Ukraine (31 Viewers)

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This is a good video. The tactics discussed reflect US tactics dating all the way back to my time of service which have not changed much in the intervening forty some years since.

It's basic in nature, but these basics still apply to this day, more so rather than than less so. This video also explains why a no fly zone would require NATO forces to engage ground forces in Russia and Belarus.

A no fly zone would in essence be a full fledged no holds barred war between NATO and Russia.

 
SamAndreas said:
This is a good video. The tactics discussed reflect US tactics dating all the way back to my time of service which have not changed much in the intervening forty some years since.

It's basic in nature, but these basics still apply to this day, more so rather than than less so. This video also explains why a no fly zone would require NATO forces to engage ground forces in Russia and Belarus.

A no fly zone would in essence be a full fledged no holds barred war between NATO and Russia.

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If we sold Pac II Patriot batteries to the Ukrainians like we've sold to other allied nations you could enact a serious no-fly zone including over Russian territory ;). I think the Pac 2 has a range of about 100 miles? Now the Russians wouldn't like it but as long as they are operated by Ukrainians and not a NATO country then pound salt. Added to the fact that the Patriot would eliminate SCUD and cruse missile strikes on Ukrainian cities and you could call it a "humanitarian" sale.

99 Miles.jpg
 
BooBirdSaint said:
If we sold Pac II Patriot batteries to the Ukrainians like we've sold to other allied nations you could enact a serious no-fly zone including over Russian territory ;). I think the Pac 2 has a range of about 100 miles? Now the Russians wouldn't like it but as long as they are operated by Ukrainians and not a NATO country then pound salt. Added to the fact that the Patriot would eliminate SCUD and cruse missile strikes on Ukrainian cities and you could call it a "humanitarian" sale.

99 Miles.jpg
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You can’t just give them weapons they have no experience with. It would take time to train them and to become proficient with the weapon system. I have no idea how long that would take. They need more of the things they already know how to maintain and employ
 
Crzycjunx76 said:
Well to be fair if the conflict goes nuclear I dont want to be stuck on this planet with my family not knowing what to do.

I have had a recurring dream at least half a dozen times since Feburary where we know there are incoming and I am holding my kids crying and telling them I am sorry and they diserved more out of life.

I mean we are in the middle of Seattle, if the alert came through the only quick routes out of the city would be instant gridlock... the arterial roads here cannot handle much of a load as it is.
Stealing or hopping on someone elses boat and heading for somewhere like vancouver island has occured to me, but if I had the idea, a million others have had it too. Besides there are Naval and Air Force bases in the Puget Sound, so the whole area is probably forked.
Additionally Seattle's geograpic location probably affords it the least warning time of any target in the lower 48 I would think.

Anyway, back to work, I can solve my current conundrum with code, I cant do shirt about the potential willingness of Putin to end human civilization.
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There was a time when Seattle was in the least warning zone. That was when the Soviet's still maintained eastern Siberian missile and bomber bases.

At this time the furthest east that they have a rocket base is near Irkutsk. That is technically in Siberia but it's pretty far west of Seattle, being located north of Mongolia.

The rockets located there are mobile RS-24's. I would think they are aimed at China, Pakistan, and India, and North Korea, but not Seattle because the RS-24 would be at about it's extreme furthest range to reach Seattle.

They are the most modern land based missiles Russia has, they are post Soviet, having been made in the 2004 to 2006 year range. But even they are approaching 20 years old, and they are solid propellant. I would think their effective range has diminished a bit over the years.

Anyway they have 27 missiles like that near Irkutsk, and each can carry 4 warheads, but not all of them will have 4 warheads.

All of their other rocket bases are further west from there. In most cases significantly west of there. While the further west bases that have the very old SS-18 missiles might be in range for Seattle, they are liquid fueled, and I would think about half of them would likely explode in their silos if they attempted to fuel them. I would also think their warheads are well beyond their shelf life, they would probably fizzle instead of explode.

Insofar as missile submarines their Pacific fleet only has two. One is very old and is carrying sea launched liquid fueled SS-18's, and if even one of them were to exploded during fueling it would sink the whole submarine. That old submarine is at it's end of life and it might already have been decommissioned.

So that leaves one project 955 modern sub in the Pacific fleet that carries 14 missiles, where each missile might have as many as 10 warheads. Like the RS-24 land based missiles they were built by Russia after the Soviet Union collapsed.

I would regard that one lone submarine as the only likely threat to Seattle at this time. I don't think a single aircraft dropped warhead, or launched cruse missile would even make it to America.

The sub base near Seattle is certainly likely to be a target. It's about 25 miles at most from the Seattle city center so even if Seattle were not a target, if they hit that sub base nearby Seattle's city center would be in the mild to barely damaging blast radius. The expected damage from a RS-24 air burst 150 kiloton warhead would only do very modest damage to buildings in the city center. Break windows, and a few flimsy buildings might be structurally damaged.

