| From: | Paul J. Adam Paul@********.demon.co.uk |
|---|---|
| Subject: | the value of education |
| Date: | Fri, 16 Jul 1999 22:17:57 +0100 |
>"Paul J. Adam" <Paul@********.demon.co.uk> wrote,
>> Submarines don't do aviation very well: aircraft are bulky and subs are
>> volume-critical, plus conducting flight operations traps you on the surface.
>
>True, an SSVN wouldn't be very effective, if you use it to project power
>like a regular carrier. Subs really aren't about projecting power,
>they're about denying sea control to the enemy. I think SSVNs could work
>somewhat effectively by extending that denial to the air. We're not
>talking about rattling sabers, we're talking about plunging a dagger
>into the back.
The problem is that you're either limited to doing this by the coast, or else
you have a long overland flight in which case your stealth aircraft suffers
by comparison with landbased air in that it has tighter corrosion
requirements and has a lot more folding-up to do (thus compromising its
RCS with all those extra mechanical interfaces). Notice that even the USN
has yet to make carrier-borne stealth work: the nearest they got was the
A-12 Dorito, the F-117N and F-22N were both shunned.
>Load up an SSVN with a few "stealth" fighter-bombers and use it as a
>pre-emptive strike at targets a cruise missile couldn't hit, or couldn't
>hit very well. (Clinton's little escapades in Iraq and the Balkans seem
>to prove to me that cruise missiles have their limits.)
What you want is Tactical Tomahawk - what the next-bar-one batches will
be. GPS to get you into the target area, imaging IR plus datalink for
search and attack of targets. Or LASM (Land Attack Standard Missile) -
Mach 3 speed and GPS plus inertial guidance. 0 to 150 nautical miles in
five minutes with a big bang in the nose :)
Tomahawk at present is programmed to hit a location, and there's about
a six-hour (at best, at worst _days_) lag while digital maps and mission
plans are prepared and uploaded. Even then, it takes about fifteen
minutes per 100 miles' range to reach its target: so, it doesn't do well on
snapshots :)
Where does a drone become a missile? If the mission's important enough,
who cares if you get the damn thing back? ;)
>An SSVN could also make a pretty decent AWACS hunter. If you sneak an
>SSVN close enough "under" an AWACS,
Problem - why is the AWACS over the sea? Other than that, sure, anything
that lets you take potshots at assets as vital as AWACS or JSTARS is to be
examined carefully.
An interesting AWACS-killer idea from one of the Russian arms companies
was an adaptation of one of their tactical ballistic missiles with an ARM
seeker: loft it at the general location of the AWACS from ~500 miles
away, and the missile homes on the radar emissions from above and at
alarmingly high velocity. Not sure if the AWACS would even see it
coming...
>Okay, maybe you couldn't recover the plane, but at least
>you'd shoot down that AWACS. That would make it preferable to use a
>UCAV.)
I think your SSVN overlaps with SSGN - you're giving it a new designation
because the "missiles" are still one-shot devices, but with 2060s tech they
can become _much_ more versatile. My only real objection is the idea of
recovering the aircraft - just too damn hard to do under any tactical
situation.
>If you're really
>ambitious, you could even go after an orbital, semiballistic, or
>suborbital during the initial launch or final re-entry stages, when it's
>the least maneuverable and most vulnerable. Combined with an SSGN, an
>SSVN could be a decent strategic weapon, attacking at a nation's
>transportation lanes, thus crippling its logistic operations, not to
>mention its trade economy.
Again, I'm not sure I'd seperate SSGN and SSVN... but the idea has some
interesting ramifications :)
>Again, the keyword here is using surprise to beat the response time of a
>carrier- or ground-launched fighter. At the very least, you'd force the
>enemy to divert fighter assets as escort, fighters that won't be used to
>attack your own aircraft.
>
>IMHO.
Not sure I entirely agree, but thoughtprovoking and interesting, and there
are ideas I'd _definitely_ want to steal there.
--
Paul J. Adam
