plawolf
Lieutenant General
In which case you can argue that the entire beach assault is just an enabling operation for you to land stuff later.
Taking a beach is not the ultimate mission, but a means to an end. The spearhead is, by my definition, the first significant forces in. A few small specops teams infiltrated in for covert recon and sabotage won’t really count, but massed air assault most certainly does in my book.
But to continue on this point will most likely mean we will just be going round and round arguing about semantics.
I think you are being way too optimistic in your assumptions about how easy and effective it might be to make enemy AShM batteries useless without having to destroy them.
OTH targeting is obviously preferred, but its lack is by no means enough to make AShMs useless.
A few quick examples off the top of my head:
Blind fire.
Not ideal, but if your front line units are reporting a massed 726 assault, you will have a very good idea of where the landing fleet is gathered.
You can blind fire your AShMs with waypoints to send them into your suspected target zone and switch on seekers for self-targeting.
You will have low probability of hits never mind kills, but you can easily up your odds. You can blind fire with one missile battery/launcher and spreads the waypoints to cover the biggest area possible. Then turn your radars to passive.
As soon as the escorts start engaging the first missiles, you can use their emissions to get a much better fix on the location of the landing fleet for a massed, concerntrated follow on missile attack.
Satellite uplink.
It would not be out of the question for the likes of the US to allow ROC forces access to their space based assets during a conflict.
Those assets would be pretty much untouchable by the PLA if the US has not directly enter the conflict.
While those satellites won’t be able to designate for coastal defence AShMs, they can give ROC AShM batteries precise coordinates to send their missiles so that they can lock on with onboard radar seekers.
Those are just some obvious examples, I am sure there are many other ways.
The key here is that such enemy counters takes time to organise and execute.
The 071’s owe defences and escorts should be able to easily handle localised piecemeal attacks, it’s the co-ordinated saturation attacks that will cause them the most problems and pose the highest risk.
So, unless you are be sure you have killed every AShM battery and launcher on Taiwan, you have to assume that they can launch those missiles at your ships, and do so in at least a semi co-ordinated way.
So those 071s doing OTH assault won’t be sitting pretty, but rather exposing themselves for extended periods to allow the enemy to mount the kind to attack that might punch through their defences.
Of course I am not suggesting they try a beach assault with enemy defences untouched, that would be so absurd that I am surprised you would ask such a question.
As you yourself have pointed in this very discussion, it will be extremely hard and time consuming to gaurentee destruction of all Taiwan’s defensive assets with air and missile strikes alone. So why is it such a leap for you to appreciate that PLA game plans should and would make the assumption that Taiwan might still have significant forces hidden and surviving by the time they come to launch the landings, and plan accordingly?
My point is and has always been that the PLA won’t have the luxury of the weeks or months of intensive air and missile strikes needed to guarantee with a high degree of confidence that all Taiwan’s AShM batteries and launchers are dead before they have to start the invasion.
Under such circumstance, you are left with all the negatives of OTH amphibious assault while getting the main benefits massively impaired or eliminated entirely.
Thus it is far better to move your LPDs in closer, so they can deploy all their cargo of IFVs and marines in the shortest time possible and then pull those high value assets way back, out of missile range where they will actually be safe.
Such a move, because of it’s much shorter timeframe, means the PLAAF, PLAN and PLA missile forces could surge a much higher number of supporting assets and be able to suppress the enemy defences far more effectively.
Think of dozens or even hundreds of UCAVs deployed on grid formation where the entire target beach and much of the inland areas within weapons range of the beach gets UCAVs on station for the duration just waiting for concealed weapons and troops to reveal themselves.
Add in similar numbers of manned attack helicopters and fast jets acting as rapid reaction, with naval artillery doing suppression fire and EW assets disruption enemy communications and targeting etc, all done while there are no US satellites overhead, and you will have a solid chance that those 071s will be on their way back out to sea before the enemy could organise a serious, co-ordinated response.
