Passive protection of airfields

Hmmm....

Most of us have seen photos of blow up rubber or simple wooden decoys.

Perhaps the next war would be a war of decoy by the PLA...an aspect and capability perhaps many of us oversee and tend to underestimate.

Perhaps make rubber inflatable things to resemble aircraft, and wooden full sized models as well. From the air, because the pilot cannot really look at much detail from so high above, it would only confuse the pilot and make survivability of actual aircraft higher.

Decoy aircraft can mix with the real aircraft, or place these decoys actually in the open while the real aircraft are atleast moved to more sheltered positions.

Decoy aircraft kits should be made available in important PLAAF air bases. Snap kits or inflatables...assemble them in hangars (so surveillance cannot make obvious observations of PLAAF deploying decoy aircraft), then roll them out of the hangars in time of war. THis would confuse satellite recon for starters, making PLAAF seem to have more aircraft than they normally counted, and if the enemy did penetrate deep enough to strike, these decoys would multiply targets for the enemy to hit.

I mean, hell even a blow up hangar and blow up shelters, blow up AAA and inflatable rockets to resemble SAM, and wooden replicas of radar. That would give a hard time for the pilots attacking an airfield, might draw some fire power to attack air defence decoys, wasting the enemy's munitions and time.



Another thing...

Back in D-day invasion, they made extensive use of blimps to cover the invasion...and correct me if im wrong, but was that for adding large obstacles in the sky in case the enemy flew over?

If they employ such defences for air fields, then it would seriously be a hazard for any low flying attacker, as he would have to avoid these obstacles, munitions and jet engines may get caught in these obstacles...and coz low flying aircraft have to make a pass over the run way to achieve good hits, these obstacles will serve to make this task harder.

Disadvantage of course is that PLAAF's own air defences would have a hard time targetting enemy aircraft without destroying their own blimps, and PLAAF aircraft wont be able to take off (but i spose in an era of jets, any attack on the run way by fast attackers would make any takeoff by your own aircraft almost an impossible risk).

I'm not sure what affects things have to flying jets...i mean, a huge flock of sparrows, or a large swarm of flying insects. Or even releasing a swarm of balloons...i am not sure how well these may act as defences. How about making an active defence system which fires rockets or grenades upwards which when explodes...creates this smoke screen to cover the runway or parked aircraft....or even, some kind of soot/ash that may potentially get sucked into the enemy's jet engines if they flew at low altitude, that is ejected by grenade/rocket...yet it won't pose too much of a threat to PLAAF aircraft, coz it would be blown away only hours after the attack.

It seems like the focus of the discussion has been on passive defenses against bombing and missile attacks. But what about passive defenses against specops sabotage or helicopter gunship attacks? There must be some rules of thumb on base design regarding these types of threats...

I guess shelters would help in these cases too.

Finn McCool said:

I was looking at Taiwanese airbases on Google Earth and I found their level of protection to vary. At one I saw 9 of what appeared to be Chung-Kuo Indigenous Fighters (or whatever those are called) simply sitting in a giant concrete parking lot.

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Of course I can't be sure, but I have seen some pictures of F-5s that were "modified" to look like IDFs, casually parked around an airbase. Could that be what you saw?

MIGleader said:

Why do Chinese airfeilds need passive protectiogn anyways? Due to radar coverage, it is impossible for taiwanese fighters to launch a sneak attack.The active defences in place right now, as well as future ones, are mroe thna enough.

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Isn't there a potential threat from the Taiwanese HF-2E cruise missiles if they get enough of them in service?

FuManChu said:

Of course I can't be sure, but I have seen some pictures of F-5s that were "modified" to look like IDFs, casually parked around an airbase. Could that be what you saw?

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And here they are... the pics of the "IDFs", that is. Dunno that's what he saw, though.

While sure better than nothing, inflated and wooden decoys have their problems. Firstly, i am not sure that us optical spy satellites don't have enough of resolution to tell an inflated plane with its blunt edges and so on, over one made out of hard material. I guess one could make a relatively faithful inflated decoy too but itd have to have a fair amount of support structure or even parts made out of different materials.

While effective agaisnt optical satellites, wooden decoys, just as inflated ones, may still be identified as decoys by synthetic aperture radars which give a 3D image of the surveyed area and can be sensitive enough to know if a plane's radar return matches the expected one or is closer to one made out of wood/plastic/other cheaper materials. Then there are ground penetrating radars which may or may not be even good enough to tell what's underneath each reinforced shelter, let alone a metal box. Though wet soils, other electroconductive materials like metal and even simple foilage do lower their penetration ability.

Still, best bet is to stay mobile, hence the wheels on the box shelter. US does have a limited number of satellites, especially ground penetrating ones.

As for the various shaped camouflaged boxes proposal, while good and certainly has its benefits, it would also work mostly against optical satellites, not SAR ones. After all, we're talking about 20*20 m big objects, even bigger if you wanna add various shapes to them. Not exactly hard to spot. Plus non standardized model that comes in many shapes would add to price and lower availability.

Totoro said:

As for the various shaped camouflaged boxes proposal, while good and certainly has its benefits, it would also work mostly against optical satellites, not SAR ones. After all, we're talking about 20*20 m big objects, even bigger if you wanna add various shapes to them. Not exactly hard to spot. Plus non standardized model that comes in many shapes would add to price and lower availability.

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Aren't decoys against recon sats very similar to movie props?

Why not just out source to a commercial movie prop manufacturer. Just come up with a design with enough sophisticated in materials that it can fool even a SAR or ground penetrating radar. [Like maybe use plastic with a layer of cheap metal or something.]

Totoro said:

While effective agaisnt optical satellites, wooden decoys, just as inflated ones, may still be identified as decoys by synthetic aperture radars which give a 3D image of the surveyed area and can be sensitive enough to know if a plane's radar return matches the expected one or is closer to one made out of wood/plastic/other cheaper materials. Then there are ground penetrating radars which may or may not be even good enough to tell what's underneath each reinforced shelter, let alone a metal box. Though wet soils, other electroconductive materials like metal and even simple foilage do lower their penetration ability.

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The point of most defenses isn't to make something invulnerable, but to make it more difficult to attack, requiring more resources (SAR sats, more analysis by humans or computers), opportunity cost (resources could have been spent elsewhere), and involving more risk (more passes/sorties to get positive identification, get close enough to use sensors). If the decoys achieve these, they would have been successful, since they're probably incredibly cheap.