Recently, the KGB and military intelligence personnel have been paying close attention to the movements of the NATO coalition forces, especially the E-3A early warning aircraft of the US Air Force, and have basically summed up the operation law of the US air combat command system. According to the analysis of the data, Long Yun followed the train of thought and summed up the things again, and then stretched out and turned off the lights and went to bed, recuperating for the next day's attack.

Once the test is done, it's a matter of waiting.

In the past few days at the Bugas base, a partner has been transferred from the 541st Front-line Fighter Regiment of the VVS Ninth Air Force stationed at the same base, and while training with his new partner, Long Yun has been waiting for an opportunity.

This opportunity, the NATO coalition did not make him wait too long.

At a time when it was advancing all the way and the momentum of the attack was in full swing, it encountered a strong counterattack by the Red Empire, and was hit by the anti-radiation missiles that rushed across the sky.

After figuring out "what's going on in the sky" through various channels, especially after picking up the R-27P/EP missile that crashed to the ground and not exploded, the huge NATO warplanes quickly began to adjust themselves, trying to deal with the sudden anti-radiation missile threat through various tactics. Among them, the most decisive and wide-ranging decision is the so-called "blind engagement," that is, basically abandoning the use of the fighter's own radar, relying entirely on the guidance of the integrated combat command system to go out to meet the enemy, entering the visual distance while evading the attack of anti-radiation missiles, and then relying on combat to defeat the enemy.

“Blind_Combat”。 Basically, it is a tactic that gives up the advantages of electronic systems such as radar. It is certainly not economical for NATO, which has a slight upper hand in the level of equipment.

But compared to theoretical deduction. Before finding a more efficient countermeasure or even the development of-for-tat weapons, in the face of the overwhelming ferocious offensive of the Warsaw Pact, only "blind eye engagement" was a basic and truly effective combat strategy, so it was quickly adopted by NATO's tactical air force.

For the NATO Air Force, which has a relatively high operational initiative and a strong campaign and tactical command capability, once it is changed to a combat mode in which combat tasks are assigned entirely by the command system and the route of receiving the enemy, the change in combat style will be very obvious, and this point will soon be noticed by the Soviet military system and the KGB. The reports sent by the intelligence officers also showed that the US military was making adjustments, which gave Long Yun's sortie certain realistic conditions.

The moment when the decision to strike is today.

Unlike the sunny days of the previous days, the clouds on the horizon have been drifting in since yesterday, and the coast of the Black Sea is shrouded in a large cloud cover, and in some places a few light rains fall from time to time.

Taking off from the Bugas Air Base in the early morning, two MiG-29N fighters with light gray gradient camouflage all over the body flew together above the clouds.

Keep the flight altitude at about four thousand meters. The MiGs flew all the way south and soon flew over the southern border of Bulgaria, and the Sea of Marmara was in front of them. After Long Yun checked the navigation beacon, he called the wingman on the radio to maintain a formation posture and pay attention to visual vigilance, and then the two fighters entered complete radio silence, and they could only use wings swinging and other actions to communicate with each other.

The current southern theater of operations is different from the situation of confrontation across the strait, the warsaw pact mechanized troops that are advancing in a big way have rushed into Asia Minor, and the battle line of air confrontation has also advanced to about 80 kilometers south of the strait.

Piloting the fighter plane to fly smoothly, seeing that the open water surface of the Sea of Marmara was below, Long Yun paid attention to keeping the fighter plane's flight attitude basically stable, while paying attention to the reading of the fuel gauge.

Today, for the first time with his new partner, looking for an opportunity to raid the E-3A "watchtower", Long Yun thought of two issues that he needed to worry about the most: first, whether they would be discovered by NATO fighters passing by by accidentally, and second, whether the fuel carried on the MiG-29N was sufficient.

Now, seeing that the sky is covered with clouds and has formed a good cover for the MiGs with similar colors, he doesn't need to worry about being discovered in advance by enemy planes, which is of course good news: the MiG-29N, which is a halfway monk, is not a real radar stealth fighter after all, not only is the weapon only an R-27EP missile, but also cannot perform any drastic maneuvers, and it will be very troublesome once it is targeted by the enemy planes - of course, he and his wingman can choose to retract the air intake cover, Enter a full state engagement with improved mobility, but the weapon problem really can't be solved.

