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06-03-2013, 14:50
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חבר מתאריך: 13.11.04
הודעות: 16,823
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ועוד אחד, עם המון אנקדוטות ותובנות מעניינות
בתגובה להודעה מספר 28 שנכתבה על ידי strong1 שמתחילה ב "תקציר מוצלח של מלחמת פוקלנד - מתוך מגזין STRATEGY AND TACTICS המצויין"
The Falklands, 30 Years Later
http://www.defensemedianetwork.com/...30-years-later/
שימו לב לגזירות שהכותב עושה בין אירועים מרכזיים במערכה ובין מלחמה קונבציונלית אפשרית באירופה בין נאט"ו לברית ורשה בזירה הנורבגית והצפון אלטנטית
A second level was political. In 1982, many in the Soviet leadership believed that the West had lost so much of its morale that its end was inevitable, and perhaps even near. The Soviets themselves were in trouble, but they thought they could survive. The Argentinians clearly thought much the same thing about the British. Initially many in Britain seem to have assumed that Argentinian seizure of the islands was just another unavoidable step in the slow decline of the British Empire. British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher didn’t agree. Like U.S. President Ronald Reagan, she did not think the West was dying, let alone dead. She personally demanded that the Royal Navy form a task force to retake the Falklands. Even after the task force sailed, many on board were so skeptical of British resolve that they doubted they would be allowed to get to the Falklands. In effect, Thatcher saw the Falklands War as the great test: Were the British locked into decline, or did they have a future? The popular British response to the war suggests that many in that country agreed with Thatcher, and saw the war in much the same terms.
The impact on the Soviets cannot be underestimated. In 1982-83, the Soviets were increasingly aware that they had been caught up in a new revolution in military technology based on micro-computers. In the Falklands, the British fleet deployed far more computing power, for example, than the Soviets had in all their fleets. The Soviet problem was that their economy had been contracting for years. It did not have the stretch it needed to compete on these new terms with the West, particularly while continuing to pour out existing types of weapons. Within a few years, a new Soviet leader would be chosen specifically because he promised to clean up computer production: Mikhail Gorbachev. His attempt to solve the Soviet economic problem destroyed the Soviet Union.
If the war actually pitted a miniature U.S. strike fleet against a miniature Soviet force, the success of the British showed that the full-scale strike fleet had an excellent chance of carrying out its mission, a far better chance than critics of the evolving U.S. Maritime Strategy imagined. That mattered. The Maritime Strategy greatly raised the price the Soviets would have had to pay to prepare for a war, at a time when they were badly stretched. The need for a stretch, not just for naval but for other military purposes, forced the Soviets to take measures to change their economy and their political system. It turned out that the system did not have much stretch in it, either – and the edifice collapsed. The Falklands War mattered because in important ways it was the beginning of the end of the Cold War
On the eve of the Falklands War, the British went through the latest of an apparently endless series of defense reviews intended to keep defense affordable. Defense Minister John Nott considered surface warships useless in a NATO war, on the theory that a war in Europe would be over long before seaborne reinforcements arrived. He also rejected the Royal Navy’s argument that its surface force would perform an essential deterrent function during any run-up to war. Nott therefore planned, among other steps, to sell off the new carrier HMS Invincible and to cancel her two sister ships. He also planned to sell the amphibious fleet. To Nott, the only acceptable future lay with nuclear attack submarines. On the eve of war, Invincible was sold to Australia. This would leave the Royal Navy with only the light carrier HMS Hermes
When war broke out, the sale was canceled. Invincible herself had been conceived as a limited carrier with anti-submarine and strike functions, the theory being that in a NATO war naval forces could be protected by land-based aircraft. Although that did not work during exercises, the fiction was maintained, probably because to admit that carrier air defense was needed would have entailed ruinous expense. The fiction clearly could not apply to a fleet sent thousands of miles from the British Isles. Fortunately the strike airplane on the carriers, the Sea Harrier, had some air-to-air capability. Unfortunately, the fiction had precluded any attempt to develop an airborne early warning (AEW) capability for the carrier – a capability to detect and track air targets below the radar horizon of the fleet. It turned out that even without the airborne radar support, the Sea Harriers were the most useful element of Royal Navy air defense during the war.
Until 1982, it was widely believed that satellites had solved a key problem: how to communicate freely at long range without being tracked. The idea was that the narrow up-beam from the ship could not easily be detected. The only alternative means of long-haul radio communication, high-frequency (HF), could certainly be tracked. Indeed, for years the U.S. Navy had cut back its long-haul HF communication specifically to frustrate Soviet tracking. Now it became clear that shifting to satellites was not enough; the down-link of a satellite system carried too much information (in the form of Doppler) about the ship sending the up-link. It took about a decade to solve the problem using new satellites (during the 1991 Gulf War the Soviets apparently used the Argentinian technique to keep track of the buildup in the Gulf, but that may have been exploitation of merchant ship satellite communications).
The British view of radio silence was demonstrated when, en route south, the captain of the carrier Hermes ordered her tactical air navigation (TACAN) beacon cut down from her mast. Normally TACAN ensured that a carrier’s aircraft could find her. In U.S. practice it also gave pilots their positions relative to the carrier, and thus made it possible for the carrier to give them air interception data. Without TACAN, pilots may be blind in bad weather. Hermes lost two of her Sea Harriers in bad weather en route to the Falklands, and it seems that the absence of the TACAN beacon was to blame. Since she was carrying only 10 of these rather important aircraft, the loss was significant.
