Re: How Do You Sink A Carrier?
What I meant was mid-corse guidance. You have wonderful ideas of 1000+ km ranged cruide missiles going after the CVN.... ever wondered how to update the guidance of the cruide missile mid-course? The CVN isn't sitting prettily at one spot waiting for the missiles, you know. You could do it the Russian way and try to shorten the time of flight by making the missiles supersonic, but that would in turn make them large and heavy, which would in turn limit the number of missiles carried. Stop thinking just about the missile firing platform, think end to end of the whole chain of events needed to engage a CVN. At least, look up how the Russians tried to do it - it would give you a far more realistic perspective of the difficulties involved in trying to take on an American CBG.
It's
possible that the PLA is looking at the Russian "heavy missile" solution. The PLA imported at least 6 x Kh-55's in 2000-2001 from Ukraine. This missile can reach from China to Guam. This year, we see this from Janes:
The Russians recently tested an updated, land-attack version:
I recall the Russians built Kh-55 derived anti-ship missiles (Kh-65/SD/101?), not too sure.
On mid-course correction, I think since wer'e talking about ships at sea and not stationary target, we can't use TERCOM. So we'd have to rely on a combination of aircraft, ship/sub, UAV, satellite, and various manned intelligence methods.
Of these, the cheapest and most risky would be human agents. If someone makes a call via satellite phone, you can get a fix on their position, but planting the agent, smuggling in the communication device, and actually getting away with it would be quite difficult.
The least risky (and possibly very expensive) would be battlefield recon satellites. Satellites are expensive, so the PLA needs something cost-effective. The H-6 NGSLV launch platform that CASC is working on, is a step in the right direction:
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plummets. UAVs of the types and varieties you suggest also are not cheap, especially when you put the kind of sensors needed to search for the CVN on them. Guess how much the Global Hawk costs, even in its baseline version?
Total program cost over ~9 years of the Global Hawk, as of Nov 2006, is estimated at $9.5 billion:
In comparison, the F/A-22's total program cost is $71+ billion. But the (total) unit cost of the Global Hawk and the F/A-22 are similiar, because so few of the UAV's are ordered:
The new official cost estimate projects that the Air Force will buy 54 Global Hawks eventually. So far, the Air Force has 14 and the Navy has bought two for experimental purposes.
The actual construction cost per unit is estimated at $35 million. But the R&D cost is making the Pentagon choke.
p.s. as I mentioned previously, I believe UAV is the future and the PLA should allocate $ toward UAV R&D, even at the expense of traditional manned aircraft. I think all existing AF with man-pilot culture is going to hate this. If it costs $1+ billion/year for next 10 years in R&D, so be it.
