Wednesday, September 28, 2016

Russia "Destroys" Another Hospital(s) And Kills Cute Puppies Too.

Ahh, those nasty Russkies, they don't know how to fight terrorism. As ever reliable (wink, wink) Reuters reports: Russian or Syrian warplanes knocked two hospitals out of service in the besieged rebel sector of Aleppo on Wednesday and ground forces intensified an assault in a battle which the United Nations said had made the city worse than a slaughterhouse. I have a problem with this low quality reporting. Russians knocked out not two, but five or twelve, certainly no fewer than seven, hospitals. While doing this Russians slaughtered a number of cute puppies and many cute kittens too. Puppies like this: 
 
Meanwhile, ever committed to fighting terrorism, Washington D.C. warns Russians that killing "moderate rebels" (and moderate cute puppies) may cost Moscow attacks on Russian cities and many Russian lives lost. But call it a hunch, I somehow think that those attacks will have a very specific force behind them, the one which is very committed to fighting barbaric deaths of cute puppies. Well, there is a reason for this rising concern for destruction of numerous hospitals in Syria and reduction of population of cute puppies (and kittens) and it seems the reason is that Russia (and Syria) really decided to cleanse Aleppo from "moderate rebels", akin to "moderate rebels" in Grozny who loved to take hostages, kill children (obviously not as cute as puppies), behead others and do other things which in D.C. go under the title of "freedom fighting".  I am sure in coming days we all will witness a number of other Russian "atrocities" such as destroying Syria's other 12,000 remaining hospitals and killing off a population of Syria's cute and "moderate" penguins. Penguins like this:

           


Tuesday, September 27, 2016

On Syria (Mostly).

I usually try to stay away from Syrian war for a reasons that I do not have enough time and resources to look at the maps and study operational situation there--for that there are many bloggers who do just that and I gladly use their information. But the more important reason is that I know for sure that nothing what is stated by Arab sources on the ground usually corresponds to the reality. Not for once I wrote that Arab militaries and modern combined arms warfare simply do not mix well. I wrote about it here and here, with Colonel Murahovsky's interview. Now, it is very reputable Russian military analyst Colonel Khodarenok who speaks out:

Ex-Russian Colonel: Why Moscow Has Not Succeeded in Syria After 1 Year of Involvement

It is an excellent piece which does address reasons of why Arabs can not fight modern war. Here are some good quotes:

Further Syrian army success does not look good. The quality of army management is the most important question today. Since 2004 Syrian army fired a lot of officers and generals who got their education in USSR and Russia. There are almost no Russian-speaking officers in Syrian army today. Officers who got their education in Turkey, Saudi Arabia and the West were preferred. They were the main core of Syrian army.

Or this:

Syrian army has no centralized supplies. Everything is decided by the army commanders. They get the money and decide what supplies they are going to buy. These commanders are the richest people in Syrian army. Central staff has no influence over their decisions regarding supplies. This is the reason why Assad army is so poorly supplied. Syrian young people leave the country from the conscription. There is a minimum help for the family members of dead or wounded solders. Such families are extremely poor.
  
Well, it never changes with Arabs. Now that the Russian military advisers left Syria (and rightly so) the Syrian Army (SAA) is left to its own devices in doing what they never could--serious strategic and operational planning, and effective command and control. So, nothing really new here but, in the same time, Khodarenok is a bit on a grim side here. While he is correct in this assessment: 

A huge amount if intelligence forces (mukhābarāt) make the situation even worse. There are four kinds of it: national, military, air and political. There is also the National bureau of security. The corruption in Syrian intelligence forces is awful. They force the whole population and army to pay an enormous amounts of bribes.

