March 10, 200818 yr AAR: There's No Place Like Home [spoiler Alert] A Harpoon Classic scenario By Patrick Howard The time is the present, and the Kosovo crisis and the resulting Serbian invasion has led to long simmering tensions between Russia and the US exploding, with the sinking of an American submarine found within Russian territorial waters near Archangel. The Commander of the ASW frigate involved has been cashiered for his aggressiveness, but the loss of USS Dallas and 155 American sailors has the US public infuriated and the US government is bent on revenge. American diplomatic staff has been recalled and war is imminent. Unfortunately, the AFS Kuznetsov, with his escorts, is in the Atlantic on exercises; far from friendly ports and exposed to American attacks. The US has claimed that this task group is a threat to American shipping and must surrender to US forces. Your job is to get him and his escorts home safely in the face of overwhelming opposition. As a student of history, I had read about Xenophon and the 10,000 but never really felt that I understood it until I was faced with the same situation. The Kuznetsov group was operating off the Irish coast when she received orders to return to the Kola Peninsula. Unfortunately, receiving orders and actually carrying them out can be very different things. All I could see was an entire wall of potentially (probably) hostile bases. The more I looked, the grimmer things appeared. The previously powerful forces of Soviet Naval Aviation had fallen from regiments of Backfire and Badger bombers to only 5x Tu-22M Backfires, 2x Tu-95H Bear, and 4x Tu-160 Blackjack bombers on call to assist in the voyage home. Soviet doctrine called for regimental strikes by SNA against the American carrier battle groups and I had barely one squadron's worth of bombers. Soon, Elint reports started coming in from two surveillance trawlers in the North Atlantic. E-2 Hawkeye radar had been detected. Where there are Hawkeyes, there is a carrier. I couldn't localize the ships, but the AWACs gave me an idea of where they might be. As all routes back to the Kola seemed to be blocked, I decided that the only chance I had would be to blast my way through the carrier group so I shuttled all available aircraft down to Kaliningrad in hopes of re-inforcing the Kuznetsov for a combined attack. It was my only hope. I also ordered the BCGN Petr Velikiy out to lend assistance, but her meagre screen of two Udaloy destroyers was promptly engaged and sunk by torpedoes. The Ka-27 Helix got a measure of revenge by sinking one of the submarines, but there was no way that the BCGN could be risked to travel on her own through such treacherous waters so she was recalled. Once the bombers landed and re-fuelled at Kaliningrad, they had to fly a very careful profile out to the Atlantic. In order to avoid interference from the EU fighter patrols, they stayed at low altitude to avoid the radar from the UK as well as Lechfeld air base. Once past the radar fence, they made their ingress towards the suspected position of the carrier group. As they made their approach on the deck, the lead reconnaissance Bear reported that the strike group had been counter-detected by the Hawkeyes. Now, it was a race between the pride of Russia and the American Combat Air Patrols. All of the planes increased speed to full military power and activated their radar in hopes of surviving long enough to reach their release points. Today, luck was with the Russians as a Very Large contact was soon detected. With Bears approaching from different angles, it was fairly easily localized through triangulation. ESM also detected emissions from 2 Ticonderoga cruisers and one Arleigh Burke destroyer. This was going to be one tough nut to crack. As soon as they came into range, the measly strike force of 7 bombers released their AS-4 Kitchen missiles from maximum range in hopes that some might survive. The Blackjacks, armed only with shorter-ranged AS-65 missiles, tried to close the distance and were promptly shot out of the sky by SAMs. One Oscar-class SSGN was also in range and threw her 20 SS-N-19 Shipwreck missiles into the fray. Attacking three AEgis-equipped vessels with only 40 missiles seemed like hopeless odds, but the attempt had to be made. The escorts must have been distracted in their hurry to destroy the Blackjacks as the AS-4 Kitchens raced through the screen and promptly demolished the carrier! Victory was awarded right away. I wanted to see if I could make the trip all the way back to Russia so I continued onwards. It was a good thing that I managed to sink the carrier as the Kuznetsov was hit by at least two torpedoes on her voyage home. She limped along at 8kts with 77% of her flotation destroyed and never made it back to home waters before the scenario expiration. A really superbly challenging scenario. I can't wait to try out the next one. Thanks for sharing it. FilesOfScenShare
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