Japanese Defence Minister: Helicopter & DDG "locked on" by Chinese Frigates' Radar

asif iqbal said:

Well in that case that was a very stupid tactic,

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and if you do not realise the importance of AWACS in aerial warfare then I will not even begin to explain,

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you do realise that ground radar works over land and not over the sea

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Mysterre said:

And they would somehow be different reasons? I don't even get your question here. Ships usually ground because they didn't know the shoal was there. Do you mean to suggest the American grounding was intentional? You mean to suggest the American ship did in fact know it was there and grounded it on purpose?

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We don't even know where it happened, or under what circumstances so what's wrong asking if he was capable of giving a more detailed description.
Anyway I think you are wrong in assuming he hit an unknown shoal /sand bar. After all there are many scenarios where the harbour pilot or captain of the vessel being aware of the possible dangers of sand bars made the wrong call. Eg. the harbour pilot , having guided thousands of ships in the past under all sorts of conditions becomes contemptuous of the risks if pressed to get the boat into harbour, but delays due to weather and an outgoing tide............ you can imagine the rest.

Futhermore , if the ship was travelling during the daytime , one can usually tell when there are shoals/sandbars around from the movement of water.

Or maybe he was referring to the Guardian grounding where the boat hit a well known reef last month.? In daylight one can certainly tell that theres an underwater obstacle ahead.

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You obviously imply (by even just asking the question) that the American grounding smells sweeter than the Chinese grounding. Please, enlighten us how this can be.

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As someone whose opposed to the Chinese Policy in the SCS, and no one died/hurt because of the grounding, I guess its ok to have a chuckle when things went pear shaped for them. There's no doubt that many in this very thread would be doing the same thing if it happened to the Americans.

The PLAN will just have to learn as did the Americans, " If youre going to wave the big stick, make sure you don't make an ass of yourself.

Mentioning the downed J8 is yet more evidence that you are just trolling, as if that was the first time in the history of flight that an intercepting fighter collided with their intended mark.

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He was "Hot Dogging" I bet that wasn't part of the C.O.'s orders.

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plawolf said:

Care to actually enlighten us how you are so much more clever than those fighter pilots?

Please read what I wrote. It is precisely because I am aware of how much of a difference AWACS makes to air combat that I am of the belief that western pilots rely on them far more than what most people might realize, and that without the awesome situational awareness and co-ordination that AWACS provide, western pilots would almost certainly not have done as well as they did in real life combat in recent decades.

In addition, the basic principle of using a massive and powerful radar that can see a lot further than fighter radars, and having an operator use that radar to direct fighters to where they are needed or where they have the best advantage is the



What are you talking about?

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plawolf said:

Please read what I wrote. It is precisely because I am aware of how much of a difference AWACS makes to air combat that I am of the belief that western pilots rely on them far more than what most people might realize, and that without the awesome situational awareness and co-ordination that AWACS provide, western pilots would almost certainly not have done as well as they did in real life combat in recent decades.

In addition, the basic principle of using a massive and powerful radar that can see a lot further than fighter radars, and having an operator use that radar to direct fighters to where they are needed or where they have the best advantage is the same irrespective of whether that radar and operator are in a ground station or on board and AWACS.

Trying to draw a fundamental dividing line between GCI and AWACS just seems like a deliberately engineered distinction, and the main reason GCi gets all the scorn while AWACS gets heaped with praise has little to do with the difference in the merits of both methods and entirely to do with the fact that the East primarily used GCI during the Cold War while the west preferred AWACS (but also used more than its fair share of GCI, but shhh, don't tell any of the fanboys that).

Had anyone who bashed GCI actually based it on the merits of using AWACS compared to it, that would have been fair enough. But the idea that GCI is somehow fundamentally different from AWACS directed intercepts is just silly and smacks of mindless prejudice.

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bladerunner said:

Mysterre said:

As someone whose opposed to the Chinese Policy in the SCS, and no one died/hurt because of the grounding, I guess its ok to have a chuckle when things went pear shaped for them. There's no doubt that many in this very thread would be doing the same thing if it happened to the Americans.

The PLAN will just have to learn as did the Americans, " If youre going to wave the big stick, make sure you don't make an ass of yourself.



