Air and Strike Campaigns for PLA relevance

AndrewS said:

But how much does a MLRS round cost?

It looks like $1.1M for a M26 Rocket with a range of 30km
Each M26 Rocket has 644x M77 submunitions
Each M77 submunition only contains 33g of explosive.

So in summary, 12 MLRS rockets costs $13M and only covers an area of 600m x 600m

In comparison, $13M buys 13000 unguided artillery rounds.
Each artillery round contains 7kg of explosive, and has a blast radius of 70m.
An unguided artillery round at a 30km range is supposed to have a CEP of 236M.

Even if the seaborne artillery round CEP is degraded significantly, you can still expect 4000 artillery rounds to completely blanket the same MLRS 600m x 600m area.
But the MLRS rockets cost 3x more than the equivalent artillery rounds.

I agree MLRS rounds are useful, but that artillery rounds have even more advantages for area targets.

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I have no issues with artillery -- e.g.: I think the idea of the PLA sending ground based artillery onto Taiwan after a beachhead has been secured is essential to their military strategy and overall ground warfare doctrine.

But I do not believe placing ground based artillery onto cargo ships to use them as a fire support or strike platform in the early phases of a Taiwan conflict is viable.
If the PLA were able to develop some kind of modular containerized system that was more automated and had some level of protection from the weather, then sure.

1. These ships would be visible from the Taiwan coastline and be a very inviting target.
It's better that concealed Taiwanese antiship missile batteries fire their missiles on these expendable targets, which are fully under covered by the Chinese battle network.

You want to deal with these antiship missile units before an actual invasion by high value amphibious warships.
Taiwanese missile batteries and anti-invasion artillery units will reveal their location when they fire.
And during the actual Chinese amphibious assault, additional artillery support and ship targets for Taiwanese defenders is definitely be useful.

2. Yes, MLRS launched on a ship or on mainland China will work as well.

But the point is that cargo ships, artillery guns and artillery rounds are cheap, expendable and available in practically unlimited quantities.
They already exist and have already been paid for.

So it doesn't actually matter if they are less "efficient" than missiles for many use cases.
When artillery rounds are used, it conserves scarce air and missile power for more important uses.

3. I did mention guided projectiles like the Excalibur which cost $68K, for precision targets as one solution.
That is still a bargain compared to airborne delivery, although it may not be if compared to a MLRS rocket.

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I have no issue with the idea of having "decoy" targets to lure out ROC AShMs. But putting a bunch of ground based artillery, shells and artilleryman on the deck of a cargo ship is not the right solution for it. You're putting a bunch of useful and valuable materiel and soldiers onto a ship in a way that makes them part sitting ducks and part fire support in a way where they are not good for either.

It's outlandish to place artillery on ships, especially if they could draw fire. The required platforms simply don't exist. You're looking at an unmanned ship + unmanned naval proofed artillery system + highly guided shell (because the ship itself doesn't have fire control). If there is to be a surprise factor, it would also need to be put inside a container.

Bltizo said:

I have no issues with artillery -- e.g.: I think the idea of the PLA sending ground based artillery onto Taiwan after a beachhead has been secured is essential to their military strategy and overall ground warfare doctrine.

But I do not believe placing ground based artillery onto cargo ships to use them as a fire support or strike platform in the early phases of a Taiwan conflict is viable.
If the PLA were able to develop some kind of modular containerized system that was more automated and had some level of protection from the weather, then sure.

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I don't see how the weather would be a big factor.
An artillery gun would face the same weather, whether operating on a ship or on the ground.

But if you want weather protection and automation, just use a PLZ-05 self-propelled howitzer.
The platform costs increase $2M, which doesn't change the overall cost-benefit equation.

I have no issue with the idea of having "decoy" targets to lure out ROC AShMs. But putting a bunch of ground based artillery, shells and artilleryman on the deck of a cargo ship is not the right solution for it. You're putting a bunch of useful and valuable materiel and soldiers onto a ship in a way that makes them part sitting ducks and part fire support in a way where they are not good for either.

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Sure, so what decoy ship targets would you suggest the Chinese Navy offer up?

Taiwanese defenders will want to conserve their scarce anti-ship missile batteries and anti-invasion artillery units.
They have to be presented with a valuable enough target to justify revealing themselves.
I suggest 1000 artillery shells as the minimum threshold.

My argument is that all these materials cost less than $8M and there are less than 30 people in total on such a ship.
And that all these materials and personnel are available in a practically unlimited quantity.

