The Serbian air campaign had nothing to do with high intensity warfare over a battlefield the likes of which the Central Front would have developed into.
NATO disagrees. The Serbian air defense campaign today is used as a textbook example of Soviet-style IADS successfully preserving a ground force under conditions of total enemy air superiority.
The ROEs for NATO restricted them to an almost ridiculous high minimum attack altitude, for example.
Maybe if you actually read my posts, you would have understood the implications of that:
Me said:
was in an atmosphere of minimal casualties of course (both for NATO for political reasons, and for the Serbs because they only had a few SA-3 batteries and couldn't afford to lose them), but it does provide an idea of how robust and annoying a handful of well handled SAMs can be. In this scenario NATO can't afford to be so squeamish, so they'll have to strike targets and suck up the losses, meaning attrition will be much heavier. Much heavier. With Soviet counter air and attrition from air defenses, we could expect NATO air losses to be in the double digit percentiles, which gives them about a week before they have to scale back/withdraw.
Not to mention the technology to conduct a campaign like Allied Force didn't
exist in the 1980's, so yeah, of course NATO's plans for a war in 1984 looked substantially different.
But Allied Force was 1999 NATO vs Serbia using 1960s Russian gear. And it didn't exactly prove a walkover for 1999. That isn't a ringing endorsement of 1985 NATO against the 1985 WarPac.
The locations of fixed SAMs beyond the Curtain were well known. They would have been toast very quickly. The thing with mobile SAMs is that while you are shuffling them around and playing hide and seek, they cannot do their job, which is shooting at enemy planes. So, mission kill. And lots of holes in the vaunted WP anti-air umbrella. BTW, chances are that when one does radiate, it eats an anti-radar missile.
Heh, such optimism that is completely unwarranted by actual historical examples. For instance: I once chatted with a NATO intelligence officer who recounted watching a video of an NATO strike package under SA-3 attack during a strike during Allied Force. As the plane the guncam footage was from (an RAF Tornado) evaded missile after missile, you could hear the escorting Hornets desperately trying to suppress the Serb SAM battery. He lost count after twenty "Magnum" calls*.
And they never did get the SA-3 battery.
Similarly, in Vietnam SEAD attacks against fixed SAM batteries frequently suffered heavy losses and rarely permanently knocked them out.
None of this inspires much confidence in the ability of NATO to degrade the vastly larger and more sophisticated Soviet air defenses rapidly enough to affect the ground battle.
*Of course, as he pointed out, that doesn't mean they actually fired more then 20 HARMs. NATO knew Serb SIGINT was listening in, so SEAD packages would sometimes make bogus "Magnum" calls on the radio when they were low on/out of missiles. Either way, they fired a lot of HARMs to no ultimate affect.
Directly over the battlefield, ALL NATO gunners on the ground were trained to go for enemy command tanks and AD vehicles before anything else. Unit cohesion and AA capabilities would have been degraded very, very quickly.
Which is all nice on exercise. But in the heat and confusion of battle with WP artillery falling all around you, Soviet tanks bearing down from your front and likely working around your flank, with disorienting explosions constantly assaulting your senses, and your buddies dying around you... you might not really have the luxury of being able to methodically prioritize your targets.
People also fail to appreciate just how much firepower systems like the MW-1 or MLRS were adding to NATO's arsenal. With stuff like that, NATO did have firepower at battalion level akin to small tacnukes that could take out whole formations in minutes.
Willful exaggeration. The MLRS's cluster munitions, while plenty devastating against light formations, have a hard time taking out heavy tanks like the late-model T-64/T-72s and T-80s the Soviets will be using. And the MW-1 requires a NATO strike aircraft coming in low and exposing themselves to heavy SAM and AAA fire. for a relatively extended period of time. This is ignoring, of course, that the Soviets had plenty of equivalent systems to turn against NATO...
Attack helicopters do not swoop in at a height that makes them easy prey for Ivan Ivanovich Flakgunner. They hide. They go NOE.
So basically, they fly in at a height that would make them easy prey if they wind-up flying over a Soviet AAA or SAM piece they didn't spot until it's too late.
