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Bombers vs Carriers - 1/1/2022 1:37:31 AM

ARCNA442

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I was running some tests to see how the F-14 compares to the F/A-18 in the traditional fleet defense interceptor role, but I stumbled on what appear to be a bigger question - was the Soviet bomber force actually a viable weapon against carriers?

It appears that a semi-competently managed CAP can prevent long range recon planes from getting within radar range of the CVBG, which means the bombers end up having to fight their way in and find their targets themselves based off ESM intercepts on the E-2 and CAP. While the bombers can still inflict some damage that way, the result tends not to be a massed coordinated attack on the carrier, but instead a piecemeal attack on targets of opportunity.

Was the idea of massed bomber attacks knocking out carriers a good strategy? Or was it merely the best the Soviets could come up with lacking carriers of their own?

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RE: Bombers vs Carriers - 1/1/2022 9:57:46 AM

SeaQueen

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quote:

Was the idea of massed bomber attacks knocking out carriers a good strategy? Or was it merely the best the Soviets could come up with lacking carriers of their own?

It depends. I assume you're assuming they're striking the carrier far out, beyond the reach of escorting fighters? An AS-4 KITCHEN missile has a range of 215NM according to the DB3000. That means you've got a vital area at least that large if that's your most challenging threat. If you load the Tomcat 2 AIM-7 x2 AIM-9 x 4 AIM-54, it says you can do 96 min of on station time at 150NM. In order to be effective, you want to engage the BACKFIRES before they have an opportunity to launch, which means you want to CAP NO CLOSER than 215NM. That's 43% further. Let's assume that cuts your on station time approximately in half, so now you've got 48 minutes of on station time. You might be able to extend that using tankers, but let's start with that. It takes at least 3 hours to turn a Tomcat around according to the database, so that means a single Tomcat can fly at most 1 sortie every 1.75 + 3 hours = 4.75 hours. That means in one 12 hour deck cycle a single Tomcat can fly about ~2 times.

Let's suppose you've got a Tomcat squadron with 10 tails. If you're flying 2-ship CAPs, so you've got 5 CAPs, each covering 48 minutes. That means you've got 15 time slots in that 12 hour deck cycle to fill with 5 CAPs. If each of those CAPs flies twice you've filled 10 of them. It's inevitable that those CAPs will be gapped and the moment you start taking aircraft down due to maintenance, you increase the risk of leaving at least one of those CAPs gapped and presenting an opportunity to the BACKFIRE and BADGER bombers.

To make matters worse, you've only got so many hours to burn on your engines before they need to be overhauled. Every time you're flying, you're burning engine time. It's inevitable that you'll have to stop flying some of them. Further more, when a regimental sized raid occurs, you're probably not going to bingo out and go home. You're more likely to Winchester out before you bingo out. That increases your demand for aircraft to keep those CAPs filled.

Now ask yourself, is it feasible for regiment sized BACKFIRE/BADGER raids to shoot 215NM missiles at a US CV? The real answer is "maybe." Once the CV gets within striking distance of the mainland, then the answer goes from "maybe" to "hell yeah!" because they're within fighter range and therefore the bombers could be escorted to their launch baskets. That'd increase the odds of them being successful by a wide margin. At that point it's not just "how many CAPs can I keep filled?"

< Message edited by SeaQueen -- 1/1/2022 10:02:26 AM >

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RE: Bombers vs Carriers - 1/1/2022 9:58:47 AM

Gunner98

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I think the massed bomber raid was a viable strategy, but as with all doctrines it has its vulnerabilities.

Getting the AI to play the recon phase intelligently as a designer is difficult. If you reverse roles and play as a Soviet you can often get your recon A/C into range, but getting the AI to do it is hard.

I think it is telling that each Soviet Fleet had at least one Long Range Reconnaissance Regiment. That equates to 20+ or in the RB Northern Fleet - 30+ specially focused airframes. ELINT A/C to get a sniff of the general area, these guys are 400nm out from the carrier group, so reasonably safe. Radar recon to rush in at wavetop level to get into a position ~180-200nm from the suspected site, probably about 4-6 from different directions, ready to pop up and get radar contact. Jammers to cover these guys - lots of jammers. A practice that went away in the 80s was Chaff AC to drop large shields of radar clutter to protect the bombers, which are coming in at different angles and ready to release at ~350nm. The bombers (or in Soviet terms - Missile Carriers) did not need to come from Naval Aviation and it was often practice to include up to a Division (50-70) LRA aircraft in this task.

