Assets Used In The Trilateral Missile Strikes On Syria

[kevinkins]

http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/20 ... s-on-syria

Excellent article to show how these all too common strike packages are put together.

[BradOrbital]

Thanks Kevin, great info!

[ExNusquam]

The big takeaway is that this is what would be considered a small operation today - it was one salvo with minimal follow up. And to that, it still took 15 Tankers, 7 C4ISR/EW aircraft, plus 36 DCA for 10 ALCM shooters (6:1 ratio of support:shooter). There's a reason the US is still the only country that can really pull off strikes like this; no other country has enough support assets.

[SeaQueen]

ORIGINAL: ExNusquam
The big takeaway is that this is what would be considered a small operation today - it was one salvo with minimal follow up. And to that, it still took 15 Tankers, 7 C4ISR/EW aircraft, plus 36 DCA for 10 ALCM shooters (6:1 ratio of support:shooter). There's a reason the US is still the only country that can really pull off strikes like this; no other country has enough support assets.

That's a really great point. I also think it's interesting when you look at the scale of what happened. In a single strike there were many different aimpoints, with aircraft taking off from throughout the Middle East and Europe to converge on just a few points.

As a Command scenario, I suspect it'd be kind of boring from the NATO perspective because everything is in the up-front planning and there's not a lot of stuff to do besides hit the "play" button once you're done planning. None the less, I think it might be a good starting point for a Command scenario, only pick a different target set, something more heavily defended, maybe assume the Russians don't sit on their hands this time, maybe turn it around and make it a defensive scenario from the Russian/Syrian perspective. Maybe all the targets don't lend themselves to strikes by cruise missiles (e.g. deeply buried). It definitely gives people a sense of what it takes to make a complicated strike in a denied environment work, though.

[ExNusquam]

ORIGINAL: SeaQueen

None the less, I think it might be a good starting point for a Command scenario, only pick a different target set, something more heavily defended, maybe assume the Russians don't sit on their hands this time, maybe turn it around and make it a defensive scenario from the Russian/Syrian perspective. Maybe all the targets don't lend themselves to strikes by cruise missiles (e.g. deeply buried). It definitely gives people a sense of what it takes to make a complicated strike in a denied environment work, though.

Even pre-2013, Damascus was pretty heavily defended. More recently, the Russians have delivered SA-17 and SA-22 for area/point defense (SA-26 isn't a slouch either). I'd argue that "going downtown" in Damascus is probably the mostly heavily defended part of the country, with the only exceptions being extremely important point targets like the Presidential Palace itself and BAA.

I think even a direct Russian response is somewhat of a boring scenario - the Russians are qualitatively and quantitatively outmatched across almost every domain. The only Russian advantage is in SAM capability, but the ALCM shooters can stand-off and SA-21a WEZ against a low-altitude target like going to be pretty small (<25NM), and can be plotted around. A target deck that includes harder targets would certainly be more difficult, but there are a variety of ways to defeat UGFs (Page 23) that don't require direct penetration (although entombing a bunch of Syrians would probably make for bad press.)

The interesting (and challenging) scenario is a week-long defensive scenario where the coalition strike targets, shooters and timeline are all ambiguous, but the Russian/Syrian commander needs to make decisions of surge vs. sustained capability, assets dedicated to DCA vs. CAS/Strike, and dispersal vs. sortie rates. In this case you can play with various options that would impact the actual readiness to defend, i.e. how long can the Russian/Syrian AD crews keep alert? The designer could also have the option of looking at the effects of coalition D&D and high-level messaging. A defender victory would be degradation of attack (successfully protect at least some aimpoints).