The MiG-25 is a big, clumsy, stupid beast,…and I love every square inch of it.

MiG-31, essentially the same aircraft, but remade with titanium, aluminum, and modern avionics, is a vast improvement, and a potent combat aircraft, but it lacks the gothic appeal of its dim witted progenitor.

The Foxbat, is a monstrous, stainless steel locomotive with wings. In a suicide dash, (it tends to run out of fuel when pushed to maximum speed, but if you make it back to the barn, it’ll need two new engines*) it is close to the SR-71 in speed**.

Of course, in all it’s muscle bound majesty, it is after all just a very, crude, mutated knock-off, of one of the most beautiful fighters of all time, the ill fated Avro Canada CF-105 Arrow (But that’s another show)

Western estimates of the Foxbat’s potential, based on its rumored titanium construction, and enormous plan form, hinted at a frightening level of aerodynamic performance.

That anticipated performance, shaped, and even supercharged the development of what we now know as the F-15 Eagle, and to a degree, the other Legacy Fighters, F-14, F-16, F/A-18. The USAF needed a Foxbat killer, and the superbly maneuverable Eagle, (which you may notice, is shaped a lot like a MiG-25) had a fighting chance.

Then, literally out of the blue, on September 6, 1976, a young Lieutenant, Victor Belenko, a pilot with the 513th Fighter Regiment, 11th Air Army, Soviet Air Defence Forces based in Chuguyevka, Primorsky Krai, landed his MiG-25 in Hakodate, Japan. He climbed out, handed over the keys, and walked into history.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but I’ve heard this Foxbat was in such disrepair, it had rusty, non-stainless sheet metal patches on its skin. We got our hands on a real MiG-25, for a very brief period, and learned that the F-15 would enjoy unparalleled air dominance. Well,…at least until the Boys at Mikoyan-Gurevich, unleashed the MiG-29 Fulcrum, just three years later. Clearly derivative of the F-15, (and F-16) the Fulcrum is the best MiG ever made, and a very formidable fighter, even now***.

To be fair, I wouldn’t be too hard on the Soviets for continuing development of the MiG-25.

How would they know, for certain, that the XB-70, and the concept of high altitude mach 3 penetrators was really abandoned by the USAF?

*On the other hand, it stood a very good chance of intercepting XB-70’s, which would make the sacrifice worthwhile.

**Yeah, but how fast can the SR-71 really go?

***Note: MiG-35’s are just highly evolved MiG-29’s

I’ll give you an example from the other sides’s point of view, perhaps that might be ideologically more acceptable to you.

When the USA started developing supersonic bombers, like the B70 Valkyrie, the USSR realized it needed a counter to them. The MIG 25 Foxbat was the result. A big, expensive plane that could fly very high and very fast and shoot them down. The plane never did work out, it had the performance, but it had technical problems and was difficult to integrate into the USSRs air defense system effectively. But the decision was made to build them anyway. People’s careers were dependent on this weapon system. A massive infrastructure to support it was coming on line.

Then the Americans canceled the B70 program, and their other supersonic bomber, the B1 Lancer, was reconfigured into a different role as a low altitude, subsonic, terrain following penetrator. Our operational supersonic strategic bomber, the B58 Hustler, was decommissioned. Suddenly, the Russian Foxbat became a plane without a mission. It had no targets to shoot at.

Unfortunately, the Foxbat still had a constituency. Factories had been built to produce it, crews trained to maintain and operate it, special bases built to fly it from. A lot of promises had been made and money and resources had been lavished on its development, and other, important systems starved to rush it into production. They couldn’t just cancel it! So the Russians continued cranking them out, while attempting to hastily shoehorn them into other ludicrous missions, like long range naval reconnaissance, air superiority fighter, and selling them to their allies, like the Iraqis, who were too dumb to know they didn’t need them and couldn’t use them. And of course, the Foxbat was such a technical triumph, the Comrade Generals just couldn’t bear to part with it. Who says warriors don’t have a sentimental side?

Economic and political, and even personal factors tend to overshadow purely military decisions. The idea of using submarine launched ballistic missiles to knock out Russian air defense sites so our bombers could get to their targets
came from two separate sources: the US Air Force was afraid that their bombers were becoming obsolete because of improvements in Soviet air defenses, and the US Navy was fishing for major upgrades to the sub force. The solution, to work together so they could both keep their funding. The idea that the submarines could have knocked out the targets the bombers were aiming at was conveniently forgotten. I guess you could call it inter-service cooperation! And the idea of using our last line of defense, our most secure weapons (SLBMs) in the opening stages of a war, instead of at the end, which as you pointed out makes the most sense, took a back seat to other, more administrative concerns. Fortunately, this idea was never implemented, but the fact it was even considered is a sobering thought.

This is not an ideological comment. It is a meditation on the behavior of all large organizations and the careerists that toil in them, and my examples have been military ones, from the US, the Soviet Union, and Nazi Germany. It has nothing to do with my political preferences, it has to do with the annoying propensity of military men (as well as politicians, government bureaucrats, technical management and business executives) to sometimes pick their careers over their duty. Or perhaps I could be more charitable and simply say their stake in the program may tend to subconsciously color their judgement.

Or I could bring up how a company I worked for managed to successfully lobby the Reagan administration for permission to declassify and get export licenses to sell the Red Chinese some highly sensitive remote sensing technology with numerous military and intelligence applications.

