Modern Carrier Battle Group..Strategies and Tactics

Actually, I think in such a scenario none of the ships would be able to communicate with one another. Nor would anything on Guam be able to communicate with any ships in a carrier group. Nor would any of the aircraft be able to communicate with one another unless they were in close range. Nor would any US military asset be able to communicate with the ROC military at all! Only old fashioned radio is going to work.

Originally Posted by Roger604

Actually, I think in such a scenario none of the ships would be able to communicate with one another. Nor would anything on Guam be able to communicate with any ships in a carrier group. Nor would any of the aircraft be able to communicate with one another unless they were in close range. Nor would any US military asset be able to communicate with the ROC military at all! Only old fashioned radio is going to work.

I apologize for the one liner but why? ASAT taking out communications? Some sort of EMP weapon?

Originally Posted by Roger604

Actually, I think in such a scenario none of the ships would be able to communicate with one another. Nor would anything on Guam be able to communicate with any ships in a carrier group. Nor would any of the aircraft be able to communicate with one another unless they were in close range. Nor would any US military asset be able to communicate with the ROC military at all! Only old fashioned radio is going to work.

Roger, you have made a very blunt statement without saying how such a major undertaking could be accomplished. Surely you know that will not fly on this forum.

Your implication sounds like a nuclear EMP (though you do not backup what you say with any explanation).

Modern US warship are hardened against such attacks, depending on the proximity of the attack, and would continue fighting. That protection is costly, but very achievable. It is the US civilian infrastructure which is most susceptable to such an attack.

IMHO, the Chinese, who are rational (as opposed to some of the fanatics in the world) would not go nuclear in such a scanario in any case in the near future because that would be playing to, and invite escalation, in an area where the US has an absolute strength, whose weapons are far more numerous, reliable, and accurate.

So, short of inviting a nuclear exchange, the PLAAF and PLAN would still have to find a way of saturating or defeating the conventional defenses of at least two US carriers somewhere east of Taiwan in the scenario I presented.

Your answer sounds like an admission that such an undertaking would be unacheivable to the point of either trying to continue and win the fight with those carriers in place, or resulting to a nuclear gambit out of desperation.

Finn, you are right. The first move in any hostility would be to take out all communication satellites. Once the satellites are gone, there would be no way for any aircraft, ships, submarines or bases to communicate with one another unless they were in close proximity. This makes the sort of coordinated actions Jeff is describing impossible.

The PLA folks know what they're doing: they have already established multi-platform and multi-layer measures to project power not only over Taiwan itself but also around it.

I don't think a Taiwan scenario is ever going to happen, but a more likely scenario would take place as China projects its power even further east over all of the East China Sea.

Originally Posted by Roger604

Once the satellites are gone, there would be no way for any aircraft, ships, submarines or bases to communicate with one another unless they were in close proximity. This makes the sort of coordinated actions Jeff is describing impossible.

Sorry Roger, you don't really know what you are talking about. The US Navy does not really in the least exclusively, or even primarily, on sat communications in these types of engagements as far as the engagements themsleves or their coordination are concerned.

The comms between the vessels and aircraft of the task force, as well as bases in relative proximity like Guam would continue with or without sat comm and suffer very little impact by the loss of them.

An inconviencence? Yes.

Causing that coordinated operations could not occur? Absolutely and emphatically not.

The only way the PLAN and PLAAF will degrade communications enough to cause that is to interdict and jam the signals imminating from the vessels, the bases, and the aircraft themselves. And to do that, when those vessels are on the high seas, they will have to get their aircraft close enough to do so...which puts you right back in the same place of having to saturate the defenses of said task forces.

Ever heared of MIDS / JTIDS using link 16? These are very capable, jam resistant line of sight networks wich provide quite a lot of coordination and situational awarness. No need for sats.

LOL. If you're forced to use line-of-sight communication, it's much more than an inconvenience, you're pretty much back to 1970's. Definitely no base communication and no communication will take place between battle groups. Aircraft won't be communicating with their carriers either and no communication will take place with ROC forces.

