Airpower And The Cult Of The Offensive by Major John R. Carter

Author:Major John R. Carter [Carter, Major John R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Military, Iraq War (2003-2011), Persian Gulf War (1991), United States, Aviation
ISBN: 9781786252760
Google: MjVvCwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Pickle Partners Publishing
Published: 2015-11-06T02:58:55+00:00

Failure to Account for Increased Defenses

The Arab forces greatly increased both their passive and active defenses against air attack between 1967 and 1973. The Soviet Union enhanced Arab active defenses by furnishing updated SAMs and new radar-directed AAA. The mobile SA-6 Gainful SAM and the mechanized ZSU-23-4 Shilka AAA proved the most deadly of these systems. By tightly integrating the AAA and the SAMs, the Arabs intensified the lethality of their defensive system. Tactics useful against the SAMs made aircraft more vulnerable to the AAA. As a result, the IAF lost approximately 109 aircraft in the Yom Kippur War to surface-to-air weapons, split approximately evenly between SAMs and AAA. 54 of those aircraft, almost half of the total, were lost in the first four days of the war. {152}

The Egyptian forces made great strides in increasing their passive defenses as well. They constructed decoy missile sites along the Suez Canal to distract attackers. {153} They also modified their airfields to make them more survivable. Egyptian airfield improvements included the construction of both hardened and underground aircraft shelters, the addition of multiple runways to allow operations if one runway was hit, and even the emplacement of highway landing strips near airfields to launch and recover aircraft in case damaged runways were not repaired quickly enough. {154} On October 7 the IAF struck many Egyptian airfields, but achieved little lasting damage due to the protection afforded by aircraft revetments and the rapid response of runway damage repair units. {155}

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.