Anti air umbrella in middle east

[KevinRanger95]

I was wondering, during the six day war and the Yom Kippur war, how effectve was the the anti air capabilities of the countries that the Isrealies had to fight? I know that they air superiority!

[kevin]

SAMs were able to deny Israeli air superiority in the first couple days. Note this is not the same as having air superiority themselves, the sky was a no-man's land. There are two different reasons this changes.

On the Golan front, the Syrians just plain ran out of SA-6 missles. The SA-6 didn't set-off Israeli EWR and were smokeless. They didn't have enough of them. After SA-6 ran-out, Israel had no trouble neutralizing SA-2's.

The Sinai was different due to Egyptian tactics. (Brief History Lesson) Israel figured Egpyt would try to take the entire Sinai Peninsula. So they deployed their armored forces back, with the intent of counter-attacking. Egypt bamboozled them. They decided to only take the canal a few miles and then stop and dig-in. They had an advanced, fixed SAM shield. Of course the initial Israeli counter-attacks were uncoordinated, CAS was destroyed, no arty, the tank brigades ran into a wall of armor and ATGM.

Just when everything was going great, Egpyt screwed up. Syria was getting its *** kicked so they pressured Egpyt to open up the southern front. They also faced political pressure from the Soviets to gain results. (The Soviets also wanted to observe mobile ATGM tacctics.) Egpyt launched armored attacks that just plain out ran the range of their SAM system. This was the battle of maneuver that Israel wanted and, with their excellent small unit leadership capability, just tore up Egpyt.

[PlasmaKrab]

The Israeli air force (Heyl Ha'avir) had an overwhelming air-to-air edge (five to one kills IIRC) but were effectively denied ground support flights by the Soviet-made SAMs and AAGs.

That was admittedly largely due to overwhelming quantity.
Basically they were denied higher altitudes by the SA-6, SA-4 and SA-3 systems, and had to fly so low that the ZSU-23/4 were able to take them out.

The fact that they crash-designed ground-launched ARMs tell you how desperate the situation was...

IIRC the SA-6s and ZSU23s took the heaviest toll, but basically there was nothing better on the Eastern side at the time.

[KevinRanger95]

So they relied more on SP-AA and AA more than they did on SAMs. Now in this time in history did anyone have anything like HARMs or any of the such?
I really like the Camp in the game, but I would like to make one just alittle longer.
In the game, the loadouts for the sams, would it be to many for the Camp, like in real they had a launcher that held 3 missiles, would the Egyptians only have 2?
And about how many ZSU SP's would there have been?

[PlasmaKrab]

So they relied more on SP-AA and AA more than they did on SAMs.

Not what I meant. Both systems SA-6 and ZSU23 complemented each other perfeclty on this terrain. And pilots knew that they could avoid missiles by flying low enough, and that they were less likely to get downed instantly from a 23mm burst than from a Kub missile (59kg warhead!)

Now in this time in history did anyone have anything like HARMs or any of the such?

The Israeli had, mostly first-generation Shrikes, which they felt they were not reliable enough to risk aircrafts on. That is why, as I told you, the Israeli mounted some on Sherman beds to launch from the ground.

In the game, the loadouts for the sams, would it be to many for the Camp, like in real they had a launcher that held 3 missiles, would the Egyptians only have 2?

In the end battles maybe, else more likely many Israeli aircrafts and no ammo reload for the SAMs.

And about how many ZSU SP's would there have been?

Anyone got a figure about that? I would hazard to say about one platoon per ground forces battalion r equivalent, probably more.

[KevinRanger95]

Wow, when I thought that I had heard of everything, shrikes on shermans,got any pics of that? How reliable were they? Did the Egyptian's catch on when they were being engaged by the shrikes that the shermans fired and did they shut down their radars when they were fired on?
How many is in thier platoon?

[kevin]

The Egyptians didn't have to catch onto anything. When they decided to resume the offensive, their armor forces went outside their SAM coverage. Israeli pilots could hunt advancing Egyptian armor with little threat. Their Air Defense system was largely fixed, while the Syrians were mobile.

After the first day, the Syrians had advanced to forward airbases and could practically start firing SAMs before the Israeli Aircraft could form up and figure out what was going on.

[PlasmaKrab]

For ground-fired ARMs:

http://www.israeli-weapons.com/weapons/vehicles/self_propelled_artillery/kilshon/Kilshon.html

Could be easily modellable, apparently Listy managed to get one working, as a MRL firing ARMs. Sounds tricky, but well...

[KevinRanger95]

thats cool, I don't know how ARMs work, but by the looks of the pics on the website, look like they tried real hard to come up with a good plan.
I think I got a good hold on how to set this camp up. I really do want to thank all of you for the help, if you all can send any websites links that might help it would be appreciated, thanks again!!!!!!!!!!!