Improving Vietnam war era SAM Survivability Against SEAD in CMO

[Tcao]

The reason I’m making this post is because when I was playing the Vietnam and late Cold War scenarios in CMO, conducting land-based SEAD missions felt far too easy. Sometimes all you need are two F-4Gs carrying eight Shrikes to cripple four SA-2 or SA-3 sites. Part of this is because scenario designers often leave the SA-2’s air search radar turned on, but there is also a major WRA issue: SA-2 and SA-3 batteries will launch SAMs to intercept Shrikes. Unfortunately, the interception probability is only around 1%, which effectively turns the SAM site’s fire-control radar into a blazing beacon guiding the Shrike directly onto the target. After wasting all the missiles loaded on the launchers, those fire-control radars often continue locking the incoming ARM until the radars are destroyed.

As a result, we cannot see the kind of common engagement dynamic that occurred during the Vietnam War IRL, where the SAM operators would shut down their fire-control radar and cause the Shrike to loss the guidance.

To better simulate this cat-and-mouse interaction, and to improve the survivability of SAM sites while increasing scenario difficulty, I think it is necessary for SAM systems to shut down their fire-control radars when faced with an ARM threat. Besides implementing this through Lua scripting, I also think scenario designers should spend more time configuring WRA settings. Early SAM systems from SA-2 through SA-6 should all be configured not to intercept guided weapons, and instead only engage aircraft and helicopters at short range or within effective engagement envelopes.

Of course, even this alone is not enough. The current defensive logic in CMO causes SAM units to actively turn on their fire-control radars whenever they detect they are under attack. To address this, additional EMCON settings are needed.

EMCON.jpg (9.05 KiB) Viewed 302 times

Like this one, change "Ignore under attack" to "NO"

With these adjustments, we could finally see scenarios like this: an EMCON-silent SA-2 battery suddenly activates its fire-control radar and launches missiles at a strike package of F-105s. About ten seconds later, the escorting F-105 SEAD flight fires Shrikes at the SA-2 site. After completing its engagement, the SA-2 battery immediately shuts down its fire-control radar, causing the Shrikes to miss. The strike package must then decide whether to detour and completely avoid the SAM engagement zone, or have the escort aircraft descend to low altitude and bomb the SAM site directly — while simultaneously entering the lethal envelope of anti-aircraft artillery.

That would make the Vietnam scenarios in the game feel far more dynamic and challenging.

[HalfLifeExpert]

I like this idea quite a bit. It is correct that those earlier generations of SAMs couldn't really target small targets like ARMs (Otherwise the N. Vietnamese would have done exactly that ALL THE TIME).

Aside from default WRA for those earlier SAMs, we could also see some possible improved ways to emulate smart EMCON behaviors by the AD Crews.

[thewood1]

"The current defensive logic in CMO causes SAM units to actively turn on their fire-control radars whenever they detect they are under attack"

I use the Doctrine/ROE setting EMCON: Ignore Under Attack set to no. Of course with passive EMCON. But I have simulated, with the AI, the ability to remain silent until either a specific aircraft or specific type of aircraft enters an area. That triggers a change in mission from a very passive mission to an active mission. You could easily put a timer in with that event to shut off after X seconds. None of this using any lua. You can also do some of this through intermittent sensor settings and sleep/wake on detected threat only.

btw, I do the mission switching a lot vs using lua. Every unit can have literally hundreds of missions that can be activated/deactivated through a number of different events. Using some simple Boolean logic with events/triggers/actions along with various missions, you can have the AI become very flexible and spontaneously reactive.