PLAN Anti-ship/surface missiles

B.I.B. said:

Im pretty sure there will be ongoing improvements to the missiles as well as their delivery systems.

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But no missile is like YJ 18 It is one scary missile and this author is wrong China now posses the mean to find and detect any large Ship and keep improving it with every year

Michael Pilger, “

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,” Staff Research Report, U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, 28 October 2015.

In April 2015, the U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence confirmed that China has deployed the YJ-18 antiship cruise missile (ASCM) on some People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Navy submarines and surface ships. The YJ-18’s greater range and speed than previous Chinese ASCMs, along with its wide deployment across PLA platforms, would significantly increase China’s antiaccess/area denial capabilities against U.S. Navy surface ships operating in the Western Pacific during a potential conflict. The YJ-18 probably will be widely deployed on China’s indigenously built ASCM-capable submarines and newest surface ships by 2020, and China could develop a variant of the YJ-18 to replace older missiles in its shore-based ASCM arsenal. This paper assesses the capabilities of the YJ-18 and describes the implications of its wide deployment for U.S. forces operating in the Western Pacific. The author exclusively used open source information and considered the capabilities of similar missiles to assess the likely characteristics of the YJ-18.

Characteristics of the YJ-18

• Speed: The YJ-18 has a subsonic cruise speed, reportedly about 600 miles per hour (mph), or Mach 0.8.2 Media reports suggest that when the missile is about 20 nautical miles (nm) from its target, the warhead accelerates to supersonic speed, reportedly up to Mach 3.0. The more fuel-efficient subsonic stage of the YJ-18’s flight increases its overall range, and the supersonic terminal flight stage reduces the time adversary forces have to engage the missile.
• Range: According to the U.S. Department of Defense, the YJ-18 has a range of 290 nm. The YJ-18’s predecessor on many Chinese submarines, the YJ-82, has a range of about 20 nm.
• Flight path: The YJ-18 most likely follows a sea-skimming flight path as it approaches its target.7 By flying only a few meters above the sea, the missile attempts to evade detection by surface radar until it breaks the radar horizon 16 to 18 nm from its target.
• Payload: Authoritative open source information on the YJ-18’s physical dimensions, including the size of its conventional warhead, is scarce. Some sources, including an IHS Jane’s report, suggest the YJ-18’s warhead weighs 300 kilograms (kg), though other sources suggest it weighs only 140 kg.
• Targeting: China is focused on building a robust C4ISR§ system for detecting ships and aircraft over the horizon, which would provide targeting data to antiship missiles such as the YJ-18. This system incorporates an array of ship-borne and land-based radar (including over-the-horizon radar); a constellation of imaging satellites; and a variety of intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance aircraft. However, China’s C4ISR infrastructure might be insufficient to generate and fuse the targeting information necessary to take advantage of the YJ-18’s assessed range. According to the Department of Defense, “It is … unclear whether China has the capability to collect accurate targeting information and pass it to launch platforms in time for successful [antiship missile] strikes in sea areas beyond the first island chain.” Moreover, some systems in China’s C4ISR infrastructure may be vulnerable to countermeasures, such as electromagnetic warfare operations, that could degrade the ability of the PLA to detect, identify, and track enemy ships and employ antiship missiles against them in a contingency.
• Navigation: The YJ-18 most likely is capable of using waypoint navigation and onboard radar-seeking technology to navigate to its target. …

It is extremely hard to believe that the current YJ-82 has a range of about 20 nm. It is true that the original YJ-82 had a range of 40km and has been extended to 120 kms in 1990s. I don't believe that any PLAN ship carries the original YJ-82 anymore

By the way they are assuming so much ... but do we even have a true image of that YJ-18-monster at all ??

antiterror13 said:

It is extremely hard to believe that the current YJ-82 has a range of about 20 nm. It is true that the original YJ-82 had a range of 40km and has been extended to 120 kms in 1990s. I don't believe that any PLAN ship carries the original YJ-82 anymore

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The YJ-82 with the 40km range should be the solid rocket fuel version. I recall the argument was that the longer range turbojet version of the YJ-82 can't be used on Chinese submarine platform since its dimensions are too big to fit into the submarine torpedo tubes. This is of course based on the (as yet unproven) assumption that the designer never tried to work around the problem, one way or another, like reducing the diameter of the turbojet YJ-82 by modifying in some way the air-intake bulge of the turbojet YJ-82.

