SinoDefence Forum

Scratch

I don't think that's a very strong point. For one thing, one can use multiple assets to locate targets at sea wich will be attacked by ship launched missiles. Next, the very long range ship to ship missiles, i.e. the anti-ship-tomahawk, have been removed from active service anyway. Also, there are a lot of fixed land targets wich may be attacked by ship launched long range cruise missiles. Furthermore, cruisers don't just serve in an offensive way. Exactly to defend those very carriers, in the future also from ASBMs, big ships with powerfull radars and far reaching defensive anti-missiles have a future, IMO.

SampanViking

I have been following the replies and think there is good selection of views and some very valid arguments.

So a few points:

1) I try and think of the Type 022 as the first of a new class rather than just a new type. I will not be surprised to see a rather beefier design for blue water operations in the not too distant future.

2) The main thrust of my OP was specifically for direct ship to ship engagement, and that either this is now highly unlikely and will be undertaken by aircraft, subs or FAC's. The role of mid size ships in other defensive roles is not under question although a change in form as a consequence of a change of role would be likely.

3) People have mentioned cost and I would have to counter with survivability. A number of mother ships would provide good value for money in my opinion. FAC's are not Aircraft and do not need to "land" every few hours. The boats could be on patrol for days at a time, refuel at sea and can rotate crews etc, only needing to dock for maintenace or long distance transit.

4) There are few examples of AShM being used in real combat, but these make sober reading. The main example has to be HMS Sheffield in the Falklands. Most attacks were by Dumb Bombs and many ships that were hit, still managed to survive; just as their WW2 predecessors did, coming home looking like old Prize Fighters! Sheffield was different though and one Exocet fired by a third rate, developing world nations airforce, sank a state of the art destroyer of one of the worlds greatest Navies when it was on full alert in wartime conditions.

Beyond that I also see the FAC having a greater role, based on some other developments which I think are likely in the coming decades. Principally, I suspect that we will see a move away from the kind of Carriers and other large support ships we see now, towards much larger facilites, which are moveable, rather than necessarily mobile and which combine with elements of Oil Rig construction to build large semi-permanent structures in International Waters - effectively artificial Islands on which full bases can be operated. This again would limit the need and scope for Destroyer sized ships and much bigger facilites can be built on base etc. It also seems a far more effective way of projecting power abroad than the current CVBG.

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hkbc

1) This is not power projection its sea denial

2) How do you propose to counter ballistic missile attacks against your "movable" rather than mobile platform!

3) If its not mobile how do you prevent a couple of subs just laying a minefield around the thing to neutalize it and have another couple of subs to punch out the 22's when they have to come home to replenish

Your whole concept just has target painted all over it.

Vessels need to be a certain size to support blue water operations. Enough space to carry fuel and provisions, enough crew to maintain combat effectiveness around the clock, enough munitions to make a fight meaningful, sufficient sensors to enable situation awareness.

SampanViking

The answer to your question(s) is survivability. Some people think that the answer is duck and dodge (effective manoeuvre and point defence) personally I doubt this and once you realise that you are going to get hit, you need to be able to survive the blow. The only obvious answer is to build a mixture of the very small and the very large. Moreover, large and built in such a way that a successful hit is not fatal to the entire facility and that the ability to repair or work around the damage is integral to the design.

The biggest problem with Carriers for instance is that a hit on the flight deck is not just a hole in the runway but also a large amount of the ships interior. Other ships as previously discussed can be taken out with a single missile, which makes it far too risky to actually use them in a fleet action.

The other point raised about being a big target also apply to any major land base as well. By being big, carrying critical and non critical modules, the best sensor and defensive systems and having significant offensive firepower associated with them (docks for FAC's and Subs, full length Runways etc) I think they have a chance to survive and complete the mission.

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Finn McCool

On the subject of the Sheffeild, it actually sunk several days later under tow in high seas, not as the result of the actual missle impact (although the Exocet was powerful enough to mission kill the ship by causing it to list and disabling the elctrical system). The Sea Dart system is somewhat primitive compared to later systems like the SM-2 and the Aster, and CIWS has evolved since then too, so I think it's safe to say that today missle defences would not perform as badly as they did in the Falklands, but htat experience has caused me to wonder for a very long time; what if they really just don't work? If that's true, than all of the world's major navies are basically just sitting ducks.