As for the second point, that is, the range of the MiG-29N, Long Yun has gone through some tests in the past few days, and found that the range of this temporarily modified MiG aircraft is really as Krakow said before, and the internal fuel range of the "low detectability" fighter is completely not optimistic.

The reason for this is that, on the one hand, the belly magazine installed on the fighter destroys the aerodynamic configuration of the MiG-29 "central lifting body", and on the other hand, relying only on the auxiliary air intake, the air intake of the two RD-33 engines is limited, and the combustion efficiency is not very ideal, and no matter how it is adjusted, it will be more fuel-intensive than the original, so although the internal oil volume of the MiG-29N is more than that of the MiG-29 as a prototype, it still cannot fully make up for the loss of flight range with one out and one in.

So now, in order to make a gain in the sortie, Long Yun and his wingman must cautiously enter Asia Minor, continue to search south, and approach the "watchtower" AWACS aircraft before they can deliver the fatal blow after hibernation.

As for whether the missile firepower of only two R-27EP missiles can ensure the downfall of an E-3A "watchtower" after approaching the early warning aircraft, Long Yun has some confidence in this, he knows that the early warning aircraft basically keeps the radar on all the time, and it is also flying in a straight line during the mission, and this kind of target is the easiest to deal with for anti-radiation missiles, so he only needs to think about how to covertly engage the enemy now.

For the silent infiltration of the two stealth fighters, the Warsaw Pact's air situation monitoring system has naturally done some work.

Just as the two light gray camouflage fighters crossed the Sea of Marmara and entered the airspace over Turkey, Long Yun received air information from GCI's special communication channel, focusing on the position of the early warning aircraft judged by the signal detection system.

For a model like the E-3A "Watchtower", its survivability is extremely poor, and it can only hide far away on the side of the war zone, in fact, there is another reason for this, that is, the S-band signal of the AN/APY-1 series radar is easy to be discovered by the radio detection system, and the early warning aircraft that completely exposes the position is equivalent to the most valuable live target in the eyes of the enemy.

So now, according to the unified deployment of the US Central Command, two F-3A "Watchtower" AWACS aircraft on duty are hovering over the central territory of Turkey, and the distance between them has also been stretched to hundreds of kilometers.

On such an open front, only two early warning planes with a scanning and detection range of only a few hundred kilometers were put in, and if the previous NATO combat mode was changed, it would certainly be completely insufficient, but now the commanders have divided the aircraft into a number of action groups and ordered their subordinates to maintain a superior number of enemy planes before engaging in battle, otherwise they would rather temporarily retreat -- so it is obvious that the Americans are preparing to use their numerical superiority, or the tactics of aircraft and seas, that they are not good at before, to carry out "blind engagement" On the contrary, this will facilitate the normal operation of the air command system and avoid a large amount of target information and friendly movements from surging in, which will make the staff of the early warning aircraft and the ground command station busy with errors.

In addition, probably the Americans also realized the extreme danger of the war situation in the southern theater of operations, and were prepared to keep a sufficient number of AWACS aircraft in the rear base to cope with the high-intensity combat attrition?

Long Yun was very concerned about this issue when he was preparing for combat, but he has not been able to find a lot of research materials on this aspect, that is, "once the front-line early warning aircraft lose their command capability, how long will the chaotic situation in the air last?" -- not to mention the Soviet Union, where the number of early warning aircraft is scarce, and even the United States have not made public some relatively in-depth research results, or even if there is research, it has been done in sufficient detail, but it has never been able to come up with a practical solution.

The practical difficulty in dealing with this problem lies in whether the number of AWACS aircraft is sufficient.

In a parallel world still in the 1990s, as one of the world's two superpowers and the number one ally of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the US military is equipped with early warning planes that rank first in the world in terms of quantity and quality, with not only more than 100 small E-2C "Hawkeye" planes, but also more than 30 large E-3A "watchtowers," in addition to a certain number of other functional models.

But the so-called "strong lineup" also depends on what kind of opponent it is facing.

The NATO bloc, which hastily triggered a world war and was not fully prepared, has been in an all-out confrontation with the Eastern bloc for several months, and this has overwhelmed the dozens of large "watchtower" early warning planes equipped by the US military, and almost all of them are exhausted in their respective defense zones. (To be continued......)