Herman
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42nd scenario posted this year!
Foothold - EC2003 MEDC Battleset
Daren Lorentz is the 12th designer to post a scenario this year. Congratulations to Daren on his very first scenario! We certainly hope that the high quality shown in this one is an indicator of more great things to come.
Following independence from France in 1956, President Habib Bourguiba established a strict one-party state. He dominated the country for 31 years, repressing Islamic fundamentalism and establishing rights for women unmatched by any other Arab nation.Tunisia has a diverse economy, with important agricultural, mining, energy, tourism, and manufacturing sectors. Located in a strategic location in central Mediterranean; Malta and Tunisia are discussing the commercial exploitation of the continental shelf between their countries, particularly for oil exploration.
A Magnitude 7.2 Earthquake has hit the Kairouan region in central Tunisia. In an emergency session of the UN, the Tunis Government has requested international aid of food, water and civil and structural engineers. The Tunisian Army is stretched to the limit at this time trying to re-establish order.
In an astounding announcement at the UN table, it seems that Libya is making threatening overtones to block all aid underway to Tunisia. Following France's reluctance to put it's navy in harm's way to aid an ungrateful colony, the United Kingdom has agreed to provide an escort for the humanitarian ships now assembling at Portsmouth.
Author: Daren Lorentz
Check it out on the
SZO file archives or at -
Taiwan slammed on lax defense
By Bill Gertz
September 20, 2005
A senior Pentagon official yesterday sharply criticized Taiwan's government for not moving ahead with an arms buildup to counter a mounting threat from China.
Edward Ross, a senior Pentagon security cooperation official, also suggested in a speech that the United States might not defend Taiwan in a conflict with China unless Taipei does more to boost its defenses and national will.
"As the lone superpower, our interests are plentiful and our attention short," Mr. Ross said. "We cannot help defend you if you cannot defend yourself."
With U.S. troops fighting and dying in Iraq and Afghanistan, "an increasing number of Americans are asking hard questions about how much we are willing to sacrifice -- for the security and democracy of others," Mr. Ross said.
The blunt speech, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Times, was given at the annual U.S.-Taiwan Business Council-Defense Industry meeting in San Diego. Attendees included Huo Shou-yeh, Taiwan's vice defense minister, and other officials from the island, which is also known as the Republic of China.
Defense officials said the speech was aimed at pressing Taiwan's government to pass a proposed $15 billion special defense budget, which is stalled in the legislature by political differences.
The Bush administration in 2001 approved the sale to Taiwan of eight diesel electric submarines, 12 P-3C anti-submarine aircraft, along with 54 torpedoes, 44 Harpoon submarine-launched anti-ship missiles and additional arms.
The administration also wants Taiwan to purchase Patriot anti-missile systems to counter the more than 750 short-range Chinese missiles deployed within range of the island.
Mr. Ross said China has calculated that U.S. forces will assist Taiwan in any conflict and, as a result, is purchasing more submarines and anti-ship missiles.
The Pentagon is watching both China's military buildup and Taiwan's political stalemate over the defense budget and is making its own calculations, he said.
"We do not live in a world of absolutes," he said. "And the time of reckoning is upon us. In the end, the U.S. ability to contribute to Taiwan's defense in a crisis is going to be measured against Taiwan's ability to resist, defend and survive based on it own capabilities."
He called on Taiwan to unite and invest in a defense-modernization program that will protect its democracy and deter Chinese "aggression" across the Taiwan Strait.
"It is time that the people of Taiwan and their elected officials understand that when it comes to defense, they, and not the United States nor any third party, are in the first instance accountable," said Mr. Ross, a director in the Pentagon's Defense Security Cooperation Agency.
Defense officials said differences within the Bush administration over Taiwan have added to the Taiwan defense problem.
Pro-China officials in the Bush administration have sent mixed signals to Taiwan's government about the need to boost defenses. As a result, Taiwan's government has been confused about the U.S. position.
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Shifts in Pacific Force U.S. Military To Adapt Thinking
New Plans Reflect Reaction To China's Growing Power
By Edward Cody
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, September 17, 2005; A01
ANDERSEN AIR FORCE BASE, Guam -- A dull-gray B-2 bomber sat poised in a typhoon-proof air-conditioned hangar, its bat wings stretching 172 feet across. The bomb bay was fitted for 80 GPS-guided bombs, at 500 pounds each, that could be delivered to any target in Asia within a few hours.
The hulking stealth aircraft is a symbol of new times in the Pacific.
"Having this airplane in theater sends a message to the world," said Air Force Lt. Col. Tom Bussiere, of St. Johnsbury, Vt., who arrived at Andersen last February with four of the boomerang-shaped strategic warplanes.
The deployment of Bussiere's squadron, replacing a contingent of aging B-52s, marked part of a broad U.S. military realignment in the fast-changing Pacific. The reposturing, scheduled to run over several years, has been designed to strengthen U.S. military forces in Asia and usher them into a new era, reacting primarily to China's expanding diplomatic, economic and military power.
The rise of China as a regional force has shaken assumptions that had governed this vast region since the end of World War II, including that of uncontested U.S. naval and air power from California to the Chinese coast. With those days soon to end, senior officers said, the U.S. military in Asia is retooling to reflect new war-making technology, better prepare for military crises and counter any future threat from the emergent Chinese navy and air force.
Some U.S. specialists have predicted an Asian Cold War or outright conflict as a newly muscular China gets ready to project power beyond its shores. But U.S. military planners in the region have a different interpretation of the Chinese challenge. The goal, they said in interviews, is to maximize U.S. forces here -- as demonstrated by the B-2 deployment. However, the planners also said the United States was seeking to build a network of contacts with the Chinese government and military through which the power overlap could be managed rather than fought over.
"Do we have to have conflict because of the rise of China? I don't believe so," said Adm. William J. Fallon, who heads the Hawaii-based Pacific Command from an office with a sweeping view of Pearl Harbor and the vast ocean beyond.
"As they grow, there's going to be an inevitable push as they take advantage of their economic ability to improve their military capabilities," he said of the Chinese. "We ought to recognize that as a reality. This is not a zero-sum game.
"I do not buy the program," he said, referring to the presumption that conflict cannot be avoided. "I just don't buy it."
Fallon said he had received a clear mandate in this regard from Washington, despite widely noticed remarks in June from Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld questioning China's motives in modernizing its military forces. In addition, Fallon said in an interview, this approach means China's cultivation of stronger diplomatic and military ties with other Asian nations does not have to compete with U.S. changes in the Pacific.
"A rising China that is actively engaged in helping the countries of the region maintain security and stability can be a very good thing," he explained.
The admiral, who has led the Pacific Command for six months, got his start building military ties with China during a maiden visit there Sept. 5-9. Although he and his 300,000 troops have responsibility for 43 countries and more than 100 million square miles, Fallon said China's size and growth make it the center of his network-building efforts.
Eventually, he said during a stop in Beijing, he would like military-to-military contacts to grow to the point where he could invite Chinese officers to observe U.S.-South Korean military exercises. But, he acknowledged, there is a long path ahead before that would be possible.
The Taiwan Factor
Despite the resolve to get along, the U.S. military in Asia has long faced off with China as part of the struggle over Taiwan. Many of the U.S. moves underway in Asia have been designed to better counter the improving Chinese military in any conflict over Taiwan. Similarly, many of China's weapons acquisitions and other improvements have been made with a view to the possibility of fighting the United States over Taiwan.
This uneasy equation, Fallon said, is "a fact of life."
Under the Taiwan Relations Act, the United States has pledged to assist Taiwan in its defense. Whether this would mean military intervention in the event of a Chinese attack would be up to the leadership in Washington. But conversations with U.S. military planners in the region made it clear they feel mandated to be ready if it comes to that.
In his confirmation hearing to become Air Force chief of staff, Gen. T. Michael Moseley told the Senate Armed Services Committee in June that calculating the right mix of U.S. air power in Asia to defeat China in case of conflict was "at the top of my list." Fallon, in hearings several months earlier, expressed concern that recent Chinese military improvements, particularly in submarines, should not be allowed to alter the balance against Taiwan and, in case of conflict, U.S. forces that could be sent in to help.
The two were referring to the fruits of China's two-decade-old military modernization program. After years as the world's largest military reliant chiefly on masses of soldiers, the Chinese armed forces have sought to leap into the age of electronic warfare. Through acquisitions from Russia and elsewhere, along with developments in their own defense industry, they have laid the groundwork for a newly potent navy and air force, equipped with modern missiles able for the first time to pose a threat to U.S. forces in the region.
The long-standing danger of Taiwan becoming a reason to go to war against China has been part of the broader military realignment, contributing to concern over the extent to which China's rise changes the environment for U.S. military forces.
"China is a huge piece of the puzzle right now, and the military certainly recognizes it," said Col. Michael Boera, who commands the 36th Air Expeditionary Wing at Andersen.
Another part of the U.S. military's new environment is a shifting Japan, which has moved away from postwar pacifism and tightened strategic ties with the United States. One clear sign of the evolution was Japan's decision to buy PAC-3 and Aegis anti-missile systems from the United States. The layered defense system, Japanese and U.S. officials noted, was designed to protect Japan -- and U.S. forces based in Japan -- against any threat from Chinese medium-range missiles as well as any North Korean attack.
Some Taiwanese officials have suggested the possibility of an integrated U.S., Japanese and Taiwanese missile defense system based on PAC-3 and Aegis. Fallon noted, however, that Taiwan's defense spending was nowhere near the level needed for that; the Taipei government has still not decided whether to finance purchase of a PAC-3 system on offer from Washington for the last four years.
Nonetheless, Japan and the United States for the first time last February identified stability around Taiwan as a "common strategic objective." Although China complained, Japanese officials called the decision a logical response to China's expanding missile arsenal. Southern Japanese islands, including Okinawa and its many U.S. forces, fall well within Chinese missile range, they noted.
"Japan is very close to Taiwan," said a senior Japanese official involved in defense policy. "And if something happened in this area, it will undoubtedly affect Japanese security. It is naive to suggest that a cross-strait conflict would not affect Japan."
Japan's growing assertiveness and willingness to work militarily with the United States, although a boon in planning for Taiwan, has also raised the prospect of U.S. involvement in other quarrels with China. Long prickly because of the legacy of Japanese occupation during World War II, Japanese-Chinese relations have grown more tense in recent months over competing claims to several islands and petroleum exploration rights in the East China Sea.
The Japanese government recently complained that for the first time it had observed several Chinese warships, including a guided-missile destroyer, patrolling in the vicinity of the disputed petroleum deposits.
