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Would even a conventional war between NATO and Russia really be decided by artillery shell production rates?
It'd matter quite a bit.
Maybe 20-30%. Shells are very hard to intercept and potent, when aimed properly. Artillery caused like 50% of casualties when used with ground spotting with line of sight or plane directed. (was nowhere near universal, iirc only Americans did it)
Missile systems like HIMARS and Smerch and Tornado allow hitting targets up to 100 km in. Tactical missiles, for which Russia is characteristically making with huge warheads of up to 800 kg, [can accurately hit targets at 400 km.] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9K720_Iskander#Iskander-M). Unless you can prevent enemy from sneaking drones all over your airspace, there's no such thing as a 'front line'. There's just a region of pain where the slightest mistake can result in getting the equivalent of a 3-4 ton bomb falling at you with a 1-2 minute warning. Fuel-air explosives are more potent than high explosives.
But what about the NATO air forces? Well, even if missiles strikes disabling airbases are avoided, the expectation is reducing air defense to allow combat missions that aren't suicidal would take weeks to months. Yeah, you could whittle that down fast if you had thousands of AI-guided small drones outranging big SAMs ready to go, but NATO doesn't have that. And i've seen no indication they want to procure such. What's going on is they're buying Israeli 'stand-off' munitions at outrageous cost (something like $500k per one drone). That's probably, not gonna cut it unless cost goes down by a factor of 10-50x.
Modern war is just a whole different beast than what it used to be.
Let's remember that western military doesn't have a stealthy drone with ~100 km range and hours of loiter capacity per each howitzer. Even though it very well could. At some point, we're going to get a whole ecosystem of autonomous drones patrolling the airspace to prevent enemy recon, laser dazzlers to prevent satellite recon. But we're not there. Even if SV won over the MIC and started making these air-defense drones in bulk, it'd take 5 years to build up enough to matter for NATO. And they won't win. Billions in stock valuations are at stake here!
More important stuff:
-anti-aircraft missile production (US Patriot production is expected to go up to 600 a year. A year!). I've never seen figures on Russia but they seem well aware of the utility so it was likely a lot higher.
US has nothing like the Pantsir system, which is designed to be economical, with cheap, high performance missiles. No expensive seeker, basically a fast missile guided by impossible to jam commands from the radar and a proximity fuze).
-whether stealth actually works (unclear. You can detect stealth aircraft using bounces to places other than the radar, so called 'multilateration. With satellite comms, you don't even need to set up microwave relays between these sites.)
-degree of dysfunction in western militaries. Oppressing sand people doesn't translate well to contending with an enemy who can't wait but put a small, tiny drone above your unit and blow your entire headquarters section up with a 300mm missile. (Himars, Tornado-U?, beats me what Chinese call theirs). You need completely different tactics, weapons to kill and detect small drones etc. Winning at such a conflict would be hard even if you had an infinite budget and enough competent, serious people.
-whether China gets involved (imo a certainty, China allowing Russia to fall due to a lost conventional war would put more enemy bases on their borders. And allow yanks to embargo them almost totally on gas and oil).
I am certain no one here has ever actually used a fucking FCR or even a operated a boat with a commercial nav radar. All this 'stealth doesn't work' smugposting to portend the sheer stupidity of NATO in developing a white elephant fails to consider the corpus of historical evidence for low observable UCAVs in penetrating contested environments, not to mention literally every Red Flag exercise seeing F35s curbstomp 4.5G unless things are stacked specifically against the F35. Stealth aircraft are incredibly difficult to detect much less differentiate from atmospheric pickup, and not even 2010s tech is able to do variable gain adjustment and track reacquisition. Every nation is either looking to buy or indigenously develop 5G+ stealth planes because right off the bat stealth strangles your opponents aerial inventory and capability. No CAP, CAS or ISR if you can never confirm if even your own airspace is clear and if you lose automatically lose any contest. Ground Based Air Defense spam is cope when GBAD all requires a first track to be established by a radar station and thus is itself subject to the 'contested' matrix outlined above.
This doesnt change (much) the points raised about drones and artillery spam, but that might require a seperate effortpost. Suffice to say, artillery now has to include a wider variety of counter battery threat vectors and drones... well let me just say I am really excited for sci fi lasers to finally manifest in reality.
Carriers are also obsolete against peer forces who are just going to launch a hundred supersonic missiles at them a salvo of strategic air above to give planes something to dodge & overwhelm point defense and simply sink them.