The truth is--it can not be any other way and it is true across the board in Arab world. And, I think, there is still military solution in Syria and there are signs of the so called "rebels" (terrorists supported by West) being at the end of the rope. But then again--all of this is a typical Arab affair and it never changes and to understand its military logic is usually beyond the grasp of "western" mind. But in the end, I have to disagree with Khodarenok in most dramatic fashion--the title of his article is plain wrong. I am just not in the mood to list all strategic benefits Russia already got in her mostly air campaign in Syria and by any metric, the circumstances favor Assad and SAA, thus providing for the main political objective of Russia's interference in Syria--survival of secular and friendly to Russia regime. In the end, it is the opinion of one man, there are many others which differ drastically (in Russian).

In related, that is military, news: Russia continues to slowly abandon Brigade structure and now resurrects yet another division, this time 42nd Motor Rifle Division, stationed in Chechnya. Another proof of a complete military bankruptcy of Serdyukov's "reforms", as well as people who promoted and supported them--namely people from SVOP such as late Vitaly Shlykov.  Incidentally, these were this new 42nd MRD's units which gave Georgian Army, trained and updated by NATO and Israel, an abject lesson in combined arms warfare on 08/08/08 in a brief Russian-Georgian War. 

Thursday, September 22, 2016

Situational Awareness 101.

No comments, just the report from one of the STRATFOR founders. Some quote with a link to Color Commentary On Russia.


So what are the dominant impressions derived from my recent trip? Of a country suffering under sanctions? A little, but not much. Of a country poised to conquer the West? Absolutely not. To the contrary, I've seen festivities. I've seen wealth. I've seen people on the streets who are free and highly self-expressive. The postures, the gaits, the eyes, the clothing!
"Oh, but you were just in Moscow, where the wealth is concentrated. The rest of Russia is still in the 12th century," you might object.
But we spent a week in Yekaterinburg, Russia's fourth-largest city, two time zones east of Moscow on the edge of Siberia, and I've rarely seen so many building cranes. The Boris Yeltsin Presidential Center and Museum in Yekaterinburg is an architectural wonder. The mayor is a lanky 6-foot-5, 54-year-old runner straight out of central casting, vibrant and impressive, who began his career as a poet.
 ................

One final thing: Did I or my traveling companions experience a shred of anti-Americanism? No. Not one shred.

For those who are interested, here are some photos of Yekaterinburg:

     
                
                     
 

                   
Yeltsin Center eventually has to be renamed and all what relates to this drunk low life has to be removed and center transferred for children's use.








       


 

Monday, September 19, 2016

It Is Over.

Well, boys and girls, here it is--the end of the rope. You see, it is normal now to suspect Russians "bombing" NYC in order to help Trump. Any other "free" media in US? It is called insanity, there is no moral in it--mentally sick people are not judged in normal court precisely for the reason of insanity--they are locked up in the asylum. US has gone off the rails...

    
She doesn't want to speculate...

Friday, September 16, 2016

Happy Birthday, Medvedev--Here Is The Present For Ya.

It was Dmitry Medvedev's, Russia's incompetent liberal Prime-Minister (lawyer by trade), birthday yesterday. I wouldn't even pay attention to this hack's 51st but it was the present which was made to him by Vladimir Putin which really struck me, and very many others, as both a huge hint and, let's face it, affront. The present was also a huge policy statement. Putin gave Medvedev a picture titled "In The Industrial Shop". 
      
Happy BD, Mother Fucker.
The art piece depicts a large industrial machine-building plant and its message is unmistakable--re-industrialization must accelerate. This Putin's gesture is especially significant against the background of two competing economic programs which must be presented to Putin in the nearest future.  One is by Alexei Kudrin--a shill for globalist elite and a financier who has no idea about anything but bookkeeping and monetarism. The other--is by Stolypin's Club and this one is the program of massive, state-driven re-industrialization while liberalizing small and middle-size business--the program I wholeheartedly support with one huge caveat, however. 