The United States has been careful to avoid taking sides in either set of disputes, officers noted. But as the U.S.-Japanese military alliance has strengthened, so has the danger that an unforeseen clash in the East China Sea could end up involving the United States.
An Indonesian Shift
Indonesia, a longtime U.S. ally, has recently become another example of the new environment for U.S. military forces operating in Asia. After years of caution and even enmity toward the Chinese government, Indonesia in April concluded a strategic partnership with Beijing, with President Hu Jintao proclaiming a "new era" in relations between the two nations.
Since then, talks have opened on the sale and technology transfer of Chinese surface-to-surface missiles, according to Maj. Gen. Dadi Susanto, director general for defense strategy at the Indonesian Defense Department.
During a visit to Beijing in July, Susanto said, President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono signed an agreement specifying Chinese assistance in a broad range of military production, including aircraft and ships, small arms and ammunition as well as the missiles.
"It's everything," Susanto said in an interview. "Whatever we would want to have from them, they would support."
During the same period, the United States has debated lifting restrictions on U.S. cooperation with the Indonesian military that were imposed five years ago over army abuses during the East Timor secession. Since U.S. forces mounted a prominent rescue operation in January after the Dec. 26 tsunami hit Indonesia, chances for agreement on loosening the restrictions have improved, U.S. officers said. Some spare parts have already been provided and International Military Training exchanges have resumed. But Congress has not yet changed the rules on sales or grants of lethal weapons and major equipment such as aircraft.
Susanto said Indonesia's military wanted to retain its ties to the United States but could not wait too long for resumption of sales and grants because its equipment was aging. "The enhancement of relations between China and Indonesia is not because we hate the United States, but just for our legitimate needs," he said, adding, "Our principle is we're open to everybody."
The Role of Guam
Although repositioning in the Pacific is part of Rumsfeld's order to make the military more agile, it has also resulted in the deployment of more modern forces close to Asia's likely trouble spots. Nowhere is that more visible than at Andersen, a 21,000-acre base where a permanent bomber presence and a regular rotation of fighter planes have been ordered since last year, along with the stationing of KC-135 tanker aircraft.
A second submarine, the USS Houston, was assigned to Guam's naval base in December, joining the USS City of Corpus Christi, which arrived in 2002. A third submarine is planned soon.
Officers pointed out that using Guam, a U.S. territory, frees the U.S. military from restraints imposed by basing in foreign countries, such as Japan or South Korea. Japanese sensitivities over nuclear power, for instances, do not apply on this 200-square-mile island surrounded by the broad Pacific.
Although the realignment is still being worked out, a sketch of what Fallon has in mind was offered in a recent solicitation for comment on the environmental impact of Andersen's expansion plans. When the realignment is complete, according to the document, Andersen could be hosting three Global Hawk unmanned aerial reconnaissance aircraft and 12 KC-135 aerial refueling tankers, along with 48 fighter planes and six strategic bombers on regular rotation from the United States.
Correspondents Anthony Faiola in Tokyo and Alan Sipress in Jakarta contributed to this report.
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Wow! :surprise: The stuff that movies (and scenarios
) are made of!I certainly hope that someone tries to make a scen for this one.
Cold War thriller is for real, author writes
By JULES WAGMAN
SPECIAL TO THE BLADE
RED STAR ROGUE: THE UNTOLD STORY OF A SOVIET SUBMARINE'S NUCLEAR STRIKE ATTEMPT ON THE U.S. By Kenneth Sewell, with Clint Richmond. Simon & Schuster. 306 pages, $25.
Red Star Rogue reads like a spy thriller, except that nuclear engineer and submarine veteran Kenneth R. Sewell says it's true. A rogue Soviet Golf-type submarine blew up in the Pacific March 7, 1968, while attempting to launch a nuclear missile at Pearl Harbor, 350 miles away.
Starting with known facts, adding interviews with Russian and American military and civilian officials, and topping off with his own conjectures and deductions, Sewell develops a story of how we escaped nuclear war by a countdown that exploded.
The facts: Soviet missile submarine K-129 sails from its Siberian base Feb. 24, 1968. Just before sailing, 11 men join the 83-man crew. The mission is routine until K-129 fails to report crossing the International Date Line March 1.
Instead of patrolling its assignment, K-129 approaches Pearl Harbor. On March 7, about 350 miles northwest of Pearl, K-129 surfaces and prepares to fire.
At zero, the missile is torn by an explosion which puts a 10-foot hole in the missile compartment. The explosion dooms K-129, which plunges three miles to the bottom.
U.S. spy satellites record the explosions. A few days later, a University of Hawaii oceanographic vessel happens onto a radioactive oil slick. In port, agents, believed to be federal, confiscate its logs and swear everyone to secrecy.
On March 21 the Soviets begin hunting for K-129 1,700 miles northwest of Hawaii. By April Moscow concedes the sub is lost. In mid-July, spy sub USS Halibut leaves Pearl Harbor to find K-129. Halibut locates it, takes 22,000 photographs, and is awarded a presidential citation.
A year later the CIA contracts with a Howard Hughes company to build a ship to raise K-129. The cover story says the ship, the Glomar Explorer, would mine the seabed.
In 1974, the ship sails. Its claw seizes the sub and brings it to the surface, where it is put into the central bay. Six bodies are buried at sea.
When the story broke in 1975, Washington said the sub fell apart as it was brought up and only the bow was saved. Sewell says the entire sub was recovered. He points out that in 1993 K-129's bell from the conning tower was returned to the Russians, refuting the story that only the sub's bow was retrieved.
The U.S. role in all this remains shrouded in official secrecy.
Why did this happen? Sewell conjectures:
Yuri Andropov, head of the KGB, and Mikhail Suslov, Communist Party ideologue, plotted to get China and the U.S. into a war from which Moscow would benefit. Their plan: send a sub to fire a nuclear missile at Pearl Harbor and make it look as though the Chinese did it.
The KGB controlled Soviet nuclear weapons. It also had special military teams similar to our Rangers. Such a team would carry out the scheme.
The plotters have all the codes except the one which controlled the fail-safe system. The 11-man team seizes the sub by March 1, sails to within 350 miles of Hawaii - the Chinese would have had to do that - and surfaces the sub to get at the fail-safe mechanism.
The effort fails and K-129 pays with its life for the failed attempt.
Such is the story in brief but there are many interesting twists. The conjecture seems a bit far-fetched, but makes great reading. Washington is expected to continue stonewalling.
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39th Scenario this year!
Dave Steinmeyer has posted his third scenario, Power Sweep. For a guy who just started designing this year, this promises to be yet another classic. Only a handful of units, but this scenario should by no means be considered easy. Take that attitude and you'll soon find yourself on the wrong end of a 533mm torpedo!
The war has not been kind to the Soviet navy; especially their submarine forces. In order to protect their remaining submarine units, the Soviets have been forced to begin escorting their less capable boats with first-line SSNs.
In this engagement, a Soviet SSN is guarding two other units as they proceed south through the Norwegian Sea. Once the group has reached the Atlantic, the SSN will perform its own mission while the SS and SSGN attack surface shipping.
First, though, NATO will try to stop them.
Author: Dave Steinmeyer
This scenario requires the latest release of the PlayersDB v5.9.7
Get it via: StrategyZoneOnline, HarpGamer, SimHQ, PlayersDB Depot, SubSim, CombatAce, or Frugal's World of Simulation.
Check it out at:
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AAR: Roman Thunder [spoiler Alert]
By Mark Gellis
"Merde", I thought. Those pesky colonials were acting up, yet again. Why the Republic ever granted them their independence was beyond my comprehension. However, orders were orders. In order to establish a composite radar picture of the Area of Operations [AO], I positioned my lone Sentry over the SAG [surface Action Group] that was centred on the DDG Chevalier Paul. This way, the AWACS could avail herself of the SAM coverage and a dedicated escort would not be needed. I also wanted some AEW coverage for the Prince d'Asturias so a P-3 was assigned to her. It was not quite the coverage of a dedicated AWACS plane, but "Needs Must" in time of war. The Conte di Cavour had her own AEW helos to provide her group with radar coverage.
Four Su-24 Fencers and 2 MiG-23 Floggers quickly rose from Es Seina to investigate my Orion. They were quickly sent tumbling into the sea by an outbound flight of Hornet SEAD [suppression of Enemy Air Defences] strike aircraft. I wanted to silence the enemy radar coverage before the strike aircraft were sent. ARM [Anti-Radiation Missile]-equipped aircraft also launched from Italy, Rota, and Albacete. The Hornets from Albacete arrived first at Es Seina and loosed their HARMs at the SA-6 batteries. Unfortunately, they were easily shot down by the defenders.
The Algerians were no shrinking violets, today. They fought viciously over the air of Es Seina. Clouds of defenders rose to challenge the air over their homeland. However, their aircraft were no match for the superior technology of the modern European fighters. With many of their radar systems degraded by jamming, they were easy prey for the waves of AMRAAM and Meteor Air-to-Air Missiles [AAMs].
The Algerians did not go gently into that long night. SAG Chevalier Paul had been detected and was garnering the attention from most of the Algerian strike assets. The colonials fought bravely and were tenacious in their attacks. What they lacked in quality, they made up for in quantity. There simply weren't enough missiles to kill them all and some managed to get within launch range of the SAG. Chinese-made AShMs [Anti-Ship Missiles] were released, but were quickly shot down by the French ASTER systems. The Algerians did not survive for a second attempt.
The MiG-29 Fulcrums of the Algerians were formidable opponents on paper. In fact, their Alamo AAMs actually out-ranged the Mica AAMs carried by the French Rafale fighters. However, in this age of modern air combat, electronic warfare is an element that cannot be ignored. The Algerians were learning that lesson this day as their fighters we quickly and easily shot out of the air by aircraft they could barely register on their radar scopes. Soon, aerial supremacy belonged to the NATO forces.
The submarine arm of Algeria proved to be more dangerous, but no more lethal. Two submarines were detected just outside the range of their torpedoes; one approaching the Conte di Cavour and other closing on the Prince d'Asturias. Neither lived long enough to deliver their 'eels' as the ASW helos swarmed from the decks.
Once the air had been cleared of the antiquated MiGs, the Hornets and EuroFighters re-armed with additional ARMs and set about blinding the ground radar facilities. In this task, they were only moderately successful. The ground batteries were notoriously difficult to shut down even after multiple ARM hits. As time was running out on the operation, I decided that additional risks would have to be undertaken. With aerial supremacy guaranteed, the aircraft could be re-armed exclusively for the ground strike role.
