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Ok, this is a necro, but I promised some more analysis.
Still learning the Harpoon interface too, although I'm getting better at it.
This scenario required me to stop a powerful Soviet Surface Action Group escorting 4 merchant ships to Cuba, supported by Cuban jet fighters of MiG-12, -23/27 and -29 types flying from a Cuban airbase near the western end of the island. The Soviet combatants included Admiral Ushakov (actually would have been Kirov at the time) BCGN, a Slava cruiser, 2 Udaloy destroyers, 3 Sovremenyy destroyers, and 2 Krivak frigates.
Friendly forces included my CVBG centered on Kitty Hawk, a Leahy and a Belknap for cruisers, a Kidd destroyer, a Spruance destroyer and a Knox frigate. I also had 6 A-6E aircraft at PAtrick AFB in Florida. No subs on either side.
The date was circa 1985. I started south of the Bahamas, and the Soviets were sailing west through the islands.
Locating them proved easy; I simply put up a Hawkeye and some F-14s to escort it, flipped on the radar, and bingo, keeping my surface ships under EMCON.
My plan was to try to suppress their radars with HARM missile attacks early and then, once that had been knocked back, follow up with Harpoon attacks.
Initially, however, I had a long delay because I had 12 F-18s with air-to-air loadouts, and I ahd to have them reloaded with air defense suppression loadouts which took time (Harpoon 3 takes 6 hours of game time to reload an airplane from scratch and 4 hours to change munitions if it's already fueled and ready, which strikes me as excessively lengthy given the attention paid to turnaround time since the Israelis started pushing that int he early 70s, but I digress). I also had 5 EA-6 Prowlers that are excellent for SEAD with their heavy jamming abilities but they only carry 2 HARMs each so I knew I'd need a lot more than that.
Impatience, however, reared its head and I decided to go ahead and try to go in with the prowlers under EMCON themselves for a quick hit, relying on their heavy jamming abilities to help them survive the inevitable SAMs. This attack went off reasonably well givent he very powerful antiair capabilities of the Soviets; three Prowlers lost for 3 hits on a Sovremenyy. The HARM is a very fast missile but its range isn't great nor is its warhead large since all it needs to kill is radar. Enough hits will still do a ship, but that's a lot of hits and you only have so many, although this scenario gave me plenty of HARMs. The HARM also isn't a sea-skimmer so its fairly easy to shoot down. I wouldn't have been surprised to lose all 5 to those defenses.
In the meantime I'd also been picking off helicopters from the Russian group as they launched, trying to knock back any airiel radar they may have had. The F-14s handled this with Phoenixes from well outside SAM range.
The next attack was with the now ready Hornets which I split into 4 groups of 3, attacking from evenly around about a 180 degree perimeter from the south. This was where the cost of my impatience showed; although every HARM launched, I only got 5 hits on a Udaloy; a primarily antisubmarine destroyer and so therefore of only minor help to me since I had no subs. Worse, I lost 10 of 12 F-18s in this attack. I should have held off with the Prowlers, and then sent one in each F-18 strike package as a jammer keeping the 5th in reserve; the F-18s lack of serious ECM meant the SA-N-6 systems on the Kirov and the Slava took a heavy toll, despite dropping to the deck and running at full afterburner after launch. One lucky F-18 did survive a total of 4 SAMs fired at it and lased the rest of the battle, however!
This attack did, however, have the effect of making the Russians fire a LOT of SAMs at the HARMs, and running them out of SAMs was a costly, but effective way of beating them, and easiert than it sounds because while they had a total of 160 SA-N-6s between their 2 cruisers and plenty of smaller SAMs, any missile fired at them could result in at least 2 fired at it to assure a kill, although this worked in reverse too; my ships would also fire 2 SAMs per 1 incoming. I could mitigate that, though, with jet fighters firing AAMs at any incoming missiles while they couldn't since they were still much too far from Cuba for air cover.
Following this attack, I decided it was time for a major air attack; I had 10 more F-18s loaded with 4 Harpoons each on my carrier, plus the 6 A-6s at Patrick loaded with same, and 12 A-6s on the carrier with 4 more each as well. I decided to launch my F-18s and the A-6s from Florida first, making an attack from 3 directions to complicate their defense.
This attack had the positive effect of making them expend huge numbers of SAMs but at the cost of 5 more F-18s and 1 A-6 and nary a single hit! Still, I thought that they had to be running low on SAMs and I launched my remaining A-6s from the carrier and made a second attack. This attack took no aircraft casualties (they may have been out of the SA-N-6s by this time and down to the medium/short range ones and point defenses) but still got no hits. I think the sheer density of point defenses was what helped; as long as they had any SAMs they could thin the missiles out to the point where their large numbers of guns could stop what made it through in conjunction with ECM, decoys, etc. Soviet ships have significantly heavier close-in gun defenses compared to most U.S. ships.
