PRC/PLA 2015 Victory Parade Thread

[subotai1]

Refute my points please. Don't go on personal attack. What points that I made do you think is not plausible?

I will humor you. But I am going to build on what vesicles said as well.

First of all, this is not amateur hour for China. They know what they are doing when it comes to subterfuge and intelligence and have been doing it a very long time.

Those missiles you saw? Those are what they wanted you to see and they are what the West thought they would see (eventually). Df-21, check. Df-26, check, DF-31, check. Ability to kill a carrier, they claimed they had 2 that could do that. But nobody (outside the PLA) really knows what you were shown in the parade. Those designations of the missiles have as much source in the West as they do in China. But what were they and were they capable of sinking a carrier? Unknown.

Now lets talk count and tracking. Who knows how many missiles they actually have of each type? Again, it could be more, it could be less. It actually does not matter. Because what they ARE going to do is this. They have far more TELs (with missile cases) than they do missiles. So which one of the TELs is which and which one has what missile? Even if you can answer that question and track it for a while, eventually that TEL is going into a mountainside tunnel (of which China could have thousands of kilometers of). But where does it go from there? Is the truck that exists the tunnel the same one that went in? Is it a real missile or is it fake? Maybe 10 kilometers down the road another TEL exits. Which one is that one? What if not all those missiles are on TELs? Some may be on railcars. Some may be in silos. Where are they all? While some of these TELs with real missiles could be tracked (or maybe the PLA lets you track them, like a magician lets you watch his hand), the odds of you, the enemy state finding a large number of them is very low.

Lets talk about the Arleigh Burke and Ticonderoga and use your assumptions. First, China's tunnels and a large number of the launch facilities are not directly on the coast. They are in the closest mountain ranges away from the coast. They are not close enough that any of those ships are going to get a shot during the boost phase. Even if they were and it was a scenario where the US had all 82 ships off the coast of China and China was worried about these ships, those ships would go down first or face their own saturation attacks before China launched the big boys. Also, the missile tracking satellites, those would be downed too.

Its good to have commentary here, but please be rational and think before posting. Don't just come across like a fanboy (no insult intended).

 

[plawolf]

I beg to differ. If those missiles are what they are, meaning if they are real - the ground surveillance teams will laser paint the target for satellite survelliance teams to continously track these TELs to their designated hiding places after the parade.

My, where to begin with this.

Firstly, no one would need to, or be stupid enough to laser designate the missiles. It is completely unnecessary unless you are directing in LGBs, far easier for the guys to just stay within line of site and use widely available GPS locators to call in grid references for satellites to focus on.

Secondly, what do you think Chinese internal securing and counter intelligence, not to mention the missiles' own close protection forces are doing while your guy smugly follows an ICBM?

Any such suspicious activity would be recognised very quickly and your agents taken into custody.

You also clearly have very little real world experience of how things work in China.

In terms of transportation, for such important strategic assets, the Chinese have zero problems about closing entire highways, whereby traffic cops move in ahead and behind the convoy and order all civilian traffic to pull over onto the hard shoulder and stay there until cleared to do so.

Anyone trying to tail such a missile convoy would blend in as much as a professional bodybuilder on a fashion catwalk.

In addition, there are vast military controlled areas in China that can be quite vast in size.

You will need a permit to even get past the sentries at the gates.

Any missile storage or launch areas are going to be inside these special military controlled zones, so your guys are not even going to get close to seeing where they end up.

It is also the easiest thing in the world for the missile convoy to enter one of these zones and immediately leave from one of the many entrances and exits such zones typically will have.

And it is not like China has that many nukes to begin with - and this is why designation matters - the US only needs to focus on the few "big ones" that will actually threaten the US mainland - eg. DF-5, DF-31. Designation allows them to identify and prioritize survelliance targets.

You seriously think anyone needs a designation number to figure out which missiles could reach the US?!

You think if the Chinese painted "DF31" on their little DF15s and "DF15" on their big DF31s, anyone in the Pentagon would be daft enough to think its the little missiles they need to keep their eyes on?

There are less than 30 DF-31 and less than 20 DF-5; basically less than 50 targets to track. If satellite survelliance cannot cover the tracking of these 50 targets continously, I am sure US DoD has many covert ground survelliance teams tailing these missiles on ground. If they can find and track Osama Bin Laden who didn't even step out of his bunker, they can find China's DF-5 and DF-31.

How many years did it take for the US to tracking down OBL? You make it sound as if the US knew where he was all that time.

In addition, it wasn't fancy satellite surveillance or signals intercept that rumbled OBL, but a leak within the ISI.

A far more relevant example would be how hard it was for the coalition to find and hunt Saddam's Scuds in largely featureless desert, with special forces teams roaming at will and total control of the skies.

Yes, technology has moved on since then, but that cuts both ways. US surveillance technology has improved, but so has Chinese counter-surveillance technology and methods.

Good luck trying to find, let along track the missiles when the first thing China will do when hostilities break out is to dazzle and jam western surveillance satellites.

Even if they US knows where all the missiles are during peacetime, which they will almost certainly not, as soon as it looks like a shooting war is about to break out, China could temporarily blind all tracking satellites and relocate their missiles.

You are giving America far too much credit and the Chinese not nearly enough.

In addition, the US doesn't have anywhere close to the almost total access with assets over China as it did over and within Iraq.