There are hundreds of small cargo ships available.
China has a huge stockpile of artillery shells.
Ditto for artillery guns and personnel.
And there is no way that the Chinese Army can land all the artillery units it has onto the beaches in Taiwan, and then support them in the 1st month.

Hence I don't see them as being particularly valuable.
And during an invasion and land campaign, there will be far higher casualties.

I agree that they will be sitting ducks, but any ship within sight of the Taiwanese coastline is a sitting duck.
But better for this ship to be hit, than a Type-71 LPD costing $500M carrying 500 men.

Yes, the ship will face incoming missiles, so it does make sense to have a frigate/destroyer providing air defence behind them.
But then the launching missile unit will be tracked until it is destroyed.

Yes, the ship will face incoming artillery fire. But again, the artillery gun that fires will be tracked and destroyed in the aftermath.

I'll borrow from Oct 9, 2019

Jura said:

... combat is different because

• on a soldier level, it's life-threatening
• on a command level, it's important to be able to handle what Clausewitz called "friction"

and you wouldn't know until it happened if you know what I mean (no matter how much time you had spent on a range/in a military academy)

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and my point is before they're serious about an invasion, they should do some actual combat (in places like South Sudan for instance)

Biscuits said:

It's outlandish to place artillery on ships, especially if they could draw fire. The required platforms simply don't exist. You're looking at an unmanned ship + unmanned naval proofed artillery system + highly guided shell (because the ship itself doesn't have fire control). If there is to be a surprise factor, it would also need to be put inside a container.

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It's supposed to draw fire, and not supposed to be a surprise.
It's a low-cost, expendable, area-effect weapon, which is drawn from existing stocks.

The premise is that Taiwan has a limited number of concealed trucks with antiship missiles.
And that they will be saving many of these for when a Chinese amphibious fleet appears off a Taiwanese beach.

Yes, the Chinese Air Force will be doing their best to hunt these concealed missile trucks.
But as we know, concealed trucks are very difficult to find, particularly since Taiwan is one of the most densely populated and urbanised places in the world.

So you want to provide targets that will draw the attention of antiship missiles.
Yes, the cargo ships will be protected by escorts with SAMs (like am actual amphibious vessel).
But those cargo ships are expendable if need be.
And they are difficult to sink because the ships are completely empty and have a lot of reserve buoyancy.

AndrewS said:

I don't see how the weather would be a big factor.
An artillery gun would face the same weather, whether operating on a ship or on the ground.

But if you want weather protection and automation, just use a PLZ-05 self-propelled howitzer.
The platform costs increase $2M, which doesn't change the overall cost-benefit equation.

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It isn't only the weather but the overall operating environment.
I don't think it takes much to imagine how an artillery gun operating on stable, fixed land facing elements it was designed to face (dirt, rain, mud), might differ in terms its effectiveness and the effectiveness of its crew, versus putting that same gun on a cargo ship exposed to rolling waves, sea spray and a cargo ship that by the way is always moving (unless you want to literally anchor it in one place)

Sure, so what decoy ship targets would you suggest the Chinese Navy offer up?

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IMO if you want any kind of "decoy" it must be able to sufficiently draw enemy fire or attention under the conditions that you need it to, while not drawing needless resources for its ability to be a decoy.

If you want a seaborne decoy, I believe a combination of EW/jamming as well as a group of cargo ships that are minimally manned and carrying no load, would be the best screen for the PLAN. Considering the PLA can be expected to have heavily degraded the ROC's early warning sensors, I do not expect the ROC to have the sufficient level of situational awareness to differentiate between a cargo ship and say an LST or LPD under a heavy jamming environment.

Taiwanese defenders will want to conserve their scarce anti-ship missile batteries and anti-invasion artillery units.
They have to be presented with a valuable enough target to justify revealing themselves.
I suggest 1000 artillery shells as the minimum threshold.

My argument is that all these materials cost less than $8M and there are less than 30 people in total on such a ship.
And that all these materials and personnel are available in a practically unlimited quantity.

There are hundreds of small cargo ships available.
China has a huge stockpile of artillery shells.
Ditto for artillery guns and personnel.
And there is no way that the Chinese Army can land all the artillery units it has onto the beaches in Taiwan, and then support them in the 1st month.

Hence I don't see them as being particularly valuable.
And during an invasion and land campaign, there will be far higher casualties.

I agree that they will be sitting ducks, but any ship within sight of the Taiwanese coastline is a sitting duck.
But better for this ship to be hit, than a Type-71 LPD costing $500M carrying 500 men.