Armed with GBU laser-guided bombs, the flights of Hornets, Tornadoes, and EuroFighters undertook the long journey to their targets. Through careful course selection, the bombers were mostly able to fly around the surviving SAM batteries and bomb without resistance. Only in one location were the SAM batteries able to fire on the strikers. A high speed pass on afterburner allowed them to release their ordnance without loss. The Algerian construction engineers deserve much credit for their solid construction. However, in the end, the repeated strikes with heavy ordnance were finally too much even for their skill and all five complexes were destroyed. Victory was awarded soon afterwards.
Thanks very much for sharing another entertaining scenario with us, Mark.
HarpGamer.com - Home of the HCDB.
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Chinese attack sub encounter puts Taiwan's navy on alert
TAIPEI, Taiwan -- Taiwan's military was investigating a news report Saturday that a nuclear submarine from rival China surfaced and nearly collided with a patrol of navy vessels off a Taiwanese-held island.
The Chinese attack sub -- a Han-class nuclear-powered vessel -- suddenly surfaced and appeared to be heading for five Taiwanese ships near Kinmen island on July 25, according to Saturday's edition of the Apple Daily, which didn't cite any sources.
The Taiwanese ships spotted the submarine and prepared for a confrontation. Three speedboats equipped with missiles were called in to assist, and the alert lasted 10 minutes before the Chinese submarine passed by without incident, the paper said.
If the Taiwanese ships hadn't located the submarine and halted, they might have collided with the Chinese vessel, the newspaper reported.
Taiwan's military wouldn't immediately confirm or deny the report, but said it was investigating.
China and Taiwan split at the end of a civil war in 1949, but Beijing still threatens the use of force if the self-ruled, democratic island moves toward formal independence. Reports of Chinese spy ships and other military vessels approaching Taiwanese waters are frequent and often occur during war games.
Kinmen is a Taiwanese-held island just off the coast of mainland China. (AP)
September 17, 2005
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Typhoon Arises
Eurofighter's plane finally comes in
by Michal Fiszer
Sep. 15, 2005
The Eurofighter Typhoon is finally reaching full operational service, with its Tranche 1 aircraft due to be delivered to customers by the end of this year. The Eurofighter program is one of the major European defense efforts and can be compared to the US F/A-22. Both aircraft have their roots in the Cold War, and both were initially developed with a focus on the air-to-air role. The Eurofighter Typhoon has been widely criticized in the press around the world. The program was cited for its long development cycle and high cost. But it must be remembered that state-of-the-art European technologies were integrated in the aircraft.
Germany initially had placed greater emphasis on the air-to-air role, but as Luftwaffe Tornado units are reduced in strength, the Typhoon will be required to carry a greater share of the strike load.
The Typhoon has all the capabilities typical for modern, fourth-generation fighters. It has a powerful radar of impressive range, target-tracking, and electronic-counter-countermeasures (ECCM) capabilities, as well as modern, beyond-visual-range (BVR) missiles. It will be equipped with an even more powerful, active electronically scanned array (AESA) radar and longer-range BVR missiles in the form of Meteors. It also has tremendous maneuverability and dynamic flight characteristics in terms of acceleration, climb, and a wide flight envelope, which makes it a demanding enemy in a dogfight. The Typhoon will have a helmet-mounted display integrated in the subsequent tranches of aircraft, with agile air-to-air missiles slaved to the helmet cueing system. In an attack role, the aircraft will be able to perform standoff strikes against well-defended targets. It will be also able to engage ground targets with various types of weapons regardless of weather, day and night. Weapons load and combat radius are also high, enabling a considerable punch against a ground target, even deep inside enemy territory, suggesting potential usefulness as a suppression-of-enemy-air-defenses (SEAD) and anti-ship platform. The aircraft is also tailored to a network-centric warfare environment: it is equipped with a MIDS data-distribution system and three multifunction color displays. The pilot's workload has been reduced through the automation of many functions and by introduction of a direct-voice-input system together with hands-on-throttle-and-stick (HOTAS) controls.
But at the same time, the Typhoon has a relatively large radar cross-section (RCS) as compared to its peers. Some low-observability features were used but not to the extent employed on the F/A-22 Raptor or F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (JSF), or even the French Rafale. Detailed figures are classified, but an unofficial source says that the Typhoon has about a 1-square-meter RCS. Such a figure is quite a good achievement, since it is only about 0.13% of the RCS of the Su-27/30/35 and about 0.2% of the RCS of the MiG-29. However, it is significantly than the F/A-22's figure, which is reportedly in the region of 0.05 sq m. This is one point that brings much criticism to the aircraft. But it has to be considered that the balance between various features and capabilities is always a trade-off of one for the other.
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Revolutionizing Electronic Warfare
JSF Will Combine Strike, Jamming, Intelligence
By MICHAEL FABEY
August 23, 2005
The U.S. Marine Corps wants its F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) to be more than an affordable replacement for the Harrier close-air-support plane; it wants the next-generation aircraft to jam the cell phones that trigger roadside bombs.
“For about the past six months, the Marines have been coming to us and asking if there was anything the JSF could do to support the guys on the ground, to shut down a communications system,” said David Jeffreys, a program manager with F-35 maker Lockheed Martin.
And in February, the Marines hired Penn State University to study how the JSF might handle other forms of electronic warfare (EW). The Corps currently relies on the decades-old EA-6B Prowler, which is slated to retire in a decade or so.
“Given our part in the Electronic Attack role and the aging of the EA-6B, we must assess the possibilities of the F-35 taking on an electronic attack mission,” said the February Marine document that authorized the study.
The Marine Corps, which intends to buy up to 600 F-35s, is hardly the only JSF customer that is intrigued by combining strike and electronic warfare roles in a single plane.
“We have discussed electronic attack with every customer, and every single one of them said, ‘We want more of that,’. ” said Jeffreys, who manages JSF upgrades for Lockheed Martin.
The JSF is slated to be produced in the thousands for the U.S. Air Force, Navy, Marines and the British Royal Navy, and to be offered to other countries as well. The plane’s potential as a digital killer blurs the traditional line between platforms that collect aerial electronic intelligence and those that act on it. A plane that drops precision munitions may also sever analog and digital links in an enemy network: between troops, between anti-aircraft missiles and their guidance radar, between an insurgent’s cell phone and a roadside bomb.
Some countries, such as Israel, have long loaded jamming pods onto their strike aircraft because they could not afford dedicated planes to do the job. Even at the Pentagon, which has long used the Prowler and other specialized platforms, the appeal of a do-it-all aircraft may be growing because of rumors of program cuts and belt-tightening in the ongoing Quadrennial Defense Review.
Improving EW
The Pentagon has seen the need for a better electronic warfare aircraft since at least 2000, when its Kosovo after-action report to Congress said that NATO forces had difficulty targeting missile sites. A separate report noted that the problems included interference from the Prowlers’ jammers with friendly targeting devices. The report to Congress launched a classified study of electronic warfare improvements, which in 2001 identified the JSF and its cousin, the F/A-22 Raptor, as EW candidates. Lockheed is building the F/A-22 for the Air Force.
Marine officials say they won’t talk about their specific electronic warfare needs until their study is finished.
The service has relied on Prowlers for traditional jamming along with electronic deception — a subtler form of EW that involves mimicking, redirecting or slightly altering an adversary’s signals to confuse his weapons and distort his view of the battle zone.
“What they can do is get into the enemy’s radar and alter it without the bad guys even knowing,” one analyst said. “It’s like that line in the movie, ‘The Sting’: ‘The best con is when they don’t even know they’ve been conned.’”
The Air Force, which abandoned tactical electronic warfare when it retired its EF-111s a decade ago, may soon add an electronic warfare suite to its B-52 bombers. But officials say they are taking a good look at the EW and intelligence-surveillance-reconnaissance capabilities of the JSF and the F/A-22.
The Navy seems less interested in the do-it-all bandwagon. The service is developing and in 2009 will field an electronic-attack version of its F/A-18F Super Hornet, the so-called Growler. It takes a dedicated plane to do the job, said James Smith, who is leading the Navy’s E/A-18G analysis and integration team.
“The goal of a dedicated electronic warfare aircraft is versatility with different capabilities across a very wide frequency spectrum,” and multiple-use systems have a limited capability, Smith said.
Enter the AESA
Some of the JSF’s electronic-attack capability resides in the phased-array radar in its nose. Unlike a traditional radar with a moving dish antenna, the JSF’s Active Electronically Scanned Array (AESA) radar includes myriad individual, solid-state emitter-receivers. This allows the radar to keep tabs on multiple objects, and to focus energy on electromagnetically sensitive targets. This gives a factory-standard AESA-equipped plane some EW capability before other EW gear is installed.
Boeing certainly sees the value of AESA radar; the firm is retrofitting one on Super Hornets. But the company’s AESA program manager says there are limits to the radar’s electronic-attack abilities. For one thing, it can only zap electronic systems within a limited frequency range. “We don’t get out of the bandwidth where the radar operates,” said Roger Besancenez.
Besancenez dismissed one-jet-does-it-all claims as marketing tools — though his company is looking to improve the Super Hornets’ data links, he said.
But there are plenty of other people interested in the EW capabilities of the JSF and Raptor, among them defense analysts, industry officials and several dozen U.S. lawmakers who belong to the Electronic Warfare Working Group. They point to the sensors embedded in the JSF’s fuselage and wings, which give the JSF an innate ability to gather electronic intelligence (ELINT).
“Electronic warfare really starts with ELINT,” said Congressional Research Service analyst Christopher Bolkcom.
Moreover, the jet is built with the ability to distribute its information.
“Each one of them out there becomes a flying router,” said Lilian Goleniewski, the author of “Telecommunications Essentials,” a telecom industry bible and a former consultant to the military on telecom issues. Planes with that kind of data link capability are becoming “the Internet in the sky.”
“It’s really an all-singing and all-dancing plane,” said Richard Aboulafia, vice president of analysis and military jet expert at the Teal Group.
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Russia to Expand Baltic Submarine Fleet
By AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE, MOSCOW
Russia’s navy plans to expand its Baltic Sea submarine flotilla from three to as many as nine combat submarines by 2007, the Baltic Fleet’s commander told Interfax-AVN news agency Sept. 15.
”A submarine brigade with between six and nine Project 677 Lada submarines will be formed over the next two years,” Admiral Vladimir Valuyev said.
The expansion follows a cut-back in the number of submarines operated by the Baltic Fleet after the Soviet Union’s 1991 collapse, the admiral noted.
Of the three subs currently in the fleet, two are in a state of permanent combat readiness.
The fourth generation Project 677 Lada submarine can carry up to 18 torpedoes and evade detection by radar. It has a surface speed of 10 knots and travels at 21 knots underwater.
The 67-metre (221-foot) long vessel weighs 1,765 tons and can remain underwater for 45 days.
