Hence I think the USN dropped the Kola peninsula option a long time ago.

However I still think you're over estimating Russian capabilities. Although money is arriving in the fleet I still see no evidence of increased tempo of operations or in crew quality. EG the fire in Panther the other week. QC needs to be sorted out.

I know the fleet is going over to all contract sailors in 2008 but if as you say nukes were flying we'd all be ****ed.

The quality of the older ships isnt good the russian navy is no longer a blue water fighting force and its good reason the USN dropped the kola approach, but now the money is getting better so hopefully the whole fleet will be re done by 2020 or 2030

There is no nation that would committ its entire surface fleet, as well as a number of its most expensive and valuable submarines, to the destruction of one surface group. Remember, we are talking about a SAG, not a CVBG. This is, simply, not how wars are fought.

1) I was working under the assumption that when Kapitan said "Any idiot with half ounce of old holbern of common sence knows a SAG wouldnt survive agasint a SAG" he really meant a CVBG for the second one. Kapitan's later post seems to vindicate my assumption.
2) In any case, it is a function of what you can do. If your military is good enough have a good chance of killing three groups, then of course you will disperse your guys into three groups and send them against all three. However, if you can only kill one. A cardinal principle of warfare is adequate concentration of force.

There are some fundamental mistakes in the idea that a SAG could shoot so many missiles at a CVN that it would get some through. The main error is in thinking that such a super-SAG would ever get close enough to shoot those missiles to begin with.

Compare the range of an ASM with that of a carrier air wing (with tanker support). Compare the speed of a CVN with the speed of a Sovv, or a Slava. The SAG doesn't even have enough time to sprint toward first base.

No CVNBG would operate in the russian littlorals because there would be no need to. The brown-water arguments are insignificant, because they apply to an operational condition that would not exist.

Russian surface combatants were never a credible threat to a full-size CVNBG with 3-4 carriers making up the core. The threat came from soviet ground-based naval aviation and their submarines. That is the reason the US is so much more advanced in ASW and AAW than they are ASuW.

Yeah! The airforce would have gotten them, never had to leave Ohio, and still gotten back in time to watch "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?" :D

For this mission, that means you take the information given in the briefing, mark the expected course on the map at one hour intervals, go deep and fast on course 270. When you intersect the line you marked, slow down and wait for them or approach quietly. Every time I played it, the briefing information in this mission was so good the enemy group would pass over your position, at the expected time.

I'm not sure that's always the best way to do it. My experience has been that if you try to get directly in front of a formation, you're usually going to get detected and pounded. That's fine if you're going to try to shoot your way past the screens to get at high value units but often that's not the wisest course of action.

Instead, I try to come in offset somewhat. That's sort of where it gets kind of squishy, because if the formation is designed smartly, to avoid detection you need to be super precise in your maneuvers.

The other option is to get behind them and shoot wakehomers from behind. It's not always such a bad idea in terms of survivability, but sometimes you can't always sink a ship.

Which mission is this, btw?

Barents sea loiter. In this mission, I've achieved success by simply staying ahead of them out of active sonar range, and sending passive adcaps to meet them head-on. TASM doesn't work well here initially because the escorts have good SAM systems. However, once a few of the escorts are out of action, it can work.

That should work.

I've never had any problem with the TASM in this scenario, though. Honestly, I think the TASM makes the scenario a bit too easy because they give you enough information to target the Russian SAG as soon as you receive the radio message. It's never out of range, so I can usually destroy at least one of the escorts using a salvo of TASMs.

The fact that they have good SAMs is the only thing that prevents me from destroying the entire battle group as soon as I get the radio message, actually. With a salvo size of 16 missiles, statistics says that at least one or two is almost certain to hit something. Suppose that a single missile only has a one in ten chance of getting through their missiles and chaff. Then the probablity of scoring at least one hit given a salvo size of 16 missiles is

pk = 1-(1-0.1)^16 = 0.81

That's pretty good! I like those odds! :know: The large salvo size lets you compensate for the relatively slow missile.

After clearing the datum from my initial cruise missile attack, I make another attack with the Harpoons. The salvo size is smaller, but they're faster and so individually they they are a little bit more likely to make it through the Russian formation's defenses. A salvo of four missiles usually does okay as well. With a little luck I can sometimes destroy a second escort.

Then I have to clear the datum again...

By that time I'm ready to make an attack with my torpedoes and finish off anything that survived the two strikes already made against it. For this I use tactics similar to what you described.

