I’m afraid a more realistic / comprehensive EW environment is not in the near future for DCS. It would be nice to have though. For the (near) future we’ll have to make do with monkey-acacombat level of electronic warfare simulation.
How good is CMANO in that aspect?
I was friggin thinking the same! 
This sounds about right when compared to CMANO. There, ships with modern vertical-launched SAM systems are essentially immune to ASM until they emptied their magazines. Which is aided by the fact that each ASM exchanges for 2-3 SAMs.
Carrier magazine allocations are apparently confidential, but in the CMANO sphere I think I have seen 48 Harpoons being thrown around. 4 Harpoons for a full squadron (or more likely 2 Harpoons for 2 full squadrons) sounds at plausible I think. When combined with a similar number of Shrike/HARM, that is probably enough to disable a typical Soviet SAG. With two Sovremennyys, two Udaloys and two Krivaks you are probably on the high end of escorts.
I always imagined that the burning hulk of the Kirov would ultimately be sent to the bottom by an Intruder dropping 22 Snakeyes. “A Navy Cross waiting to happen” is what I have read in that context 
Fun! Though, and correct me if I’m wrong, wouldn’t the escorts be operating further away, to maximize their missile envelopes? I’m not sure if Russian Naval doctrine is similar to American in that regard.
“Since I started putting this data together,” Jake told the Colonel, “I’ve become a big fan of attack submarines.”
“Why don’t you say what you really think?”
“Yes, sir. Attacking a Soviet task group with free-fall bombs will be a spectacular way to commit suicide.”
“If the balloon goes up, we’ll go when we’re told to go, suicide or not.”
-from The Intruders, by Stephen Coonts.
No clue, I’ve never seen hard evidence on how the soviets arrayed their surface units. I do know that the most effective anti missile weapon they have in DCS currently is the SA-N-9, so I arranged the fleet to maximize overlapping coverage of those launchers.
In the era that book was set, there’s some real irony in a pilot who throws himself at Hanoi every night whinging about a 60s era Soviet Task Force. Shrikes exist, protections against saturation attacks do not. Jake needs to put on his adult pants and get in the jet.
“The difficulty of planning against American doctrine is that few in the US Navy even know their doctrine and the ones that do, do not feel obligated to follow it.”
Supposedly a quote from a Soviet Admiral during “The Big One”…the Cold War.
It’s been a while and the Russians have a few newer toys than the Soviets, but yes, overall a screen of escorts positioned where they can do the most good, which may be several Nm away from the HVU.
It is also fair to note that aside from surfaced submarines, DCS doesn’t do ASW. That means those Udaloy’s (at least Udaloy I DDGs) and Krivaks can concentrate on air defense rather that screening for subs. So instead of being positioned where they (and the Udaloy’s tails) can counter a sub threat…likely far away from the HVU and others so that surface ship noise doesn’t drown out everything else.
Landlubber translations:
HVU - High Value Unit…i.e. the one that you really do not want to have sink.
Tails - long hydro-acoustic arrays that are trailed behind a combatant in order to detect and track submarines.
@near_blind…have you been reading Joint Pub 3-01 and Joint Pub 3-32 again?
(I’m going to wait until they come out on Audio books.)
From JP 3-01: “…enemy IADS need to be analyzed in depth to neutralize or avoid enemy strengths and exploit enemy weaknesses.”
…and from JP 3-32, “Effective sensor and combat systems management includes:…(4) Ability to launch one’s own weapon first and then exploit the tactical advantage gained as the opponent is forced into a defensive posture (subject to rules of engagement [ROE]);”
Which is essentially what you wrote.
It does this old Cold Warrior’s heart good to see the discussion on ASUW against a near peer adversity. I can tell you from experience that you all are rediscovering the tactical challenges we faced with the Soviet Navy.
The one thing I haven’t seen is the use of multiple axis of attack to overwhelm an enemy’s defensive systems. In the screen shots, all the SAM trails seem be heading the same way and the map plot has the threat coming from the SW.
