Hail MAARy

[Choppedspinach]

AAR matey, here be a Chains of WAAR AAR. Alright, I can't sustain the pirate talk for a whole AAR. But let me tell you how I sent the PLAN to davey jones' locker:

Let me start by saying I love Chains of War, and Hail Mary in particular. It's an awesome, massive sandbox. All the other Chains of War missions feel like training, to familiarize you with both US and Chinese weapons and tactics, to prepare you for Hail Mary. Having said that, it feels a little unfinished. Still great, but like an unfinished symphony. There are Chinese missions marked inactive, with no trigger to fire them, and other missions with no units assigned to them. There are missions that are a little ill-conceived, like intercept missions with no limit on distance, so units fly out to intercept ELINT contacts that they have no hope of reaching, way beyond radar coverage, until they're at Bingo and turn around, leaving them extremely vulnerable. Also, there's no weather, even though July in southern China is monsoon season. Another issue is that the scoring could use a little work--for instance the OTH site is on the official target list but you get no points for destroying it. You get points for destroying empty tarmac, but not for destroying underground buildings or hardened aircraft shelters, which seems a little backwards. One final nitpick: if you shoot down one out of say, a flight of four J-10As, and the other three RTB to a single unit airfield, they will never take off again, and are effectively out of the game and invulnerable, which represents a lost scoring opportunity. Fixing that would only require checking the box that allows flights to take off even if understrength.

Again, I love this scenario, and I only noticed these issues after repeated playthroughs. They're mostly easy to fix, but this scenario is proprietary/for sale, so it's up to individual users to mod their own copy rather than sharing it through the community.

Enough griping. Like I said, I love this scenario, and I've played it through a bunch of times, and I think I've settled on the optimum strategy. First, let's talk about Event 8. That's the main Chinese counterattack. It triggers randomly at a time between 4:30 and 8:30 GMT. There's an ASBM strike, and a pretty massive ALCM strike on the carriers, the Mactan airbase, and Iwo Jima. Intercepting the ASBMs is just a matter of how many SM-3s and SM-6s you want to commit, and how well the dice roll. Intercepting the ALCMs inbound to the Philippines is easy, so long as you have an appropriate AEW mission set up to spot them. There are a lot of them, but you have a lot of planes. I find that setting up a mission doesn't intercept them efficiently--there seems to be issues with the intercept AI. For instance, sometimes your interceptors won't close to within gun range, and instead just follow along behind the cruise missile doing nothing. Handling the interception manually is a little tedious, but perfectly doable. There's no need to waste AMRAAMs on this: all the ALCMs can be shot down with guns and sidewinders. Maybe just with guns if you're ambitious. The ALCMs inbound to Iwo Jima are trickier--if you haven't planned ahead and set up a CAP over there (which takes a lot of planning with tanker and AEW support), there's no way to stop them.

After many playthroughs, I got ambitious, and decided to see if it's possible to shut down the Badger airbases before Event 8 fires. Short answer: yes, it's possible. There's no way to hit those airbases before 4:30 GMT, so partly it's a matter of getting lucky and not having Event 8 fire too soon. Maybe you could do it by 4:30 if you just launch all your tomahawks at once and aim them only at runways, but that seems really costly (1000 tomahawks at $2 million a pop equals $2 billion). Anyway, I did manage to knock out all the runways with JASSMs by 6:55 GMT, which isn't terrible. Also, the ASBMs are launched from sites in the Xiangshui area, which happens to be a good place to start the attack anyway. So I was able to knock those out by 5:10 GMT, and I might have been able to knock them out a little earlier if I had been just a little more aggressive and efficient.

Next topic: efficiency. I actually googled the cost of all the weapons I used (or considered using) and generally tried to avoid using expensive weapons (like tomahawks) when cheaper weapons would do (like JDAMs.) I didn't hold back on weapons/systems that are being phased out, though, like CALCMs and ITALDs, since that's a sunk cost. Really, though, there's no need to fire a single tomahawk in this scenario, even though you have over a thousand at your disposal. The main advantage of tomahawks is speed. Not that they fly fast, although they do fly a little faster than the standard 480kt cruise speed of your planes. But, unlike a plane, tomahawks are available at a moment's notice, and take essentially no time to prepare. Also, they have a tremendous range, and don't need to spend time tanking up en route. So, even though it wasn't the absolute most economical thing to do, I did fire tomahawks at a lot of EW sites that seemed worth blinding (especially the OTH site). Also, once the Chinese air defenses were degraded and air superiority was achieved, I fired tomahawks at Chinese planes that I had spotted parked at airbases, trying to catch them before they move (or take off, if the runway gets repaired.)

