The Future of Air Power by Neville Brown

Author:Neville Brown [Brown, Neville]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Military, General
ISBN: 9781000371116
Google: 0owoEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2021-05-30T17:14:43+00:00

Likewise, Soviet analyses of the Great Patriotic War show that two-thirds of all the Luftwaffe planes destroyed in the air were shot down in a single pass attack. Even in 1914-18, indeed, the more prolonged of the aerial duels on the Western Front seemed likelier to end in stalemate than did the short and sharp encounters.

No doubt, too, some would support the case here put by a process of reasoning analogous to that unfolded by Basil Liddell Hart about the ratio between troops and linear space in ground warfare (see Chapter 5). Thus the fact that planes like the Tomcat can use missile-fire to engage at long range several intruders at once does encourage the expectation that a given number of fighters on CAP could cover a much wider sector than ever before. Yet here, too, such ratiocination may be too glib. All else apart, cruising time may constrain CAP, especially in situations where refuelling in flight is impracticable. So, even more critically, may the expenditure of ordnance. Once their larger missiles had been released, aircraft would have no choice to make except that between complete disengagement and coming to much closer quarters. Also, attrition by the main SAM belts for anti-aircraft defence in depth might contribute to a breakdown of so measured a confrontation.

What is more, the history of the last two decades suggests that something approaching a classic dogfight may sometimes recur quite readily. This happened frequently over North Vietnam, partly because of the inhibitions on long-range encounters induced by deficiencies in IFF and partly because the North Vietnamese sought thereby (a) to exploit the then exceptional facility with which their MiG jets turned, though (b) to lessen their dependence on rather backward electronics. To which one might just add that authentic dogfights have figured in the Arab-Israel conflict on various occasions.

Throughout we should bear in mind the oblique but ongoing debate as between the Western Europeans and the Americans. Might not a future air battle conform to no coherent pattern of any sort? Might it not instead be more of a mêlée, a chaotic assortment of mainly brief and individual encounters?

The influence of Electronic Warfare would be in this latter direction, albeit unevenly. The same goes for weaknesses in the infrastructure for operational command and control. These might stem from sheer paucity of resources; and they might also relate to inapposite doctrine and institutions. However, they may be much aggravated by battle damage. Not so long ago we were warned that many of NATO’s search-and-control radars were decidedly immobile, and often even lacked anti-blast walls.66

Contemporary Swedish practice in this regard affords a useful pointer. The backbone of the semi-automatic STRIL 60 air defence environment is provided by 16 primary radar sets, all of them basically modelled on the US-designed AN/TPS-32. One claim made for this model (peak pulse: 2.2 megawatts on c. 3.0 gigahertz) is that it stands a 90 per cent chance of detecting at 200 nautical miles a perfect target one meter square, set normally

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