Remember, the longer the range of the missile, the more expensive each one is.
Roads Versus Railroads in Wartime
- Thread starter Aaron Fox
- Start date
Remember, the longer the range of the missile, the more expensive each one is.
Accuracy is still a far bigger driver of that cost than range. The obvious trick is to mix lots of unguided rockets with few similar but guided ones for cheap saturation attack, and that's mostly applicable to... heavy MLRS.
Depends on local infrastructure. Especially after the other team starts taking potshots at it and goarounds are necessary.
No one has enough to defend everything with them. Many have little to none of that at all.
Some. More than most. Which still is a small fraction of what would be necessary.
You would need them in numbers approaching WW2 era air defenses.
4 CRAAMS
And do they add up to even 1k units?
Railways can shunt troops and equipment more quickly and in greater quantity than roads can, simply on account of how much railway engines can lug along behind them. It's an easier target to be sure, but strategically vital all the same.
AnimalNoodles
Well-known member
The density of cargo transport is far greater with rail. You can literally move the equivalent of the entire military airlift capacity of the USA in a single train. If you have to supply 2-3 corps over a front of a thousand miles with supply lines stretching back a thousand miles, you aren't going to do it with trucks. You will use rails to pull it to a railhead, then distribute it to trucks to drive it where its needed.
The advantage the western powers have is that they typically use alot more trucks. This allows them to use depots further from the front than the Russians.
If you overlay the depots in Ukraine with all the big battles, you will see that most of these battles are fought over the railheads, and that the limit of Russian advances from these railhead is the max range of Russian trucks moving supplies from the railheads to the front.
The advantage the western powers have is that they typically use alot more trucks. This allows them to use depots further from the front than the Russians.
If you overlay the depots in Ukraine with all the big battles, you will see that most of these battles are fought over the railheads, and that the limit of Russian advances from these railhead is the max range of Russian trucks moving supplies from the railheads to the front.
Well, yeah, in the end it's all a money matter. If you can afford to have a shitload of trucks, you can rely on them more, transload from rail or ports further from frontline, if at all, and there are some advantages of that if you can afford that option. If you can't, you have to fight closer to railheads and rely on trucks less if you run low on trucks, but no army does that by choice, only necessity, because as Ukraine is showing, those railheads close to the frontline are a tempting target, especially when a train full of ammo is parked there.
Anyone who played Missile Command back in the 1980's knows that no matter how many you have, in the long run it's never enough.
Aaron Fox
Well-known member
That is based on missile interceptors only. The funny thing is that we're now deploying lasers that are literally cents on the dollar in terms of cost efficiency. This, however, is countered by the fact that we're now also looking to start expanding the production of various missiles and their components, as Ukraine is showing us that the stockpiles we had were nonviable, ala WWI.
Also, I wouldn't be surprised if next-gen ARMs are fitted with cluster munitions for warheads, given that IADS is showing to be extremely hard to take out otherwise when at least semi-competent.
The problem with "stockpiles" is that you might be heading for a world in which all of the stuff your side built last year is totally obsolete already. At least against the stuff the other side built more recently than that.
As for the second point: the Russians are already using MIRV weapons now - which is itself a form of "cluster munition".
"If a Jedi can stop a bullet with his lightsaber I'll just get him with a shotgun instead."
LordsFire
Internet Wizard
I'm curious what you base this on?
That problem applies to stockpiling missiles in general. Depending on technologies used, you need to send them back to factory to be practically rebuilt every 5 to 20 year (some simpler ones may last somewhat longer but that's not the kind we are talking about here), or their failure rates will start going up badly (real world examples abound even in NATO).
That's in addition to cases where the guidance, ECCM, sensors or other pricey electronic part like that becomes obsolete.
There's the point Marduk made - a lot of modern stuff does not last well in storage. Some things simply cannot be left in a box for a few years and expected to work fine when you take them out. Chemical explosives or fuels will slowly degrade, the electronics might rust a bit no matter how carefully they were stored, oils will evaporate or leak out, etc etc.
The second point - the one I had in mind there, was about advances in technology meanwhile. Take this example:
So the good news is that your nice radar guidance set survived storage just fine for 5 years. The bad news is that during those 5 years, the Russians learned how to jam that kind of system. So you will need to swap some of that out to upgrade it to the new version that's been hardened against that jamming. Well for now. Sooner or later, Ivan will have better jamming.
This sort of thing has happened before - there was a time in the 19th century when the science of battleship design was advancing so fast that by the time your new warship was built it would already be obsolete. Which meant that the only serious players in the navy power game were those nations that could build new battleships quickly and scrap or sell off old ones after only a short service life.
Sergeant Foley
Well-known member
Subscribed and following this discussion thread with very intriguing interest. Keep the good work!
Even a lot of "robust, old-fashioned" stuff does not last in storage. When the Iowa-class battleships were reactivated in the 1980s, the Navy found that while 90% of the armor-piercing 16" shells in storage were serviceable, only half of the high explosive 16" shells and none of the Mark 19 cluster munitions were serviceable (even though said cluster munitions only dated to the Vietnam War).