The announcement follows a round of sackings and disciplinary measures at the top of Russia’s navy over its performance during the near-fatal snaring of a mini-submarine with seven crew under the Pacific Ocean last month.
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U.S. Army To Lockheed: Stop Working On ACS
By GOPAL RATNAM
The U.S. Army asked Lockheed Martin to stop work on the $879 million Aerial Common Sensor program contract for a new spy plane after a review found that continuing the current effort would delay the program by two years and lead to additional costs.
In a Sept. 14 statement, the Army’s Communications-Electronics Command (CECOM), Fort Monmouth, N.J., said Lockheed had 60 days to resolve problems that company officials found in June.
“Although we're issuing a stop work order, it is important to note that we’re not terminating the contract at this time,” said Edward Bair, the Army’s program executive officer for Intelligence, Electronic Warfare and Sensors at CECOM.
The Army’s review found “has determined the weight of the ACS payload and required airframe modifications exceed the structural limits of Lockheed Martin's selected aircraft,” Bair said.
The stop-work order is far less drastic than an outright contract cancellation that many analysts and observers had expected and allows Lockheed Martin more time to convince the Army that it can still salvage the program.
At an investors conference in Phoenix, Ariz., Sept. 14, organized by investment banking firm Morgan Stanley, Robert Stevens, Lockheed’s CEO, said he was “accountable” for the company not getting its proposal right.
“We didn’t deliver efficiently, effectively and well for our customer a complete and durable Aerial Common Sensor system solution,” Stevens said, according to a transcript posted by the investment firm. “In this case, we did not do a sufficiently good job.”
Lockheed proposed fitting its electronics and sensors onboard an Embraer ERJ-145 airplane.
Bair said the review found that “an alternate aircraft to the Embraer 145 will be necessary to achieve mission capability.”
The Aerial Common Sensor program is intended to replace three current systems: the Army's Guardrail Common Sensor and Airborne Reconnaissance Low and the Navy’s EP-3E Aries II with a common system to be developed through an Army-Navy partnership. The Navy, however, is yet to sign on to the program that could ultimately cost about $7 billion.
The Army’s review and its decision to stop work follows Lockheed’s discovery — one year after it won the contract — that it had underestimated the weight of wires and equipment used to install electronics on board the airplane.
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40th scenario posted this year!
STRIKE - EC2003 GIUK Battleset
FROM: COMMANDER WESTERN APPROACHES
TO: COMMANDER 111TFW, LAKENHEATH AFB
SUBJECT: STRIKE ORDERS
SITREP: The strike two days ago by NATO submarines against Soviet naval bomber bases and Soviet AF bomber bases on the Kola Peninsula was not as successful as SacLant had hoped. However, we are presented with a golden opportunity to hit them again since heavy weather has closed their bases. With Strike Fleet currently tied down just south of the Narvik line while trying to re-arm and filter Pact sub forces, our only chance is to strike them hard with USAF tactical fighter bombers.
ORDERS: Using 60 bombers from your wing, fly with tanker support as far north as Tromso. Land there and re-fuel. We have a 36 hour window to strike them before the weather clears up. We will understand and expect heavy losses. Try to limit them to the best of your planning. You are also being provided with a squadron of F-15Cs from the 48TH TFW to provide limited tactical escort.
Author: Charles Berlemann
Please direct all comments to: Charles Berlemann
Check it out on the
SZO file archives or at -
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The PlayersDB Project
Get the PlayersDB-ANW on HarpDB or ughHQ.
Get the PlayersDB on HarpDB or ughHQ.
Archived versions:
Get the PlayersDB 8.1.1-ANW on HarpDB or ughHQ.
Get the PlayersDB 8.1.1 on HarpDB or ughHQ.
Get the PlayersDB 7.4.7-ANW on HarpDB or ughHQ.
Get the PlayersDB 7.4.7 on HarpDB or ughHQ.
Get the PlayersDB 6.4.9-ANW on HarpDB or ughHQ.
Get the PlayersDB 6.4.9 on HarpDB or ughHQ.
Get the PlayersDB 5.9.7 on HarpDB or ughHQ.
We are pleased to announce the release of a new Harpoon3 database, the PlayersDB. This database has been built upon the excellent foundations set by the H3DB Project (edited by Fred Galano) which in turn was built on the basis of the HUD-II database (edited by Darren Buckley). It incorporates the data from the Harpoon Classic DB (HCDB) that is edited by Brad Leyte. Many thanks to the exceptional work by these three fellows. Without them, the PlayersDB would not have been possible.
In keeping with the design philosophy of H3DB and HCDB, the PlayersDB will follow a policy of "Never delete - only append". Some of the unique features of the PlayersDB are:
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Ships, planes, and subs have been indexed by country for your convenience
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Players can now see the launch altitude of the weapons. No more guessing at the launch parameters.
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Numerous special weapons and special platforms for designers.
If you would like to see a special capability or platform for your scenario, let us know and it will be added for you. There is ample room for specialty units and player requests. One player has already been accommodated. He wanted to try Soviet Sub-Launched Land Attack missiles from Charlie-class SSGNs so we modified the torpedo tubes to allow him to test this new feature.
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Old versions of the DB will be retained.
This is the only certain way to guarantee compatibility. Once a scenario is built, IT STAYS BUILT unless or until the author decides that he wants to adapt it to a newer version. This means that the scenario will play EXACTLY as the author intended.
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Pre-constructed installations.
Over 110 fully pre-constructed bases and installations for scenario designers to insert with the single click of a mouse. No need to hunt down 40+ individual facilities before adding them to a scenario.
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Comprehensive descriptions.
Detailed text for subs, ships, aircraft, and weapons.
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Loadout ready times displayed.
Loadout re-arming times for every aircraft and mission is now fully visible to players and scenario designers.
The scenarios have been re-built for this new database. For those of you who have played them, thank you, and we strongly encourage you to try them again. During our testing, we found that the scenarios run very differently under the new PlayersDB parameters. Not better or worse; just differently. It was almost like playing something brand new. We were very pleasantly surprised to have our butts shot off in the very scenarios that we designed and should have known what was going on!
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Ships, planes, and subs have been indexed by country for your convenience
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Any advice on beating the Chinese aircraft?
What I generally try to do is close on them, fire my missiles, and then try to get away from them before they can shoot back. Since the Flankers have missiles that outrange the missiles on the Japanese aircraft, this can be difficult.
And the Flankers and the J-10s seem to be very adept at not getting hit. I will sometimes fire four sets of four missiles at a pair of Chinese aircraft (16 total) and miss every single time. That ususally doesn't happen when they're shooting at me. What am I doing wrong? I've found that ganging up on aircraft can work pretty well. I'll have one set of aircraft fire missiles, the Red planes will run, but the only place they can run is too close to another flight of my aircraft to get away from THEIR missiles--between the two sets of missiles heading towards them, one will sometimes get them. But not always. And this only works if you have enough aircraft and have them in the right place at the right time.
Any advice? Tactics? Ideas?
Thanks.
Mark
Try this:
Fly in at low altitude and fire AMRAAMs from maximum range. Since they are true Fire-and-Forget missiles, you can pull away once you release them. I normally add 2 "insurance" missiles over and above the quantity recommended by the AI.
Once you release your missiles, you will be headed out of their missile envelope if they counter-detect you and return fire. Also, they need to head towards you in order to use their Radar to direct their missiles.
In my experience, I can often kill them before they realize I am there about 50% of the time. In the other instances, they fire LR SARH Alamo at me. However, once the AMRAAM strike home, the missiles drop into the ocean without any guidance. The only time it gets hairy is if my AMRAAM fail to kill all of the Flankers.
For me, this situation epitomizes the benefit of self-guiding AAMs.
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AAR: Qian Kong Kuai [spoiler Alert]
By Brad Leyte
I launched my AEW assets to try and get a grasp on the situation over the Senkaku region. While I had ample resources under my control, many of the aircraft and ships started near Japan, fairly far from the action. My first move was to bolster the defences at Naha. I saw that a number of aircraft were already slated for the Ferry mission, but I elected to arm them before launching them. This would prove fortuitous.
My amphibious force was clearing the Strait of Tsushima when a hostile three ship SAG [surface Action Group] consisting of Maanshan-, Luda-, Jianghu-class vessels was detected moving to intercept them. I launched the F-2 strike aircraft and they executed an attack "en passant" before heading to Naha to land. Flight of F-2 armed with ASMs killed the Maanshan and the Jianghu frigates while a follow-up Orion finished off the Luda with Harpoons. Just as they were about to land, an ALCM [Air-Launched Cruise Missile] attack arrived at Naha, too. Some of my first fighters had already landed and were out of play. This attack was very nice timed by the enemy. If I had not delayed the departure of my assets from Japan, they would all have been caught on the ground re-fueling at Naha. Instead, they were able to shoot down the ALCMs just before they entered the landing pattern.
Meanwhile, the AEW escorts killed a number of marauding Flanker fighters, but the Chinese hordes kept up the pressure. One CAP went Winchester [out of weapons state] and broke off to re-fuel and re-arm. The second patrol was left to try and parry the probes by the enemy interceptors. A little deft aerial judo sent most of the PRC Flankers into the sea. However, there simply weren't enough missiles to kill all the interlopers. The Sentinel was driven off-station but wasn't killed.
At the start of hostilities, all friendly tanker traffic had been ordered out of the region. However, the Takashi had just finished loading from the rig and was late in her departure. Her tardiness cost her the lives of her crewmen as she was caught and killed by something huge, lethal, and nasty. The fighters were so busy defending themselves that they were unable to extend any protection to the civilians in the area. Subsequently, a Houjian missile boat was able to close and sink the Oil Rig operating in the area. A strategic loss along with a heavy cost in lives.
A number of JH-7 'materialized' on the doorstep to Naha from the direction of the occupied islands. Thankfully, a flight of Phantoms was not yet in the landing pattern and were able to dispatch them. The little buggers were almost invisible on the near-useless radar of the Phantoms. I re-routed the E-2 Hawkeye to provide much-needed coverage for Naha. A second raid by 14 JH-7 from the mainland was nicely timed over Naha. Only a few fighters were available, but the lack of LR AAMs on the strikers allowed the defenders to close and kill them with Sidewinders. Slowly, but surely, Sakashima was isolated from aerial contact with the mainland.
