If you could upgrade the Ka-50, what would you do?

[Scrim]

Who do you think they used to take out the Iraq radar system in the golf war? Helicopters. They can fly below radar detection and kill the sam's. DCS does not have proper train modeling for that type of masking though. Wouldn't be my first choice of jobs though.

 

In the Gulf war, yes, Apaches fired the first shots during the offensive by taking out Iraqi radars. But those weren't SAM assets, they were part of the Iraqi strategic radar screen that prevented the Coalition fixed wing aircraft from crossing into Iraqi airspace undetected. Something completely different to attacking actual SAM weapon systems.

[GGTharos]

Old EWRs, not SAMs. When SAMs in-game do become more complex, you can pretty much forget about going up against the modern ones in a helo.

 

Who do you think they used to take out the Iraq radar system in the golf war? Helicopters. They can fly below radar detection and kill the sam's. DCS does not have proper train modeling for that type of masking though. Wouldn't be my first choice of jobs though.

Edited December 1, 2013 by GGTharos

[MBot]

I stumbled over an interesting post on this subject lately:

 

You and others may be interested in how the Red force did in the Hawk Belt in WINTEX-CIMEX81, which I witnessed from HQ, COMLANDJUT. The Rus went in low level nighttime with attack helos and hosed down the SAAM installations and more importently, the radars. This is hauntingly similar to part of the US & Coalition [there was one, once] air campaign in 1991 vs. Iraq, where Apaches did in some of the key AAW/radar installations as the first blow.

 

http://www.tank-net.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=19608&page=3

 

The Hawk belt refers to the belt of HAWK SAM batteries that ran across West Germany.

 

Off topic, but also highly interesting from the same post:

 

As to Rus EW, it was well respected in NATO and I witnessed a particularly scarry brief by the German staff ECCM Officer. Remember also that the VHF band was overlapped 1/3 by the Rus. Just normal use by each side [and we always had freq allocation problems on our own side in NATO] would have made it self-jammed!

[GGTharos]

HAWKs could have been in various state of upgrades, including a lack of anti-helicopter capability.

 

Recent exercises against a single PATRIOT + Avenger patrols had a bunch of Apaches not doing terribly well. Some described it as a stalemate of sorts.

 

Terrain also plays a huge role.

 

I stumbled over an interesting post on this subject lately:

[MBot]

Of course. But since Hawk is also in DCS it is still a relevant example.

 

Interesting to note is that the poster mentions COMLANDJUT as the HQ this exercise was witnessed, so this has most likely happened in the relatively flat North German Plain. I assume the helos that played the Russians were AH-1F (1981 and night attack). Would be interesting to learn more about that exercise, this seems to have been the origin of the 10 years latter attack in Desert Storm.

[Scrim]

I don't know, seems like an awfully big difference between sending AHs on a broad scale against SAMs in hilly Germany (something might be relatively flat to be Germany there, but even the flattest is like Mt Everest compared to the Iraqi desert), and sending AHs out for a pin point strike on the Iraqi EWR to create a secure "blind" corridor into Iraq.

[PDM]

tighten up the navigation system, missile launch message, ecm... I

think that is about it....