Hunting the hunter

摘要

Some aspects of air power lend themselves more to the Wild West than modern 21st century warfare - one being the eternal competition between aircraft and surface-to-air missile (SAM) systems. While this could be viewed as a game of cat and mouse, where the roles can be quickly reversed, in practice it's just like the OK Corral, where the one who shoots and hits first wins. In the Arab-Israeli conflicts of the 1960s and 70s, and over the skies of Vietnam, a new paradigm of air warfare was taking place in which the odds of success started to become increasingly stacked in favour of more sophisticated SAM systems. Previously, anti-aircraft gun batteries or crude and ponderous surface-to-air missiles had a relatively low probability of kill against the more manoeuvrable fighter aircraft they sought to target. While it was an SA-2 Guideline that claimed Gary Powers' U-2 spyplane during a CIA mission over the Soviet Union in May 1960, it was the more capable and mobile SA-6 Gainful which began to tip the scales in favour of the defender. Now that passive measures - such as simply staying out of reach and avoiding an engagement zone - were becoming less effective, something else had to be done to maintain the edge.