On the subject of huge floating bases, I seriously doubt that a system based on huge slow moving platforms will be terribly successful until missle defence has evolved considerably, because a base of that nature would be even more vunerable to missles (ballistic and cruise) than an aircraft carrier or destroyer. And easier to find too.

Antiship ballistic missiles seem to be mainly held back by the lack of accuracy necessary to hit a target like a ship. But what if the BM was armed with cluster munitions? Several BMs releasing cluster munitions over a CVBG would do quite a bit of damage I think, or at least would mess up the radars and other sensitive equipment on the superstructures of ship so that a cruise missile barrage would have an easier time getting through. And as I always say, what about putting torpedos inside of BMs, so that the BM delivers them to within the range necessary to hit a ship and then releases them in the air, they fall into the water, and begin homing in on their targets?

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Battles are won by slaughter and maneuver. The greater the general, the more he contributes in maneuver, the less he demands in slaughter.
-Winston Churchill

Scratch

I guess once BM delivered torpedos become a real threat, we'll also see a development of anti-torpedos. It works in the missile arena, and I see no reason why it can't work under water, too.
I also think just because we have one incidence over the last 25+ years were a then modern warship was killed/sunk by a AShM does not make the whole concept obsolete. So far the swarming FAC concept isn' battleproven either.

FriedRiceNSpice

I think I have mentioned this idea in an earlier thread. At the speeds that a ballistic missile travels at, even golfball-sized pieces of metal will be able to cause significant damage. If a large swarm of BM are fired to completely blanket an area in which an enemy surface group is operating, then you stand a good chance of mission killing the group through the destruction of electronics, sensors, flight deck, etc. This was severely degrade the group's capability to defend itself from conventional attack, rendering it vulnerable to followup strikes by conventional missiles, aircraft, and submarines.

Don't today's navies counter torpedoes with their own torpedoes and/or depth charges and ASROC type systems?

Jeff Head's book deals substantially with fictional advances in Chinese torpedo technology and American counters to these weapons.

bladerunner

Can anyone prove that the ballistic missile boat/ aircraft carriers sinkers actually work, because I don't recall any tests being done.

Pointblank

The problem of course will be FINDING and MAINTAINING contact with the group to begin with, and the Chinese don't have much or many in the way of long range maritime patrol aircraft or of the like to adequately perform a search of such a large area. Even then, the Chinese sensors will be heavily degraded due to electronic jamming and spoofing meaning that their sensors have a significantly shorter range reducing their sensor footprint.

You have to know where to shoot otherwise it is a pointless endeavour. And even if they had the aircraft, they would probably will have to overfly hostile airspace over Taiwan, where they can be intercepted by either surface based weapons, or by fighters. Half the battle is FINDING the opponent, not shooting.

They try to screw up the guidance of such systems. Most torpedoes utilize sound as a method of finding their targets; they can either spoof the torpedoes into hitting decoy's by using systems such as the AN/SLQ-25 Nixie or the British Surface Ship Torpedo Defence which would try to present a more tempting target by magnifying ship's own noise, or they can reduce their own sound footprint by mounting noise producing equipment on rafts like in submarine's or through the use of bubblers, such as the Prairie-Masker, which works to create a barrier of air bubbles in the sea about the hull, thus trapping machinery noise. To a passive sonar set, such bubbles would sound like rain hitting the ocean.

There are of course hard-kill systems under development; the USN is working on th TRAPR DCL, which is such a system.

bladerunner

I thought the BM was aimed at carriers, and Ive never heard that a large swarm of BM would be launched.
However given time could'nt they launch a group od ground search dedicated satellites just to monitor the opposing fleets?.
Anyway given the lessons the learned from Pearl. one had better damn well know the where abouts of the American fleets before embarking on a course of action that could result in a Mexican stand off in the China seas.

SampanViking

Hi Finn

Just a reminder of what the Exocet actually did



and remember, the missile warhead did not actually explode. Had it done so, then the ship would have gone down right away. The Sheffield was a 4100 ton displacement destroyer. I know this was more than 25 years ago now, but I remember the incident very clearly (I had mates in the task force) and both attack and defence systems will have come on considerably from then.

I still also remember just how many dumb bombs the Argentinians were able to drop on target against the Task Force Ships, despite our Sea Dart "Hittiles" which proved to be Missiles all too frequently!

