Bulletins and News Discussion from December 9th to December 15th, 2024 - Assad Must Go

My answer was an airbase, for the following reasons: Airbases are quite spread out hardened targets, with everything you want to strike spread out over kilometres, and usually protected by hardened shelters, in the case of forward airbases that are likely to be hit first. You can either do this with a lot of high precision weapons, or with a wide area of effect weapons, such as using cluster warheads/submunitions, or even a tactical nuclear weapon in a total war scenario.

The problem with a lot of submunition or cluster munition based weapons, is that the smaller conventional explosive munitions lack the power to seriously damage any hardened shelters, for aircraft, resources or personnel. That's fine if the airbase is relatively unprotected, but if it's full of hardened shelters, it poses a serious issue. But Oreshnik is unique in this regard: it is suspected to use kinetic submunitions that travel fast enough and with enough energy to penetrate these hardened shelters and cause damage to them. That's why I thought Oreshnik would be an ideal weapon to seriously damage forward airbases. It's a submunition weapon, without the drawbacks of typical submunition weapons.

To support my argument, we'll be using imagery and data from Iran's retaliatory strike on Nevatim Airbase during Operation True Promise II. We know that there were 33 observed impacts on the base. So what if, instead of each impact being from a single warhead, it was from a grouping of submunitions with a 175m radius for the grouping. 175m is the estimated damage radius of a Chinese DF-15 SRBM with a submunition warhead, so it's why I'm using that figure (also I'm lazy and some OSINT guy on twitter already did the math and imagery with that radius). 33 groupings would be the approximately the equivalent of six Oreshnik IRBMs, as each Oreshnik is estimated to carry 6 MIRVs, with six submunitions each. Six Oreshniks would give you 36 groupings, so three more than the Iranian strike. But close enough for this comparison. Now Iran did not use submunitions for the reason I described in the previous paragraph, but we know that reasoning does not apply to Oreshnik, so here we go:

As you can see, we go from singular impacts mostly missing key targets, to getting good coverage over key buildings on the base as a whole. Let's look at the potential hits in detail:

As for the aircraft shelters in the north west of the base, the strike has gone from hitting none of them, to hitting 9 aircraft shelters within the radius of the cluster strike. And those 9 shelters only required two groupings to take out. Now let's move on to the F-35 hardened shelters at the heart of the base:

Iran achieved one direct hit here with a couple of near misses. But now with a potential cluster munition strike, 19 of these hardened shelters are hit, along with a couple of other buildings. A huge difference. Now moving on to the aircraft hangars to the east:

Here Iran did manage a some good hits on these hangars, so the difference is not large. But there is full coverage over the hangars, and six large aircraft could have been destroyed if they were unable to get in the air before the strike.

So in conclusion, from the Iranian strike, to a potential Oreshnik strike with six Oreshniks on the same target, we've gone from a direct hit on 1 F-35 hardened aircraft shelter and a couple of hits on unprotected hangars to the east, to hitting 19 F-35 shelters, 9 other fighter jet shelters, 5 unprotected hangars (for 33 hangars/shelters total), and 6 large parked aircraft. And that's if Oreshnik has the same accuracy as Iranian MRBMs. If it has greater accuracy, the same damage could be done with less Oreshniks, or more damage with the same amount. If the Oreshnik was incredibly accurate and always hit it's mark (very unrealistic, but just for the sake of argument), only one Oreshnik would have been needed to take out those 33 hangars/hardened shelters, as only six groupings were required here. That's an incredible amount of damage from one conventional missile, to be able to take out 30+ fighter aircraft with one missile, while they are still on the ground. Even if multiple Oreshniks are required for such a strike (which is likely), it's still a massive amount of damage. This is what Putin means when he says it's equivalent to a tactical nuclear weapon. Taking out an entire airbase with half a dozen missiles, or even less if they are highly accurate.