air defense under SysFla:

1695784898360.jpeg

However, Oerlikon was mainly good at making radar guided air defense guns, and they were rather rubbish at missiles, is the obvious takeaway.
 
Last edited:

Similar threads

Please donate to support the forum.

Back
Top Bottom