Quickie said:

The YJ-82 with the 40km range should be the solid rocket fuel version. I recall the argument was that the longer range turbojet version of the YJ-82 can't be used on Chinese submarine platform since its dimensions are too big to fit into the submarine torpedo tubes. This is of course based on the (as yet unproven) assumption that the designer never tried to work around the problem, one way or another, like reducing the diameter of the turbojet YJ-82 by modifying in some way the air-intake bulge of the turbojet YJ-82.

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A simply pop-out intake, as featured on some other missiles, especially sub launched ones, should have solved that issue easily enough.

I think this is where your old western bias and high burden of proof they demand gets caught out by the PLA's secretive nature.

Your typical western analyst absolutely loathes to assume anything good or positive about China. Thus they demand the most unrealistically high burden of proof for even fairly easy and straight forward innovations and developments.

Basically, their default position is that the Chinese can do nothing new or innovative unless they are known to have bought something very similar they could copy, or if there is undeniable proof to the contrary.

Thus, the west is full of reports and assessments by people, that while technically accurate as far as what the evidence available shows, are in fact almost certainly underestimating the PLA's true capabilities to some extent.

Obviously it sometimes works the other way as well, but generally, there are far more that underestimates Chinese capabilities than those that overestimate.

Part # 1

351 days ago ... ...
In South China Sea ... ...
There was YJ-18 Anti Ship missile firing demo.

There were 10 sequential pictures.

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Part #2, on the next post ... ...

Part # 2

351 days ago ... ...
In South China Sea ... ...
There was YJ-18 Anti Ship missile firing demo.

There were 10 sequential pictures.

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With China busy putting up satellites up there, it can provide real time info over the entire SCS, ECS. So with that, isn't a 1000 miles range Anti ship missile possible? Satellite can provides real time mid course correction. Could another game changer.

With that even its entire navy and air force got wiped out, it still can fire those long range missiles at surface fleet with the help from satellites.

tidalwave said:

With China busy putting up satellites up there, it can provide real time info over the entire SCS, ECS. So with that, isn't a 1000 miles range Anti ship missile possible? Satellite can provides real time mid course correction. Could another game changer.

With that even its entire navy and air force got wiped out, it still can fire those long range missiles at surface fleet with the help from satellites.

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1000, 2000 or even longer range AShMs have been possible for quite some time. All you really need to do is stick an active seeker on the nose of a LACM and you are done.

The biggest limiting factor of missile range for the top powers have always been kill chain rather than any technical limitation about being able to build super long range cruise missiles.

Those Satellites you mentioned would likely get jammed and/or taken out in the opening stages of any serious war.

With a 1000 mile range conventional AShM, you are also going to run into serious kill chain issues even without hostiles taking out your satellite network.

Say they made the YJ18 have a 1000 mile range, it will take the missile 1h40min to reach its target.

In that time, an enemy ship sprinting at 30 knots could have moved 60 miles from its position from when the missile was launched, well outside the seeker range of the missile.

That means you are going to have to be able to monitor and track your target ship for 1h40min and keep updating your missile with course updates to take into account the updating position of its target.

Considering LEO satellites can only provide tracking windows a handful of minutes long at a time, you are going to need a great many satellites to provide continuous coverage for that length of time, and it just won't be economically or practically viable to do that.

The alternative is to loose contact with the target for intermittent periods and hope your next satellite can find it again when it comes into range. But that makes it a lot more difficult and likely that the engagement will fail.

That is why the PLA started with AShBMs for its long range strike option, since ballistic missiles can cover the distance to target within minutes, thus allowing them to keep the target in view throughout the engagement and cut the time from detection to missile impact down to within the viewing window allowed by a single LEO satellite.

For conventional AShMs, they would be relying more on other, long endurance recon assets, such as UAVs, OTH radars, fighters, subs, AWACS and MPAs etc for targeting information, so the range of the missiles are tied to how far those assets could reliably find and track hostile ships.

There is little point in having a 1000 mile ranged missile if you could only achieve a reliable kill chain against targets 300 miles away.

You won't be able to launch your missiles at targets 1000 miles away since you won't be able to detect and track targets that far away, so you have just made your missile significantly heavier and more expensive for no good reason.

This could potentially be parked on the man-made islands...

(3000 x 2167)