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Hi there,

After a first casual attempt at solving the Korean missile crisis scenario, I found out that I did not have enough AMRAAM's available in the initial setup to take out all NORK fighters without getting into risky heat seeker dogfights. Then I tried to trow in my tomahawks to take out the NORK's airfields, but found out that the NORK's MIG-21's swarmed the tomahawks once detected and most of them got shot down... So I had to refine this strategy a bit and found this solution: I basically went for a "time on target" overwhelm strategy with tomahawks striking their targets before the NORK's could swarm them. I used my Tomahawk block IV rerouting capacity (about a 100 weapons targeted at runway acces points) to create a two east/west strike axis (A and B) which penetrate the NORK airspace at the same time as the older block III weapons from the south (C) which hit the NORK AF's before the NORK fighters could take them down.

This way I could neutralize 5 of the 8 NORK AF's before they could spam their fighters and overwhelm me, letting me finish this scenario in about four hours game time with ZERO losses on the US side (did not even need the Russians to help as all AF and SAM threats where already neutralized before they even got into the action ) ....

So what are your strategies to win this scenario?

Hey there.

I had some different philosophy, which lead to a total different approach.

Probably the biggest difference to you is that I regard using valuable TLAMs on the airfields as a waste. TLAMs are pretty accurate in taking out objects precisely and they are also very valuable. Then, I don't deem them really appropriate for cratering runways, as they lack enough punch to do that job economically while attacking in reasonable numbers.

In my first attempt of that scenario, I had my CSG surprising me by suddenly launching a massive TLAM attack towards the two southeastern airbases. I could reroute the TACTOMS but all of the "older" Tomahawk attacked hangars, bunkers, fuel and all the other airfield stuff. It was a total waste of tax payers money, since it didn't help the cause.
Sending in fighter waves into their southern belly lead to intense air combat, killing those north korean pilots in horrible numbers but they keep on sending these masses that my rotating in and out of fighters got tedious pretty quickly. Also my aircraft got into serious situations repeatedly because the high number of targets let them expense their missiles quickly, so they often found themselves surrounded by flocks of enemies while reaching Winchester state. Which is no fun. While then trying to guide them manually onto promising evasion vectors, this situation caused my first losses, still at a prevaling ratio to their losses of course. Still it was no desirable outcome.

The next attempt with the scenario, I set RoE attack land targets to HOLD right at the beginning, hence only allowing manual land attacks.
Now I attacked all known EW radar sites with TLAM-C. It is debatable how much redundancy you want to apply here, 1 per target, 2 per target or even more. I went the unsafe but economical way and only sent one Tomahawk per radar. There is this one radar you pick up in the far nortwest in an area of uncertainty. I sent a F-16 with HARMs northbound along the west coast, with sufficient distance to their coast, hoping they wouldn't conclude the imminent attack too early. But unlike your group A on the pic, I also kept out of Chinese airspace. At the same time, I tried to reduce their anti-air capability (not expecting to eradicate it but simply keeping them occupied with incoming stuff) by also launching TLAM-D at any known SAM-location. It is not that easy but I tried to time the arrival of all the Tomahawks to hit all targets within the same few minutes. Of course i didn't achieve that, because I plotted off-angle paths for the Tomahawks, keeping them off the coast for as long as possible. It would be great if CMANO had some kind of syncronized-strike-planning tool with flight path estimations [:)]

After that strike, only about 4 EW radar sites at that west coast cluster zone remained intact. Yet I even managed to kill that site far in the north at the Chinese border, sending the Tomahawk along the west coast and then along the Chinese border.
Also most of the TLAM-D hit. I can only guess that many even took the radar vehicles of those same sites out, in most cases, several launchers were at least damaged.

Now they scrambled up their fighter clouds.

This time I only sent 8 to 12 F-16, keeping them strictly in the vicinity of the border. So every North Korean closing in got in trouble not only with my airborne protection but also with my own SAM-belt (which expensed all missiles within one to two hours). So again they lost numerous planes, yet in a slower rate. Still what I achieved with this, was their attention being drawn away from their own assets.

While this continued for a while, I launched half a dozen flights containing 2 F-16 each, loaded with GBU-24. EMCON was set to silent, RoE for all target types on HOLD. I put all these off-angle out to the sea and then northbound along the west coast or directly inbound for east coast targets. Then each two-ship-formation turned towards a target airfield, descending to terrain following tree top level. When indicated, I altered their courses along valleys and stuff. All closed in undetected, the red fighters didn't show any sign of reaction and were continuously distracted by my fighters pushing north across the border in cat and mouse style. Some miles (maybe 10 NM?)before overflying their targets, I let them pop up to angels 12 and assigned targets manually for each of the 4 GBU-24 of a flight. Runways receiving 2, runway grade taxiways receiving 1. All packages were back on 12000 feet in time, then dropped their GBUs onto the assigned targets. I successfully cratered all those airfields (only the 2 in the far northeast I intentionally did not attack, because I didn't see them as threat for the subsequent attacks on the mission critical land targets. Also I had located the S-300 in that area, so at this point I saw no reason to risk losses there).
In the following 30 or so minutes the red airborne contacts then disappear progressively. If you are impatient, you can then kill those lone leakers off easily.

The next phase was destroying all SAM-sites showing activity and all remaining EW-sites (even using ground strafing for the latter). After that, the main body of North Korea west of the submarine base is pretty calm and you can focus on striking the mission targets...

So far I lost only 2 F-16 and didn't even call in any of the "wonder weapons" (TACTOM, F-22 or F-35).

Interesting that different people take such different approaches in order to eliminate the NORK fighter swarm's within the provided 4-6 hours after the start of hostilities. I agree with you that knocking out runways with tomahawks is difficult and costly, that is why I chose to target the much easier to take out runway acces points with my tomahawks. These you can often knock out with a single tomahawk hit, but as a fail safe (their hit reliability is only 95%), two missiles per acces point can knock it out with 99.95% certainty and without these, AC can not take off and the AF is thus neutralized. You will need the range of the F-22 and F-35'later on to take out targets in the north east btw.

Thanks for your feedback.

W.

Hello, it's been quite some time since Post, but the interesting approaches to the scenario, I'm replying.
Could I get the play history of this scenario? I'm trying to play through it using reinforcement learning, and I'd like to reference the various approaches.