So, Russian PM Medvedev was given, as I think, the last (not-Chinese) warning--to shape up or... Well, who knows, Putin is an extremely loyal friend--sometimes at his own, and nation's, peril--but the events of the last 3 years may change his approaches to personal relations. After all, he has a huge country to run and Russian are ready, nay--yearn, to get back at what Russians are known for--making things. As for the present? Putin never makes hollow gestures... 



Thursday, September 15, 2016

Damned If You Do, Damned If You Don't-III

We already touched upon very basic calculations of Sweep Widths and Rates to give at least some impression about the scale of the tasks ASW faces when operating in the area such as Russia's Far East. Of course, search in general and ASW's in particular realities and math involved are more complex than that, including such funny things as Probability Density Distributions and Probability Maps, which reflect, if to put it in layman's lingo, those areas (often represented as cells on a grid) where the probability of the target is lowest and highest.  The formula used there is not a complex one (unlike a general math concept, which requires a little bit of time to get acquainted with) and it looks like that: 
           
Where in red, obviously, is Probability Density, POA is a probability of the target we search for being contained in some area (it is also goes under POC abbreviation), while A is the size of this area. Not a difficult stuff, really, but if some of you want to ask the question of how the hell has this anything to do with Elmo Zumwalt, the answer is this: as the story goes by some people who had a first hand experience with ASW--it is so complex that it reminds many the story of a man who constantly hit himself on the head with a hammer in order to feel good when he stopped doping this. This is ASW in a nutshell. US Navy's CBGs thought (and still think--hence this series of posts in response to Admiral Richardson's claims) that their organic ASW capabilities (remember those ungainly but crucial S-3 Viking planes?) combined with those of patrol aviation (P-3 Orion then) could provide the safety of carriers. Famous Soviet Foreign Military Review magazine published in mid-1970s the article (by Rear-Admiral Pushkin and Professor Naskanov) with a straight forward title: Anti-Submarine Defense Of Carrier Group. It was a fairly detailed review of the open information on the subject and it had a number of schemes of deployment of CBGs' organic ASW forces. Such as this:
        


 Or this:
                   

Which was pretty generic tactical (and operational) mambo-jumbo, but in the end of this article both authors noted that complexity of technology (mid-1970s, mind you), physiological and psychological loads on ASW crews, other objective factors limited realization of all supposed advantages to... drum roll ...20% of actual capability. There went, through the window, the myth of CBGs' invulnerability. Zumwalt knew that. No, of course, he would continue to extol the value of carriers as a main platform for US Navy but he and a number of his Navy allies, such as Admiral Stansfield Turner, looked at the emerging Soviet Navy's capabilities really seriously--thus the Project 60 was born.  After all, it was THIS Admiral who made it to the cover of the Time Magazine in 1968. 
      
And this Admiral loved his submarines and ASMs. In fact, it was the only way to stop US Navy's CBGs since, as Baer succinctly points out: far from being a platform which can fight for Sea Control, US Navy's carriers themselves depended on it and that meant only one thing--someone else was supposed to fight those nasty Russkies who increasingly were prone to reducing their Probability Densities and were working really hard at noise and other physical fields' reduction technologies. This is, mind you, without mentioning Gorshkov's battle axe of Naval Missile-Carrying Aviation which was specifically honed for sinking carriers, using a variety of means, not least of which were, and you may have guessed it, air-launched anti-ship missiles. But back to the underwater start. 

