Rocksolid Light

Welcome to novaBBS (click a section below)

mail  files  register  newsreader  groups  login

Message-ID:  

"The lesser of two evils -- is evil." -- Seymour (Sy) Leon


tech / rec.aviation.military / A Quora on B-52 loads and capabilities (has back & forth)

SubjectAuthor
o A Quora on B-52 loads and capabilities (has back & forth)a425couple

1
A Quora on B-52 loads and capabilities (has back & forth)

<2wPPJ.26753$ZmJ7.1380@fx06.iad>

 copy mid

https://www.novabbs.com/tech/article-flat.php?id=3081&group=rec.aviation.military#3081

 copy link   Newsgroups: rec.aviation.military soc.history.war.misc
Path: i2pn2.org!i2pn.org!weretis.net!feeder8.news.weretis.net!newsreader4.netcologne.de!news.netcologne.de!peer02.ams1!peer.ams1.xlned.com!news.xlned.com!peer01.iad!feed-me.highwinds-media.com!news.highwinds-media.com!fx06.iad.POSTED!not-for-mail
MIME-Version: 1.0
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:91.0) Gecko/20100101
Thunderbird/91.6.0
Newsgroups: rec.aviation.military,soc.history.war.misc
Content-Language: en-US
From: a425cou...@hotmail.com (a425couple)
Subject: A Quora on B-52 loads and capabilities (has back & forth)
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
Lines: 347
Message-ID: <2wPPJ.26753$ZmJ7.1380@fx06.iad>
X-Complaints-To: abuse(at)newshosting.com
NNTP-Posting-Date: Fri, 18 Feb 2022 16:08:30 UTC
Organization: Newshosting.com - Highest quality at a great price! www.newshosting.com
Date: Fri, 18 Feb 2022 08:08:32 -0800
X-Received-Bytes: 18928
 by: a425couple - Fri, 18 Feb 2022 16:08 UTC

William Sayers
Retired from a career of watching foreign military forces wail on each
other.3y

How were B-52s expected to get through Soviet air defenses to their targets?
I have some expertise in this dating from the 1980s and, quite frankly,
the B-52s would have had no trouble at all from Soviet defenses except
in the most extreme cases. That may sound like a bold statement, but it
was quite true.

First and foremost, the B-52s would have arrived hours after the war
began, and hours after ICBMs and SLBMs had ravaged the Soviet defenses.
Many of the missile strikes were designed specifically to blow holes in
the Soviet defenses, taking out SAM battalions, interceptor airfields,
and air defense command posts. Others would have done damage by
generating electromagnetic pulses, blinding radars and frying computers.

Then, there’s the fact that PVO (Soviet national air defense) couldn’t
be everywhere at once. In fact, much of Soviet territory would have gone
virtually undefended because of the vast expanses. Soviet air defenses
were well mapped out, and the bombers would have taken routes avoiding
most of them, until they got in the vicinity of their targets. As late
as the 1980s, PVO was not particularly good at low altitude
interception. Frankly, KAL 007 showed the world that they weren’t that
good at easy, high altitude interceptions, either. In 1978, they shot
down another KAL airliner over the Kola peninsula and that aircraft
circled around for an entire hour looking for a place to crash land,
after the interceptor pilot reported the airliner destroyed. These were
peacetime interceptions of single, defenseless airliners that were
making no effort to evade interception. Can you imagine how difficult
that would have been in the middle of a nuclear war against multiple
targets that were well equipped to defend themselves?

Then, of course, were the aircraft themselves. First off, the rather
large airframe was stuffed full of Electronics Countermeasures (ECM).
Black boxes on black boxes, chaff bundles and flares by the hundreds.
And then there was the defensive gun. When the Vietnam War was over, the
score was B-52s - 2, MiG-21s - 0.

Then, there were these:

That’s an ADM-20 Quail decoy missile popping out of the B-52’s bomb bay.
B-52s generally carried 2 to 4 Quails, in addition to nuclear bombs in
the bomb bay. The Quail was a drone that could fly a pre-planned course
of up to 400+ miles while reproducing the radar and infrared signature
of the actual bomber. To make matters more confusing, it could drop
chaff along the way.

Then, there were these:

The AGM-69 Short-Range Attack Missile. The SRAM had a range of up to 110
nm, Mach 3 speed, and a 210 kt nuclear warhead. It could fly a ballistic
profile for maximum range, or for shorter distances, it could fly a
terrain masking profile. The B-52 could carry eight of them on a rotary
launcher (shown above) in the bomb bay, and a further 12 under the
wings, for a total of 20. How accurate was it? I had a friend whose crew
was chosen to launch SAC’s yearly live SRAM. The navigator started to
update the missile on where it was, and the missile told him to stuff
it, that it knew better where they were. The nav told the missile to
stuff it, and pressed the override button forcing it to take the nav’s
position input. When they launched the weapon with forced launch
coordinates, the last thing they heard that missile say was, “I told you
sooooooo…” And no one ever saw it again.