At this point, however, things got a bit hairy because while I was managing these attacks the Cubans got serious with their aircraft instead of just tooling around their airbase and the middle of the Gulf of Mexico. They began the first of a series of air raids with various mixes of jet fighters that lasted until near the end of the battle when I evidently ran them out of fighters; I shot down about 60. They did, however, manage to kill a total of about 7 F-14s (not really serious in terms of the scenario since I had 24 and they were useless against the enemy ships that were my target) and far worse, 3 Hawkeyes by simply rushing them. This was aided by the inability of the Harpoon "staff" to exercise judgement; it wouldn't fire at "unidentified" aircraft automatically; you have to manually command it to do that, and worse, sometimes it just gets **** petulant about firing at all for reasons I'm not totally aware of. This let them get in close to the Hawekeyes. The Phoenix also suddenly seemd to not work all that well; I had an amazing number of misses. ECM may have had something to do with this; I wasn't able to tell. They also fired a number of SSMs at my ships but without result. Still, it was hugely annoying that the game treats aircraft that take off from an enemy airbase as unidentified in what's suppoed to be a hot war zone until you get a visual. It's not like airliners take off in formations of 12 and fly straight at your ships in the middle of WWIII.
Right after the first attack the Soviet ships located me, and the 2 cruisers fired off all 36 of their big, long range antiship missiles. None of them got through, and this greatly increased my freedom of action because these ships cannot reload at sea. By this time my 2 F-18s from my SEAD attack and my prowlers were ready, and I made another attack for a few hits. At this point pretty much all my strike aircraft were reloading and I was totally out of aircraft Harpoons, so I was loading up with Walleyes which are powerful, but much shorter-ranged and do not skim the sea; they are also slow. My A-6s at patrick were loading up with 2000 pound laser-guided bombs as well. I did, however, have 34 Harpoons aboard my escorts and with the long-range enemy missiles gone I could get in close enough to fire them with no fear for my carrier. I was almost accurate in my estimation that they were out of SAMs by now; with no missiles the thick gun defenses could no longer keep up and I scored a large number of hits, sinking 2 merchant ships, a Sovremennyy and one of the Krivaks, as well as damaging the other.
Still, the gun defenses were thick and I was out of Harpoons and had not a single Tomahawk to my name. I used my F-18s and A-6s from the carrier to attack with Walleyes next with no success; the big, fat, slow, missiles were easy meat for the gun systems. I lost a few more aircraft to the SAMs of the Sovremenyys, which aren't area defense weapons and therefore hadn't been totally expended when Harpoons went for other ships; the Walleye forced the launch aircraft to get in rather close. I continued to make antiradar strikes from 2 F-18s and my 2 prowlers as well, slowly knocking out radars, although there were a ton.
Finally, though, I struck a truely crippling blow. My 5 remaining A-6s from Patrick, flying at very high altitude, above the guns, dropped 20 2000 pound bombs on the Kirov, for numerous hits, sending her rapidly to the bottom. 4 of these planes died in the attack, again to a few remaining SAMs from a Sovremennyy.
I was out of Walleyes by this time, forcing my 5 strike F-18s to load up with regular old iron bombs, since they inexplicably could not carry the other short-range missile the A-6s could, the AGM-123 skipper, nor laser-guided bombs. the 5 F-18s dies in an ill-advised low level bomb run against the remaining cruiser; the density of guns was simply too much. Shouldn't have done that. My last land-based A-6 died as well making another high-altitude bomb run, but it did get a serious hit on the Slava.
The A-6s, however, had success with the Skippers, sinking another Sovremennyy, one of the 2 remaining merchants, and damaginf the Slava. By this time, the Cubans were out of fighters as well and if they hadn't I still had plenty of SAMs (although they were my last resort for sinking ships; if I had no airplanes left I was going to get into visual range and let my escorts go to town with SAMs against the surface ships which, by this time, couldn't have stopped them.)
At this point I knew there was nary a SAM in the Russian formation, so my 10 remaining A-6s on the carrier loaded up with laser guided bombs and went to town. A single mission with them in 2 5-plane formations sank the Slava, the other merchant, the remaning Sovremenny, and one Udaloy. At this point the scenario ended with my victory; one Udaloy and one frigate, both damaged limped away.