P-120 Malakhit (NATO SS-N-9 Siren)  already had a serious impact with its range. Indeed, what were the probabilities of the CBG, with its immensely expensive and mission-crucial carrier in the middle, to defend against the salvo of 2, 4 or maybe 8 of such missiles? Crisis in Mediterranean in 1973 showed that what Soviet Navy cared about was, as Admiral Kapitanetz later recited, "how many missiles we had in the first salvo". The operational concept of having a missile revolver at the temple (carrier) of each US Navy's CBG had its own flaws, to be sure, people and ships (also known, and for a good reason, as kamikaze) would die but then again--the game in those days was too damn serious. Project 60, which was a US Navy's internal document, was seeking to withdraw carriers into the second echelon for pure power projection, that is only when the battle for Sea Control will be won against Soviet Navy and that meant a massive ASW campaign both in Atlantic and on the Pacific theaters. The centerpiece (or rather four of them) of Project 60 was a ship which would give any US navy's aviator an aneurysm--Sea Control Ship. This was a blasphemy, a sacrilege, really (for US Navy's "aviators union") to have a relatively inexpensive ($100 million--compare with $1.44 billion for nuclear carrier then)  ASW and escort missions capable ships whose task was, actually, to fight Soviet Navy and its subs. Look above, at the first picture where it is namely a helicopter ASW sweep ahead of CBG which was tasked with immediate safety of a carrier. This was the same concept, except that this time, those helicopters would fly from a ship which was almost 15 times less expensive than carrier and whose loss wouldn't entail a massive escalation and a political and psychological crises in the US. Seems reasonable, after all--the second Project 60 key item, a venerable FFGs of Oliver Hazard Perry-class reached unheard of number built--71 (!!!) and I guess that was because these were ... excellent (in reality outstanding) and inexpensive multi-purpose ships?  They sure as hell fell into Arleigh Burke's paradigm handed by him to Zumwalt:"We need numbers"(c). They also proved very survivable, granted that the crew was properly trained. But if Project 60 was able to push through those ships, Sea Control Ships were an absolute no-no. Guess why? I am sure you already have guessed. There was a problem, though--with ASM salvo a defending unit (CBG) is limited by the radio-horizon--this is as far as CBG can theoretically detect and track incoming ASMs (we will touch on this later). So, the best way to defend against this salvo is not to allow this salvo to happen, to not allow this salvo to happen one had to:

1. Detect the Soviet carriers of ASMs before they launch;
2. Destroy them before they launch. 

If the carrier of those ASMs was some TU-22 or TU-95 US Navy theoretically had the answer--F-14 Tomcat and AIM-54 Phoenix, which allegedly could also shoot the incoming  ASMs. The real tasks of  Tomcats, however, was to shoot down primarily carriers of those ASMs. Theoretically some measures could be taken against Soviet surface kamikazes keeping cross-hairs of their ASMs on US carriers--a practice called tracking with the weapons (slezhenie oruzhiem). In the end, those kamikazes were on the surface, they could be tracked visually and by radar, so there were some chances. But submarines--this was a completely different game. And the only answer was a massive and extremely well-coordinated ASW effort with probabilities which would be at least satisfactory for US Navy's carriers to carry out their force projection tasks. Well, I am about to make a statement which some will not like: once the anti-shipping missiles learned how to launch from underneath the surface of water, those probabilities were never in this "satisfactory" range. And, indeed, what is this satisfactory range? I would say, for CBG's safety it has to be in the vicinity of 0.85-0.9 under the most adverse (combat) conditions. The problem, however, was that against near-peer, let alone against peer achieving such numbers was simply horrendously difficult. Today, it is absolutely impossible, because those very near peers and peers spent decades developing means of.... making Elmo Zumwalt and Project 60 correct--that modern US CVNs can not realistically fight for Sea Control and survive, totally different classes of ships are required and I don't mean LCS.    

To be continued.... 
         

       

Wednesday, September 14, 2016

Meanwhile In Syria. (18+)

These photos must be framed and installed on every desk in US State Department and whatever intelligence services are responsible for helping to create this evil. And they did help. The same goes for Israel's operatives who consider the existence of ISIS to be good for the safety of Israel. Those who call for removal of Assad's "regime", which fights this collection of US-supported "moderates" who migrate in and out of ISIS aegis based on the expediency of the moment, must be mentally evaluated, because only mad, amoral shitheads can view anyone who fights these animals "a brutal dictator".  This is an execution of 20 peasants in Deir ez-Zor. They were allegedly the "spies" for "coalition".
   