Yes, the ship will face incoming missiles, so it does make sense to have a frigate/destroyer providing air defence behind them.
But then the launching missile unit will be tracked until it is destroyed.

Yes, the ship will face incoming artillery fire. But again, the artillery gun that fires will be tracked and destroyed in the aftermath.

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I don't know if you want a decoy or a seaborne artillery platform.

Because what you're describing really sounds like it takes the worst of both worlds.


Again, I have nothing against decoy ships. However putting a bunch of land based artillery guns on them that won't be able to be operated effectively as a fire support platform with crew and artillery shells on the exposed decks of those ships and putting them within 30km of the Taiwan coast is a use of resources and logistics that may be better suited for other purposes.


I also want to add that I have no issues with the application of land based artillery for a Taiwan scenario, but they should be land based. I.e.: the PLA should land those artillery units in conjunction with their combined arms brigades on Taiwan, where their landed artillery will operate in support with their maneuvre brigades.
However, I never said anything about the PLA landing all of its artillery units onto Taiwan. Only land the ones they need to.


Reading your proposals, it seems like you believe that because the PLA has so many cheap land based artillery that it would make sense to marry them with another cheap naval based platform that they have in abundance (civilian cargo ships) to create a cheap, numerable sea based fire support platform.
But I think you are ignoring the logistics and manpower and transport needed to move and install the PLA's land based artillery+shells+other logistics onto those cargo ships, to create a viable fire control structure for a bunch of artillery units that are now operating aboard an exposed cargo ship rather than operating on land, and for the crews of the artillery units to even develop a new procedure for operating their guns of a ship that is constantly in motion, and to get used to the rolling of the waves and the sea spray and exposed winds of the Taiwan strait. Even if you straight up mounted an SPH aboard a cargo ship, asking the crew to operate aboard it is an entirely different environment to operating on land.

... and you're telling those artillery crews to get within 30km or less of the Taiwan coast, to try and hit targets on land, while also to act as decoys???


No, I don't think such a proposal is wise or achievable.
Maybe if we had pictures from recent years showing that the PLAGF has been consistently training their artillery crews onboard cargo ships, with some kind of additional technology to make the artillery crews job easier (like some kind of semi-containerized solution), then sure that will change the feasibility of your idea.

But considering the only evidence we have of the PLA placing land based artillery on cargo ships was only one or two instances many years ago that have not been observed to be repeated in recent years, I don't think the kind of widescale use of artillery aboard cargo ships is something we can consider to be a realistic prospect.


I can see a small number of cargo ships equipped with SPHs to act as initial fire support platforms during an assault against a beachhead to support the rest of the joint fires against said beachhead (including long range MLRS, SRBMs, air strikes, and surface combatant NGFS), but they will be relatively niche platforms and not widely converted or deployed.

Army Artillery on commercial ships is non-viable, and has never been tried by the PLA afaik, MLRS on commercial ships is a different matter entirely, especially the obsolete, shorter-ranged stuff that the PLA must have retired in huge numbers.

Those platforms are little more than MLRS mounted on the back of a truck. There is no need for sophisticated targeting, and the launch is easily set for remote operation.

You just need a skeleton crew to get to a specific nav point, orient the ship per instructions m, remote trigger the MLRS, and then head home after a few minutes when all the rockets have been fired.

The whole point of this is to make the requirement on the crew as minimal as possible to allow mass conversion with minimal or no special training needed. All the hard work would have been done by the pre-work setup of the ships.

It’s trivially easy to write a programme where you input the target location, and a few optional other fields like desired launch distance to target; ship heading, wind direction and speed etc, and it spits out the container ship nav data as well as the MLRS elevation settings etc. Hell, given all the raw data tables, I can put together such a file in excel in a few hours.

As such, beyond a few proof of concept tests, no regular training is necessary.

Is this the primary strike option of the PLA/PLAN? Most certainly not, it’s probably not even in the top 100. But it is absolutely a viable option.

Whether the PLA uses it will depend entirely on how well their principle strike options work in a campaign.

If their stand-off missiles, long range MLRS, UCAVs and manned strike fighters and bombers are absolutely obliterating all ROC defences as planned or even better, then there would be no need to resort to massed obsolete MLRS spamming with press ganged commercial ships.

However, if the primary strike options are not yielding the desired results; and/or there are significant uncertainties about the effectiveness of those strikes, having tens of thousands or more of commercial ship based short range MLRS accompanying a landing would make good sense.