I know enough to figure out that neither you (nor anybody else on this board probably) know enough about naval tactics to fully gauge how much this cripples any mass coordinated action.

Originally Posted by Roger604

LOL. If you're forced to use line-of-sight communication, it's much more than an inconvenience, you're pretty much back to 1970's. Definitely no base communication and no communication will take place between battle groups. Aircraft won't be communicating with their carriers either and no communication will take place with ROC forces.

I know enough to figure out that neither you (nor anybody else on this board probably) know enough about naval tactics to fully gauge how much this cripples any mass coordinated action.

Sorry Roger, high frequency communications are regularly used in the commercial and military sectors to make use of ground wave propogation and other technologies and atmospheric conditions to create ELOS/OTH capabilities.

There are several methods, but the US Navy and the US military make good use of them and have honed them to a fine art over the years. With the AEW aircraft operating as they do, at the alititudes they operate at, and with other platforms and technologies available outside of satellites, you are still going to have to find and jam those comms before you can stop the kinds of communication that would allow these forces to coordinate their operations...and even then, as is the case in many such operations, the OpPlan would be carried out anyway and come off very coordinated because in many cases they are planned to kick-off with very minimal or no RF communications or other emmissions.

But you go ahead and believe whatever you want to believe...it will not change how these groups operate...and I am willing to bet, that the PLAAF and PLAN are well aware of these basic communication, coordination, and planning capabiliites and will hold them in very high regard.

...I wonder how in the heck the allies coordinated Operation Overlord in World War II, or Operation Iceberg in the same war without all the satellites...huh? The coordination was able to occur even when the operations kicked off with radio silence and those operations were much, much more massive than what we are talking about here.

These methodologies and basic communication technologies have been understood and applied for decades before satelliets ever came on the scene, Roger. The US military services are much better at it, and have much more refined equipment to make it work today, with or without satellites, than they did then.

Gentlemen, we have a great discussion here. Let's be sure to maintain a level of civiliblity. Thank you.

bd popeye super moderator

I think this piece adds a little more credibility of the existence of Chinese AShBMs.

Missile Threat Helped Drive DDG Cut
Zumwalt Class Could Not Down Chinese Weapons

By christopher p. cavas
Published: 4 August 2008

The threat posed by a super-secret new Chinese ballistic missile is among the factors driving the U.S. Navy's decision to "truncate" the planned seven-ship DDG 1000 Zumwalt class of advanced destroyers and build more DDG 51-class ships.
After years of planning, U.S. Navy leaders have announced plans to end the Zumwalt class at two ships.

Navy officials say the primary advantage of DDG 51 Arleigh Burke-class ships equipped with the Lockheed Martin Aegis combat system is that they can shoot down ballistic missiles - a capability the Navy never asked for in its high-technology and high-priced Zumwalts and its new Raytheon-developed combat system.

A program to upgrade 15 existing DDG 51 destroyers, along with three Aegis cruisers, will be complete by year's end. But the new missile threat is causing combatant commanders - the "cocoms" who lead regional commands such as U.S. Pacific Command and European Command - to demand more ships that can handle ballistic missile defense (BMD). The Navy's solution is to drastically reduce the number of Zumwalts to two ships that critics say will be simply technology demonstrators.

"The DDG 1000 … is incapable of conducting ballistic missile defense," Vice Adm. Barry McCullough, deputy chief of naval operations for Integration of Resources and Capabilities, told Congress July 31 during a hearing called to address the destroyer issue.

McCullough, in his written testimony, also revealed that the DDG 1000 cannot perform area air defense - the ability to shoot down enemy planes and missiles over a wide region. The Zumwalts, McCullough said, "cannot successfully employ the Standard Missile-2 (SM-2), SM-3 or SM-6."

The SM-2 is the Navy's primary air defense missile, and Raytheon is developing the SM-6 replacement. The SM-3 is a BMD missile.

A Navy source said the ships could carry and launch Standard missiles, but the DDG 1000 combat system can't guide those missiles onward to a target.

The new information contrasts with a DDG 1000 briefing provided this spring by the Naval Sea Systems Command, which listed Standard missiles as among the Zumwalt's weapons, and with well-known sources such as Jane's Fighting Ships, which lists the new ships as carrying the SM-2 missile.