Along the same lines of being cost-efficient, I used guns to shoot down vulnerable Chinese planes, like the ELINT Y-9s they send out into the South China Sea. No need to waste an AMRAAM on that. I was shocked when I looked up the cost of a Mark 45 torpedo: $3.8 million a pop. Still, two torpedoes is a lot cheaper than the dozens of SLAM-ERs it would take to overwhelm a Chinese DDG's air defenses, even with Growler and MALD-J support (AARGMs aren't cheap either.) Not to mention the fact that tasking planes with attacking a ship means that those planes aren't performing other duties, like bombing airbases or maintaining air superiority. Better to give all those subs something to do.

Now, let's talk about tactics. I am very proud that not only did I take zero losses, I never expended a single unit of chaff or launched a single flare. I micromanaged the heck out of air-to-air combat, and SEAD. Generally, I would have one flight with radars on, often with Growler support, trailing my lead flight by maybe 20 or 30 miles. F22s excel in this role, as their radar is powerful enough to pick up J-20s well outside of PL-12C range. Everybody would have orders to hold fire. The lead flight would maintain EMCON, although that doesn't really matter for non-stealthy F-18s (they get detected anyway.) The Chinese planes would Leeroy Jenkins at me at full afterburners. When my lead flight was slightly inside the Chinese range circle, I'd manually fire off a single AMRAAM at each Chinese plane (again, efficiency), and turn (but not burn--usually no need.) The trailing flight with radars on would guide the AMRAAMs in. For J-20s, since they're so dangerous, I would go ahead and fire two AMRAAMs at each, and possibly go to afterburners (or supercruise) during the evasion phase. As soon as the Chinese began turning to evade my AMRAAMs, my lead flight would turn around and prepare for a second shot, if necessary. If I scored a hit but not a kill, I would let the Chinese RTB if they were going to a base I could bomb later. If they were going to a single-unit airfield, I would chase them down if possible. F-22s excel at chasing down damaged planes, between a 1000 kt supercruise and stealth to avoid return fire. Occasionally a Chinese fighter would get a shot off at me, but I would invariably just turn and burn and outrun the missile, since I was just on the edge of their range circle.

The big exception, of course, is PL-15s. They have such a long range that there's basically no way to get close enough to fire a shot before the Chinese starting shooting and you have to turn and burn. And when the Chinese plane fires off its last missiles, and you turn to evade, the Chinese plane is long gone by the time the PL-15 runs out of energy and you can re-engage. The best tactic I found is to get the Chinese to waste their ammo on decoys, then charge in with F-22s when they RTB. However, no planes start the scenario with decoy loadouts, so for the first 6+ hours of the scenario the PL-15 armed planes were more or less untouchable.

SEAD tactics varied depending on the air defense system. HQ-9s were by far the most dangerous, so they had priority for using my limited supply of EMP-JASSMs. I noticed that EMP JASSMs generally detonated about a mile from the target. It was important that they detonate at an altitude equal or slightly higher than the SAM site--if they came in below, I guess the EMP effect was blocked by terrain. So planning a good route was critical, especially for the final approach. Hiding behind hills or mountains is a good tactic, but it's important for the final approach to involve going around the mountain, not flying over it, and again, terrain blocking the EMP effect is a major concern. Even with a good approach and a successful detonation, the EMP didn't always blind all the SAM radars, so sometimes it was necessary to follow up with MALD-Js and AARGMs. HQ-9 sites also incorporate an effective AAA battery with EOTS, so even an EMP-blinded HQ-9 will defend itself pretty well against JDAMs or JSOWs during the day. Best to do the mop-up at night. Mavericks are another option for attempting to kill the AAA during the daytime.