That doesn't prevent them being useful against people who don't have hundreds of good ASMs on hand. That's why Chinese are building two.
If you can make a plane stealthy at a reasonable cost, it's still worth it, because it's going to make it a harder target against simple radar systems.
Multilateration aside which is kinda not talked about much but probably works...
You ever heard of IR sensors ? Yeah, sure, you say you can hide a MW level heat source against the cold sky. No, you can't. Even Yuropoor systems like the Eurofighter have IRST that detects planes up to 50 km from the front.. You think China's unable to manufacture similar sensors and stick one on a high pole in every square 100 kms and connect them by fibre? You think unless there's total overcast, a stealth plane with a 3 MW engine on cruise can just waltz through ?
Detecting IR is 1980s technology. Most air defence now comes with it. America is refitting such on its older warplanes.
Stealth works against countries with bad equipment. That doesn't mean it's going to work against a sophisticated enemy.
Point to how good multilateration is vs stealth please. At that sensitivity you're making your radar pick up every passing sparrow. Good luck differentiating one gain, much less three. IRST still has a very wide performance band, always better for confirmation than for acquisition. IR has an issue where it is rear-facing optimized against jets since the heat of an engine comes from the rear (engine motors on helos are all hot which is why SHORAD will never go out of style) and is constant, unlike forward facing thermal profiles which continually deform based on angle and scatter. Stealth is also not just radar signature reduction, it is also thermal emissivity absorbing, which is why all stealth planes have that darker shade - absorbs more thermal energy and thus reflects less thermal energy. Also, thermal has notably stupid performance when things like cloud reflected scatter (same as radar), so a web (can't be a ring, you can just punch a hole) of IR sensors must still be complemented by multiple stations to increase gain probability. Nevertheless, once a decision is made to launch GBAD in a not so vague direction where a hostile aircraft is incoming, IR does render stealth null. Modern IRH is stupid hard to soft counter inside the kill envelope, so if the adversary is ok with just wasting dozens of missiles in the vague air then yeah stealth totally is a meme - but so is basically any type of air mission if the enemy just throws dozens of missiles at every passing (literal) bird.
You want me to give you the kind of data that'd get you into ADX Florence or whatever its Chinese equivalent is ?
I think people are just full of shit. And when there's billions at stake, the incentive to deny and lie and hope it somehow works out gets irresistible.
Americans pointedly refused to even sell Turkey their F-35s because they apparently don't want it tested against it in a real environment.
https://www.janes.com/defence-news/news-detail/us-turkey-continue-talks-to-settle-f-35-dispute
S-400 doesn't phone home, no military system can afford to, so it's obviously they didn't want the problem where Turkish air defence troops find out just how good F-35 is. There's little justification for it. They just want to delay the inevitable.
Of course not. This is a nerd forum, not warthunder. If you have secret info so damning to stealth, then so be it, rest easy that when the balloon floats you'll be vindicated, unlike literally every nation scrambling over themselves to buy F35s or develop the Su57 or J31 or Qahar. I prefer to err on the side of the wisdom of crowds and see 'past winners' continuing to buy 'winning' tech. Lazy and reductive, but its not like the history disfavors it. There is one exception to this historical trend though, and its super fun!
Of course this cuts both ways: S400 and Pantsir sellers also have every incentive to tout their stealth killing capability, which kind of is odd if stealth is so useless that 'multilateral' stations and a ring of IRST can easily counter this non-threat. Do note that the multirole/air superiority sales sector does not advertise their offerings as 'better than F35' but instead 'we can fulfill your order books faster and meanie LockMart doesn't want to sell F35 to you' for expensive multiroles (F15EX, Gripen, Typhoon, Rafale) or 'you are poor and we are cheap' (TA-50, Tejas, JF17). Whether this thesis is rooted in smart purchasing decisions avoiding a politically loaded white elephant or a reflection of limited political/financial bargaining power is an exercise in relative value assignment.
Finally, re Turkey... I respect your hypothesis that S400 tested against F35 would show the folly of stealth against superior GBAD and the USA is being spiteful bitches for Turkey going behind NATOs back, but do consider that Turkey has always been an ally of last resort in the geopolitical chessboard which is the Near East. Erdogan has made no secret of his disdain for the West, and with that comes an adjusted calculus on whether that asset owner will respect the interests of the manufacturer - a very different and significantly more interesting discussion could be had on whether F35 unified maintenance system and capabilities are the REAL octopus of the US DoD ensnaring lesser states in its wake, but again that may require a seperate effortpost.
