Documents / FOIA release
This Central Intelligence Agency Directorate of Intelligence assessment, dated January 1985, examines how Warsaw Pact air forces would support large strategic operations in Central Europe. It concludes that the Soviets see NATO air power as the greatest threat to a Pact ground offensive. They revised their air supremacy plans in 1980 and 1981 to use sector-concentrated raids and a defensive air operation. The assessment also finds that heavy aircraft losses and limited deep attack capability would remain serious problems. The document has no UFO content.
“Cooper”4 pages
Top 3cret make maximum use of low-altitude flight profiles " the responsibility for destroying NATO AWACS and electronic countermeasures (ECM) to avoid radar aircraft. The recently increased role of the ground detection. In some cases the attack aircraft would be forces artillery and missile forces in air defense given a fighter escort, and as much as one-third of the suppression may have reduced the participation of ground attack aircraft in the deep attack groups fighter-bombers in this group would be used to attack the point defenses in the areas of the primary targets The so-called strike echelon would follow minutes behind the support echelon and would be composed ofExecution Sequence. The Soviets settled on an opera- strategic aviation and naval bombers, about 20 per- tional plan for the individual massed air raids of the cent of the fighters, the rest of the front air force initial air operation during the mid-1970s that would fighter-bombers, front-subordinate light bombers, andcommit their air forces to battle in three successive most of the reconnaissance and ECM aircraft. The echelons (figure I1). We cannot be certain that their strike echelon would b: charged with destroying the employment concepts have remained unchanged, but primary targets in the operation (airfields, SSM we note that a similar overall scheme of two attack launchers, and aircraft carriers) and providing top echelons and one reserve echelon w a oslulatedilnihe cover and ECM support for the attack aircraft. massed air raids n c-mT-T9xTS concept o operations, tliafirst group was called the support echelon and The so-called third echelon (or reserve echelon) of thetypically consisted of about 40 percent of the fighters, massed air raid would contain the remaining 40 roughly half of the fighter-bombers, and some of the percent of the front-subordinate fighter-interceptors, ECM aircraft of the front air forces. Its mission which would be used to maintain air cover in thewould-be-to establish the penetration corridors penetration corridors and to guard the safe recovery through NATO's forward air defenses in cooperation of the first two echelons at the con Jusion of the with ground forces artillery and missile forces, destroy missio bout one-third of air defense command posts, conduct fighter sweeps the stra tegi aviation ngnter torce also has been used over NATO territory, and mine the runways and in the reserve echelon, rather than for escorting attackestablish fighter "blockades" over key NATO air- aircraft fields. The support echelon also probably would have Potential Problems. We believe the Soviets wouldrSove mitioary writings have shown a song find it extremely difficult to amass enough force topreference for conducting tijit opTeratons at "tow" (200 to 1,000 launch a TMO-wide air operation at the outset of warmeters) and "extremely low" (50 to 200 meters) attitudes during conventional operations to minimize hostile radar tracking and with high expeclt ions of a successful outcome shouldihNreby improve bomber survivabiliiy. Sovie writings credit France fight with NATO or the United States deployNATO's ground based radars with solid detection coverage againstsinfctrefoem tsoCnraEupe(emedium-altitude aircraft to a depth of 200 to 250 km inside the signifcant reinforcements to Central Europe (see GDR and Czechoslovakia and to a depth of 40 to 50 km against appendix C for our estimate of the Soviets' percep-tow-altitude aircraft. Soviet electronic warfare doctrine asserts that tions of the impact of reinforcements on the air 'NATO's air defense command and control system canbeneutral- ized if one-third of the facilities are destroyed bydirect attack and balance). The Soviets' perceptions of the air balance another third are effectively jammed. Soviet studies in the late are strongly influenced by their judgment that most1960s concluded that using low-altitude flight profiles can reduce Western aircraft enjoy a significant qualitative advan-the losses to the strike farce by a factor of three or four. The Soviets taeorcnem rrySvtairf.believe that the Nike SAMs can be avoided entirely by flying at tage over contemporary Soviet aircraft. altitudes of less than 1,500 meters. They also found that, in addition to using penetration corridors, losses to HAWK SAMs We believe that aircraft attrition rates substantiallycould be nearly cut in half by halving the interval between attack flights penetrating in trail (using a maximum interval of 10 seconds higher than the Soviets expect could force the cancel-between aircraft), and that losses to interceptors could be reduced lation of the initial air operation after only one or twoby 80 to 85 percent through the useof a combination of maneuver- ing, jamming, and chaff. The recent NATO deployments of F-15 lookdown/shootdown fighters and AWACS aircraft probabl have reduced the expected effectiveness of these techniques. 37
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FOIA release, from the cia-readingroom collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. 95 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.