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The Tupelov TU-22M (NATO ASCC reporting name “Backfire”), was considered a large threat to the US Navy’s Carrier Battle Groups. The Backfire would travel in regiment size formations (approximately 20-24 aircraft) and launch its Kh-22 cruise missiles (NATO ASCC reporting name “Kitchen”) at CVBGs. The Backfire first appeared in 1976 and was specifically designed to attack targets in Europe and CVBGs. The Backfire did cause some controversy and there was a debate amongst various US intelligence agencies. By 1975, the SALT 2 talks were underway between the US and the USSR. The question was whether or not the Backfire was a tactical or strategic weapon. The Soviets contended that the Backfire was built to attack so-called “peripheral attack” missions, meaning attacks on targets in continental targets in Europe and Asia. The various intelligence agencies opined that the Backfire was a strategic weapon and designed to attack not only CVBGs and “peripheral” targets but also targets in the continental US. As such the various intelligence agencies disagreed on what the actual range of the Backfire was:

The first Backfire was spotted at a Soviet airfield by an American satellite in July 1970, nearly a year after it had first flown. It represented something of an enigma toAmerican intelligence analysts, for it was too big to be a tactical attack aircraft, but too small to be a heavy bomber. Over the next several years, as the aircraft entered production, American intelligence analysts collected information on the Backfire in every way possible, closely studying its planform and trying to determine its operating characteristics such as its top speed, fuel consumption, and range. The last variable was particularly important, for Air Force analysts estimated that the bomber had the range to reach the United States carrying a nuclear bomb.

In May 1975 the Air Force’s Foreign Technology Division produced an assessment of the “Backfire B” version which had replaced the rather limited A model. According to the Air Force, the Backfire B could carry two large missiles under each wing, but probably not a single missile because it would block the probable internal bomb bay. The Air Force also increased its calculation of the bomber’s supersonic drag and revised downwards its calculation of the bomber’s range, to a little over 4000 nautical miles. The analysts also concluded that when using afterburners, the aircraft’s two big Kuznetsov turbofan engines guzzled a lot of fuel. They predicted that although the aircraft could probably reach low supersonic speeds with external missiles attached, they could not carry the missiles for long at high speeds or launch them at supersonic speeds. In a National Intelligence Estimate in summer 1975, the CIA had calculated that the Backfire possessed intercontinental range and could strike targets within the United States. This was a significant finding, because the United States and Soviet Union were at the time considering negotiating limits on their strategic weapons, and if the Backfire could strike targets within the U.S., then it was an intercontinental strategic weapon.
But by fall 1976, the CIA’s Office of Weapons Intelligence revised some estimates of the Backfire’s performance. A Backfire B had been photographed over the Baltic Sea carrying an AS-4 missile on its centerline, confirming the CIA’s earlier suspicion that contrary to the Air Force’s assessment, it could mount a single ship-killing missile instead of the two hung under the wings seen on earlier aircraft. Naturally, the Backfire could fly farther with only one missile than with two. By the end of November the CIA made a more significant announcement—the agency determined that the Backfire lacked sufficient range to reach the continental United States. It could strike Alaska, but the CIA concluded that the Soviet Air Force primarily intended to use the Backfire to strike targets in Europe and the Middle East. In fact, the CIA eventually calculated the bomber’s range at approximately half of that calculated by the Air Force. This became an ongoing dispute between the Air Force and the CIA—another one of the perpetual arguments between the two organizations over the capabilities of various Soviet weapons systems. But as the CIA noted in its November 1976 report, the Soviet Union was deploying the bomber to bases in the western USSR, strongly implying that its targets were in Europe and the Middle East, not the United States.
Over the next several years the dispute raged within the U.S. government. The U.S. Air Force was unwilling to concede that the Backfire was not an intercontinental bomber. If it possessed a refueling capability (which appeared on later models), or was used on one-way suicide missions, it could still reach the United States. This soon became a major point of contention in Strategic Arms Limitation Talks started in 1977, and it was not really resolved until later. The Backfire was on many minds at the Pentagon at this time.

Recent Russian accounts indicate that the combat range of the TU-22M1 was 3,106 miles unrefuelled with a 3-ton payload and that the TU-22M2 was 3,169 miles and that combat radius was only 1,367 miles unrefuelled when carrying a single Kh-22. The range question for the Backfire is a complicated issue that dependent on many variables, including attack profile, weather, fuel/weapon payload combinations and many other factors. It turned out that the CIA’s estimate was pretty close at 3000 miles.

The primary role of the Backfire was to attack CVBGs with the Kh-22. Once CVBGs was found in the vast ocean, the Backfires would launch and try to overwhelm the battle groups defences by sheer numbers of Kh-22 (reminiscent of massed Japanese kamikaze attacks of the Pacific War). The solution for the US Navy was to detect the Backfires as early as possible and put F-14 Tomcats in position to attack those Backfires before they could launch their missiles.

How early could you detect Backfires launching? The DSP. First deployed in 1960, the Defence Support Program was designed to detect Soviet ICBM launches and large explosions from satellites. By the time DSP was being used it began to detect unusual infrared events in some areas on the Soviet Union:

But soon after it entered service Aerospace Corporation scientists began detecting other heat targets, including surface to air missiles and ground explosions. The company’s scientists and engineers also began unusual infrared events. These infrared returns occurred over Soviet territory at regular intervals and traveled in relatively straight lines. They were clearly not ballistic missiles. The engineers analyzing the heat sources soon determined that they were originating at Soviet bomber bases, notably those that fielded Backfire bombers. For the next several years Aerospace Corporation scientists tried to interest the Air Force in studying this data
more closely and possibly using it as a source of intelligence. But the Air Force space
leadership was not interested.
By 1982 the company that made the DSP’s sensor, Aerojet-General, had also been trying for eight years to interest the Air Force in using DSP to warn U.S. naval forces that Backfire bombers were heading toward them. But the Air Force was uninterested, a fact that one independent observer theorized had more to do with a desire to preserve the DSP’s primary mission of strategic warning than reluctance to help the Navy. Aerojet then went to the U.S. Navy, which was more interested in tracking Backfires than the Air Force, and in 1983 a group of naval officers spent time at the DSP ground station in Australia to determine if the satellites could detect the Backfires during takeoff, or the launch of their AS-4 ship-killing cruise missiles. Aircraft targets looked different than ballistic missiles. They tended to travel at regular speeds in relatively straight lines
for several minutes, unlike ballistic missiles that accelerated as they climbed, curved in their flight paths, and then suddenly burned out. The aircraft tended to appear as “walking dots” on DSP sensor displays.
In spring 1983 the Air Force approved a Navy project to take advantage of the DSP capability to detect these “walking dots.” It was code-named SLOW WALKER. Starting in 1985 the Navy deployed a regular contingent to Australia to extract the data from the DSP satellite transmissions and then manually disseminate the information to the fleet. This was called the SLOW WALKER Reporting System, or SLWRS. By the late 1980s the Navy improved its SLOW WALKER capability to the point where the information was disseminated nearly instantaneously.

The US Navy had used the USAF’s DSP to detect Backfires at launch. A very interesting project that I never knew and an “outside the box” way to detect incoming Backfires. You can learn more about the Slow Walker, and some of the associated programs here.

Additional sources:

World Airpower Journal Volume 33