Alternative fighter for Argentine AF & Navy during Falklands war.

[Scott Kenny]

Yes the crux is that Argentina didn’t prepare for the conflict.

That's what irritates me the most. The junta forces had been talking about retaking the Malvinas for how long, even before the Coup?

Yes, there are forces that need to be laser focused on the coup, but everyone else could be handed instructions saying "plan how to retake the Islas Malvinas" to keep them distracted from seeing the coup if nothing else.

They lacked the training and ability to sustain sorties to properly use what they already had… all of that would have to be addressed with funding and proper planning. Only then would it make sense to fix some of the equipment gaps.

As for Port Stanley you wouldn’t need anywhere like that much infrastructure with only 4 fighters on the ground at any time. Just metal matting for a pair of alert spots at the runway threshold, some matting at the runway end to help aircraft temporarily clear the runway after landing, and a hardstand area with 2 spots for quick turnaround (refuel & a few AIM-9 missile containers nearby). With so few sorties, pairs of fighters could taxi on the runway without blocking it for very long.

Protective revetments would be a nice to have, but not absolutely necessary. Given the low effectiveness of Harrier strikes and the presence of at most 2 widely dispersed pairs of fighters, it’s unlikely more than 1 or 2 could be hit. And that would be an acceptable risk considering the alternative which is to not have fighters at all, wasting the Mirages’ potential.

I think the infrastructure requirements do increase if you want the ability to simultaneously refuel strike aircraft, as even small numbers of strike aircraft (2-6 at a time) would eat up runway and hardstand availability as well as increasing fuel logistical requirements.

Just with the size of the airfield, I think the best plan is to keep a couple of fighters there, no attackers. Maybe 2 pairs, 1 pair for QRA and chasing the Harriers off, and 1 pair for spares, while everyone else flies in in the morning to fuel and then do a CAP mission or two before flying home at the end of the day. While the visitors are refueling, the QRA is airborne, so that there's only about 4 planes on the ground at a time. This would require staggering the arrivals of the daily forces into pairs maybe 15min apart. However long it takes to refuel a Mirage/Dagger, so that 1 pair is landing and going to the hardstand while the pair that arrived before them is going to the turning loops to take off.

Since the airfield engineers will be doing a lot of work laying matting etc, we can ask them to make revetments at the end.

 

[Rule of cool]

My thoughts on planning is that in Argentina's case it has strict limitations. Argentina had a huge problem by winging the entire war, not even knowing what they had and to what use it might be put for what reason. Good planning would likely have seen much better results just by deploying equipment they had in service according to a pre-arranged schedule. We've gone over a lot of the possibilities in this informative thread.

However, once the plans make good use of the equipment and forces they already have the ability to go beyond that is severely restricted. In 1982 Argentina had been under embargo by the US for the previous 4 or so years and was restricted to buying from Europe and Israel, but even then the mix of equipment was not uniformly of a high calibre that might be expected of a top tier medium power. Good planning isn't going to allow the Argentine Air Force to match the sortie rates of 'NATO standard' air forces for example, or foster good relations between officers and their soldiers, or produce Red Flag and Top Gun graduate level pilots.

When it's all said and done the reason the war was close is because Britain also rushed and winged their war, but they were simply better across the board with planning on the fly, sortie rate generation and combat capability from the front line individual upwards.

 

[Darthmalgus]

Oh no I agree it would be a formidable opponent in the air, just not flown by Argentina.

Argie fliers were totally untrained and inexperienced in the tactics needed to confront RN aircraft and pilots. After the first few attempts they withdrew their fast-movers in most cowardly fashion, leaving the Skyhawks to their fate.

The air victories would have gone to Britain even without the AIM-9L.

I would not dismiss the A-4 as a threat in air to air mode. It is a very maneuvrable dogfigther, let`s not forget that the americans used it as a disimilar air combat threat at Top Gun, against the best Navy fighters, right at the period of the Falkland conflict. And it constantly made kills.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/heres-why-a-4-skyhawk-made-such-good-enemy-plane-hk-122625

It has comparable speed performance, while beeing lighter and with a bigger wing area as the Harrier. It has an excellent instantaneous turn rate. This makes the A-4 a very dangerous close range gunfighter. The difference in the air combat win rate over Falkland resulted mainly because the pilot training, not the machines.

 

[Archibald]

Shamelessly crossposting my post about Anaya role https://www.secretprojects.co.uk/th...-testing-their-bomb-fusing.52117/#post-931957