This is how the spread of "democracy" looks like. But then again, when Chechen "freedom-fighters" slaughtered children in Beslan or even cut the heads off of some hapless Britons, "West" still found a way to blame it on...Russia. But the time for hypocrisy and double standards is up. We live in the world of mass communications where information (and knowledge) travel fast and render the "profession" of spin doctors useless for those who think. As the title of the stunning WWII movie by Elem Klimov said--Idi I Smotri--Come And See.  We are in for a fight for the existence of human Civilization. Those who ignore it--they do it at their own, and others, peril. 
 

He Did It!!

I wrote about this issue in this blog from the inception--US "main stream" media is a sewer. They have no integrity, honor and are staffed by people who have no applicable skills and are, generally, low lives. Journalism is not a profession, nor is it a "science".  Degeneration of what once was considered to be "respectable" and "free" press in US into tabloids is complete. Here is Washington Post "elaborating" on the mental fart by imbecile with medical degree on the possibility of....Putin poisoning Clinton. Holy Fvck!! It is not anymore about "journalism", it is about catastrophic and violently deteriorating mental illness of US so called "elites" who seem to be hellbent on taking their nation with them down into the oblivion of disintegration. Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad. Once touted as exemplary, the golden standard which world should aspire to achieve, American "democratic" process today is a laughing stock of the world and is financially, morally and culturally corrupted into the mad circus. 

To suggest that the leader of a world power, who not for once asked for and offered cooperation with the US, would poison a presidential candidate of another world power--one has to be absolutely insane to float such an idea. Yet, nothing is too shitty and smelly for prostitutes in WaPo who turn insanity into the viable political options. The way American "mainstream" went all in for Hillary is unprecedented in US presidential election history, no holds barred, really, and that is what makes it so scary and grimly ironic. US is slowly turning into totalitarian state which will (sadly) more and more resemble Orwell's fantasy. This is unless this madness is stopped by silent American majority which can not and must not ignore upcoming elections, because Donald, for all his major flaws, it seems will try to do at least something which may preserve what is left of US sanity. 

 

Friday, September 9, 2016

Brian Connolly...You Were The Best!

Even Soviet Firm Melodia produced Sweet's 45s (or rather 33 & 1/3) flex records....... One of the most beautiful voices of rock music. 

  
Here is the song which did it for many of us in 1970s. Who would know then that it was really a sinister thing.........

            
Those who know what 1968 was....I do. Yet, they are still one of the most amazing bands of 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s... 

Tuesday, September 6, 2016

Damned If You Do, Damned If You Don't-II

Elmo Zumwalt, who probably, should he be still alive today, would hate to see what kind of ships' class was named after him, had some ideas about naval warfare which certainly did not and do not fit US Navy's preferences of, as either Hyman Rickover or Arleigh Burke (do not remember from the top of my head) stated, "the US Navy got used to traveling the first class". The "first class", of course, being large and expensive, or rather very expensive, combatants. There always existed this contradiction between Arleigh Burke's "we need numbers" and this very "traveling the first class". Indeed, it is very difficult to have both and especially so when the foundation of contemporary operational culture of US Navy is classic Nimitz, and upcoming Ford-classes CVNs who pack an immense punch against inferior nation and her fleet but also are immensely, in fact--outrageously, expensive. They are not only expensive in themselves, let alone with organic air wing on and under their decks, but they require a constant escort of several other very expensive and sophisticated AEGIS ships equipped with the  SPY-1D,  and its further modifications, radar. Of course, the issue of ASW of Carrier Battle Group follows not far behind. This is an antithesis to a US Navy's contemporary slogan of Distributed Lethality.  