As an aerial cordon was being set up around the islands, torpedoes were detected inbound on the Sasebo PhibRon. Seahawks (only 2 of them available) launched immediately. Luckily an Orion was in the vicinity enroute to a Anti-Surface strike with its Harpoons. It was quickly re-tasked to this more urgent need. Sonobuoys were dropped as the helos flew outbound and were quickly able to pinpoint the inbound torpedoes. By triangulation and backtrack, an estimated launch point was determined and all three hunters raced to the datum. Soon, the water was filled with ASW homing torpedos as a succession of these weapons finally killed the now-identified PRC Kilo. However, the PhibRon still had to evade their own torpedoes. Shimakaze and Takanami both survived and, again, took up positions at the head of the PhibRon.
Once the F-15Js were able to establish an air-tight perimeter around the islands, the F-4 Phantoms and F-2s were able to exterminate a re-inforcement convoy from the mainland. With no further challenges from the mainland, the strike assets re-armed for air-to-mud action. A full strike of 20 Phantoms and 17 F-2s were easily able to demolish the facilities on disputed islands and victory was awarded.
Thanks for another challenging scenario.
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Drills put U.S. Navy on notice
By RICHARD HALLORAN
Special to The Japan Times
HONOLULU -- Soon after Adm. Gary Roughhead took the helm as the new commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, the Chinese and Russian armed forces gave him something to think about.
Those two forces in the western Pacific have just completed eight days of joint maneuvers centered on the Shandong Peninsula, across the Yellow Sea from the Korean Peninsula. The drills were conducted with 10,000 military people on land, at sea, and in the air, about 8,500 of them Chinese.
That's not large as those things go, but it was the first such exercise done together since the breakup of the Soviet Union 15 years ago. It marked another step in a gradual Sino-Russian reconciliation after decades of rivalry during the days of the Soviet Union.
The war games evidently had three purposes: Put the United States on notice that it has military competitors in the western Pacific; show the Taiwanese once again that China would use force if that island nation declared formal independence; and market more Russian weapons to a China that has already bought Russian warships and aircraft.
Roughhead suggested that he was more interested in the Chinese than the Russian navy, much of which has been idled by lack of funds. "Clearly, the Chinese are developing a very capable modern military, especially the navy," he said in an interview at his Pearl Harbor headquarters. "The question is: What do they see as the intended use of that navy?"
"If it is to ensure the free flow of commerce, that would not be surprising," he said, nodding toward the sea lanes in the South China and East China Seas through which pass the oil and raw materials that feed China's billowing economy, not to say its soaring exports.
The admiral added, however: "What if the intent is not purely to defend the sea lanes?"
Roughhead said he was keenly interested in learning what ships and aircraft the Chinese and Russians sent into the war games, how they operated together, and how they integrated their commands and communications.
The U.S. Pacific Fleet was not invited to send observers to the maneuvers; nor would he or any other officer discuss ways in which intelligence was being gathered. It does not take rocket science, however, to figure that a couple of U.S. submarines, several reconnaissance aircraft, and surveillance satellites have been watching and listening closely.
Roughhead, who took command of the U.S. Pacific Fleet's 200 warships, 1,400 aircraft, and 190,000 sailors and marines on July 8, said he would not drastically change course from that set by his predecessor, Adm. Walter F. Doran. "When you come on watch," Roughhead said, "normally you don't try to trim the sails right away."
Much of his attention will be directed to continuing the transformation of the armed forces ordered by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. In the Pacific and Asia, that transformation is adding to navy responsibilities as the U.S. plans to depend on sea power and air power rather than ground forces in most contingencies.
Regarding Taiwan, for instance, the U.S. would rely on ships and airplanes to help defend Taiwan if China sought to enforce its claim to sovereignty with an assault and if President George W. Bush decided it would be in the U.S. interest to resist.
Roughhead said he plans to invite more Asian and Pacific navies to take part in multilateral exercises, in contrast to bilateral drills. To increase their ability to operate together, he would like to persuade allied navies to codify procedures.
That would be true not only with blue water navies, such as those of Japan, Australia and India, but also with the smaller navies of Southeast Asia fighting pirates that prey on merchant ships in those constricted waters. The admiral stressed, however, that he would seek informal arrangements, not another North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
The need for codified procedures is also needed within the U.S. Navy, Roughhead said. Not many years ago, the U.S. really had two navies, the Atlantic and the Pacific, each with its own way of operating. With a smaller navy today, ships may be deployed from one fleet to another and must be able to fit in to a new assignment seamlessly.
With an eye toward China's expanding submarine force, Roughhead emphasized antisubmarine warfare. It relies on submarines said to be the best weapon against other submarines surface ships equipped with sonar, torpedoes and new antisubmarine missiles, and low flying aircraft.
"This is an area," the admiral said, "that we want to be able to dominate."
Richard Halloran, formerly a correspondent for Business Week, The Washington Post and The New York Times, is a freelance journalist.
The Japan Times: Aug. 30, 2005
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For those familiar with the Harpoon Classic game, this idea sounds a lot like the Cold War concept platform, Mitchel Offshore Base, that is found in the GIUK and NACV Battlesets. Looks like what was old is new again.
US and Japan plan floating runway
Justin McCurry in Tokyo
Monday August 29, 2005
Japan and the US are planning to build a giant floating runway off the coast of western Japan in a bid to reduce noise pollution by US military aircraft, local media reported yesterday.
The "megafloat" will be built six miles off Iwakuni, home to a US marine base, at a cost of up to ¥500bn (£2.5bn), the Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper said, quoting government sources.
The countries will include the plans in an interim report on the realignment of US forces in Japan due in October.
The new runway would be used by about 70 aircraft, including F/A-18 fighters.
The jets, which serve the US aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk moored at nearby Yokosuka naval base, have been the target of complaints from residents because of the noise.
"Being four kilometres away [from land], nearby residents won't be bothered by the noise," the Yomiuri quoted a Japanese government official as saying.
US officials believe the sea off Iwakuni is calm enough to safely support the floating base, which will be made out of hollow metal boxes and could last 100 years.
Local councils in the Iwakuni area oppose the megafloat, however, saying the presence of more aircraft will increase noise levels and heighten the risk of accidents.
In addition, the Iwakuni base has already been selected to be used for refuelling for aircraft from a marine corps air station on the southern island of Okinawa.
Okinawa is home to well over half of the 47,000 US military personnel in Japan.
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AAR: Force Z
By Harold Hutchison
HMAS Stuart found herself amidst three unidentified vessels. She immediately launched her SeaSprite helicopter to classify them. Unfortunately, one of her charges, Iowa Farmer, happened to be between her and one of the unidentified vessels. The merchant's master was particularly ornery today and refused all requests to turn his vessel to starboard and allow the Stuart to screen him. His reply was, "You're the [expletive deleted] Navy. It's not my job to get my [expletive deleted] [expletive deleted] [expletive deleted] shot off. You do your [expletive deleted] job and I'll do my [expletive deleted] job." With little choice, the Captain ordered flank speed to interpose themselves between the Farmer and the 'skunk'.
In short order, the helo pilot reported that it was an Indonesian Siada-class vessel. He overflew it a number of times, but it did not exhibit any hostile action so the pilot was ordered to train his Maverick missiles on the vessel and proceed to identify the other two skunks in the area. Stuart's Tactical Action Officer [TAO] ordered all weapons trained on the Siada. If she was up to no good, he was determined to make her antics very short-lived and fiery, indeed.
As the Stuart manoeuvred herself between the intruder and her lamb, repeated messages were sent questioning the intentions of the Indonesian ship. No reply was received. All of a sudden, at a range of 1nm, the Siada opened fire. Upon seeing the muzzle flashes, the TAO lost his composure and said, "Fight's on!". He then calmed down when the Captain ordered a turn to starboard and the age-old command, "Fire as you bear."
The little vessel was raked from stem to stern with .50 calibre machine gun fire and 5' naval gunfire. She blew up in a shower of sparks. Well, the Captain thought, looks like Indonesia is serious about this exclusion zone. He immediately order his SeaSprite to launch her Maverick against the other confirmed Indonesian vessel. The Todak was struck amidships and left dead in the water.
No sooner had this action ended when the CIC announced, "Air Action Port!" A pair of F-5E Tiger had been detected. Both were engaged with SeaSparrow and killed with one SAM apiece. The Stuart returned to Emissions Control [EmCon] status and relied upon her helo for early warning.
The flock of merchant vessels was scattered over a large area. The Stuart and the Canberra elected to position themselves between the flock and the enemy airbase at Kupang. Hopefully, they would be able to intercept any aircraft before the rest of merchants could be detected. They maintained radar silence in hopes of ambushing any attackers.
A helo from the Canberra engaged and killed the Sibara with a Penguin before continuing on to destroy another gunboat. Soon enough, six bogeys were detected 50nm from the Stuart bearing 027T. Her Captain fervently hoped that they would be able to pull off an ambush against these aircraft. All the aircraft were making a beeline for the frigate.
At a range of 13nm, the radar was energized, the TAO declared, "Weapons Free" and one SeaSparrow SAM was fired at each plane. Two were killed in the first volley, but three more SAMs were needed to finish the job. There were two more hostiles out there. Again, they were allowed into the No-Escape envelope before a single SeaSparrow was able to kill each of them.
No sooner had this action ended than CIC reported, "Three bogies, multiple vectors, bearing constant, range decreasing." This was going to be a difficult day for the men of the Stuart.
The first one was a lone Skyhawk and she was killed with a single SAM. The second plane was a Persuader Maritime Patrol Aircraft [MPA]. The TAO did not believe her to be armed so she was allowed to close into gunfire distance in order to preserve the limited number of SeaSparrow as there were eight more bogeys heading straight for the Stuart. The ploy worked and the plane was hit by AAA and exploded. However, bad news seemed to multiply. Now there were TEN(!) aircraft aimed like the proverbial dagger at the Stuart along with a small flotilla of menacing surface contacts. This was like fighting a Hydra!
A SeaHawk and a SeaSprite were launched to attack the ships. The Stuart was able to kill all ten aircraft, but the SeaSprite was shot down by a marauding Skyhawk after it launched its ASMs. The SeaHawk hugged the waves and fled for her life, but she, too, was caught by a Tiger. Damn and double Damn. There went my long-ranged attack assets.
Without any radar system airborne, detection times were almost at point-blank range. HMAS Stuart was again attacked by eight more Hawks/Skyhawks. She managed to kill them all, but also used up her remaining SAM inventory and had to kill the last two with AAA fire. She was no longer able to offer area protection to the merchants and would likely need protection herself so she set a course to bring herself under the Canberra's SAM umbrella.
Meanwhile in the Eastern part of the Area of Operations [AO], HMAS Newcastle and Voyager were experiencing their own trials and tribulations. Their helos had detected a small flotilla consisting of four missile-armed frigates; two with Harpoon and two with Exocet. They tried to engage at long range with Harpoons, but these were easily destroyed. The enemy concentrated their fire on the cargo vessel, Fosters Market, and sank her with SSMs before they stopped moving. With no other vessel in the area to protect and with their long-range armament expended, both frigates decided that discretion would be the better part of valour and retired to try and shield the incoming merchants in the west.
