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Old 20th Sep 2010, 10:03
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Coldair,

It is set out in Peter Hennesey's book, The Secret State, in which you will find diagrams etc.

Essentially the force would depart simultaneouly from its main and dispersal bases and would not form up in any form of formation. They would however generally concentrate in time and space to present a narror front when they penetrated the littoral defences. The idea would be to saturate the SAM and fighter system on a very narrow front which hopefully would achieve local air superiority during the penetration.

The USSR was well aware of this potential and attempted to plug any gaps it determined. On one occasion there was a gap of about 12 miles; they filled this gap with 2 SA3 batteries narrowing the gap to less than 5 miles. It was still assessed that the batteries would be shot-out before the bulk of the force squeezed through.

Although aircraft were given time-on-target to +/- 3 minutes there was no such timing constraint on the initial penetration; things would have been quite exciting.
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