You would probably survive. There would be a big sound and the earth would shake, and then there would be a strong gust of warm wind 25 seconds later. That might break your windows. Might cause a tree to fall on your house. Tear up a carport.

But most likely that warhead, or warheads hitting the sub base, would be ground bursts and that would further minimize the effect.

Those RS-24 missiles are intended for counter force use. They are not city killers, They are missiles carrying many small warheads targeted at our missile silos. They will be ground burst, and their radius of extreme damage will be only be about a mile.

There are placed in Montana, the Dakotas, Colorado, that would be much worse places to be.

So I think your chances for survival in Seattle are pretty good.

You might adsorb some fallout, but I have survived a lot more fallout than you are likely to be dusted with. I and almost all members of my extended family who got dusted survived.

:)
 
staphory said:
You can’t just give them weapons they have no experience with. It would take time to train them and to become proficient with the weapon system. I have no idea how long that would take. They need more of the things they already know how to maintain and employ
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I have a sneaking suspicion that there are more than a few Ukrainian soldiers and "forigen legion" volunteers at NATO bases in Europe training up on equipment right now.

Patriots, obviously useful. I would bet money (and im not a gambler) that we identified a few weapons platforms that would have the greatest impact and that training is ongoing.

I know a lot has been said about the M1A2, and we have way too many of them... but they take a ton of support and seem less feasable or useful than the M2A3, or the M-SHORAD.

Training on western aircraft is likely too much of a hurdle in the short term... and the MIGs the eastern european nations have are not going to provide air superiority, so ground based platforms to clear the skies for ground support aircraft seem to be the best option.

Oh, and as a side note... I am sure it would be seen as an extreme provocation by Putin and his ilk, but I wish we could give Ukraine something capable of lobbing a tomahawk or two. They could park one in the Kremlins lobby from seburbian Kiev.
 
SamAndreas said:
There was a time when Seattle was in the least warning zone. That was when the Soviet's still maintained eastern Siberian missile and bomber bases.

At this time the furthest east that they have a rocket base is near Irkutsk. That is technically in Siberia but it's pretty far west of Seattle, being located north of Mongolia.

The rockets located there are mobile RS-24's. I would think they are aimed at China, Pakistan, and India, and North Korea, but not Seattle because the RS-24 would be at about it's extreme furthest range to reach Seattle.

They are the most modern land based missiles Russia has, they are post Soviet, having been made in the 2004 to 2006 year range. But even they are approaching 20 years old, and they are solid propellant. I would think their effective range has diminished a bit over the years.

Anyway they have 27 missiles like that near Irkutsk, and each can carry 4 warheads, but not all of them will have 4 warheads.

All of their other rocket bases are further west from there. In most cases significantly west of there. While the further west bases that have the very old SS-18 missiles might be in range for Seattle, they are liquid fueled, and I would think about half of them would likely explode in their silos if they attempted to fuel them. I would also think their warheads are well beyond their shelf life, they would probably fizzle instead of explode.

Insofar as missile submarines their Pacific fleet only has two. One is very old and is carrying sea launched liquid fueled SS-18's, and if even one of them were to exploded during fueling it would sink the whole submarine. That old submarine is at it's end of life and it might already have been decommissioned.

So that leaves one project 955 modern sub in the Pacific fleet that carries 14 missiles, where each missile might have as many as 10 warheads. Like the RS-24 land based missiles they were built by Russia after the Soviet Union collapsed.

I would regard that one lone submarine as the only likely threat to Seattle at this time. I don't think a single aircraft dropped warhead, or launched cruse missile would even make it to America.

The sub base near Seattle is certainly likely to be a target. It's about 25 miles at most from the Seattle city center so even if Seattle were not a target, if they hit that sub base nearby Seattle's city center would be in the mild to barely damaging blast radius. The expected damage from a RS-24 air burst 150 kiloton warhead would only do very modest damage to buildings in the city center. Break windows, and a few flimsy buildings might be structurally damaged.

You would probably survive. There would be a big sound and the earth would shake, and then there would be a strong gust of warm wind 25 seconds later. That might break your windows. Might cause a tree to fall on your house. Tear up a carport.

But most likely that warhead, or warheads hitting the sub base, would be ground bursts and that would further minimize the effect.

Those RS-24 missiles are intended for counter force use. They are not city killers, They are missiles carrying many small warheads targeted at our missile silos. They will be ground burst, and their radius of extreme damage will be only be about a mile.

There are placed in Montana, the Dakotas, Colorado, that would be much worse places to be.

So I think your chances for survival in Seattle are pretty good.