Strangelove was a comedy. The real world can be a farce.

I understand your concern, that it might be misinterpreted as such, and just so we don’t get confused on that issue, I’ll repeat this portion of my post;

“I hear you, and certainly, nobody who lived through the constant threat of nuclear war with the Soviet Union, ever wants to return to those days.

A good indication of that, is seen in the most recent Bush administration’s decision to cancel a Prompt Global Strike (PGS) weapon, that used the 1st and 2nd stage SRB’s from an ICBM.

They did this purely out of concerns, such a PGS launch could be mistaken for a Strategic Nuclear Strike.

That was the right thing to do, it listened to, and addressed the protests of the Russians, and should remind both of us, things really are very different than they were during the Cold War.”

Not exactly Dr. Strangelove.

I absolutely take you at your word, regarding your defense work, and I enjoy reading your posts very much. Though not a historian, (hobbyist is more like it) I love military history, especially, WWII, and the Cold War.

Those unfamiliar with military contingency planning, are sometimes shocked and outraged at planning documents detailing the invasion of Canada, or attacks on otherwise friendly nations. But these, and countless thousands of other war fighting plans are necessary tools employed by the militaries of all nations.

I’m not surprised, that at the height of the Cold War, Strategic planners would pull out all stops, and examine every possible scenario, including First Strike, and such an unconventional use of SLBM’s. (as you describe)

I’m also fairly comfortable in assuming you understand the very nature of the SLBM leg of the Triad, was to deter Soviet strategic planners from ever dreaming they could pull off a First Strike. Land based silos can be targeted, penetration bombers can be mitigated. Ohio Class SSBN’s?

Most likely not

I don’t want to mischaracterize your position, but after reading your last two posts, (‘Yo,…Ainz’ and ‘Some background’) you sum up your view of the United States motivations during the Cold War;

“…we really didn’t want to conquer the world, we just needed to keep our defense contractors busy building new, expensive weapons. It was Congressional and corporate inertia and greed, not empire-building megalomania.”

I have some friends, good friends, who use almost the same language to describe the motivation for the United States involvement in WWII,…and South East Asia.

I understand that political point of view. I don’t share it, but I understand it.

I look forward to your future posts.

But MAD had great advantages. It was stable. It was robust. It did not require skillful generalship in a chaotic environment. It ran itself. It made both sides leery of doing anything that might be misinterpreted as a hostile act, and it made the very thought of a defensive measure come across as a preparation for aggression, which in turn made aggression less likely. It may have been crazy, but it got us though the Cold War without a nuclear exchange. Whatever you may think about MAD, it worked.

The idea behind MAD was that you built lots of cheap, simple, robust, even primitive missiles, and put in a go-nogo trigger on it. If enough of them survived an enemy first strike, you could destroy your enemy. All it took was to knock out a major proportion of his cities, very few warheads, actually, and he was punished.

The alternative idea was Kahn’s “flexible nuclear response” theory, that we should prepare for every conceivable type of nuclear war, that we would have a suite of responses available to us and we could pick and choose the best, and the enemy would have no idea what we might do, complicating his planning. It would make nuclear war like other types of war. It could be “managed”. Of course, no one had ever fought a nuclear war before, so no one had any clue how it would actually turn out in the confusion of actual combat. Like most theories of this type, it assumes we’ll have knowledge of events and the ability to assess the situation and give orders, and have them carried out. In other words, that command and control, the chain of command, would remain intact during a general nuclear exchange.
This is incontrovertible evidence of stupidity of the highest order.

The ideal defensive weapon would be a cheap, durable, solid fuel booster in a deep silo, with a straightforward air burst warhead that could take out an enemy city even if it wasn’t too accurate. Having lots of them would ensure the enemy couldn’t take them all out in one massive preemptive strike.

Putting them on submarines was even better, because the enemy couldn’t possibly take out all your subs at once. You could keep them in reserve and their skippers would launch only when they determined the war was indeed a real one (not an accident or false alarm).

With a triad of manned bomber, submarine, and silo missiles, it was highly unlikely an enemy could come up with a technical breakthrough that would neutralize all three. You were mutually assured enough ordnance would survive even the most massive enemy first strike to knock out a few dozen of his major cities and end his, and world, civilization.

First strike weapons were different. They had to be super accurate to take out hardened silos. Big warheads were not necessary, they just had to go off near the ground to take out the protected target. They also took advantage of MIRV concepts so a small number of missiles could delay detection and deliver a large number of weapons. Cruise weapons were also useful, they were slow, but much harder to detect by satellite, and cheap enough you could launch vast numbers of them to overwhelm any defense. Replacing our old clunky but dependable Minutemen with highly accurate MIRVed Peacekeepers in the same silos where the Russians knew exactly where they were was practically telling them “we have every intention of shooting first”, and “we’re going after your silos before you can empty them”. This is not likely to encourage a “lets wait until we know for sure this is not a false alarm” attitude in your opponent. In fact, it makes for an itchy trigger finger and a high degree of instability. And the Russians were by no means innocent victims, they were doing he exact same thing we were.

Much of our nuclear strategy in the last half of the 20th century sure looked like a first-strike strategy to me, and this was not lost on the Russians. I knew the reason, we really didn’t want to conquer the world, we just needed to keep our defense contractors busy building new, expensive weapons. It was Congressional and corporate inertia and greed, not empire-building megalomania.

But from a distance, the two are hard to tell apart.