We used to use something called a KISS wheel (yes, keep it simple stupid) Basically a circle divided into about 8 sectors. The idea was to launch, tank and time everything so everybody pushed at the same time from their assigned sectors on the wheel and launched weapons so they achieved an near same TOT. Sounds simple but in reality it isn’t that easy to accomplish…which is why we practiced it a lot.
To make things more fun, you might integrate Harpoons into the KISS wheel. That’s where the Harpoon’s waypoints function came into play. One or more of the strike aircraft assigned to the KISS wheel might launch a Harpoon before the push time so that it would travel to a different sector, hit a waypoint, turn, and come in from that direction.
Theoretically you could also add surface and sub launched Harpoon but to my knowledge we never tried.
Thought that the sinking ships/Anti-Surface-Warefare discussion deserved it’s own thread
This is a great discussion!
Better than DCS but still fairly game-ified, which is to be expected considering this is the probably one of the most classified aspects of operations.
My understanding is that IRL, jammers can most things some of the time, but not all the things all the time. By that I mean something like an ALQ-99 can jam a wide spectrum of radar bandwidths, but a single pod cannot effectively jam different bands of frequencies at the same time. You need to allocate each pod to jam a specific bandwidth, so collectively you can blanket multiple receivers. This behooves carrying more pods, but each pod reduces range and increases performance, so it becomes a tradeoff of how many radars do you want to be able to jam without killing your range or over-extending your tankers.
Logistics are fun.
In CMANO you turn on the OECM and everything basks in the radiation. In my experience unless your fighting modern wunder SAMs and AESAs, sticking a single Prowler to a strike group is enough to get in range for Harpoons or Walleyes. I had a real humorous experience where I had to sink a Kirov. I’ve spent ten years playing in DCS, so I put together this horrific gorilla package of dredd, only for the first four A-7s with an EA-6 in tow to merrily put over at 30,000 feet, throw sixteen Walleyes at it, and fly home. Something like twelve of them hit and we were left with one extremely dead Kirov.
I was not, but those are getting added to my reading list.
sooooo… are you saying that
walleye rocks
prowlers are wildly OP
CMANO EW sucks
all of the above?
I wouldn’t go that far. I’d say it’s not as nuanced as it could be, but that’s way different than “it sucks”. It’s still a system you want to understand, and an important part of any mission. I do think Walleyes rock though. I’ll let @komemiute vouch for the Prowler.
I’ll see if I can find it again. I read an interesting paper discussing the use of smaller caliber guns on modern Coast Guard vessels as inadequate to stop most surface vessels anymore. The context of the paper was basically in regards to waterborne 9/11 style attack (say a liquid natural gas tanker headed to NYC harbor and rigged to blow). IIRC the short version was the throw weights below an 8" gun were not going to accomplish the goal of being to achieve a mobility kill or actually sink the vessel, in any reasonable time frame/round count.
Obviously not terribly pertinent to stopping a Russian/Soviet TF, but interesting none the less.
I’ll update here if I can find it.
So chock one up for DCS. I didn’t really make use of the compass in that mission because I threw it together in twenty minutes. Disregarding that, the last time I paid close attention it didn’t seem to matter. I came home this evening, and low and behold, DCS actually models radar scan limitations for the Russian surface combatants.
I put together a simple mission with four F/A-18s, one each at each point of the compass, array sixty miles out from a Moscow. Each F/A-18 fired two harpoons and went home. The Moscow could only engage two missiles at a time with it’s SA-N-6, and the time taken to physically rotate the TOP DOME and acquire the next pair was simulated as well. I re-ran the test with the Kirov, and Nuetrashimy. Each time the ship had to rotate it’s FCR, reacquire and shoot. Very Interesting. At some point I’m going to have to re-run that mission with a more proper use of space. Hamstringing the SA-N-6 means more missiles can make it into the SA-N-9 grinder…
It strikes me that, for DCS at least, it’d be better to make multiple missions, each of which focus on a smaller ship of a group rather than trying to attack a group all at once.