I did make one other mistake though, keeping close to the enemy to keep flight times and therefore turnaround short I accidentally exposed my frigate to the short-ranged SSMs ont he enemy destroyer. The first salvo was all shot down, but the second crippled and sank it. Thankfully its Harpoons were gone (it only had 2 anyhow) and it was essentially useless for air defense anyhow, but I was still annoyed at myself for being careless.
In summary:
Scenario issues:
- I found the presence of 6 Navy aircraft and no AF aircraft at an Air Force Base a bit inexplicable
- The AFB, understandably, had unlimited (for purposes of the scenario) stocks of regular old iron bombs for the A-6s there. Less understandable was the unlimited supply of laser-guided weapons, which then translated to an equally unlimited supply of such weapons on the carrier - but only for the A-6s.
- The obstinate refusal of the game to classify obviously hostile aircraft as such until they were identified specifically as a MiG-21 or act accordingly cost me a number of F-14s and Hawkeyes that probably would have survived in real life
- Another annoying habit of the game is launching aircraft loaded for strike missions to stay on patrol over bases or carriers. This is **** annoying since you have to either turn off staff automated air patrols and micromanage it, or accept that your strike aircraft may be **** around flying in circles around the carrier with half a load of fuel when you need them.
Lessons:
- Be more patient. Don't send a low-level strike with iron bombs into the teeth of active radar-guided guns, SAMs or no. I should have known better
- Be more patient. Put your jamming aircraft in packages with the strike planes; don't send them out in a group by themselves while other planes load up just to be doing something. Part of the problem here was learning the interface and putting different types of planes with different loadouts in the same air group.
- Be more patient. (see a theme here?) Hit them with at least 3 waves of air defense suppression mission with HARMs to wreck radars and make them expend SAMs before you send in your Harpoon-armed aircraft. Kill air-search radars first, then fire-control radars.
- Send all your Harpoon aircaft in one group; don't hold back a follow-up strike. You get better saturation this way.
- Watch your distance; Because of the Soviet love of 8 different kinds of missile for any given task they may still have ASMs in reserve when their big hitters are dry.
- In 1985, a Surface Action group with 2 major antiair shooters is a major threat for a single carrier, especially a conventionally-powered one like Kitty Hawk with its more limited magazine space, and also especially in conjunction with land air cover. The computer could have made far better use of that, if it had coordinated a single major alpha strike with its MiGs with a missile strike by the ships. I think this still could have been defeated since I had plenty of F-14s with nothing to do but kill MiGs and I could see them coming as soon as they took off but it would have been a challange.
- In part, this is due to the limited availability of AEGIS ships and practical nonexistance of VLS-equipped ships; I had neither. My Spruance destroyer didn't even have the 2x 4-shot ABLs which would have given me 8 Tomahawks. My Kidd-class was my best antiair shooter and combined with the 2 cruisers I had enough against a second-rate air force and a SAG with limited missiles (I still had at least 2 dozen SAMs across all the ships at the end, maybe more) but had this been fought with a nuclear carrier and an AEGIS cruiser, especially a VLS in place of one of the other 2 it would have been much less challanging.
- Had this scenario been fought for real (most likely if a Russian SAG was caught in transit to Cuba for some reason at the outbreak of hostilities) the outcome would not have been significantly different. The Cuban/Russian side might have played it smarter, mainly by going faster (they inexplicably went at 5 knots the whole time) and alpha-striking, but I think a real CVBG commander could easily counter those as well mainly by avoiding my mistakes. Land-based air cover from the U.S. would have been present in far greater quantities as well.
- That said, air losses would be far higher than the... nonexistant losses we've had in the actions against the Libyan and Iranian navies in the 80s. Cruisers and destroyers with thick point defenses, some long-range SAMs, and organized as a coherent battle group are a far greater threat than speedboats or even missile corvettes.
- Had this battle occured with the results I obtained, the air losses would have been a serious blow to the carrier's capability. The ammunition expendiatures would have as well, although enough air to air ammor and antisubmarine weapons remained for self-defense until the offensive stocks could be replenished. Still, even with the heavy losses I had it would have been a victory; the Soviets lost 2 major combatants, 4 merchant ships and a number of smaller combatants and the Cubans had their air force massacred in exchange for killing about a third of my aircraft and a frigate. The latter would have been the most serious loss because it was completely avoidable and also greatly increased my vulnerability to subs, if there had been any in the scenario.
I'll have another scenario soon; I did have one against China/NK but that one turned into an exercise in massacring Chinese airplanes and small surface ships with inadequate air defence and then bombing NK coastal forts and obsolete SAM batteries into oblivion, and really didn't tell us anything we don't already know.
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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."
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