You might adsorb some fallout, but I have survived a lot more fallout than you are likely to be dusted with. I and almost all members of my extended family who got dusted survived.

:)
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Bremerton would be a bad place to be. Probably Everett, too. And joint base Lewis/McChord.
If there's a way, get East just across the Cascades then hunker down.

Yacolt isn't really on anyone's hit list, so we can likely manage long enough to figure out a way to reach the Oregon coast.
 
BooBirdSaint said:
If we sold Pac II Patriot batteries to the Ukrainians like we've sold to other allied nations you could enact a serious no-fly zone including over Russian territory ;). I think the Pac 2 has a range of about 100 miles? Now the Russians wouldn't like it but as long as they are operated by Ukrainians and not a NATO country then pound salt. Added to the fact that the Patriot would eliminate SCUD and cruse missile strikes on Ukrainian cities and you could call it a "humanitarian" sale.

99 Miles.jpg
Click to expand...
It would be nice to give them something that would help them shoot down aircraft and ,missiles but I don't think the Russians would sell us any of their anti air missiles systems to give to the Ukrainians.

What I'm getting at is our Patriot systems are very expensive, and not actually all that good. In the 1990 gulf war over thirty years ago it was said that insofar as going against the Scud missiles they were 41 for 42. That was in a sense true, insofar as 42 scuds fired which were targeted by our Patriot missiles only one reached it's target and blew it up. One would think with that they're super awesome 98% good.

But what is overlooked by that on the surface "awesome" performance is that 4 Patriot missiles were fired at each incoming Scud because the Patriot missiles weren't all that great and they knew it.

It was also overlooked that the Scud missiles were even worse. Apparently Less than 20% of those Scud missiles would have made it to their target had nothing been fired at them at all. Those aptly named Scuds of that era tended to break up into several useless incomplete flying hunks during flight.

With that taken into account, and four Patriots being fired at each Scud it becomes hard to figure out just how good the 1990 Pac-2 Patriots were. Estimates range from 10% to 25%.

That's one of those fallacy quirks of math. What it looks like on the surface isn't even close to what it is when all of the factors are included. That's called the base rate fallacy, one of the formal fallacies which are always wrong unless the base rate is factored in. The base rate being what the Scud would have done had noting been fired at it.

The Pac-1 Patriots were only able to go after aircraft, The Pac-2 was designed to go after both aircraft and missiles, and it was Missiles that they were best at going after.

And the newest one, the Pac-3 Patriots which are essentially a completely different much smaller missile, and they are optimized for going after other missiles. However one Pac-3 Patriot has killed the only hostile aircraft ever killed by Patriot missiles.

After about 50 years of being in use only three manned aircraft have been shot down by Patriot missiles in the whole world. The first two kills were friendly fire kills, one of ours, and one of Britons. The only hostile aircraft killed, was a Syrian jet in 2014 by that Pac-3.

Ukraine apparently uses the Russian S 300 system which is pretty good for shooting down both aircraft and missiles. And I have heard that the Russian S 400 system is currently the best in the world.

The Israelis also have a real good system.

Here's a link which will back up my Patriot data.

en.wikipedia.org

MIM-104 Patriot - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
 
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Taurus said:
Bremerton would be a bad place to be. Probably Everett, too. And joint base Lewis/McChord.
If there's a way, get East just across the Cascades then hunker down.

Yacolt isn't really on anyone's hit list, so we can likely manage long enough to figure out a way to reach the Oregon coast.
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Bremerton is where I was talking about, calling it the sub base.

Everett and joint base probably was a target a few years ago. But today the experts think that only the sub base that is currently targeted in Washington state for counter force warheads.
 
staphory said:
You can’t just give them weapons they have no experience with. It would take time to train them and to become proficient with the weapon system. I have no idea how long that would take. They need more of the things they already know how to maintain and employ
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In a short war, yes that makes total sense. However, we are now moving toward month three with no end in sight. The Russians are intent on setting up a puppet state in the East and the Ukrainians are intent on driving them out. Since the West is the primary supplier of weapons and ammo then it is time to start the conversion toward Western systems.
The West is already providing advanced systems - M777 155mm Western artillery, M113 APC's, Hummers, German Anti-Aircraft Tanks, etc. The logistics and advantage of continuing to supply Soviet/Russian systems is IMO fading. S-300 missiles are made in Russia. Once you expend your supply of Russian made ammo there won't be any more and this is shaping up to be a prolonged conflict.
If we can start training Ukrainians to use these other systems then it shouldn't be to much effort to start training them on more complex systems. I'd also like to see the US give the Ukrainians more advanced drones like Predators and Reapers. The Ukrainians have proven very adept with the smaller less hard hitting Turkish drones. If we are in for a penny then we are in for a pound.
 
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