In any case S400 has been directly used by Russia in Syria already, which is right next to Israel which has had F35s in the air since 201?, so the live data aspect should already be known to them (and, for our sake as internet shitposters, not us).
I mean...do you? Look at WW2. Past winners prepared for a trench war. Especially in wars, looking at what used to win is just weird. There's been no good environment to establish what actually works and what doesn't.
As I understand it, NATO doctrine is really not well prepared for what's going on in Ukraine
Russia is not firing them at Israeli war planes. Don't know what the etiquette is at locking targeting radars on IAF, but I imagine it's also not done there for obvious reasons (in a war zone, the logical thing is for someone to fire an anti-radiation missile the other way) so Israelis in F-35s wouldn't know if they're being acquired.
Later I thought of another reason for it : trying to pressure arm Turkey into buying Patriots or other NATO system. Looks like it's much more complicated:
https://warontherocks.com/2019/07/the-tale-of-turkey-and-the-patriots/
Turkey has been trying to build Patriots, but wanted some technology transfer to occur. Americans said no, won't let an ally license . So then they threatened to buy Chinese SAMs. Eventually bought the S-400.
I don't mean what people used to win, I mean look at what past winners are doing now. I would trust the Iranians over the Iraqis over what sort of capability is the right trend to go for winning in the region, just as I would trust the Taliban over the ANA. Similarly, I would trust NATO over Warsaw Pact, or Israel over Egypt, on who is likely to have a clearer head on what is more likely to work. I would also point out that this calculus changes rapidly, and we do see that with NATO suddenly trying - and failing - to rediscover the love of 155mm artillery.
With regards to aerial operations, this statement simply is not true. Since Vietnam, we have not seen a single instance of air supremacy being countered by GBAD, with Mole Cricket 19 and Gulf War 1 showing how a full spectrum multi layer GBAD network can be curbstomped by the threat they are supposed to be the hard counter towards, and thats against Phantoms and F15s that have the RCS of a bus. Meritorious arguments about whether those were 'anomalies', such as what Kenneth Pollack does in 'Armies of sand' when he cites specific cultural into organizational into C&C failures of Arabs as specific reasons why those systems failed have been made, so it is up to us to decide whether 'near peers' like the Chinese or Russians are necessarily up to scratch - current Ukraine would point to that not being the case, with most casualties for the UAF being the caused by the excellent Mig-31 mounted R37 air launched missile. I would also point out that many countries in the NATO sphere have their own Air Defense Artillery - specifically Patriot and their own ADA testing, even in adverse conditions, has lead them to conclude that buying into the F35 is still a good decision. I would like to imagine comically large sacks of money changing hands as a smug lockmart exec combs his hair to the WSB dicaprio slickback, but that still means their internal papers have concluded it is better to purchase F35 even though other companies are knocking at the door with their own comically large kickbacks - the last major western aerial purchase scandal was Dassault in the 90s to my recollection, but there has been plenty of investigations launched with no firm conclusion since then.
So your thesis is both 'S400 is so good that it can detect the Israelis without them noticing' and 'Russia is polite so they won't try to acquire the S400 because otherwise its a shooting match'. This literally is the opposite of how routine flight operations are conducted - terrestrial radar - even normal airport tower - stations ALWAYS paint aircraft in neighbouring countries without issue so long as the airspace integrity isn't violated (see Turkey shooting down Russian jets the moment they crossed the border back in 2015 - the Russians were tracked long before they actually physically crossed). My point is that the Russians own presence in Syria allow the capabilities of the S400 in establishing a track on the F35 can be done without needing Turkey to act as the backdoor to upend the Secrets Of Stealth. There are plenty of other reasons for the S400 vs F35 spat that don't hinge on LockMart being nervous that F35 will be exposed for the failure it is.
Ultimately, I feel it is instructive to see the direction of where countries are focusing their efforts on in countering a modern aerial threat environment. More SHORAD solutions against drones, more natively integrated AESA inside stealthy aerial platforms, less dedicated ADA ground stations. Even India has demurred against exercising the option for purchasing the last remaining S400 units, and the Indians are the only major air force with a positive operational history that have not bet big on stealth as their air dominance capability. S400 certainly has its advantages, but it has not been assessed to be the stealth killer by the people actually making the decision to buy the damn things.
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