Combat Ship GCI...

[mytai01]

I'm pretty sure larger combat ships with surface to air radar can provide GCI services to combat aircraft like an AWACS. We should be able to use them the same. Especially, ships with an anti-air mission.

[Exorcet]

Any unit with a radar should be able to do this. Communication is a huge part of military flying and sometimes units have to improvise. A F-15 flying around with a bunch of F-5's could direct the F-5's with radio while scanning with radar.

[Kang]

Why leave it there? In theory it might make sense to give any unit the option to report contacts, if so set up through its advanced actions.

Certainly, a ship has other abilities and units capable of that (ships, EWR and search radar units as well as plotting units) should be able to give proper GCI directions whereas other units would realistically be limited to reporting a sighting and their own position at best. But even the latter could be very useful for WW2 scenarios, for example.

[mytai01]

7 hours ago, Kang said:

Why leave it there? In theory it might make sense to give any unit the option to report contacts, if so set up through its advanced actions.

Certainly, a ship has other abilities and units capable of that (ships, EWR and search radar units as well as plotting units) should be able to give proper GCI directions whereas other units would realistically be limited to reporting a sighting and their own position at best. But even the latter could be very useful for WW2 scenarios, for example.

The ability to identify a contact is critical. detecting something you can't identify is pretty useless. That could even lead to fratricide.

[upyr1]

9 hours ago, mytai01 said:

I'm pretty sure larger combat ships with surface to air radar can provide GCI services to combat aircraft like an AWACS. We should be able to use them the same. Especially, ships with an anti-air mission.

While the USAF had Warningstar and the Navy had Hawkeyes during the Vietnam war US Navy Cruisers were used in the EW role using the call sign red crown

 

https://stationhypo.com/2021/04/17/piraz-in-the-gulf-of-tonkin-nsgs-role-guest-post

 

[Dragon1-1]

1 hour ago, mytai01 said:

detecting something you can't identify is pretty useless.

Far from it. If you detect something, you can then direct assets to try to identify it. AWACS and GCI of the era couldn't do NCTR, either. Their only advantage was the ability to occasionally track the target from the time it took off, at which point you could see if it came from an enemy airfield or not. However, in other cases, VID would often be needed, and the EW asset would direct fighters to obtain that VID.