Posted byCon Crane January 6, 2022
Within a year, Soviet MiGs drove B-29 and B-26 bombers of the U.S. Far East Air Forces out of the daytime skies.
I am always uneasy with planning based on wargaming results without combat experience to validate them. Early in the millennium, I was a witness to an Army exercise at the Center for Strategic Leadership at Carlisle Barracks, designed to justify the course of Army Transformation. The scenario created a complex crisis with American forces in great peril, but then new Future Combat Systems (FCS) arrived and saved the day. It was assumed to have all the capabilities touted by contractors and force managers who were developing the system, and the service was already changing its organizational structure and tactics to incorporate it. However, the capabilities demonstrated in that wargame never became reality, and the FCS program was cancelled in 2009. We cannot allow hype from defense contractors to become operational assumptions. Neither can we underestimate the technological capabilities of our potential adversaries.
In late October of 1950, rumors of mysterious swept-wing jet aircraft reached United Nations Command in Korea. On November 1st, the MiG-15s attacked UN aircraft across the Yalu River. Their Soviet pilots blinded aerial intelligence-gathering along the Chinese border with North Korea, facilitating the passage of Chinese Communist armies. They would soon force the longest retreat of an American Army in history, after a massive onslaught, later that month. Within a year, Soviet MiGs drove B-29 and B-26 bombers of the U.S. Far East Air Forces out of the daytime skies. Meanwhile, America scrambled to get F-86 Sabres, its only aircraft capable of combatting the new foe, into theater as it cranked up production and reclaimed the 60 it had sold to Canada.
https://warroom.armywarcollege.edu/articles/tech-surprise/