BMD Issue Grew

The BMD issue gained prominence with Navy planners over the winter as intelligence assessments described the new threat. McCullough, in response to a question at the hearing by the House Seapower subcommittee, said work to rejigger the destroyer program began "four and a half to five months" ago, making it late February or early March.

Although a "secret, classified" threat was discussed during the hearing, neither Navy officials nor lawmakers would reveal any details.

One source familiar with the classified briefing said that while anti-ship cruise missiles and other threats were known to exist, "those aren't the worst." The new threat, which "didn't exist a couple years ago," is a "land-launched ballistic missile that converts to a cruise missile."

Other sources confirmed that a new, classified missile threat is being briefed at very high levels. One admiral, said another source, was told his ships should simply "stay away. There are no options."

Information on the new threat remains closely held.

"There's really little unclassified information about this stuff," said Paul Giarra, a defense consultant in McLean, Va., "except for the considerable amount of information that's appeared in unclassified Chinese sources."

Several experts on Chinese missiles contacted for this story said they weren't sure which specific threat drove the Navy to change its destroyer plans. One source speculated it might be "Threat D, a cruise missile that separates to a supersonic missile." A Chinese ballistic missile with terminal radar-homing capabilities - "a carrier killer" - is another possibility.

Retired Rear Adm. Eric Vadon, a consultant on East Asian defense affairs, thought the weapon sounded like a Dong Feng 21 (DF-21) missile, also known by its western designation CSS-5. Although the basic missile has been in service since the 1970s, the Chinese are known to be working to turn it into a homing ballistic missile.

"There's a possibility that what we're seeing is that somebody is calling this thing a cruise missile because it has some of those characteristics," Vadon said. "It maneuvers and it homes in. But a cruise missile breathes air."

The Chinese targetable ballistic missile threat has long worried U.S. Navy planners and military professionals.

"We're pretty certain the Chinese have been working on this for some time," said Bernard Cole, a professor at National Defense University in Washington and an expert on the Chinese military. "It would pose a threat. I don't know how you would counter that missile."

But Cole said the description of a ballistic missile turning into a cruise missile is new: "I've never heard this described this way."

Sources in the Pentagon said the U.S. Navy has not yet moved to add the BMD upgrade to any more existing Aegis ships. But a senior defense official confirmed the Navy is embracing BMD as a mission for Aegis surface combatants - and that all the new DDG 51s the Navy is asking for will be BMD-capable.

McCullough also said that the destroyer modernization program, which will start in 2011 with the oldest ships, will include signal processors "with inherent ballistic missile defense capability." Those electronics will make the ships more easily upgradeable should the service choose to add the BMD upgrade.

Even if the Pentagon and Congress approve the request to build more DDG 51s, the new ships won't start to come on line until at last 2015, estimated Eric Labs of the Congressional Budget Office, who also testified at the July 31 hearing.

A Controversial Move

Navy leaders received permission July 22 to ask the Pentagon to build only two DDG 1000s and instead ask for at least nine more DDG 51s. While observers have known for months that support for the DDG 1000 program inside the Navy was weak, the move nevertheless surprised Raytheon, which is developing the combat system and numerous subsystems for the Zumwalts, and a number of lawmakers who support the DDG 1000 program.

"Wow. We're turning on a dime," Rep. Joe Sestak, D-Pa., a former Navy vice admiral, said July 31 about the Navy's decision to halt DDG 1000 construction. "Where's the analysis, the strategic thought, the studies, and the cost studies that will show: is this really the way to go, or is there a different change or a better approach? I don't think we've seen those."

Rep. Roscoe Bartlett, R-Md., ranking member of the Seapower subcommittee and a former chairman, noted that he supported the Zumwalt program when the understanding was that the design's new tumblehome hull would be used in the follow-on CG(X) cruiser. Now, although the Navy has not revealed any details of an analysis of alternatives being conducted for the CG(X), Bartlett said the new ship will likely not have the new hull.

