When US sells the Apache to Taiwan, will this pose a serious threat to China?

Apaches are very effective ground attack weapons, they are not very useful against china since there is no borders to deploy them to. guarding the coast with these expensive things is not to my taste, i would rather get more fighters and harpoon to sink the enemy before it reach the coast.

because by the time the PLA reaches the coast, they would likely have air superiority and the apache will have to stay low like in forest area to hide from fighters, limiting their effectiveness to protect the coast.

Here is a surprise for you. A modern pulse doppler radar cannot pick out a slow moving helo. The rotor system offers no net doppler return, and the airspeed of a helo flying nap of the earth is slow enough to be below the minumum doppler return of most radars. The US Army had to learn this the hard way when it used an F-16 radar on the Sgt. York AA gun. It simply could not pick out low flying helos crossing the radar's scan. The same is true of airborn radars. In reality it is pretty darn hard for a fighter to nail a helo if the helo pilot is paying attention and uses good tactics. Fighter pilots should forget ever going in low for the kill, the helo can do things no fighter will ever do. The Marines practice this out in Yuma and have impressed some cocky F-15 jocks. Terrain is a helo pilots friend.
And who says an Apache is no longer able to conduct offensive ops from low level? Au contraire! In a Nato war Apaches would remain masked for nearly all their ops. Apaches use terrain or foliage to hide behind while a remote source, either an RPV, a soldier or a scout helo, finds and lazes the target. The Apache can fire missiles while remaining masked. Hellfire can be programmed to climb over an obstacle then descend and acquire the reflection of the lazer designator. The Apache can also pop up above the terrain or foliage momentarily and fire Hellfire, then descend and remask. One version of Hellfire can dispense submunitions that are deadly to troops on the beach, so it can be used as an area denial weapon. It could make a beach plenty hot. The latest version of Hellfire has active radar homing, no need for a lazer desinator.
On the last day of GWI, a brigade of Iraqi mech infantry was laid to waste by Apache's belonging to 1 AD. No ground troops were used at all, just Apache's. Apache's are not strictly anti armor as some here claim. Hellfire delivered submunitions can decimate soft targets over a wide area, like infantry and their vehicles.

Man overboard is right, the Apache is a very useful weapon against all manner of ground targets and much less vunerable than you might think, especially if its target doesn't have any air defence units of its own (ie your average column of tanks and infantry). Chances are they wouldn't even know the Apache is there before the Hellfires hit. I live in an area where military helicopters fly by all the time, and I can hear them coming from a long way. In fact I can often tell which type of helicopter is coming my way based on the sound. And I'll tell you that the Apache, especially when its flying low, is very hard to hear.

So I would give tha Apache good reviews based on its intended mission for Taiwan, hitting the beaches and the exits from the beaches and supporting a counterattack by tanks on the beaches. However the Apache is just one piece of the puzzle, Taiwan should devote the more resources to getting more fighters and SAMs available to maintain a battle in the air over the beaches and prevent it from being safe for the PLAAF.

(Trying to breath new air into this thread...)

Some numbers:

The base unit price of AH-1W was $10.7 million USD. The gross purchase price is estimated at $22.8 million each.

The base unit price for AH-1Z is $14 million USD, according to Turkish sources in 1998.

The cost of refurbishing used AH-1W to AH-1Z standard is $16.5 million each, according to US military sources in 2003.

The gross unit price (including weapons, spares, training, support) for AH-64D is $56.25 million each, according to sales figure from Greek sources.

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From the figures above, I'd estimate that the gross purchase price (including munitions, spares, etc) of AH-1Z is likely to be 50% of an AH-64D.

The ROC Army wants to purchase 30 x AH-64D's. I'm interested to see a discussion in comparing 30 x AH-64D's vs. 60 AH-1Z's. What does everyone think?

To start, I'd propose (armchair general here) that the ROCA should 1) opt for 60 x AH-1Z, 2) refurbish existing fleet of 62 AH-1W to AH-1Z standard (later), and 3) refurbish existing fleet of 1970's UH-1 to UH-1Y standard via re manufacturing (rebuild from frame), plus building more from new hulls (licensed production).

The benefits include: 1) no "new" aircraft type introduced & existing support infrastructure can be used with minimal changes, 2) the ROCA would end up with a numerically larger attack helicopter fleet, 3) they'd be using the same hardware as USMC, so they can simply wait for USMC to work out all the bugs before purchasing, and have future upgrades avail as well.

If I was an Apache pilot, I'd be most worried about the array of SAMs that any PLA invasion force worthy of the name would be carrying. That's what would keep me in the forests, not the fighters (or can those KJ-2000s pick out low flying helicopters?)

A modern pulse doppler radar cannot pick out a slow moving helo. The rotor system offers no net doppler return, and the airspeed of a helo flying nap of the earth is slow enough to be below the minumum doppler return of most radars.

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Excuse me, but define "modern"?

Are you familiar with GMTI or MTI modes? Its called Moving Target Indicator or Ground Moving Target Indicator. Essentially it can be done with any monopulse radar arrangement.

Basically it works by comparing two sets of signals, first the reflection of a moving object vs. the radar reflection of the static non moving background. No matter what, that's going to show. This arrangement also removes ground clutter, since clutter is essentially reflected signals from stationary objects. That can be filtered out.