The loss of HMS Sheffield seems traceable to lack of familiarity with data links. The data link provides all ships in a force with a joint tactical picture. Whether or not the ship’s own radar sees an incoming target, the link will show it if any other ship in the force detects it. A few years after the Falklands War, USS Stark (FFG 31) demonstrated what that could mean. Radar conditions in the Gulf were notoriously bad, and Stark’s own radar range was very limited. However, a Saudi AWACS airplane detected an Iraqi fighter approaching the U.S. ship. Stark received that data via a standard link. It happened that the information did her no great good, but she was certainly aware that an airplane was coming before she was hit.
Sheffield was not nearly so lucky. On the day she was hit, she was escorting the carrier Hermes. Given Royal Navy sensitivity about electronic emissions, Sheffield rather than Hermes was assigned responsibility for satellite communication back to London. Like all contemporary satellite up-links, Sheffield’s functioned in the radar frequency band. To avoid false alarms, she turned off her electronic intercept gear while using her satellite link. She also turned off her air search radars, which could interfere with the satellite up-link. The incident made the Royal Navy far more data link conscious, and it began to use data links much more freely. After the war, it adopted data link practices more like those of the U.S. Navy, and it also adopted a much more capable link
British ships had three main types of air defense missile. The area defense weapon was Sea Dart, broadly equivalent to the U.S. Standard Missile (in SM-1 form): a medium-range semi-active radar guided weapon. A few British ships had Sea Wolf, a highly automated point defense missile. Older ships had Sea Cat, a much earlier command-guided point defense missile. The closest U.S. equivalent to Sea Wolf was Sea Sparrow. The Argentinians had experience with both Sea Dart, which they had bought on board two missile destroyers, and Sea Cat, but not with Sea Wolf.
Sea Dart had been conceived with the open-sea NATO mission in mind. Although in theory it could handle targets at altitudes down to about 50 feet (because it was semi-actively guided), it could not handle saturation attacks, as it had to dedicate one guidance channel to each target all the way from detection to destruction. The Type 42 destroyers armed with it had two Type 909 guidance radars – which also controlled the ships’ single 4.5-inch guns. The British solution to the limitations of Sea Dart was to team Sea Dart ships, wherever possible, with Sea Wolf ships. Not only was Sea Wolf automated, but it was considered capable of shooting down Exocet missiles (a capability demonstrated postwar). As for Sea Cat, it had been developed to replace 40 mm guns, and it was neither automated nor supersonic. Although there were initial claims that it shot down several Argentinian aircraft during the war, only one Skyhawk kill was confirmed.
Argentinian knowledge of Sea Dart seems to have had an interesting consequence. The Argentinians knew that they could avoid Sea Dart by flying low, but that carried its own danger. A low-flying airplane can be destroyed by the blast of its own bomb. The Argentinians therefore fuzed their bombs with relatively long delays. In several cases, bombs passed all the way through ships before exploding. In others, fuzes failed, and bombs lodged in ships. One ship survived (HMS Antelope) only to be destroyed when an attempt to neutralize a bomb failed.
In theory, air defense over Falkland Sound had four separate major components: Sea Harrier fighters overhead, Rapiers ashore, and Sea Dart and Sea Wolf missiles. In fact, these elements were never well enough coordinated. For example, there was never any link between the missiles ashore and the fleet. The Sea Harriers were generally controlled from the carriers, and they had no direct link to the missile batteries ashore. This arrangement made good sense in the North Sea or in the North Atlantic, when the carrier would be supported directly by Sea Dart ships and the Sea Harriers would spend most of their time at a distance, but that was nothing like the situation in the Falklands. The British solved the problem by rough-and-ready rules of engagement, which amounted to banning any missile engagements while the Sea Harriers were within range. That made sense in that the Sea Harriers were far more effective than missiles against the Argentinian aircraft
On the other hand, the Argentinians were well aware of the limits of Sea Harrier performance. They knew that the two irreplaceable British carriers were as far to the east as they could get – and the limits of Sea Harrier endurance made it fairly clear where that was. The sole effective Argentinian submarine had no difficulty finding the ships. In NATO exercises, diesel submarines found carriers only when they were constrained to stay in roughly one place, an artificial restriction used to ensure that diesel submarine commanders would have the opportunity to make attacks. In the Falklands, the two British carriers were in exactly that situation, and the Argentinian Type 209 submarine San Luis attacked HMS Hermes.
The outstanding ASW lesson of the war was that such estimates were fantasies. Faced with diesel-electric submarines, the British relied entirely on active sonar, because a diesel-electric submarine on batteries has little or no distinctive acoustic signature. One consequence was that they could not distinguish whales from submarines. Not only will a whale run at roughly submarine speed, but it will turn to evade a loud noise in much the way a submarine might try to evade.
The Argentinian submarine did not have things entirely its own way; it was cornered and bottomed. The British (and others in NATO, including the United States) had no weapon that could detect and attack a submarine sitting on the bottom. The alliance depended almost entirely on homing torpedoes, which distinguish their targets by the Doppler due to their motion over the sea bottom. It is not at all clear that this problem has been solved; the best that NATO seemed to do in the years after the Falklands was to develop a very cheap, lightweight weapon. The idea was that if the weapon were dropped on a bottomed submarine, the submarine’s commander would probably try to run, creating the conditions needed by a homing torpedo.
The larger question raised by the war was whether surface fleets were still worthwhile in the face of missiles like the Exocet that sank HMS Sheffield. It did not help that the British destroyer, which was smaller and in many ways less capable than U.S. frigates, had been advertised before the war (by the British) as the epitome of modern naval power. The main accepted lesson seems to have been that several British ships were devastated because their aluminum superstructures burned or melted. The upshot was that the new U.S. Arleigh Burke class, designed after the war, had steel superstructures. Many unfortunately associated that one feature with survivability. The Burkes are indeed highly survivable ships, as the experience of USS Cole later showed, but that was due to a lot more than steel superstructure construction – which in itself would hardly have been enough. |
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