Enter Elmo Zumwalt and his tenure as CNO (Chief Of Naval Operations) in early 1970s. As one of the truly great US Navy's historians, George Baer, wrote: "The colossal expense of each heavy nuclear-powered carrier (1.44 billion in 1977) and many years it would take to replace one if it was sunk, had become reasons for being more cautious about using such carriers on the offense. To be sure, carriers retained a much debated value as politically unencumbered strike bases, but their use increasingly depended on existing Sea Control and on the ability to defend them. Further more, Zumwalt's thinking went, the technologically complicated carrier (and the similarly sophisticated and expensive nuclear submarine) required Navy personnel to go early into intensive specialization. Officers and sailors were thus forced to adopt a narrow, operational focus to form "unions", particularist and exclusive communities within the Navy that closed minds and limited vision". ("One Hundred Years Of Sea Power, The US Navy 1890-1990". George W. Baer, pages 402-403). Needless to say, US naval aviators "union" is immensely powerful and influential. Yet, it is one of the major obstacles to US Navy's achieving even a slight departure from its manifest carrier-centrism towards true Distributed Lethality. 

Zumwalt understood this problem in late 1960s. As much as some still thought (and some still do) about naval warfare in WW II carrier paradigm, facing technological reality was inevitable: once the ranges of the anti-shipping missiles reached the vicinity of deck aviation's ranges, the game was up. Russians, initially, called their first crude Anti-Shipping Missiles (ASMs) an airplane-shell (samolet-snaryad), which pretty much summed it up. Initially crude and short-range, those ASMs still represented the threat to US Navy's assets which it never encountered before. Those assets could be hit from relatively afar not by real aircraft and required a very different approach to the defense of US Navy's most prized possessions--aircraft carriers. Here is a dilemma which US Navy faced: in good old times of naval gunnery (with the exception of tragic HMS Hood and Russian humiliation at Tsushimathe exchange between two adversaries was pretty straight-forward--they pummeled each-other with relatively inexpensive (when compared to the cost of some battleship or cruiser) shells until one of them was either sunk or quit but it was quite often after dealing a lot of damage to the victor. So, all in all, the side that lost could at least claim a good fight, granted that often victors, indeed, did require either serious repairs or, altogether, a withdrawal from the operation for a very long periods of time. ASMs changed all that on 21 October 1967 Then, of course, came Operation Trident with same good ol' P-15 Termites (NATO Styx) ASMs doing the trick on Pakistan's Navy ships and HQ in Karachi. The whole notion that several small 183-ton displacement ships carrying ASMs could wreck the havoc on the enemy came as a surprise to US Navy. Yet, US Navy still decided to stick to its carrier-centric template. USSR, on the other hand, continued to develop a whole line of ASMs, ranging from cumbersome P-6/P-35 (NATO Shaddock) to, later, first ever submarine launched ASMs P-70 Ametyst, later substituted with more advanced P-120 Malakhit (NATO SS-N-9 Siren). Here was a serious change in the paradigm. Consider this: the older, however powerful,  Shaddocks carried a ton of explosives to a distance of 450 km but they had one huge drawback since required Echo-class (Project 675) SSGNs to surface and remain surfaced for a significant periods of time to provide guidance to ASMs until they could be guided by TU-95RTz hanging near US Navy's CBGs. The chances of Echoes to survive this ordeal were, frankly, very modest. Once surfaced they could be relatively easy to detect, both visually and by radar, and to launch US Navy's first Harpoons, which, at that time were carried by P-3 Orion patrol (ASW) aircraft. Actually, this is how AGM-84 (also RGM and UGM) Harpoon came into existence, not least through efforts of Admiral Zumwalt, who headed  at that time the division of System Analysis. Here is what Zumwalt had to say:

 
As you can see, "carrier union" at that time was so confident (arrogant?) in the power of its wings that it didn't pay too much attention to some funny weapon such as ASM. Well, the reality, however, was not that bright. Here was a weapon which for a tiny fraction of cost of its carrier could badly damage or eliminate altogether US Navy's most prized and most expensive possession--an aircraft carrier. Here is a simple math: 