There are other uses of GMTI. You can pick out targets in the water surface, such as ships. You can pick out moving vehicles in the ground, like tanks and trucks. All these are lower in the ground than a helicopter and moving much slower. And yet they can be picked up. And planes that use them include things like JSTARS. There are even civilian applications, one example being police helicopters catching speeders.

Many modern fighter radars have look down modes. With high frequency and high PRF for high resolution you can pick out low flying targets, especially when you're trying to nail down cruise missiles. Modern BVRAAMs are getting better picking out low flying objects, and its never been a problem with infrared seeking SRAAMs.

So, remind me how advanced computer technology was in 1990. Let's see, that was almost 20 years ago! Is it even conceivable that tracking technology has advanced in this time period? Right off the bat I can name you two critical techniques which have improved tracking since 1990: the Unscented Transform and Rao-Blackwellization.

crobato said:

Excuse me, but define "modern"?

Are you familiar with GMTI or MTI modes? Its called Moving Target Indicator or Ground Moving Target Indicator. Essentially it can be done with any monopulse radar arrangement.

Basically it works by comparing two sets of signals, first the reflection of a moving object vs. the radar reflection of the static non moving background. No matter what, that's going to show. This arrangement also removes ground clutter, since clutter is essentially reflected signals from stationary objects. That can be filtered out.

There are other uses of GMTI. You can pick out targets in the water surface, such as ships. You can pick out moving vehicles in the ground, like tanks and trucks. All these are lower in the ground than a helicopter and moving much slower. And yet they can be picked up. And planes that use them include things like JSTARS. There are even civilian applications, one example being police helicopters catching speeders.

Many modern fighter radars have look down modes. With high frequency and high PRF for high resolution you can pick out low flying targets, especially when you're trying to nail down cruise missiles. Modern BVRAAMs are getting better picking out low flying objects, and its never been a problem with infrared seeking SRAAMs.

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All of this is true. But beware, any F-15 driver with experience over Europe will tell you that if you set the speed sensitivity low enough you can pick out fast moving cars on the Autobahn, Autostrada, Autoroute or what have you. A fighter pilot isn't going to clutter the screen with ground based movement, so in practice sensitivity is set high enough to ignor this. This is where the smart helo pilot hides. Down low in the trees where ground based radars cannot find you much less shine an illuminator on you for a shot, and slow enough not to alert passing fighters. Picture your Blackhawk or Apache picking it's way through clearings and openings in trees and that is how you fly at the FEBA. Let the scout helos or recon troops find the targets and let the Apache sneak up from below the trees or from behind a hill.
In a Taiwan situation especially those Apaches or Cobra will be flying over friendly territory to shoot at the enemy landing force approaching or already on the beach. AA systems on PLAN ships won't be very useful if the Taiwanese pilots mask effectively. They should never show up on a ship's radar.

man overbored said:

All of this is true. But beware, any F-15 driver with experience over Europe will tell you that if you set the speed sensitivity low enough you can pick out fast moving cars on the Autobahn, Autostrada, Autoroute or what have you. A fighter pilot isn't going to clutter the screen with ground based movement, so in practice sensitivity is set high enough to ignor this. This is where the smart helo pilot hides. Down low in the trees where ground based radars cannot find you much less shine an illuminator on you for a shot, and slow enough not to alert passing fighters. Picture your Blackhawk or Apache picking it's way through clearings and openings in trees and that is how you fly at the FEBA. Let the scout helos or recon troops find the targets and let the Apache sneak up from below the trees or from behind a hill.
In a Taiwan situation especially those Apaches or Cobra will be flying over friendly territory to shoot at the enemy landing force approaching or already on the beach. AA systems on PLAN ships won't be very useful if the Taiwanese pilots mask effectively. They should never show up on a ship's radar.

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That's not how MTI works. As long as it moves, it is detected. And the faster it moves, the more it is detected. This is not a matter of hiding from the radar's point of view. The key element to this is that a moving object will produce a measurably different return compared to its previous reading, while a static object would produce the same return from a previous reading.

As for ground based radars, they're a lot smarter now than you think. For example, artillery spotting radar can trace a detection with only the RCS of an actual artillery shell, which by the way is pretty small and directly the same to the physical diameter of the artillery shell---all the way back to its source. Artillery spotting radar can double as detection against low flying aircraft, helicopters and even cruise missiles.

And you really can't appreciate the fact that ground based radars are on elevated arms that will enable them to be raised above the tree level height. Once again, many SAM systems are being meant to counter low flying aircraft, helicopters, and most importantly terrain hugging cruise missiles.

Aircraft with FLIR looking down can spot any helo flying low and send a heater up its behind.

As for the PLA, they got a unique situation where their own attack helicopters happen to be equipped with the world's only helicopter vs. helicopter missile, the TY-60.

adeptitus said:

The ROC Army wants to purchase 30 x AH-64D's. I'm interested to see a discussion in comparing 30 x AH-64D's vs. 60 AH-1Z's. What does everyone think?

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I think that more AH-1Zs would be better for the reasons you stated vis-a-vis logistics and costs but also the ROCAs helicopter fleet would be facing such a high threat enviroment and would essentially be "the underdog" in any invasion scenario, so it is better for them to spread out the risk over a larger number of platforms. What I mean is, when there's a chance that many of your helicopters may never get a chance to fire their weapons at all its better to have more airframes than better individual helicopters.