Quote:
Originally Posted by Raellus
I hear you. Again, i am playing devil's advocate. Why stop now?
Russia eventually reconquered Chechnya. I've written entire essays on how the Iraqi and Soviet armies are not synonymous earlier in this thread so if your curious, you know where to look.
We've also seen M1 tanks taken out by RPG-7s in Iraq and an F-117 shot down over Serbia by an SA-3 SAM so...
Out of curiosity, since you strongly believe that the Soviet Union was no match for NATO from the mid-1980s through... today, why are you a T2k fan, given its central premise and all?
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I was just discussing that Nighthawk shoot-down elsewhere, so the amazing circumstances surrounding it are still relatively fresh in my memory:
There were a bunch of mistakes on the American side that made the shootdown easier.
The airfield was being spied on by Serbs who were transmitting information back to the military about what was flying and when. Allegedly there was also a mole somewhere in Italy with access to operational information sending that to the Serbs as well.
On the night of the shootdown, weather had grounded the EA-6B Prowlers that had been escorting F-117s with radar jammers and HARM missiles to counter SAM batteries.
The Nighthawks were using the same ingress and egress routes they had used before, making them predictable.
The SAM battery had been told where to emplace to be able to engage the Nighthawks. This battery had previously tried to engage twice without being able to lock on to an aircraft.
The low frequency radar spotted the flight at a range of 15 miles (the normal range against a fighter was 200 miles). The tracking radar never saw the aircraft, and at first the guidance radar didn't either. They had been directed to only do short periods with the radar on to avoid getting a HARM fired at them, but since the battery CO had been told the Prowlers weren't firing, he lit off the guidance radar a second time.
By coincidence, that happened at the same time that one of the Nighthawks was dropping a bomb, and the radar saw the inside of the bomb bay at a range of 5 miles (normal range 50 miles). A pair of SA-3 were fired. Neither achieved a direct hit and the first detonated too far away to cause damage, but the second one detonated close enough to the Nighthawk to cause damage that led to its crash. The guidance radar never saw the other two Nighthawks that weren't open while it was emitting.
So yes, an SA-3 shot down an F-117, but it took a rather remarkable string of actions to get there - the air defense knew where the aircraft would be, when they would be arriving, may have known what the targets that night were, knew there was no SEAD escort, took advantage of that knowledge to make a second try that would have likely gotten them killed if there was a SEAD escort, and got lucky with the timing on the second try.
It ended up being a combination of complacency on the American side, good intelligence work and a gutsy battery commander on the Serb side, and a dollop of luck on top that allowed that shootdown to happen.