Yeah, but it's the American that end up having to take apart their grounded ship after weeks of pondering what options to take, meanwhile the Chinese ship got off with a little scratch. Hmmm...I didn't chuckle about the American ship, but I sure did chuckle at those that opposed China's SCS policy to realize their one and only "big stick" got stuck. And those small chuckles can sound like a huge laughter when you combined all those Chinese and overseas Chinese together.

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China’s Increasingly Good Mock Air Battles Prep Pilots for Real War

For 11 days in November, the sky over the northwestern Chinese province of Gansu witnessed some of the most intensive dogfighting to ever take place in China. Jet fighters screamed overhead, twisting and turning in complex aerial maneuvers. Heavily laden bombers lumbered through the tangle of fighters, dodging enemy defenses as they lined up for bombing runs.

The warplanes and their crews were the real deal. It featured the best of the best of the Chinese military, which with 2,700 aircraft possesses the world’s third largest aerial arsenal, after the U.S. and Russia. But the combat over the sprawling Dingxin Air Force Test and Training Base was simulated. Despite the ferocity of the maneuvers, no live weapons were fired. The mock battles of the annual “Red Sword/Blue Sword” exercise are meant to prepare the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF) for the possibility of actual high-tech combat.

In terms of authenticity, China’s pretend air battles are getting pretty close to the real thing. That improving realism, combined with Beijing’s new fighters and other hardware, has some observers in the U.S. feeling uneasy. For decades the Pentagon has counted on highly realistic aerial training to mitigate the increasing age and decreasing size of its warplane holdings. “That [training] used to be a significant advantage U.S. air forces held relative to the PLAAF,” Dave Deptula, a retired Air Force general who flew F-15 fighters, tells Danger Room.

The Pentagon still maintains other aerial edges, with more and better fighters — including stealth models — and support planes plus decades of combat experience in the Balkans, the Middle East and Central Asia. But with every scripted dogfight over Dingxin, the American war game advantage shrinks — and with it the overall U.S. margin of superiority.

Catching Up

Beijing’s air training renaissance has been a long time coming, and maps neatly — though belatedly — onto America’s own advancements in simulated combat. Forty years ago, a humbled U.S. military, bloodied by the war in Vietnam, pioneered the use of realistic scenarios to train air crews for the lethal dangers of actual combat. China, likewise bruised in a botched invasion of Vietnam in 1979, watched from afar as the Americans’ new Red Flag and Topgun exercises — run by the Air Force and Navy, respectively — revolutionized U.S. air power.

Red Flag, in particular, drove major changes in the way America prepares for war. The exercise, which today takes places at least semiannually, recreates an entire war on vast ranges in Nevada or Alaska, pitting a rotating contingent of good guys (“Blue Force”) against ground defenses bolstered by veteran pilots (“Red Force”) specifically tasked with simulating the tactics of potential enemy militaries. These “aggressors,” as they’re known, routinely slaughter the Blue Force, firing simulated missiles and guns tracked by a sophisticated electronic scoring system.

After four decades of refinement, today Red Flag has a reputation for being harder than real war. “It was almost as intense as Red Flag,” one U.S. fighter pilot said of his missions over Iraq during the 1991 Gulf War.

At first, Beijing was unable to copy the Americans’ training innovations. The Chinese air force was wedded to highly restrictive Soviet-style tactics emphasizing direct control of warplanes by ground-based commanders, as opposed to the greater freedom of action and potential for learning afforded U.S. aviators. Moreover, the Cultural Revolution in China in the 1960s had wreaked havoc on the scientific-minded training establishment. “The ideological types in [the People's Republic of China] leadership thought it was capitalistic to train,” wrote one U.S.-based Chinese analyst who goes by “Feng.” The ideologues had even destroyed flight manuals.

It took decades of painful political reform to clear the way for Beijing’s own version of Red Flag. Today the bureaucratic obstacles are fast falling away, and a rapidly modernizing Chinese air force, flush with cash and new equipment, is working hard to catch-up to the Americans. The introduction of the Russian-made Su-30 fighter in the 1990s finally gave the PLAAF a modern warplane it could match with more intensive training techniques. Beijing massively expanded the Dingxin airbase and its adjacent flight range. The Chinese began deploying small numbers of pilots and planes to Kazakhstan for exercises, laying the foundation for far bigger war games back home.

Beijing also formed several aggressor units flying specially painted fighters meant to replicate the planes of China’s rivals.