 

[plawolf]

your points depend on one assumption: the missiles shown at the parade were the actual missiles. Is it possible that they only showed models, not the actual missiles?? Towing massive nukes around town, literally miles away from the most important govn't agencies of the nation, would not be the safest thing to do, IMHO. So most likely, what was towed on Chang-An street were models or empty launch tubes for those missiles. China was simply telling the world that they now have these missiles actively deployed in the field. That was the intended message: "what we are showing here have been formally deployed". that's why they intentionally painted the designation on the weapons, to intentionally demonstrate to the world what kind of weapons they have, without any doubt. In such case, it is clear as day, that China was not worried about exposing these specific pieces. I don't think anyone, including foreign agents, expected to get close enough to inspect any of the weapons. And I don't think anyone, including the foreign agents, expected to gain anything substantial out of the showing, except that China formally acknowledges the existence of these weapons.

As many in the West have complained, the PLA is a very secretive organization. No one can get a very good understanding of what they are doing. This would imply that the PLA knows how to keep a secret, which would suggest that they would not make rookie mistakes such as allowing foreign agencies to target and track their ultimate "assasinmace" weapons...

Knowing the exactly shape of the missiles makes little difference.

For large area, broad range search, no satellite is going to be using anywhere close to enough resolution to differentiate between missile types. They will instead be programmed to scan for the general profile of a large rectangular TEL with a pointy missile cone sticking out the front.

Actually, remember back in the day when we were still debating about whether AShBMs could work, and people were pouring scorn on the notion that China could use low resolution, broad range satellite scanning and fairly easy to write programmes to scan vast areas of open ocean and automatically flag targets that fit the general size and profile of warships and carriers for closer examination?

Now that the Chinese have announced they have operational AShBMs, suddenly the US is supposed to be able to monitor all of China 24/7 in enough detail to differentiate between missile types?

 

[AssassinsMace]

This ain't the movies. Intelligence agencies rely mostly on gathering electronic information. Ground intelligence from "secret agents" is not so easy and more unreliable. It's not as elaborate as you see in the movies. In the movies they portray Western agents being able to turn Chinese women into spies for them. It's actually more the other way around. There was a PBS Frontline documentary called From China with Love. It was about the spy game between the US and China. According to it, the US has basically zero ground intelligence in China. I could guess why from other stuff I've read namely they don't trust anyone ethnically Chinese to be agents for them. I highly doubt the West has agents on the ground following these systems around in a "police state" because they would be easy to spot. All those Tibetans the CIA train as infiltrators back during 50s and 60s... none of them were ever heard from again. That came from a book written by a former CIA official on CIA failures. He also mention missions where there were defectors in China that the CIA wanted extracted. Someone would secretly fly aircraft in and land in China to pick these people up only to have the PLA waiting for them. Or how about recently that Canadian couple arrested for being spies in China. By Canada's moot reaction if they were innocent civilians meant it was probably true. China seems to have a very efficient counter intelligence.

I've brought this up before but the Kosovo War shows the limits of Western advanced military surveillance capabilities. The Serbs were able to save 90% of their armor contrary to reports that NATO destroyed 90% of Serbia's armored forces. What about China's 2000 miles of tunnels? That's a lot to cover even if the US had the capability to see underground and knew where all the tunnels led. China is a lot bigger than Kosovo. No ground intelligence... surveillance from above is limited... doesn't sound so easy.

 

[Janiz]

According to it, the US has basically zero ground intelligence in China.

Good to know. It's great there's wikipedia so they could at least get the names of the ships right.

 

[AssassinsMace]

Good to know. It's great there's wikipedia so they could at least get the names of the ships right.

Yes, it's hard for some to realize that James Bond is only fiction.

 

[Blitzo]

Good to know. It's great there's wikipedia so they could at least get the names of the ships right.

Or great for them that places like SDF exists....

 

[AssassinsMace]

Also I forgot to mention there was a story that came out when I was under suspension about a Chinese fisherman that scooped up in his net an advanced underwater surveillance drone off the coast of China. Now you know if an advanced surveillance drone was risked off the Chinese mainland to spy on Chinese submarines as speculated, then all that talk that Seawolf submarines are stealthily spying and following Chinese subs all the time is simply not the case and certainly not enough to do the job.

 

[Blitzo]

Also I forgot to mention there was a story that came out when I was under suspension about a Chinese fisherman that scooped up in his net an advanced underwater surveillance drone off the coast of China. Now you know if an advanced surveillance drone was risked off the Chinese mainland to spy on Chinese submarines as speculated, then all that talk that Seawolf submarines are stealthily spying and following Chinese subs all the time is simply not the case and certainly not enough to do the job.

I think there's a difference between whether the drone's presence means USN SSNs are not capable of conducting close in surveillance or whether they are developing less risky means of doing the same mission, or maybe simply trialling new technologies.

So I don't think the drone's presence tells us anything apart from the fact that it was used, lost, and that it exists. It doesn't tell us why they were using a drone, how often drones would be used in the stead of SSNs, nor about how capable Chinese ASW systems are.

 

[AssassinsMace]

I'm following logic not what the realities are. If people think it's so easy to track everything just like people say Seawolf submarines are stalking Chinese subs gathering intelligence without being noticed, then why is anything else needed i.e. an underwater drone? A Seawolf submarine has to have more capabilities and more advanced technology. If they're using underwater drones whether advanced or not, that only means there's a risk seen where either technologically or strategically that sets a limit. So the claiming the US can track everything so easily is not so easy as hyped. BTW, the article I mentioned reading suggested it was an advanced underwater drone. I was playing off of that. The picture they showed it looked like a torpedo. Was it launched from a sub or from a ship? Probably not a ship because that can be spotted off the Chinese coast. So most like likely a sub which again says they can't easily infiltrate without being noticed contrary to the hype.