My standard sub tactic was to BOL fire two torpedoes at a range of 15-20 miles (well beyond the green range circle.) As soon as a torpedo launched, I would immediately pause the game and manually set the torpedo to 50kts and a depth pretty close to the sea bottom. Most of the Chinese ships are in pretty shallow water, so it took a lot of micromanagement to keep the torpedoes from impacting the sea bottom. It's a bit annoying that there's no way to set the torpedo to just go "as deep as possible" or any of the other depth settings available for submarines. You can't even type in a particular depth--you just have to carefully move the depth slider and hope for the best. Anyway, I could generally get my torpedoes within two or three miles of their target before they were detected and the enemy ship began to flee. As soon as the ship started to turn and run, I'd send my torpedoes to minimum depth and maximum speed, and use F1 to send them to their target. Through all of this, my sub would be supported by a flight of fighters, which provided updates on the ship's location, as well as shooting down any ASW helos that sortied.

Partly for fuel efficiency, and partly as a house rule, I avoided flying at low altitude over land. I would assume that the PLA would have thousands of MANPADS and AAA all over mainland China, which aren't in the scenario for the obvious reason that it would make the scenario unplayably slow. But for that reason, it seems like cheating to go to low altitude. So that's another reason I turned off automatic evasion and would turn and burn whenever anyone shot at me. Also, speaking of realism, it seems completely implausible that the U.S. could destroy all of China's air defenses in 24 hours (as is possible in this scenario), even assuming prior attrition after several weeks of war. It would be cool to have additional SAM sites come on-line during the course of the scenario, or even to catch mobile SAMs in the open while they're being moved. But this is a huge, and awesome, scenario already.

Enough intro, time for the AAR: At scenario start, I set up all my surface ships in the Philippines to meander around randomly among the islands, on an ASW mission, with helos dropping sonobuoys and dipping sonars. This is really just for flavor, as no Chinese subs ever go anywhere near there. I sent each of my attack subs toward the nearest part of the Chinese coast or Okinawa, as the case may be, at max depth and cruise speed. A little reckless, maybe, but I had plenty of air assets to protect them. I launched pretty much all the planes in Australia, staggering their launch times so that the fighters would end up flying alongside the tankers and could refuel en route to the South China Sea without having to waste time flying around trying to rendezvous. The Australian F-18Fs are pretty useless without Litening AT pods, so I just used them to ferry AIM-120C-7s from Australia to the Mactan airport for the F-22s to use. I launched the B-52s last, at about 4:40 GMT, to give my fighters time to establish at least local air superiority in the Hainan area. I launched all my B1s and KC-10As, with one JASSM-loaded Bone headed towards Okinawa, and the rest to the South China Sea. I emptied out Iwo Jima, with two MQ-4Cs headed toward Okinawa and one rebased to Tinian (which actually has some air defenses.) I launched my two RQ-180s, one headed toward Hainan and the other toward Okinawa. I sent the two KC-30As to the South China Sea, to rendezvous with the B1s. I launched all my B2s, with one each headed toward Anquing, Danyang, Shaodong, and Leiyang, the Badger bases. I set the B2s to fly at mil speed, with refueling and RTB at Bingo turned off. B2s become dramatically more fuel efficient after unloading their ordinance, so it was ok that they hit Bingo long before reaching their targets. Also, by the time they were on the return trip, I would have tankers in place to help them along. Also, I launched tomahawk strikes at the OTH radar site and other EW sites around China. Maybe half got through, but hey, it's a start.

Initially, operations are hampered by a lack of tankers. The only tankers available to the CSGs at scenario start are the six MV-22Bs on America, which are really slow, and don't carry much fuel. But it's better than nothing, so I launched those and sent them north. I set up AEW missions for my E-2s to the north and west of the Philippines, keeping two in the air at any time. That's all the radar coverage I could get initially, but once they arrived on station I had an E-3 loitering south of Hong Kong and an E-737 south of Taiwan--but that's several hours down the road. I changed the loadout on all those F-18s with BLU-109s to carry MALD-Js instead, and loaded out F-18Cs with ITALDs. The F-35Cs loaded with JSOW-BROACH I reloaded with just AMRAAMs. I never did find a good use for the JSOW-BROACH.