Incrementally, and without much notice outside of China, the PLAAF transformed routine flight training into the regular Red Sword/Blue Sword mock air battles, modeled on Red Flag. By 2005 Beijing’s war games were well underway. And a few years after that, the frontline improvements began to show. As late as 2008 Chinese fighters couldn’t make it even halfway across the Taiwan Strait before being chased off by Taiwanese fighters and ground-based defenses. Today the situation is reversed, and Taiwanese jets find themselves quickly intercepted. “It shows improved reaction time and professionalism in the PLAAF,” Feng wrote.

Golden Helmets

For November’s Red Sword/Blue Sword exercises, 108 pilots from 14 fighter regiments flocked to Dingxin alongside detachments from bomber and support units. They brought along a dizzying array of jets, including aging J-7s (based on the Soviet-era MiG-21) plus the latest J-10s and J-11s built in China and Su-30s acquired directly from Russia. H-6 bombers and Airborne Early Warning planes with giant radar dishes on top rounded out the aerial armada.

After a work-up period, the main mock fighting went on for 10 days. Some pilots racked up scores of missions and an equal number of simulated kills. The 11 best pilots were awarded the prestigious Golden Helmet award and lavished with praise in state-run media. “Some people are born for flight,” crowed one official news report.

The latest war game contained important lessons for the PLAAF. The twin-engine J-11, a rough analog of America’s F-15, reportedly cleaned up against the smaller single-engine J-10s, which are similar in layout to U.S. F-16s. Besides improving pilot skill, the exercise results could shape Beijing’s warplane production plans.

In any event, China probably still has a way to go before it can match the U.S. plane-for-plane in the air. But the contest has officially begun, and with every simulated dogfight over the plains surrounding Dingxin, the Chinese inch closer to achieving the kind of realistic training that transformed the U.S. military into the world’s leading air power.

Already Beijing enjoys one key advantage: Its training exercises receive steady funding, whereas the U.S. Air Force’s own budget has been repeatedly threatened by political posturing in Washington. “Given the massive reductions in U.S. air combat training coming in the event of sequestration, the PLAAF won’t have far to go to match and then exceed us in terms of flying time and exercises,” Deptula warns.

It’s still highly unlikely that U.S. and Chinese pilots will square off in battle. Among other reasons, the economies of the two nations are practically interconnected. But the surging Chinese war games could mean the beginning of the end to the unquestioned air-to-air combat domination that American pilots have enjoyed for at least a generation.

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asif iqbal said:

PLAAF maybe good but they are not that good, J11 pilots have visited Pakistan and have shown rigid, formation and institutionalised training,

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the PAF has a long history of top tier training and combat experience with top tier aircraft for decades, from F86 sabres to Shah of Irans F14 Tomcats to today's USAF F22 Raptor, they flown with all of them, excercises from Anatolia Eagle to Red Flag who clock in excess of 240 hours flying time one of the highest flying rates in the world

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China has nice systems and getting better all the time but that doesnt nessesarly mean they have the man and machine interface, other pilots of other Regiments might be different but there is not much to say about the J11 pilots, they have a long long way to go

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I just hope we can see more excercises between the PAF and PLAAF so we can gain a batter understanding of each other, if something is good I say it's good if it's not I'm not going to sit and bang on and on about it

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plawolf said:

If they are rigid or inflexibly during exercises, it is just as, if not more likely that that is down to strict ROEs set by command to make sure they don't give too much away and the Chinese pilots are more interested in making sure they see and remember what the other nations' pilots do rather than strictly trying to best them. So they can teach their fellow pilots all about it when they get home.

As close as China and Pakistan are, China cannot ignore the fact that Pakistan is also close to America, and their pilots regularly train with American, or American allies.

If PLAAF pilots did give their all in exercises against PAF pilots, and even if the PAF pilots promised not to disclose anything to a third party, they still have to make reports and ground observes would have all the flight data anyways from radar and telemetry from any training pods carried. Can Pakistan give a 100% guarantee that the Americans would never get a hold of any of that intel?

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Franklin said:

China is trying to move away from the old rigid style's of the past but like with everything else has come a long way but still has a long way to go. This article from Danger Room tells about China's annual Red Sword exercises comparible with America's Red Flag exercises. I think Tphuang has writing about this some time back on his blog and is even quoted here. Perhabs China can benefit by inviting the air forces of Pakistan and Russia and other countries to join these exercises in the future.

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