So the whole sequence is a bit complex but had been worked out through very scientific testing and wargaming to defeat the defences of a CVBG. I think there is a decent PDF somewhere in the community DropBox that explains it much better than I have. The role of Naval Aviation is to find the targets and LRA is to strike them, Missile Carriers within Naval Aviation were meant to provide constant fleet support, pick off quick targets and keep the enemy blind. If the war was about to go nuclear - US CVs were a huge threat and the Strategic LRA would/could be used to neutralize them - with the limited refueling capacity available this was a far more viable mission for LRA then striking CONUS. If the war was in the conventional stage, a US CV was a very strategic target as the political 'win' would be useful.

So - yes the strategy is/was viable - but it is hard to implement in the game. Might I suggest you try to give Pacific Fury #1 a go (#3 is also good but not much LRA), which might give some ideas on how the strike might work. Northern Fury # 27 is also an example of where poor choices might make the US player vulnerable.

Hope that helps.

B

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Post #: 3

RE: Bombers vs Carriers - 1/1/2022 12:05:03 PM

BDukes

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quote:

ORIGINAL: ARCNA442

I was running some tests to see how the F-14 compares to the F/A-18 in the traditional fleet defense interceptor role, but I stumbled on what appear to be a bigger question - was the Soviet bomber force actually a viable weapon against carriers?

It appears that a semi-competently managed CAP can prevent long range recon planes from getting within radar range of the CVBG, which means the bombers end up having to fight their way in and find their targets themselves based off ESM intercepts on the E-2 and CAP. While the bombers can still inflict some damage that way, the result tends not to be a massed coordinated attack on the carrier, but instead a piecemeal attack on targets of opportunity.

Was the idea of massed bomber attacks knocking out carriers a good strategy? Or was it merely the best the Soviets could come up with lacking carriers of their own?

They had enough confidence to contribute a significant portion of their budgets to it.

Milan Vego talks about the strike complex in Soviet Naval Tactics a good deal. I think one of the key points reading through the engineering lines abit is seeing what it takes to get detection info to the various platforms (bombers, subs, ships) to get salvos off in the best way. I think that piece is more in question than salvo allocations and even initial detection. CMO can model that problem (opinions on how well vary).

It is also worth looking at how the missile tech changed itself with some being able to pass off targeting info to other missiles (this is just what we know about them) and hardened titanium nosecones to counter shrapnel and CIWS.

CMO is a sim. You can't make qualitative statements based on data that is guesstimated or in some cases (especially submarine warfare) wired to meet the requirements of the sim, not the real world. So SM-2 vs. Shipwreck is loosely based on what we know based on public sources, not raw classified data. Likewise, the quietness of a submarine is more like, I think the Virginia SSN is this much quieter than the Sturgeon which I have more credible public info on (maybe).

What CMO is great at is modeling the problems with a buttload more variability than past sims to help think about them. So my thinking with your problem would be first collecting the problems the USSR have and then playing with the platforms and strategy to overcome. CMO has the flexibility to do a lot of it. Likewise the same with NATO. Modeling offense in the sim is usually easier than defense (IMHO).

So start with the hypothesis that the Bomber force is a paper tiger. Then challenge your own statement using the sim. Don't work backward in that you play a scenario in which your CVBG wipes the bomber force out thus Bombers suck. That is not good method

Mike

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RE: Bombers vs Carriers - 1/1/2022 4:44:42 PM

ARCNA442

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SeaQueen - your numbers mimic roughly I found in my testing, except for the part about only have 10 fighters. Give the carrier 2 squadrons like I did (which I believe would be more realistic - even before you consider the high possibility of multiple carriers working together), and a lot of the limitations you point out go away.

Gunner98 - thanks for the scenario recommendations and details on Soviet tactics. I had assumed that LRA would have been held back for the nuclear mission, but digging around it looks like they had whole units dedicated to the antiship mission. A wavetop approach for recon aircraft doesn't seem to take into account E-2 coverage though.

BDukes - do you have any particular works from Milan Vego to recommend?

