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| Tu-22M Backfire bomber (Wiki Info - Image: Wiki Commons) |
By Robert Farley
The Soviet Union’s experience with A2/AD against the U.S. Navy carries important lessons for Beijing.
A2/AD is not new.
This statement is true in the broadest possible sense — the Carthaginians took elaborate and effective steps to hold Roman fleets at bay, for example — but also in the much narrower sense of the modern military problems associated with protecting and defeating a carrier battle group. A recent set of posts at the maritime blog Information Dissemination, building on information revealed in a 2014 Naval War College Reviewarticle, highlights the ongoing dilemmas of the anti-access fight.
The Tu-22M Backfire bomber entered service in 1972, with the Soviets eventually producing almost 500 aircraft. Theories about the plane abounded (some argued that it represented the USSR’s most serious foray into a strategic nuclear bomber force), but eventually it became clear that the most important use for the bomber would come as a maritime strike aircraft. The Backfire gave the Soviet Navy a supersonic aircraft that it could use in mass to fire anti-surface missiles against U.S. carrier battle groups.
Developing the weapons that could kill, and the bombers to carry those weapons, was only part of the problem, however. The article and the commentaries on it concentrate on the critical issues of locating and correctly identifying targets. Vectoring a massive flight of Backfire bombers onto a carrier group was an enormously expensive undertaking, both in terms of opportunity cost and in likely casualties. The Soviets had to make certain where the carriers were in operational terms, and that their missile would find the carriers themselves instead of decoy vessels. The Soviets had access to some satellite data, but largely depended on surface ships and pathfinder aircraft to communicate locations and dispositions.
Read the full story at The Diplomat