The United Kingdom has organized a simulation of a Russian attack to see pressure on its air defenses if the invasion of Ukraine had rather targeted in the United Kingdom, said a senior Air Force.
The result “was not a nice image,” said Air Commodore Blythe Craw on Thursday at a Royal United Services Institute conference in London.
Using Gladiator, a 24 million pound simulation system Sterling ($ 32 million), the United Kingdom Air Battle Espace Training Center instructed “Night 1 of Ukraine” – February 24, 2022 – and watched it play against the United Kingdom, according to Crawford, the former Center commander.
He did not detail the exact results of the simulation, which took place in 2022, but it is understood that the air defenses of the United Kingdom were raped.
Simulation was an austere lesson, said Crawford.
“We have stood for years at the western end of Europe which felt as if the rest of the continent was held between us and the enemy,” he told those who present.
But “Ukraine made us all sit down and that led part of the work we did in the Warfare Center to get the way we solve a problem like this if a similar scenario was opposed to the United Kingdom.”
Russia hit Ukraine with missiles during the opening salvo of its large -scale invasion.
The United Kingdom has improved its air defenses since 2022 and has used an approach that has incorporated planes, ships and land systems-an essential network to overcome any attempt at land invasion in the United Kingdom.
There are also notable differences between the way Russia attacked Ukraine and how it could challenge the air defenses of the United Kingdom, and – since the missiles launched on the soil European airspace – if Russia attacked the United Kingdom, it could choose to mobilize its northern fleet and launch an attack on the Atlantic.
Crawford has also said that “in the past three years, the scenario has become much more complex, in terms of types of systems that we must be able to counter, but also the mass.”
“When you see swarms of hundreds of drones operating now in Ukraine, some of them, some of them with ammunition on board, the challenge is how to approach them all or do you all attack them all?” He added. “This is a challenge that we have through the west.”
Crawford has described Ukraine as an alarm clock, “where you have two countries with very competent integrated air defense systems that compete, neither of the two parties reaching no form of air superiority, which has been an cornerstone of air operations for decades.”
He added that it had been made more complex by the rise of drones and autonomy, where you can have “swarms of several hundred ammunition – not only drones but combined with rockets and ICBM, at all levels and in all spheres.”
The concept of air superiority has changed considerably, he said. “We have tended to consider it as on the theater scale and something that you have achieved over time. Now we see the superiority of the air to be from the trench to the trench and from zero to 50 feet, rather than being necessarily something that is done through the theater.”
Although the attack on the United Kingdom that Crawford has described was only a simulation, he said that Western countries should learn from what is happening in Ukraine and cannot assume that their original bases are safe.
“In recent decades, we, in the United Kingdom, we have focused on the security of the garrison and the hypotheses that we are safe to operate from the host base because most of the wars we fight have been abroad. We must reverse this thought and suppose that, from here, we are now threatened in the host base.”
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