Two groups of vessels were detected approaching the civilians' Path of Intended Movement [PIM]. These turned out be gunboats and there were aimed directly at the cargo ships. Immediately, the surviving helos were ordered to attack and thus hoped to keep them at arm's length. A combination of Maverick and Penguin ASMs killed most of them well over the horizon. One gunboat was killed by Stuart's 5' gun which far out-ranged the gunboat's little machine guns. As proven yet again, gunboats cannot stand up to a full-sized frigate.
The frigate force that had killed the Fosters Market made a re-appearance. All the long-ranged SSMs in my force had already been expended. The enemy definitely held the upper hand in this coming confrontation as he still had a significant supply of Harpoon and Exocet SSMs. However, there was never a question of their duty. The four frigates turned towards the four Indonesian frigates in hopes of engaging with gunfire. The helos made repeated ASM attacks, but the missiles were easily brushed aside by the super-effective CADS-1 point defence system on the frigates.
The RAN huddled together to try and cover each other with their SAM umbrellas. However, HMAS Newcastle bore the brunt of the SSMs. Luckily, she had a full inventory of SeaSparrow and was able to shoot down all the missiles sent in her direction. An air attack also materialized right after the SSMs were brought down. The massed SAM defences easily defeated them. The two groups were on a collision course.
As the ships closed on one another, one Captain remarked that, "Apparently, not much has changed since the age of Nelson. Here we are in the 21st century and we are still attempting naval manoeuvres like 'Crossing the T'." HMAS Stuart and Canberra engaged with their 5' mounts from maximum range and changed course to maintain the distance to their targets while Voyager and Newcastle lunged towards the enemy in order to deliver their torpedoes.
The classic naval engagement saw the first surface torpedo engagement since World War II. Just like their Japanese cousins, the Long Lance, the Aussie torpedoes performed admirably and sank all four ships. With no other potential threats in the area, the RAN proceeded to the rendezvous point at Date1.
Thanks for a very stimulating scenario. Your most challenging one, yet!
This scenario can be found in the SZO file archives.
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US Navy Sizes Up Future
Does the Navy have the right strategy and resources to meet future threats?
by Ted McKenna
Aug. 19, 2005
The US Navy still wants to fight the Battle of Midway, some critics say. Does it have the money to field a fleet that can, though, as well as fight the "global war on terror"?
A growing percentage of the world's population lives in littoral areas, near the water, often in poverty and amid ethnic strife. The Navy must prepare to fight conflicts in such areas and wants to be fast and flexible in deploying forces, vehicles, and other assets on shore.
As senior officers in the service point out, the Navy must prepare itself for a whole range of contingencies, from major combat to regional conflicts, interception of weapons of mass destruction on the high seas and in ports, and other, unforeseen developments. The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that followed caught many off guard, and there could be some other surprise in the future that changes the world's outlook on security.
In preparing a rationale for its future structure – how many ships, aircraft, sailors, and other resources are needed, and what kind – the Navy has issued a strategic vision that it calls Sea Power 21. But like most strategies, this only paints the Navy's future in broad strokes and lacks specifics numbers, including the size of the Navy's future fleet. Given the Navy's broadening mission – and its limited budget – this is proving a problem.
Right now, at least a couple of different plans for Navy fleet size by the year 2035 or so are floating about, including one consisting of 260 ships and another of 325. During the Cold War, the Navy had some 600 ships, but with the cut in personnel the Navy underwent in the 1990s and the accompanying "procurement holiday," in which relatively little investment was made in building new ships, the Navy has had to adjust to its diminished size, with an estimated 282 ships at present, though the new Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Michael Mullen says that the US Navy today is the most capable that it's ever been.
Gradually, senior planners in the Navy in recent years have been lowering their estimates for the size of the future fleet. From 375 previously mentioned by officers to members of Congress and now with talk of as few as 260, the exact number is still not decided. In fact, Admiral Mullen, having only recently replaced ADM Vern Clark – who over the past five years has worked to reform the Navy's acquisition processes and business practices – is reportedly working on a new plan to be completed over the next couple of months that lays out exact numbers of ships to be built and maintained by the Navy over the next few decades.
The basis for deciding exact numbers of ships and what types lies in the Sea Power 21 doctrine, which has a number of elements but essentially involves shaping the Navy so that it can better participate in all manner of joint operations using new "network-centric" capabilities (see "Computing a New Plan of Attack"); protecting the US and theaters of military operations from missiles (see "Early Deployment of Missile Defense"); and more quickly and efficiently participating in operations through "sea-basing," in which supplies are kept at sea and closer to the area of operations instead of onshore, far away from the action, whatever that might be.
The various ships the Navy now plans to begin or continue building, or at least maintaining, include the CVN-68 Nimitz-class aircraft carriers, the SSN-688 Los Angeles-class submarines, the LHD-1 Wasp-class amphibious ships, the DDG-51 Aegis destroyers, the SSN-774 Virginia-class nuclear attack submarines, the LPD-17 San Antonio-class amphibious transport dock ships, the planned DD(X) multimission destroyer, and the planned high-speed Littoral Combat Ship.
Overly Optimistic
Aside from the question of whether these ships are the best ones for meeting the Navy's various duties, and despite the metamorphoses occurring in the various programs (see "Course Correction on US Navy's DD(X) Program" and "LCS Program Taps International Expertise"), some experts say the Navy is simply too optimistic about what it can build. For example, Dr. Eric J. Labs, principal analyst for national security at the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), said that, assuming the Navy's annual budget holds steady at its current approximate level of around $10.4 billion, and allowing for inflation, the future fleet will actually number around 200.
The widespread emergence of "asymmetric" tactics, including the use of improvised explosives, means that minesweeping and other means of detecting hidden bombs have emerged as a new priority for all of the US military services.
Describing the factors contributing to the Navy's excessively sunny estimates about its shipbuilding capabilities, Labs said in a presentation on "Capitalizing the Future Fleet" at the Sea Enterprise 2005 conference, held Aug. 9-11 in Washington, DC, that the Navy simply hasn't learned from cost overruns for other ship programs in the past. It continues to underestimate the cost of individual programs, and it assumes more money will be coming from Congress than it should, given, for example, the heavy resources the US Army and Marine Corps are drawing on for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Unrealistic, inconsistent plans from the Navy hurt its influence with lawmakers, who control the funding, Labs said, and will make getting what the Navy wants more difficult.
"Absence of a coherent plan and explanation puts the Navy in a weak position in DC's money competition," Labs said. "The changes to programs that seem to be without rhyme or reason hurt."
But Vice Admiral Lou Crenshaw, deputy chief of naval operations for resources, requirements, and assessments, disagreed that the Navy is doomed to have a significantly smaller fleet. Asked whether the US Navy historically has underestimated the cost of building ships and whether it continues to underestimate their cost, VADM Crenshaw said: "I don't buy the idea that we will be a prisoner of history here. I don't agree that the path we will be on will be 200 ships." Provided the Navy can learn to resist the temptation to add newly developed technology to ships as they are being built and that it can do adequate research and development ahead of time so that the shipbuilding process proceeds smoothly, costs can be kept down. "I'm pretty hopeful," he said.
The type of ships being built and what they are equipped with obviously can affect how many can ultimately be built. Terry Pudas, acting director of the Defense Department's Office of Force Transformation, said that Sea Power 21 may not be the right strategy for the Navy. "It ought to be looked at," he said when questioned about Sea Power 21 at the Sea Enterprise 2005 conference. Discussing the two main types of threats the Navy wants to prepare for – littoral warfare and major combat operations – Pudas said there are "enormous challenges" in trying to plan the future fleet. "Do we have to build two fleets?" he asked. "Or are there either/or choices forced on us?"
From irregular warfare to "traditional" large-scale warfare to catastrophic events, such as the detonation of a nuclear weapons, to some unforeseen "disruptive" capability that is not yet anticipated, the Navy will probably need to be able to move quickly from one type of crisis to another and have weapons, communications, ships, aircraft, and other resources that can be used in many different ways. The Navy's problem is this: it has more potential responsibilities than it did in the past, but it can't expect its budget to increase.
Technology provides the means to make weapons more accurate and deadly and allow one aircraft or one ship to accomplish much more than one aircraft of ship of the past, but it also adds greatly to costs. Thus, Pudas argued that the Navy should consider building smaller ships and more of them, given the increased firepower and other capabilities that each one can carry compared with the past. Instead of the current fleet of 282 or so ships the Navy has, Pudas said, it could have as many as 1,560 eventually, according to a plan that the Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA) has developed and that was first introduced last year.
Getting Ship-Shape
Other Navy planners argue that new efficiencies in business practices, from payroll and other human resources functions to more cost-conscious practices in general by managers throughout the organization, along with reforms in program development, should leave more money for the Navy to spend on ships and material. VADM Crenshaw noted that, like other military services, the Navy spends a lot of money on integration, and it also suffers from the temptation of adding new technology to platforms as it becomes available, which, of course, means higher costs per ship.
But the Navy is looking to change the old mentality that permeates many bureaucracies, where managers seek to hold onto their budget allocations year to year, whether or not their spending is efficient. Admiral Robert Willard, vice chief of naval operations, said that ADM Clark, when he first took over as chief of naval operations, considered the Navy to be in a crisis. Funding was dropping, and personnel were being cut, yet new business practices to make the Navy more efficient had not been adopted, nor was there an intelligent strategy for planning development of the Navy's future resources. "We were a culture of 'spend what you got.' I remember that we would fly aircraft just to burn up remaining gas," ADM Willard said. The fear that any money left over at the end of the year for a particular program or line item would be taken away the following year meant officers and program managers would spend all of their budget whether they really needed to or not.
The missions of the US Navy and the US Coast Guard are converging, as both are being called upon to keep US maritime areas secure from attack. Experienced in conducting ship-boardings and patrolling ports, the Coast Guard also assists the Navy in overseas operations, including in the Persian Gulf and elsewhere in the Middle East for Operation Iraqi Freedom.
So ADM Clark sought to reform the Navy in its various business practices, ADM Willard said, and achieving a modern, cost-efficient organize continues to be a struggle. As for the size of the fleet, ADM Willard said that "when we do come out with a force-structure plan, it will be for the future," but he did not provide specifics. Will more efficient business practices really permit the Navy to buy more ships? "I'm not convinced you will get savings that will allow you to buy 20 more ships over 10 years," said the CBO's Labs. "Also, it may be that, if you save money, the Navy won't get to keep it. It may go to other services like the Army, given the geopolitical situation and all the resources it needs to maintain operations."