In addition to providing a mass of additional targets for defenders to have to sift through to try and find the troop ships and warships, these MLRS ships can carpet bomb the landing beaches and immediate inland areas several times over at a minimum.

That will very effectively clear the beachhead off mines and obstacles; degrade if not outright disable/destroy enemy beachhead defensive forces and assets; and provide effective suppressive fire as troops start to land.

Add in massed UCAV support and precision strikes from naval and air force support assets, and that is a beach I cannot imagine anyone in their right minds would think can be viable defended.

These commercial ship based MLRS doesn’t make sense if you are thinking of using them like a top of the line regular army precision artillery. Instead I would not expect these to be fired more than a few dozen miles from their target at most, and probably a lot closer. At those ranges, their inaccuracies and longevity doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is that they present the defenders with an impossible choice - waste their munitions and expose the location of their heavy, anti ship assets to deal with these throwaway fireships, or allow them to get close where they can potentially absolutely annihilate you with their short range firepower.

plawolf said:

Army Artillery on commercial ships is non-viable, and has never been tried by the PLA afaik, MLRS on commercial ships is a different matter entirely, especially the obsolete, shorter-ranged stuff that the PLA must have retired in huge numbers.

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They have done exercises with Army Artillery on cargo ships in the past, some older ones using towed artillery mounted, some in the 2000s done with SPHs, as well as some with a mix of gun artillery and 122mm MLRS.

However none of these exercises have been done recently (like, in the 2010s) to my memory

Those platforms are little more than MLRS mounted on the back of a truck. There is no need for sophisticated targeting, and the launch is easily set for remote operation.

You just need a skeleton crew to get to a specific nav point, orient the ship per instructions m, remote trigger the MLRS, and then head home after a few minutes when all the rockets have been fired.

The whole point of this is to make the requirement on the crew as minimal as possible to allow mass conversion with minimal or no special training needed. All the hard work would have been done by the pre-work setup of the ships.

It’s trivially easy to write a programme where you input the target location, and a few optional other fields like desired launch distance to target; ship heading, wind direction and speed etc, and it spits out the container ship nav data as well as the MLRS elevation settings etc. Hell, given all the raw data tables, I can put together such a file in excel in a few hours.

As such, beyond a few proof of concept tests, no regular training is necessary.

Is this the primary strike option of the PLA/PLAN? Most certainly not, it’s probably not even in the top 100. But it is absolutely a viable option.

Whether the PLA uses it will depend entirely on how well their principle strike options work in a campaign.

If their stand-off missiles, long range MLRS, UCAVs and manned strike fighters and bombers are absolutely obliterating all ROC defences as planned or even better, then there would be no need to resort to massed obsolete MLRS spamming with press ganged commercial ships.

However, if the primary strike options are not yielding the desired results; and/or there are significant uncertainties about the effectiveness of those strikes, having tens of thousands or more of commercial ship based short range MLRS accompanying a landing would make good sense.

In addition to providing a mass of additional targets for defenders to have to sift through to try and find the troop ships and warships, these MLRS ships can carpet bomb the landing beaches and immediate inland areas several times over at a minimum.

That will very effectively clear the beachhead off mines and obstacles; degrade if not outright disable/destroy enemy beachhead defensive forces and assets; and provide effective suppressive fire as troops start to land.

Add in massed UCAV support and precision strikes from naval and air force support assets, and that is a beach I cannot imagine anyone in their right minds would think can be viable defended.

These commercial ship based MLRS doesn’t make sense if you are thinking of using them like a top of the line regular army precision artillery. Instead I would not expect these to be fired more than a few dozen miles from their target at most, and probably a lot closer. At those ranges, their inaccuracies and longevity doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is that they present the defenders with an impossible choice - waste their munitions and expose the location of their heavy, anti ship assets to deal with these throwaway fireships, or allow them to get close where they can potentially absolutely annihilate you with their short range firepower.

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I feel like MLRS will be an important component of PLA strike and fire support for a Taiwan scenario, however I believe they will likely be relatively large in calibre, and primarily in the form of the new 370mm long range MLRS conducting strikes from across the strait, or dedicated 300mm MLRS containerized system (i.e.: what I posted on post #13) mounted aboard cargo ships as a more automated and dedicated solution

What you are describing sounds like 122mm calibre MLRS, which the PLAGF certainly has a large number of, but again I question the manpower and logistics to get that number of MLRS aboard cargo ships en masse (and I acknowledge that you say it is probably not one of the primary PLA strike methods).