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Finn McCool

Well some of the crewmen of the Sheffeild insist that the missle actually did explode; I guess the Royal Navy says otherwise, we really don't know.

Well thats what I said earlier, the technology is quite difficult (at least as difficult as intecepting a satillite), and although it's feasibly possible, no nation currently fields a system that is capable of doing this and has been tested showing that capability. Some might claim that China has the ability to do this, secretly, but I say I'll believe it when I see it. Cluster munitions are one thing, but scoring a direct hit is extremely difficult.

__________________
Battles are won by slaughter and maneuver. The greater the general, the more he contributes in maneuver, the less he demands in slaughter.
-Winston Churchill

Pointblank

The problem is that satellites are usually in very predictable orbits, and of course, the US does have anti-satellite capability. In the event of any real shooting war, I would actually expect the US would definitely employ anti-satellite weapons to either disable or destroy Chinese ground mapping satellites and communications satellites.

Ambivalent

The Brits lost Sheffield through a comedy of errors. The missile warhead was a dud, but a fire was started from residual fuel. The missile severed the ship's fire main, so no pressure was available to fight the fires. Four nearby ships contributed a highly touted portable fire pump, but all of these failed, leading to an investigation by the RN afterward. Some glaring construction defects in the superstructure meant the crew could not set fire boundries, and she lost internal communication. USS Stark a few years later ate two Exocet, one of which exploded and the other a dud, but the crew fought the fires and brought their ship home. A missile hit is not a slam dunk kill. These were both 4200 ton ships, but Sheffield was all steel in construction ( I'v stuck a magnet to her sister's superstructure so it is assuredly all steel ) while Stark had aluminum upper works.
ECM. Jamming is far more sophisticated than simply flooding the environment with energy to be overcome. Most jamming takes advantage of the characteristics of the system being jammed to create false echos. Combine the false echo with chaff and flares that are deployed into the same point in space as the false echo and one creates a very realistic target for the incoming missile, diverting it from it's intended target. Read up on techniques such as inverse gain jamming, range gate stealing, crosseye and buddy to get the feel for this art. Larger platforms are much more successful at jamming because they have the electrical power to create a false echo that is stronger than the actual echo, a crucial necessity for most jamming to work. Sometimes however, it can be something as simple as firing the CIWS to flood an enemy radar with false echos ( a technique used to fool the radars on TU-95's ).
The MARV'ed IRBM's I'm aware of used their maneuverability to achieve smaller CEP's. As the missile falls towards the target, something like a Pershing would use an active radar to find it's target and then maneuver to hit it. These were fixed targets however. No one has demonstrated a MARV than can track a moving target like a ship, and as the missile falls, the area over which it can successfully maneuver shrinks quite rapidly. It would have to find the target at it's apogee or very close to it to have enough maneuver space to catch a fast moving ship. Not impossible, but not the slam dunk often implied. Btw, a carrier strike group under a weather system with it's radars and radios off is essentially invisible. This is a technique the US Navy uses all the time to hide carriers from prying eyes, or to achieve surprise. Read up on how Admiral Ace Lyons snuck a carrier strike group into the Barents without the Soviets finding it.
Missiles in combat. Take a look at the Israeli experience in the 1973 war. There were two major surface engagements between Israeli missile craft and Eqyptian and Syrian missile craft. Something like 48 missiles were fired at the Israeli craft in these two engagements without a single hit. All were spoofed by ECM. The Israeli's sank all of their opponent's craft, and keep in mind he Styx missiles used had a greater range than the Israeli's Gabriel I's, giving the Eqyptians and Syrians the first shot advantage. In Operation Praying Mantis, the Iranians shot multiple supersonic Standard missiles at the US Navy at close range, and all of these were successfully spoofed by ECM. CIWS was never used. Do not underestimate ECM, it has a great history of success.

Ambivalent

Oh yes, regarding big destroyers and cruisers. As the PLAN develops one would expect to see large surface escorts for a carrier to be built. This was true of the Soviet Navy, if one recalls the building of the Sovremmeny and Udaloy classes about the time the Soviets started a serious carrier program. These were the VMF's first serious long range surface escorts, other combat ships being more short duration missile attack ships intended to confront Nato forces in a one shot engagement then head home to be rearmed, assuming they made it.