 The case of Echoes SSGNs

As was already stated, after the launch Echoes remained a sitting ducks for approximately half-an-hour, providing guidance to their missiles. Obviously the time varied with the distance of salvo or how close (or far) was one of the TU-95RTz. And here we can do some pretty simple modelling for, let's say, the range of salvo by Shaddocks of about 300 kilometers. This is by no means to make actual calculations but to merely give a very simplified impression of what went into considerations at the dawn of serious ASMs. The truth was that with Echoes the task of defending a CBG was a twofold:

a) to conduct a real ASW search of the area where submerged Echo or multiple Echoes could be;
b) to shoot down incoming Shaddocks and to detect and destroy surfaced Echo(es) in order to prevent either a second salvo of 4 Shaddocks or prevent a first 4 missile salvo altogether.   

If to consider the range of salvo to be 300 kilometers and to mentally freeze sailing CBG we get the circle with the radius of r=300 kilometers. Let's use good ole area of the circle formula and calculate what area should CBG's escorts and aviation cover (conduct search) to detect Echos
 


Not a small task, if to consider that this search area is about half the size of France. For now we we'll omit all those Detection Probabilities and Operational Sweeps but we, certainly, can easily calculate the time it is required for a single aircraft with, say, MAD (Magnetic Anomaly Detector) which is a corroborative but extremely important search sensor for submerged subs. To properly detect a sub, a patrol aircraft with MAD has to be pretty low (hundreds of meters) and with the range of MAD, say, R=2 kilometers we can easily calculate Sweep Width (W), which is:

                      W=2R=2 x 2 = 4 kilometers

Now it is time to calculate Sweep Rate (R) which is R=WV, where V is a speed of a patrol aircraft. Let's say that this aircraft has a speed near surface V=250 kilometers per hour. It will be a bumpy ride, but then again--patrol aviation lacks this glamour of fighter jets, yet it is this aviation which often carries out the most important mission.  So, the Sweep Rate (R) for this patrol aircraft will be: 

             R=WV= 4 x 240 = 960 square kilometers per hour

Here, using the formula of the time for search per specific area, we get:   

294 hours--not a pretty picture, to put it mildly, but, of course, in real life the issue is addressed by the increase of the number of patrol aircraft operating both from carrier and from nearest bases, organic to CBG attack subs also conduct their own sweeps, as well as the surface ships, thus increasing Sweep Rate dramatically. But this is as far as the submerged Echoes go. Once on the surface to launch this ever important Sweep Width (W), grows tremendously for patrol aviation since it can detect Echoes by visual and radar means. Radar changes equation and here we are talking Sweep Widths jumping into many tens of kilometers. Consider the range of patrol aircraft radar when detecting a surfaced Echo at the range of 50 kilometers, suddenly the equation changes for R, since on higher elevations patrol aircraft fly faster, say 400 kilometers per hour, and see much further:

    R=WV= 100 x 400 = 40,000 square kilometers per hour 

This is a totally different game. But it also shows what a dramatic, revolutionary really, change came about when first Ametysts, and, later, P-120 Malakhits started to be launched by new Project 670 (Charlie-class) SSGNs from the submerged position--this changed the game completely, but especially so when P-700 Granit (SS-N-21 Shipwreck) came online in early 1980s. Their operational range was 600+ kilometers and that made a Search Area a whopping 1,130,400 square kilometers. Even for mighty US Navy's CBGs of 1980s this was not an easy task, to put it mildly. But that is what makes Zumwalt such a remarkable naval thinker, he foresaw the coming of missile paradigm in 1960s and he knew, that the real fight for Sea Control, especially closer to the Soviet Navy's bases was impossible within old WWII carrier paradigm. Elmo Zumwalt was not "distastefully arrogant"....  


For those who want to get acquainted in general with some ASW and Search Theory issues, a superb presentation of a renown Professor Alan Washburn of Operations Research Department of US Naval Postgraduate School can be of help  


To be continued....