"I feel a little bit 'had' now when I'm told that the hull will probably not be used in CG(X)," Bartlett said.

Navy officials have been reluctant to explain the program shift publicly. Although senior Navy leaders began briefing Congress July 22, no press conferences have been held and no official statements released. And while McCullough and Allison Stiller, the deputy assistant secretary of the Navy for ship programs, appeared at the July 31 hearing, they declined to speak with the media afterward, instead hurrying to a waiting van which sped off before the doors closed. ■

E-mail: ccavas@defensenews.com.

http://www.defensenews.com/story.php?i=3657972

With mass saturation attacs. You buile extra cheap cruise missiles, something like a small cesna aeroplane, 400km/h fast maybe even 300km/h, with one bomb of 40kg ( selfguided ), with the range of 1000km and just send 5 000 of them towards the probable carrier location. When near the carrier, the small plane drops the bomb from 5-6000m hight, 10miles away so as to bee outside ciws and ram-s. (so that the ship needs to use SAM missiles to intercept them ). Soon, the ship is out of ammunition, but even if it is not, some of the small bombs will make it and damage the ship. They will damage whatever ship they see ( they should bee image guided when they once get into the general vicinity of the target. It should not be a problem as such algoritams already exist and you only need to copy it into the computer that the bomb is carriying ). I belive one coule build them very cheaply. You can by a small motorcicle for 3 - 400$. Maybe one of this small cruise missiles would cost you 5 000$. You just have to launch them in thousands and the cost of all attack will still stay pretty low, something like 20 - 30 000 000$. When the target is damaged other assets come into play. You could also send some more powerfull items like long range stealth cruise missiles, also something cheap, like norvegian NSM. The price will be lower if you build stuff like that in civilian factories and in large numbers. I don`t know how you could defend against that? You just have to stay uot of its reach. You could lunch such missiles from ships, bombers, even trains. You can mass them very quickly and fire thousunds upon thousends at the cost cheaper than one bomber!!. Maybe you could build ramps for them, something like the germans did with V1. I can not imagine a sucessfull defence against such relatively primitive but numerous weapons. You just have to find a carrier on the open see but with all this satelites, i don`t think that it is such a big issue anymore.

Originally Posted by zraver

Win or lose militarily, a war with the US is a loss for China. The US is China's market and while we (USA) can make do with out China, China's economy cannot make do with out the US. Infact a war would help the US long term by wiping out a big chunk of our debt wich is floated with Chinese capitol. In a war we would cancel the debt.

Contrary to popular wisdom, China's rapid growth is not hugely dependent on exports to the USA , in fact , China exports in 2007 to the USA constitutes less than 6% of its GDP (yes , a mere 6% ).

If the USA goes into a recession (the dreaded 'R' word) ,China's GDP growth would still be close to 9% thanks to strong domestic demand. Hardly a blip, albeit a really really small blip.

In fact some economist would even argue that a US recession is actually good for China - it helps reins in China's excessive inflationary pressures...

What an interesting world we live in.

http://www.economist.com/finance/dis...ry_id=10429271

Originally Posted by mxiong

I think this piece adds a little more credibility of the existence of Chinese AShBMs.



http://www.defensenews.com/story.php?i=3657972

http://blog.wired.com/defense/2008/0...t-stop-ch.html

Another update that seems to reinforce the view that the USN is unable to shoot down Chinese carrier killer missiles

So as it stands today the USN has no defence against a Chinese AShBMs or ASMs ?

Originally Posted by bd popeye

As for nutralizing the American CVs..The Chinese would have to disable 11 CVNs and 11 LHD/LHA type ships plus their escorts..Not going to happen.Period.

The great powers said the same of their Battleships just before the outbreak of World War 2...how wrong they were . From the Bismarck , to the Prince of Wales, the Yamato , and the Arizona , the unsinkables ...were sunk.

Fast Forward 50 years later , why build Carriers ? They are a lame floating duck . For the price of one carrier , one can get 10000 Asbm + Cruise . Even if 1% get past Aegis 2 & 3 , that is enough to sink all the 11 CVNs.

What are the odds of success ? at 1% ? Do the numbers .....