The missile was good enough to take out primary targets, but its main
purpose was to clear the bomber’s path of air defenses, so they could
get to the target. They say that when that missile was launched, there
was nothing in Heaven or on earth that could stop it or keeping it from
impacting within the lethal radius of the warhead. And the BUFF carried
20 of them…

Finally, there was this guy:

The AGM-86 Air-Launched Cruise Missile. The ALCM started life as the
Subsonic Cruise Armed Decoy, or SCAD. The idea was to update the Quail,
but force PVO to track them down and kill them because they were armed.
At some point, the potential of the missile was realized, and the role
of decoy was dropped in favor of it becoming a primary weapon. Range:
1,500 miles. Warhead: 150 kt. Accuracy: This is the missile with the
original, “In your window!” capability. The B-52 could carry up to 20 of
these, or a mix of ALCMs and SRAMs.

Until the fielding of the SA-10/GRUMBLE (S-300) SAM in the 1980s, PVO’s
weapons were obsolescent and their command/control systems remained that
way. They had too much territory to cover, a hopeless mission, and
lacked the ability to efficiently deal with clueless, defenseless
airliners. It would have been a wipeout. Of course, at this point, there
wouldn’t have been a lot of celebrating.

Oh, and by the way, the B-52 loss rate for Operation Linebacker II (the
infamous “Christmas bombing” of North Vietnam in 1972) was 2.1%. 15
losses in 714 sorties. Hardly the slaughter it’s often made out to be.

126.5K views1.9K upvotes16 shares111 comments
5.6K viewsView 77 upvotes
6 comments from
David Rendahl
and more

David Rendahl
· February 7
Some rather sweeping statements in there. You seem to have mixed up
decades worth of development into a single package. Quail for instance,
only working for about five years before radar advances made it
obsolete. Described by USAF general as ‘being only slightly better than
nothing’.

SRAM arrived in 1972 as a stop-gap almost a decade after Quail and had a
terrible reliability record, your great story probably had more to do
with SRAM failure rate than anything else. It was also a predominantly
B-1B weapon.

You left out the bit in its history when they were all pulled from
service early because the rocket motors were found to have deteriorated.
It’s fully updated version was cancelled in 1978 as the mission no
longer existed for it to work. It’s replacement was cancelled as part of
START.

You say - until SA-10 their equipment was obsolete? Are you suggesting
SA-2 was no threat in 1960? SA-5 no threat in 1967? Maybe obsolete in
1990 but the B-52s accepted a huge loss of performance to fly low-level
to avoid these things from 1960 onwards so they musta had some kick.
B-58, XB-70, B-1A all scrapped or cancelled because of the threat.

The manned bomber community in the USAF had a torrid decade in the 60s.
Came up with all manner of spin to keep themselves viable.

But as soon as enough ICBMs were available to do all of the USAFs deep
strike (late 60s) the B-52s were kept on to use up airframe hours over
Vietnam, seed The North Atlantic and Arctic Ocean with sea mines or else
from 1980 launch ALCMs from outside the range of PVO.

I loved the second strike idea, B-52s following up from an SLBM and ICBM
attack aimed at SAM regiments so the B-52 could drop on the bases,
cities and factories etc.

Firstly B-52 bases are the most vulnerable of the triad to first strike,
they may not be around to go second. SLBM were the day after the day
after solution as they were the most survivable. B-52s were the pressure
cooker plate - you can launch them but recall them, a kind of last warning.

And surely if you can hit a SAM regiment (possibly spread over a couple
hundred sq miles around your most vital H-bomb targets) cheaply,
efficiently and without risk of interception with a MIRV then you’d just
take out the high value targets with more.

Using the more advanced and less risky weapon to carve a way for a
follow up B-52 penetration?

I loved the idea you paint of a B-52 equipped with multiple quails,
multiple SRAM, blasting and decoying its way through the defences to
launch an ALCM that didn’t need the parent aircraft to enter Russian
airspace? Which time period would this happen?

B-52 had a viable mission with free fall weapons at altitude for maybe
the first four years of service (1956–1960) then a very dodgy medium
level mission with Hound Dog until they were put in storage from 1966.
They had an even dodgier low level mission into the early 70s. You
coulda done their mission with 747s after that (in fact they tried).

I too have read accounts of how they planned to go in under the radar,
but seeing how the F-111 and the B-1A were both curtailed from 1969
because they couldn’t manage that mission - despite being faster,
smaller targets with purpose built avionics for the task - can’t see how
a B-52 could do it.

Their terrain following radar was a generation behind F-111 and B-1A so
a lot of it was done by eyeball, trained for over the Nevada desert,
which tends to be significantly less foggy, rainy and windy as the
Arctic circle side of Russia.

It’s also worth pointing out that the missions over North Vietnam were
of very short duration (usually well under half an hour feet dry) Hanoi
is less than 100nm from the coast, Haipong was on the coast and most of
the Trail wasn’t covered with SAM.

Russia is a bit bigger than that.

B-52s going there wouldn’t have the same level of support as Linebacker
which had naval vessels on SAM watch, ECM, ESM and ELINT patrol, they
had RB-66 and tactical bombers flying deception, CAP and SEAD missions
and they didn’t even face the full spread of Soviet air defences - no
Su-15, no SA-3, No SA-5.


Click here to read the complete article
1
server_pubkey.txt

rocksolid light 0.9.7
clearnet tor