Paphitis wrote:Get Real! wrote:Paphitis wrote:We've been through this all before and deduced that the Mistral couldn't even shoot down a kite...
What a little Paphian snot deduces and what the rest of the world deduces are two different things…
Mistral entered series production in 1989 and is now deployed by 37 armed forces of 25 countries. Over 16,000 missiles have been ordered. In June 2001, the last of 45 ATLAS launchers and 9 MCP with Mistral 2 missiles were delivered to Hungary.
In February 2007, Estonia placed an order for the Mistral 2 missile system. Up to 25 launchers are required for service entry in 2009.
Saab Microwave Systems has been contracted to provide the associated Giraffe Agile Multibeam 3D air defence radars. Deliveries began in July 2008.
http://www.army-technology.com/projects/mistral/
This may be of some interest to you..
http://www.f-16.net/news_article1776.htmlAlso, the Mistrel Short Range Missile is basically useless against fast attack jets. With a range of only
6km, the only thing these missiles would be able to shoot down would be a Cessna aircraft. It would be an enormous
fluke if an F-16 was destroyed by a Mistral. An F-16 could fly over 1,000 Mistrals at
18,000Ft and be 99.9% safe. The only way to counter an F-16 is with another F-16 or M2000 at altitudes greater than 18,000FT should the attacking aircraft fear the Mistral.
As a matter of fact, even the S300, Gecko and Tor are ineffective against air attack. These systems are easy pickings for HARM A2G attack. Once they turn their radar on, then it is bye-bye! Good target practice for the pilots though.
There is no SAM or Air Defense umbrella that is able to defeat a modern air force.
Have you heard off Chaff Flares GatTouri!
Bye-bye GatTouri!...
While you're correct that a surface to air missile is at a big disadvantage to a high speed, high altitude, jet that is manoeuvring, such a jet is also not much of a serious threat to someone on the ground.
In order to attack a ground target, a high altitude jet needs to loiter at low speed in order to guide a laser guided bomb. The variables that lead to a successful guided bombing mission also cause a vulnerability for the attacking jet - the jet must be able to illuminate the target for the whole time a laser guided bomb is falling - it cannot manoeuvre, or speed up and flight away. So in order to guide a laser-guided bomb, slow, straight, level, mid-altitude flight is required for the time it takes to identify and highlight the target, and for the bomb to drop the 18,000 feet. So a jet in the attack phase is highly vulnerable to medium range AA missiles.
In the successful US laser guided bombing missions you see on TV, the US uses high level intelligence to identify primary SAM sites, and the first wave of the attack will be with cruise missiles. The second phase will be a SEAD (suppression of enemy air defences), with ground attack aircraft suited to the role. Once air defences are suitably softened up, bombing against other targets can commence. There's not much you can do against an enemy of this level of sophistication.
Worse still, unless you're the US, more likely you'll be doing low level unguided bombing, where ground attack aircraft (for example, F-4 Phantoms) will attack from under 500 feet. Although they may have the element of surprise, at these low altitudes they are very vulnerable to point defence short range AA missiles, and even heat seeking missiles.
Regarding the HARM anti-radiation missile approach, this is not foolproof. Modern tracking radars have all sorts of sophisticated tricks to defeat anti-radiation radars. There are also some simple tricks, like strobing the radar periodically instead of keeping it on all the time, and even bouncing the radar beam of a metallic object close to the transmitter, so that an anti-radiation missile will track the reflector, rather than the radar itself.
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None of the scenarios you mention are likely or feasible. The emphasis would be on maintaining Air Superiority.