Especially since I had two B-52s shoot 2 AGM-84s at a Kuznetsov and then the remaining 14 at a armed gunboat, I firmly believe the AI is not particularly well-versed in prioritizing use of resources.
Ran the same mission again. Task Force Ivan was re arranged like so:
And our 24 Hornets were split into groups of three around the periphery. Harpoon usage is still way overstated, and the allocation was sloppy, but results were much better. The CG and a DDG were outright sank. The second DDG took two hits in its aviation facilities, one at the water line, and was burning. Both Krivaks and an “Udaloy” had taken two or three Harpoons a piece. The Kuznetsov is still a CIWS monster, but it took multiple Harpoons to the flight deck and conning tower near the stacks. The Shipwrecks were still there, and I’d wager it could still operate any remaining Helixes (albeit at reduced capacity), so it’s still a threat, albeit a much reduced one.
tl;dr it’s sort of better.
I’d imagine that’s a doctrinal question. In DCS the answer is “not really”, Right now we have the HVUs of the Russian/Soviet navy. The Kuznetsov, the Kirov, the Slava/Moskva. These are big, nasty ships that were designed to anchor enemy task forces. Each possess very big, very capable, very dangerous anti-shipping cruise missiles that can fire into next week. The former operates a large wing of ASW helicopters, and the latter are both rather capable surface combatants with area denial capability. You want these dead.
The other ships in game: the Grisha, the Krivak, and the Nuetrashimy are the “small boys” of the Soviet design philosophy. They were designed to support the Bastion concept: protected ocean areas that could be more easily defended against enemy attack submarines, wherein friendly SSBNs could patrol until needed. They were designed to operate as part of larger Hunter Killer packs in conjunction with rotary and fixed wing ASW support and friendly hunter-killer subs to track and kill enemy hunter-killer subs. For that mission they need a minimal amount air defense (enough to deter basic attacks, helicopters, and sub launched cruise missiles), and are instead armed primarily for hunting and killing subs.
So if I were running a strike? Forget the ASW frigates. They can’t hurt me, and a competent bubblehead skipper can deal with them. I have a finite amount of aircraft, munitions and time, I’m going to focus on the most dangerous, highest value targets. Once they’re dead I can plink the Frigates at my leisure.
If I ignore them, in the time it takes to rearm and replan another strike, the situation may have drastically changed to a position of disadvantage. The enemy ship might close to missile range, it might retreat to friendly air cover, it might just up and disappear. The distinct impression I’ve gotten from reading naval history is if you have the opportunity to sink the big ships, you absolutely take it.
What’s missing currently (and will be until Razbam decide to stop chasing Wind Mills in the South Atlantic 
) are the medium tier ships. Your Kara and Kresta CGs, your Sovremennyy, Kotlin and Kashin DDGs. These escorts are the more dangerous middle ground: more survivable, more threatening defenses, and in certain cases, more credible surface threats.
DCS AI is really dumb. It’s better to manually parcel out what you want them to hit and with how much.
Interesting. Frankly I always wondered about the desire to attack from multiple axis. It sounds like an advanced tactic at first but for most cases I think it actually runs contrary to overwhelming the defenses. Most ships have launchers/mounts and FCR distributed to cover sectors. Especially for short-range SAMs and CIWS. How Sea Sparrow and Phalanx are distributed around carriers is a prime example. Attacking from multiple directions actually distributes the load among the sectors, allowing multiple defensive weapons each to attack a fraction of the attacking weapons simultaneously, instead of overwhelming a single sector.
The only cases where I can see multiple directions to make sense is with Fire Control Radars that can guide multiple SAMs within a limited field of view. Here, spreading out the attack limits the amount of SAMs that can be guided simultaneously. The only systems to which this applies to that I can think of right now are SA-N-6 and SA-N-9. And in case of the Kirov class with two Top Dome FCR the effect is further reduced.
Know thy enemy…