Now, for the real action. Initially, with the limited tanker and AEW support, the only area that it's reasonable to attack is the Hong Kong/Xiangshui AB area. The strategic purpose of this attack is to attrite the Chinese CAP, which is worth points in and of itself, but also makes life easier for the B2s when they arrive. It so happens that the Chinese ASBMs are located in this area, so that turns out to be a bonus. I launched flights of F-18Es, F-35Bs, and F-35Cs, every few minutes, for a staggered arrival in the Hong Kong area, to begin the long slow process of killing all the Chinese J-10As. I tried to arrange it so that my planes could arrive on station, fire their AMRAAMs, and RTB, with a minimum of loitering, to avoid the need to refuel if at all possible. I had my F-35Bs RTB to Eisenhower, since it's closer, and America has a very limited supply of AMRAAMs for rearming. I tried to arrange for my F-35Cs to be the last to arrive, since they're capable of loitering the longest, and loitering becomes inevitable as the rate of incoming J-10As slows down. I also launched my AARGM-armed F-18s, timed to arrive after about an hour of air combat, to blind all those HQ-12s and -16s in the area, supported by Growlers. Lastly, I launched the Mk84 JDAM-armed F-18s, and Mk82 LGB-armed F-35Bs, to do mop up after the SAMS are blinded (and, as it happens, to kill ASBM launchers as they're discovered.)

My first tomahawks impact and destroy the OTH site at about 3:00 GMT, and I fire my first AMRAAMs from F-18Es south of Hong Kong at 3:15 GMT. When my first shooters are out of AMRAAMs, I divert them from RTB to go intercept the Y-9 ELINT that my AEW picked up over the South China Sea. After shooting that helpless plane down with guns, they refuel from an MV-22B and continue to RTB. By 4:20 GMT, after firing a grand total of 50 AMRAAMs for 24 J-10A kills, the skies are clear enough around Hong Kong for my AARGMs to do their work. By 4:30 GMT all the HQ-12s and -16s are blinded, and I begin mopping up with JDAMs. I also find some Dong Feng launchers and kill them too at around 5:10 GMT.

Meanwhile, USS Santa Fe engages and destroys a Kilo south of Hainan at 4:00 GMT. Around the same time, my two MQ-4Cs arrive on station, one north of Okinawa, one east, just outside of radar range of the DDGs they detect. Since they're orthogonal to each other relative to Okinawa, they can triangulate the position of ELINT contacts and get a pretty good fix on the location of the Okinawa SAM sites. At 4:17 GMT, my B1 arrives on station, flying at 250 ft and mil speed for the final approach to minimize the chance of detection. I fire off 16 JASSMs, 4 at each runway on Okinawa, with an approach that comes in from the northeast, and curls around the west side of Okinawa, using terrain masking as much as possible. At 4:38 GMT, every single JASSM gets through and impacts its target, completely shutting down the Okinawa airbases. Four Flankers were on RTB (after flying south on a futile intercept mission against my E-2s), and are now so low on fuel that they end up ditching in the sea. A squadron of J-20s is grounded on Okinawa, and gets chewed up later when I'm ready to begin striking airbases. My B1 (with 8 JASSMs remaining) continues on to join the others en route to the South China Sea/Hainan area.

Around 5:00 GMT the two B2s that I routed north are penetrating Chinese airspace just along the edge of the no-fly-zone. A little gamey, I guess, but hey, the scenario designer put the no fly zone where he did, so if there's a corridor I can fly through, I will. I launch 8 JASSMs at the Danyang runways at 5:28 GMT, all of which get through and impact at 5:49 GMT. At 6:07 I launch 10 JASSMs at the Anquing runways, all of which get through and impact at 6:19 GMT. The key, of course, is carefully planning a route that takes full advantage of terrain.

Meanwhile, my two B2s that headed south enter Chinese airspace in the now-clear Xiangshui area, escorted by F-35Cs. Shaodong and Leiyang are well-defended with HQ-9s and CAPs, so I'm not as lucky with my JASSMs. At 5:54 GMT I launch all 32 of my JASSMs from both B2s at the Shaodong and Leiyang runways and SAM sites. At 6:11 GMT, two of the HQ-17 sites at Leiyang are destroyed, and two JASSMs impact the runway, but ten are intercepted. At 6:16 GMT, two Shaodong HQ-7 sites are damaged by JASSMs, and three JASSMs impact the runway. These southern airbases are damaged, but not out of commission, and Event 8 could fire at any time. I still have my two northern B2s carrying 14 JASSMs between them, so they head south and fire at Leiyang and Shaodong at 6:32 GMT. I have better luck this time, and six get through to Leiyang at 6:53 GMT, and four get through to Shaodong at 6:55 GMT. The Badgers are grounded. In a beautiful bit of serendipity, Event 8 fires a few minutes later.

More to come later...

[Airborne Rifles]

Nice!