Well, when I played it, I had several cases where none of the missiles hit. This might also be influenced by mods though, it was some time ago when I last played this scenario, in standard DW. I think one of the LWAMI patches lowered the detectability of TASM and harpoon a bit.

If that's the case then you ought to do even better!

Since these kinds of saturation tactics essentially take advantage of statistics to tilt the odds in your favor, success is never completely certain. Sometimes no missiles will make it through the formation's defences. That's okay, though, because that's realistic. It happens sometimes. All you can do is shrug it off and prepare for the next strike. To go back to the example I brought up before, assume again that a single missile by itself has a 1 in 10 chance of making it through the defensive screen. In that case, the chance of scoring zero hits with a salvo of 16 missiles is still about 19%.

That's okay, though. That 19% of the time I'll have to just get them on my next attack. TASM makes everything very leisurely. Sometimes I'll play it and one of the ships might just have been damaged by missiles. That's fine. Generally speaking though, they lose a ship, the Sovremenny usually, since that's the closest one. If I'm lucky I'll get one or two of the others. That's always very iffy though, since like you said, they have good SAMs. I'm happy if I sink one, though.

I have to disagree that the USN would totally pown a Russian SAG in a shootout, particularly regarding the airwings. To get close enough to drop a JDAM or launch a Maverick would put the pilot in quesion in range of a virtual wall of SAMs and gunfire of all sorts, which is precisely the reason Russian warships are so liberally equipped with such weapons. That leaves the Harpoon, a nice missile but much too slow for the modern naval warfare environment. What the Navy desperately needs in order to stay on top in the ASUW world is a super fast cruise missile like the Fasthawk idea being kicked around (with a mach 4+ top speed) or the RATTLRS technology demonstrator in development.
http://www.defensetech.org/images/RATTLRS%20art.JPG
Question is, will they stop being obsessed with land attack missiles and give the new super fast system a true anti ship capability?

The thing is, the USN isn't currently anticipating having to fight the Russians. They're really only of peripheral interest (heh, Kapitan will hate me saying that :) ). If it was, the USN probably have continued developing the TASM and Harpoon. As it stands, what we have is fine. Interestingly they do continue R&D into the next generation of anti-ship cruise missiles. They want to maintain the capability, but right now they really don't need to maintain a big inventory of missiles.

Also, you don't have to fly into a wall of SAMs to attack an enemy SAG. Surpressing and destroying air defences is something the USN, USMC and USAF have down to a science. Anti-radiation missiles put warships in a real bind. They can attempt to shoot down the missiles, in which case they generally have to radiate and risk taking a hit, or they can shut down, in which case they still might take a hit either from the missile or accompanying strike aircraft. Aircraft can jam enemy radars with standoff jammers, as well as self protection. There also exist a whole host of decoys, not just chaff, but actual air launched drones which mimic strike aircraft. Radar warning receivers can actually be configured to pick out specifically naval emissions.

You can't just fly off and start dropping guided bombs and missiles like it was nothing. Attacking enemy warships from the air requires a whole operation, with all the associated components, but it's not impossible. It requires a little thought, like pretty much all strike planning, really. There's nothing that makes it fundamentally different.

Finally, torpedoes are still pretty good against a ship. Provided you can get close enough to use them (childsplay for a nuke, anyone who can work a maneuvering board can get a sub to within whatever range he wants of a given target) a single hit will sink most warships. They only ships that can really take successive torpedo hits are big capital ships, and who has more of those than anyone else? The USN, in the form of CVNs and LHDs. Even then, I think the record is like 7 torpedo hits. So... okay... that's two salvos? That's nothing. Since a nuke can almost always get close enough to shoot a torpedo, the big problem is just locating a target to sic an SSN on. That's not too hard either.

Between the SSNs and the aircraft, there really aren't a whole lot of reasons to carry an ASCM. It'd be nice in certain situations, but it shouldn't be a dire necessity if everything is thought out smartly. It's sort of a shame, really, because the lack of ASCMs takes a lot of the glamorous work away from surface ships. Now they're all tied to protecting high value units like CVNs, LHDs and TAOEs. The best one could hope for is to be a radar picket and get a piece of the air battle.

My guess is probably not. Right now, the Navy has to justify everything to Congress in terms of how it can kill terrorists. Al Qaeda doesn't have much beyond a speed boat with a bomb in it. What they really need to do is be able to project power ashore. That means strike, special warfare and amphibious operations are the real money makers at the moment.

The China hawks can say what they want, but China, while it has made great strides forward, still can't really compare to the threat the Soviets represented. It's not even in the same universe.