Personally, I can see them having a small number of cargo ships installed with PLAGF SPH and MLRS systems to provide additional fire support for the immediate assault on the beach in conjunction with the other joint fires that will be hitting the beach before the initial landing of PLA amphibious forces.

However I don't think having a massive number of cargo ships carrying the PLAGF's massive stockpile of MLRS (or gun artillery) is a wise use of manpower or resources, and the mass marriage of cargo ships with PLAGF gun artillery seems to be what AndrewS is suggesting.

Bltizo said:

Good, so we agree that the a actual air operation of Allied Force was reflective of the whole of FRY at the time.

Unless you have specific statistics for the actual number of munitions dropped only geographically in Kosovo, then comparing the geographic area of Kosovo with the geographic area of any other hypothetical theatre of conflict is not very useful.

After all even "below the 44th parallel" is not very useful considering there was much more than just Kosovo below that line.

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That doesn't change the fact that the targeting activities were concentrated around Kosovo. The number of aim points is a function of many things - geography (terrain difficulty), size, preparedness of defenses; infrastructure capacity; and sophistication of military defense complex. In all this metrics, I would argue that Taiwan would present a much greater challenge than the Kosovo campaign. The number of aim points follows from these metrics.

Bltizo said:

Uhh of course the range of targets change in an air campaign, that's because no air campaign has the exact same military or political objectives. Allied Force was different to Odyssey Dawn which was different to the initial air campaign in the Gulf War, which in turn was different to Rolling Thunder or Linebacker etc etc

In Allied Force one of the coalition's major goals was to deny FRY forces from operating in Kosovo, but the challenge they faced was trying to strike at the FRY forces on the ground who were operating in small units and were easily concealable.
The reason why they were forced to use air power to strike at those targets is because they didn't want to send in ground troops, while simultaneously trying to prevent those small infantry units from committing violence in Kosovo (a task which by most measures they didn't particullary succeed at). FRY forces were able to specifically avoid destruction by not congregating in large units and avoiding exposure/avoiding battle.

Therefore, for Taiwan and the PLA we need to specifically look at how application of air power and strikes would be used to achieve military and political goals, and to examine what targets would be defined as relevant targets or "aim points". I believe they would be very different to what NATO's goal of application of air power and strikes against Yugoslavia was in Allied Force.

Among the big differences includes that the PLA will not be forcing its air force and its strikes to try and destroy individual small units of ROC soldiers, and that the ROC's air defense systems are much larger and much less mobile than what Yugoslavia had (of course the ROC's air defenses are much more capable as well than SA-6s, but in context of the combined arms strikes the PLA will be able to bring to bear that doesn't mean much).
The PLA will of course still be hitting big fixed targets like air bases, naval bases, command/control centers, big early warning arrays, logistics centers, pre-sighted missile launch locations, depots, and so on, and those will be the primary targets of interest. Possibly with or without elements of civilian infrastructure if they are determined to be used for military purposes, but again, infrastructure like those aforementioned targets are big, easy to locate and target.

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After the low hangings fruits, the dispersed and well camouflage targets will be still be a problem. The Chinese airforce will need to go below 10000 feet to go after those targets. Manpads will present the greatest problem. It is the same in Kosovo, Iraq, Libya and even in the recent ME conflicts. China has no experience fighting a modern war and there is no track record to measure its capabilities. At least we know from the different air campaigns that it will not be easy and the air strikes has limited effectiveness against a discipline and well camouflaged defenses. .

Bltizo said:

(The proportion of its military power that China will be able to concentrate towards Taiwan is a different matter and dependent on geopoligical context of the time. )

Well I was saying that extrapolating trends based only on geography is not the best; other factors need to be considered.

IMO, for the PLA and Taiwan, I would argue that the converse is true to your argument.

Not only is Taiwan a smaller geographic area than the FRY, but the number of relevant aim points that the ROC offers for the PLA is significantly lower and much more easily located than the aim points that NATO were going after in Allied Force, and the military and political goals of a PLA air campaign/strike campaign against Taiwan is also significantly different from what NATO sought in Allied Force as well

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Seriously less aim points and much more easily located. Based on what?

interesting debate.
Well, the presidential election in Taiwan is going to happen in 2 weeks.
If the incumbent Ms. Tsai gets re-elected, we may see a conflict breaking out across the Strait soon enough, sighs and arrrhhh.
otherwise happy new year to all. May peace prevail.