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RE: Bombers vs Carriers - 1/1/2022 4:50:22 PM

BDukes

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quote:

BDukes - do you have any particular works from Milan Vego to recommend?

Soviet Naval Tactics.

It has many engineering-type diagrams and the writing is very dry but a lot of information on the tactics and units. One thing you'll notice is a lot talking back to a C3M node rather than direct comms between units.

Mike

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RE: Bombers vs Carriers - 1/1/2022 5:48:46 PM

Gunner98

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quote:

A wavetop approach for recon aircraft doesn't seem to take into account E-2 coverage though.

It needs lots of jammer support, and it is a vulnerability.

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RE: Bombers vs Carriers - 1/1/2022 5:49:31 PM

Gunner98

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quote:

thanks for the scenario recommendations

A shameless plug really...

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And our blog: http://northernfury.us/blog/post2/
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RE: Bombers vs Carriers - 1/1/2022 6:34:05 PM

SeaQueen

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quote:

ORIGINAL: ARCNA442
SeaQueen - your numbers mimic roughly I found in my testing, except for the part about only have 10 fighters. Give the carrier 2 squadrons like I did (which I believe would be more realistic - even before you consider the high possibility of multiple carriers working together), and a lot of the limitations you point out go away.

Regarding 1 or 2 squadrons of fighters, it depends. Different CVW had different compositions in the 80s. It was an interesting time because by the late 70s and early 80s A-4, F-4 and A-5 variants left over from the Vietnam War were being phased out in favor of F-14, F/A-18 and A-6 and A-7. While I'm sure that nominally there was 2 squadrons, some might have had one. It'd be a good topic to research.

With 2 carrier, you can cover 24 hours, but there's still some gaps. With two squadrons on at least one of the carriers, though, it's not a problem. As you can see the fighter versus BACKFIRE naval bomber problem was kind of a numbers game.

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RE: Bombers vs Carriers - 1/1/2022 7:59:41 PM

ARCNA442

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I don't know if a carrier ever deployed with fewer than 2 fighter squadrons. It was often a mix of fighter types (F-8 & F-4 / F-4 & F-14 / F-14 & F/A-18), but I've never seen mention of a historic airwing with only a single fighter squadron - and once the F/A-18 arrived, you started seeing VA squadrons replaced with VFA squadrons, giving you even more available fighters. (Personally, I think the USN missed the lessons of WWII when they fielded dedicated attack planes rather than multirole fighters, but that's a different discussion)

I think the bigger question is how many of the available fighters would have been available for interceptor duty vs being used for escort/recon/strike - but if you're out of strike range from land and the Soviets don't have carrier-based fighters of their own, why wouldn't you use as many fighters as you have for defense?

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RE: Bombers vs Carriers - 1/1/2022 8:20:57 PM

Gunner98

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You can find most of CVW sizes here by deployment, type etc : http://www.gonavy.jp/AirWingsf.html

Although I think you're generally right that two Ftr Sqns is the norm there have been some occasions where there are exceptions. IIRC, when the F-14 was first deployed the older Midway class couldn't operate them (efficiently anyway) so they only had 3 VFA Sqns but that goes to your point about the F/A-18

I think there are some future air wing options that may play around with the balance a bit.

Your point on other tasks is the critical one I think, also rest & maintenance either recovering from or preparing for operations.

Even with two full Sqns of F-14s, sidelining 25% for maint (an Army guy's math for figuring air availability), you're playing with 16 AC. Throw in a TARPS task and a couple routine things that pop up and you're down to 14 before you blink. I think gaps will occur, although I'm sure a surge would happen if the threat ramped up a notch or two.

B

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RE: Bombers vs Carriers - 2/2/2022 12:02:23 PM

SeaQueen

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Totally! It's not just TARP pod recce missions either. They might take some Tomcats away from flying DCA for the carrier in order to fly escort for bombers as well. That's part of the Tomcat's mission set. One of the advantages of Hornets is that supposedly they can self-escort. While I definitely think that having an air to air capability on a strike aircraft improves its survivability, there's limits to the self-escort thing. You're not going to be doing too much turning and burning when you've got a bunch of bombs on your wings. Eventually they'll jettison and it's a mission kill. Sometimes, regardless of the self defense capability of the bomb trucks, you're going to have to escort them, particularly in a higher threat scenario (like the Soviet Union).

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Post #: 12