Senior Navy leaders argue, though, that reforming business and product-acquisition practices not only save the service money but allow it to be a lot more responsive to crises than it might have been in the past. For instance, cheap, fairly non-technical threats like improvised explosive devices (IEDs) are proving a significant threat to high-tech US forces, as seen with the bombing of the USS Cole and all the bombing attacks occurring in Iraq today, and solutions to counter these threats, if they are based on technology, are ironically increasingly high-tech (see "Shutting the Bomb Factory"). Defeating such threats may ultimately be done not by instituting some new development program but by through some creative, as-yet-unknown approach to the problem.
Expect the Unexpected
Thus, given the unpredictable nature of threats to US interests around the world, creativity is important to planning in general, noted Vice Admiral John G. Morgan Jr., the deputy chief of naval operations for information, plans, and strategy, since obviously no one can be certain what will happen in the future. "I don't know what the Navy will look like 30 years from now," VADM Morgan said in a speech during the Navy-Industry R&D Partnership Conference 2005, held July 26-29 in Washington, DC.
As a kind of analogy for illustrating the difficulties in planning for the future, whether to restructure the Naval force or simply anticipate an enemy attack, whatever it might be, VADM Morgan showed a black-and-white video from the Internet of people running in a circle passing two basketballs back and forth to one another. Focus only the guys in the white shirts and their basketball, not the other set of people, he said. After the video ended, he asked how many times had the ball been passed among the guys in white shirts. Seven or eight, most people counted. Then he asked, "How many of you saw the lady holding the umbrella?" Out of more than 200 people in the audience, just a few people raised their hands.
With the video running again, a lady holding an umbrella could clearly be seen walking through the circle as basketballs passed back and forth around her. Why had so few people seen the lady? ADM Morgan asked. "Because I primed you ahead of time to look for something specific," he said. The events of September 11, 2001, and subsequent the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were not foreseen by the Navy or many others, and there may be other events developing that, like the "war on terror," could be as obvious as the lady with the umbrella. By better anticipating future threats, better planning of the Navy's future force should result, if only people learned to look for other than what they expect to see.
Coast Guard Charts Course With Navy
US Coast Guard (USCG) Admiral Thomas H. Collins is steering clear of specifics about funding changes to the Coast Guard's Deepwater acquisition program (see "US Coast Guard Ventures Into Deepwater"), the plans for which are being affected by budget limits. But along with shipbuilding and aircraft purchases, long-term planning for the USCG also involves changes to its relationships with other US military services and government agencies.
Following the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, DC, on Sept. 11, 2001, the US Coast Guard began devoting some 50% of its budget to US homeland security. With all of its expanding duties, the USCG is having to rethink its ship-acquisition plans.
Speaking at the conservative Heritage Foundation research group in Washington, DC, on July 18 on the topic of "The Future of the Coast Guard: A View From the Top," ADM Collins said that in the midst of its effort to acquire a range of new ships, boats, aircraft, helicopters, and surveillance technology, among other items, the Coast Guard has had to reallocate about 50% of its assets to national-security purposes, such as port security, as a result of the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.
This has meant adjustments in its plans to update its resources. The Deepwater plan currently calls for about $24 billion to be spent over the next 25 years on a variety of aircraft and ships, including 350-foot Offshore Patrol Cutters, 418-foot National Security Cutters, 140-foot Fast Response Cutters, 35-foot Long Range Interceptors, and 123-foot Maritime Patrol Boats. The exact number for these ships and boats, along with planned aircraft and other resources the Coast Guard wants to acquire, are in the process of being adjusted, just as the Navy is having to fiddle with numbers to support its Sea Power 21 strategy.
Like the US Navy, the USCG has a multitude of missions to cover, so it needs to build a fleet that can be used for many types of operations. Though the Coast Guard may be best known for its work assisting ships in distress, monitoring boater safety, and the like, law-enforcement and military operations are nothing new for the Coast Guard, which was established by the US Congress in 1790 to enforce tariff and trade laws, prevent smuggling, and protect the collection of federal revenue. Today, the USCG's duties cover everything from interception of weapons of mass destruction on the high seas to protecting US ports and assisting the US Navy in ship-boardings (see "Armed and Ready").
But why should the Navy and Coast Guard have totally separate shipbuilding and aircraft programs when a lot of their missions are the same? Some policy analysts advocate basically combing the two services and consolidating their shipbuilding plans to a large degree, given that some of the ships each plan to build are relatively similar. Bruce Stubbs, the technical director of the Anteon (Arlington, VA) Center for Security Strategies and Operations, said in a paper prepared for the Heritage Foundation that "full integration between the Navy and the Coast Guard with respect to maritime-security capabilities, planning, and operations is warranted, especially in light of current and foreseeable budget realities."
Officials from the Coast Guard and Navy note that integration of the services is part of their discussions in connection with the latest Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR), due for release next February (see "Guessing Game: Quadrennial Defense Review 2005"). ADM Collins, for instance, said that in his talks regarding the QDR, which is a Congressionally mandated report from the US Defense Department on its planned future spending and overall development strategy, one area of focus has been the creation of better "maritime domain awareness," which means closer integration of intelligence collected from various sources, including different services like the USCG and Navy.
That doesn't mean the USCG and USN will merge, though. US Navy Admiral Robert Willard, vice chief of Naval Operations, noted at the Sea Enterprise 2005 conference, held Aug. 9-11 in Washington, DC, that integration is a word, like "transformation" or "networking," that is often bandied about but can mean different things to different people. Certainly, the QDR will tout closer integration of the various US military services in the sense of being able to more quickly share information and coordinate missions. Aircraft from the US Air Force should be able to fly smoothly with aircraft from the Navy, including exchanging information quickly, but that doesn't mean there are any plans to combine services.
"That is totally off the table. I can tell you that," ADM Willard said. "There is no talk about merging the services."
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Mark Gellis has published the 36th scenario of the year.
Looks like another episode in the Global War on Terror. Thanks for sharing it with the community.
Roman Thunder – ALBAT10A - EC2003 MEDC
A few years in the future... Tensions between Algeria and the E.U. have increased. Algeria is now controlled by a religious dictatorship that is hostile to the West. The E.U. believes Algeria is responsible for several recent terrorist attacks in Europe. Current thinking in Europe is that the most likely solution to the problem is regime change.
Intelligence officers have been in communication with a coalition of rebel groups in Algeria--it would probably be too much to call them pro-Western, but they would certainly be an improvement over the current lot. They will view an E.U. attack as a signal to initiate their own attacks against the Algerian government. If the rebels can overthrow the current regime, it may mark the start of a period of improved relations with Algeria.
This scenario requires Harpoon Classic version 16b8 or later and also the HCDB_050812 or later in order to function properly.
Author: Mark Gellis
Check it out on the file archives at:
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Taiwan to get warships from US by year-end
Taipei: Taiwan will begin taking delivery of four US Kidd-class destroyers before year's end to boost its defences against China, a military official said Tuesday.
"Two of the four vessels are undergoing testing and training in the US," Rear Admiral Lee Hao said at a news conference.
"Both have passed the tests by the US Atlantic Fleet. Test-firing of Standard II anti-air missiles on the vessels will be held in October."
"The two warships will depart from the Charleston port in South Carolina for Taiwan via the Panama Canal in November and are expected to arrive in Taiwan before the end of the year," Lee added.
The Kidd-class destroyers are part of a $18.2 billion arms-sale package approved by US President George W. Bush in 2001.
The sale also includes six sets of PAC-3 anti-missile systems, eight diesel submarines and 12 P-3C anti-submarine aircraft.
The Taiwan parliament, however, has been blocking the budget for PAC-3, P-3C and subs, arguing that their prices are too high and delivery too late.
The four destroyers meant for Taiwan joined the US Navy between 1981 and 1982 and were decommissioned in 1998 and 1999 after having served half their service life. Since then they have been in storage.
The 9,000-tonne destroyers' radar has a search range of 400 km, and its Standard II missiles can hit at a distance of 150 km.
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Nuclear subs on lease from Russia to India
ST. PETERSBURG—The construction of a training centre for the Indian military in Sosnovy Bor, 70 kilometers west of St. Petersburg, confirms Russia’s intentions to lease nuclear submarines to India, said Green World Chairman Oleg Bodrov.
Vera Ponomaryova, 2005-08-16 15:56
The international centre will open in September in the town that also hosts the Leningrad Nuclear Power Plant, and will train some 300 Indian naval officers.
Sosnovy Bor is home to the Russian Training Centre for Officers of the Russian Navy which houses working nuclear reactors of the type found on nuclear submarines. These reactors are used to test nuclear fuel and other technologies applicable to nuclear submarine reactors. A building recently went up along side the training centre, where Indian specialists will apparently be schooled.
According to Green World, the building went up in record time following the visit of Russian President Vladimir Putin to India last December.
What is the new building?
A spokesman for the Sosnovy Bor administration confirmed to Bellona Web that the international training centre had been built, but had no specific information about the programme of study or the number of officers who will study there.
Prior to 1991, crews of Soviet submarines were trained in three locations: Paldisky (Estonia); Sevastopol (Ukraine) and Sosnovy Bor.
According to the spokesman, the new building will not house any special equipment or installations—such as nuclear reactors—but is only a wing for classrooms and has no relation to the nuclear industry.
Bodrov, who earlier worked at the Alexandrov Scientific and Technical Research institute (NITI in its Russian abbreviation) where tests of new submarines prototypes are carried out, clarified how such a center would be built. “As far as I can judge from my own experience at [NITI] the centre would hold simulators—computers that imitate submarines.”
Nuclear Submarines for rent?
Bodrov said that the training of Indian submariners in Sosnovy Bor was a testament to the notion that Russia has not given up on its plans of leasing nuclear submarines. Representatives of the Russian Ministry of Foreign affairs and the Ministry of Defense said they were not ready to comment on the potential nuclear submarine leasing.
Nonetheless, India’s defense minister, Pranab Mukharjee, said that negotiations about obtaining a Russian nuclear submarine were underway. At the same time, Mukharjee said that, as yet, the sides were not bound by “any obligations relative to the acquisition by the Indian side of an Akula class submarine.” Mukharjee said the conclusion of any deals hinged on “various international obligations and agreements.”
Representatives of various Russian ministries have also spoken many times of similar intentions. Russian Navy Chief Admiral Vladimir Kuroyedov announced in early 2002 his readiness to lease two nuclear submarines to India. It was planned that the first sub would to India in 2004. But the Indian side did not follow up with any official commentary to Kuroyedov’s words.
