80 km = 40 km to left and 40 km to the right, enough safety distance to most enemy artillery. That's where 80 km diameter comes from. Of course nobody needs 80km runway. But just securing an airfield to use it while under artillery fire is BS.
M777/LW155 batteries (why batteries in the first place with modern tech?) set up facing in different directions. The gun has a traverse of +/-400 mils, 360° is for Americans 640 mils, so you'd need 8 batteries (guns) to cover all 360°, probably 7 if some range is wasted and emplacement optimized for traverse coverage.
Anything beyond that +/-400mils traverse requires to move the spade out of the ground (never gets stuck, of course!), turn with manpower, ram it again into the ground and fire. Requirement for that was 2-3 minutes. For an action that some other towed gun designs do in 10-20 seconds since about sixty years.
[/quote]And I thought MRL systems were Korean War-simple, yet you make them out to be inefficient as it suits you:
Are you reading all of this out of your copy of Jane's, or a Tom Clancy novel?[/quote]The responsiveness to different missions (different munitions) is also better, and accuracy is better for unguided munitions. Minimum range is smaller. I meant this for the 30 km range, without BB or RAP.
I don't read Clancy, and I don't need Jane's A&A for such fundamentals.
Artillery aiming is relatively simple in comparison to much of today's other military activities, unobserved indirect artillery fire is more than 100 years old. A target like a long runway can easily be hit and even more easily be threatened.
Yet at the same time rocket artillery cannot as quickly respond to different missions as howitzers and mortars, as you cannot simply in a couple of seconds unload the DPICM rockets to load WP and switch to HE for some cratering or else. A military professional should not doubt such facts.
But maybe you can actually prove that anything in above quote (well, my part of the quote) was wrong instead of resorting to polemic?
Well, anyway. Why should I care. As long as it's not my people I shouldn't care if other armies try missions like seizing an airhead and using it with 250 million $ airplanes loaded with dozens of soldiers while under artillery fire.
Airfield operation under artillery fire has been done before. It eliminated much of the Luftwaffe's transport aircraft inventory in winter 1942/1943 near Stalingrad.
Of course, no enemy that the USA will attack in the next years will be as sophisticated as the Red Army in 1942/43...operating rocket artillery is too challenging... the enemies are too dumb... Murphy's Law doesn't exist... no one would emplace mines below the runway to blow it up in time... U.S. presidents have the guts to send thousands of relatively lightly armed troops behind enemy lines... no one would simply build some concrete obstacles on the runway or blow it up in advance as the own air force cannot use it anyway... no one would pre-register artillery or even mortars on possible infiltration points...howitzers have a longer minimum firing distance than a MRL...MRL unguided rockets have less dispersion than howitzer rounds...HIMARS is fine for obscuration missions...whatever. I learned a lto today.
I'll tell you something. All I'd need to make any airfield useless and unacceptable for forced entry missions is to cover parts of it with garbage. Ah, and I'd set up some snipers with IR sights and passive IR movement sensors to cover it.
The uncertainty if the runway could be made usable in time and if it's even left or already blown up would make the whole airfield useless for the planners.
Sorry for double posts, the forum first showed me page 3 as last page and I bet one post of double length wouldn't be an easier read.
Maybe I'll trump your sniper with my AC-130 Spectre? Oh wait, I forgot that those snipers will be wearing their invisibility cloaks...no...aw crap, that's the Harry Potter stuff... 
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