Discussion of this contract was again taken up in the press toward the beginning of last year, but is was denies by Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov.
Now, according to Green World, “Leasing India two third generation multi-purpose submarines with the option to buy them, as many media reports indicated in late 2004, is apparently becoming a reality.”
Bodrov commented further, asking “otherwise, why train some 300 Indian submariners in Russia? That constitutes 4 Akula crews.”
Russian has experience in leasing nuclear subs to India. In January 1988, India leased three Soviet-era Skat class—known as Charlie class in NATO designation—multi-purpose submarines, equipped with eight nuclear missile installations. After the term of the lease ran out, the subs were returned to Russia and decommissioned.
“If India is sending its submariners to us to learn how to operate their submarines, then that likely means a number of nuclear sub leasing agreements exist,” said Alexander Nikitin, who heads Bellona’s St. Petersburg office, the Environmental Right’s Centre.
“Moreover, such a scheme was already worked out in 1988—then the theoretical preparation of the crews took place in Vladivostok, and the practical training in the submarines themselves with Russian sailors aboard.”
Bodrov thinks that this time, the matter concerns the building of two Akula class submarines, which is taking place at the Amur Shipbuilding yard. Current published figures indicate that the two Akulas—one 70 to 85 percent complete and the other 40 to 60 percent complete—will cost India some $400m. The leasing costs would amount to some $25m a year.
The construction of both submarines, on shore infrastructure for them and training of the crews could run Russia, according to experts, some $2 billion.
It is worth bearing in mind that the Akula class sub is a Project 971 nuclear strike submarine—one of the fastest-moving submarines in the Russian fleet. Their crews consist of 73 sailor. The subs carry OK-650 type reactors. The subs are outfitted with four 650 millimeter torpedo tubes and as many 533 millimeter tubes. Akulas are armed with winged Granit torpedoes carrying nuclear warheads, under water missiles and missile torpedoes of the “Shkval,” “Vodopad,” and “Veter” types.
Russia-Indian military co-operation
It is noteworthy that Russia already has experience selling diesel submarines and other weapons to India. Between 1968 and 1971, India purchased eight submarines of project number I-641 and I-641K, eight Project 159AE battle cruisers, eight Project Project 205E missile cruisers and several other assistance vessels.
During 1983 to 1991, India completed its navy with the purchase from the then-USSR of three Project 61ME destroyers, three projects 1234E corvettes, six Project 1258E mine-sweepers, and eight Project 877EKM (NATO Kilo class) submarines.
Then, on January 20th, 2004, India purchased from Russia in one of the biggest contracts to date the Admiral Gorshkov aircraft carrier, built in 1978. The Russian firm Rosoboroneksport took upon itself the modernisation of the ship and equipping it with state of the at weapons systems and deck-borne aviation, such as MiG 29Ks, and Ka-27 and Ka-31 anti-submarine helicopters.
At present the foundation of the Indian Navy is nine diesel Kilo submarines from Russia’s Rubin graving yard in St. Petersburg and several ships analogous to the West German JKL 209/1500 type.
Proliferation Risks
In the opinion of ecologists, the coming submarine lease deal poses a serious threat to international security, stimulating, as it does, the Indian-Pakistani nuclear arms race.
“Arming of third world countries is a very dangerous business that can lead to military escalation in the east,” said Vladimir Chuprov, coordinator of energy programmes at Greenpeace Russia.
Chuprov said that selling weapons to India was a “regurgitation of the Cold War.”
”Kremlin bureaucrats still live on the fundamentals of the last century, considering the basic task of the state to be wide-scale preparation for war, arming India, North Korea and other countries.”
Chuprov continued saying that a submarine can contain up to 10 kilograms of plutonium in its spent nuclear fuel. “And even though nuclear scientists are usually specify that this is not weapons quality plutonium, energy plutonium still explodes,” he said.
India is one of four influential countries that are not signatories to the Non-Proliferation Treaty.
A new installation—a new target for terrorists
According to Green World’s Bodrov, the current deal not only sharpens the situation in Southeast Asia, but implies another danger: Placing the training centre in Sosnovy Bor puts the city on the radar of terrorists.
At the Leningrad Nuclear Power Plant alone there are four reactors of the Chernobyl-type RMBK 1000, several naval reactors at NITI, temporary storage for highly radioactive waste from the nuclear power plant, and enough highly toxic waste to constitute dozens of Chernobyls. The Northwest Russian regional facility of RADON for the outdoor storage of medium and high level nuclear waste also operates in Sosnovy Bor as does the Ekomet-S firm, a smelting plant for radioactive metals.
“The appearance in Sosnovy Bor of an international Russian-Indian centre for nuclear cooperation in the military sphere could create a nuclear and radiological dangerous installation on the Russia Baltic into a target for international terrorism,” said Bodrov.
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35th Scenario this year!
Dave Steinmeyer has posted his second scenario, BALTIC TIDE. Thanks for sharing it with us.
World War III has been raging across the globe for three days already. Casualties have been high on both sides. Where the Soviets expected to make rapid gains on land, they have not. And where NATO expected to quickly gain control of the skies above Europe, the Pact has made more than a fight of it.
At sea, there are only the quick and the dead. What were supposed to be set piece battles turned into bloodbaths with the winner being whoever fired first. While no American carriers have been sunk, yet, three have been heavily damaged in the GIUK Gap alone. One of the few things going as planned is NATO's campaign against Soviet subs in the Atlantic and North Sea. With the combination of first-class sonar, excellent signals processing, and land and ship based aircraft, NATO has been able to smother almost any sub contact they run across.
Reinforcements are being rushed into the meat grinder that is the North Atlantic. Here, at least, NATO has the advantage of unrestricted access to the sea. Any Pact units in transit to the Atlantic must pass through restricted (and often NATO-controlled) seaways.
NATO Orders: The Soviets have already sustained very heavy losses to the naval forces they had pre-positioned in the North Sea and Atlantic prior to the outbreak of hostilities. Satellite reconnaissance indicates that a major Surface Action Group will attempt to surge through the Danish Straits. In order to support this breakout, East German airborne units and Polish Marines have landed on several Danish islands. And, while Pact losses in these landing have been high, they are still stubbornly holding their positions. We also have indications of a large number of Soviet cargo aircraft marshaling at Russian airfields as well as cargo ships leaving the port of Leningrad. We believe they are trying to push supplies and equipment forward to support their efforts on the central front.
Close the Danish Straits. Do not allow the SAG to complete its transit to the North Sea.
Soviet orders: NATO surface fleets in the North Sea and around Denmark have suffered great attrition from our naval air forces. Expect only light forces to oppose your transit. The threat of NATO subs is high, however. NATO air forces and ASW units pose the greatest danger to your mission.
Get the SAG through the Danish straits and into the North Sea for follow-on commerce raider operations against the UK and the French coast.
Author: Dave Steinmeyer
This scenario requires the latest release of the PlayersDB v5.9.7
Get it via: StrategyZoneOnline, HarpGamer, SimHQ, PlayersDB Depot, SubSim, CombatAce, or Frugal's World of Simulation.
Check it out at:
German Navy Pursues Sub-Launched Missile
in Current Events in Europe
German Navy Pursues Sub-Launched Missile
By MARTIN AGÜERA, MUNICH
DefenseNews
In the next legislative term, the German Navy hopes to revive an effort to develop a submarine-launched missile that may ignite a multinational development and marketing effort, said officials and industry executives.
The weapon would be intended to work against anti-submarine warfare helicopters, small surface and littoral targets, industry officials said.
Last year, the German military’s central procurement agency, the BWB in Koblenz, began to explore the idea through a working group dubbed IDAS, for Interactive Defense & Attack System for Submarines. The group is composed of representatives from the BWB and several companies which split the proceeds from the contract. The contract’s value has not been publicly disclosed, but the firms and their shares of it are:
• Diehl BGT Defense, Überlingen, 40 percent.
• ThyssenKrupp Marine Systems’ Howaldtswerke Deutsche Werft (HDW), Kiel, 40 percent.
• Norway’s Kongsberg Defense & Aerospace, Kongsberg, 20 percent.
Kongsberg will provide the weapon control system and HDW will integrate the missile into the submarine itself. HDW will build the container and perform other integration, said Klaus-Eberhard Möller, head of anti-radar and naval missiles with Diehl BGT Defense.
Funding is being provided through the country’s research and development resources, said one Ministry of Defense (MoD) official.
No existing missile fully met the IDAS requirements, Möller said. IDAS would replace Triton, a fiber-optic guided missile program based on EADS-LFK’s Polyphem missile and scrapped in 2002 primarily for budgetary reasons.
“Back then,” said the MoD official, “the procurement of a new missile from scratch was deemed too expensive.”
IDAS’ primary sensor likely will be based on the infrared image-processing seeker of the six-nation IRIS-T short-range air-to-air missile. Other components will be new, such as the fiber-optic data link and the one-stage solid-fuel rocket engine with a range of 15 kilometers, said the MoD official.
The IDAS working group will also make use of the complete IRIS-T hardware and software guidance package. Each will trail a lightweight fiber-optic cable to send images from the missile’s infrared seeker back to a controller aboard the sub.
“By this, we have eliminated a share of the development costs already, which is very significant for such a program,” said Möller.
IRIS-T Model
The IDAS team said it can use management methods of a multinational program like IRIS-T to reduce redundancies, said Möller.
“With IDAS, we strive to develop a new missile for submarines that applies to the mission scenarios of the future,” said Joachim Reuter, IDAS project manager for HDW. “It is a suitable weapon for effects-based operations.”
HDW, a platform maker, has never built a munition, said Reuter.
“But the torpedo as the only main armament system of the submarine limited the ships somewhat for future missions,” said Reuter. “Now, the main focus is not any more on destroying ships totally.”
Instead, a weapon must be able to deliver a variety of punches, depending on the situation.
Preparations for tests are under way. By the end of next year, the IDAS team could demonstrate a dummy driven by a hot-water propulsor out of the submerged submarine’s torpedo tube to the point where fiber-optic guidance would begin.
The MoD official said a heavyweight torpedo tube would hold a launch container with several missiles, which will be launched separately.
The MoD official said several navies had already expressed an interest. “It would be ideal to find suitable partners for this development effort, which could begin in 2007,” said the MoD official. “Those who deal with missiles also know how expensive development work can be … That’s why putting it on a multinational level can help.”
But tight German MoD budgets are complicating the effort.
Möller expects that a number of countries — basically, all the ones that operate HDW submarines — could become customers for IDAS: Greece, Israel, Norway, Pakistan, Turkey and others.
The Diehl BGT Defense executive said the working group is already in talks with Norway.