Inside China: Admiral says China can destroy destroyers? true or not?

advill said:

There are theories of what the small boats can do to warships. This probably stems from the terrorist attack on the USS Cole & Iran's threats to use such strategies in the Gulf of Hormuz. I am sure the USN would have by now thought of & be prepared with counter-measures. One must remember that experience in actual sea battles is vital and important, and the USN has that experience from way back, including WW II (Coral Sea, Midway etc. etc). China has the experience in land battles i.e. guerilla warfare etc. However, with all its show of many new warships, submarines etc., the PLA-N has "zero" major sea encounters/battles. It's the well trained & experienced Officers, Men & Women, not only the "flashy ships" that make a REAL Navy. I think the Chinese Admiral's comment is just part of psychological warfare. Not wise to "try" the USN or underestimate the capabilities of a few other Navies of the Asia Pacific countries especially Japan.

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I think the admiral was only making reference to the zumwalt ship itself rather than entire navies... and I don't think anyone should be taking his words too seriously anyway, given his previous statements about the invasion of iraq etc.

BUT I will say that there is some merit to the use of swarm tactics against large surface combatants -- if they're alone, in littoral, shore waters. But the thing is zumwalts and other destroyers, cruisers or carriers will be operating in groups, likely not in the littorals.. so even if small boats have small profiles and say are not detected until they are a few dozen kms out, a good portion of them can be destroyed before they are able to get within bombing distance (unless they are armed with small AshMs). most ships are armed with high cal machine guns which are probably more suited to dealing with swarms of small boats than the likes of ciws, because there are only a couple of ciws mounts on most ships and cannot sustain fire for very long.

And I agree with montyp, the lack of experience does not mean they cannot become a potent force with good training and organization.
I wonder what the correlation between the ability of being able to indigenously build flashy ships and naval professionalism/potency is.

should we check on the actual comment of Adm. Zhang, i suspect he was merely stating the obvious that the Zumwalt as a powerful but expensive platform can be countered or 'destroyed' with swarm tactics

Blitzo has mentioned a keyword, combat in littoral waters, this is as far as any missile boats can go

We need to contrast PLAN current and future needs with the older times, asymmetry will still be utilized by the weaker party, just in another form and method

Nobody has really challenged the asumptions of the simulation. Probably because we don't really know them, but that also means that nobody knows if the Red Team exploited a weakness of the simulation rather than a weakness of the CVBG itself. For example, how did the CVBG fail to detect the small boats? Were they right up at the enemy coastline such that there were too many civilians around them? Or were they further out such that they could more easily evaluate potential threats? Did the simulation take into account the full E/O capabilities of the CVBG (including mere human eyesight) or just assumed the boats couldn't be picked up because their radar return was so small? The simulation mentioned suicide boat kills. Does this mean the simulation had specific rules of engagement limiting the CVBG's actions that perhaps would not have been followed in real life? Was the simulation detailed enough that it included the 0.50cal HMG's most USN warships mount, their accuracies at various ranges and sea states, and how many average rounds it takes to destroy a boat of X tons? You could go on and ask hundreds of these questions, and may find out in the end that the assumptions are not similar enough to real life conditions that the Blue team fail does not necessarily represent reality. I think the poster who has been taunting the others here about the results of the simulation has not really thought about how accurately the wargame addresses very detailed, specific issues (i.e. small boat swarm attacks) that may or may not have even been thought out by the game designers.

On the face of it it sounds like an absurd comment. But what's worse is the Washington Times took it seriously. Who knows but then who cares? A fishing boat is about as low tech as you can get and if you're worried about it, then you might as well dismantle your navy. Maybe this is a tactic to keep'em worried about small boats and then there will be billions upon billions spent on trying to defend against it. It's sort like IEDs in Iraq.

gjy2105 said:

You make a lot of good points. The fact is that it was the largest and most expensive (250 million dollars) war game ever conducted in all of human history though. If they failed to set the war game under as realistic of conditions as possible, then they can't expect to get reliable results anyways.

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The fact that it was 250 million dollars doesn't necessarily speak to whether they even considered the scenario of small boat attacks, or if they did, whether they put as much energy into make such a scenario as realistic as possible, as they surely did in creating the most realistic scenarios for, say, saturation cruise missile attacks. I can definitely believe the cruise missile kills, but the small boat attack results I would definitely take with a grain of salt.

s002wjh said:

i have hard time to believe someone in the position of adm will say stupid things like this? so is this true or not?

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The Mk-38 Mod 2 (25mm) and Mk-46 (30 mm) auto cannons being installed on most US vessels are set up to counter exactly this scenario.


MK-38 Mod 2 25mm auto cannon


Mk-46 Mod 2 30mm auto cannon

The Zumwalt will have two Mk-110 57mm guns to help in this area.



---------- Post added 05-05-2012 at 12:11 AM ---------- Previous post was 05-04-2012 at 11:30 PM ----------

solarz said:

First of all, the results of that war game is just that: a war game result. You are making a huge leap by trying to project that result into real world situations, which doesn't work for a plethora of reasons that I have listed in my previous posts.

Second, the war game you presented was back in 2002. The original topic deals with comments made by a Chinese general in 2012. The key factor in that war game was not a swarming attack by fire boats, it was a swarming attack by cruise missiles. The fire boats simply picked off the survivors of the missile barrage. Therefore, you original premise that a swarm of speed boats can take down a CVBG, or even a Destroyer, is wholly unsubstantiated.

Then we come to the actual issue of a "swarming missile attack". Just because an american general pulled off such an attack in a war game does not mean it's going to happen in real life.

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In those war games the winning admiral violated the rules of the war game to achieve his victory.

So, you had a scenario where the OPFOR played by a different set of rules than the Blue team was prepared or watching for.

In such simulations and war games, they are designed to test specific conditions, that change between operations so that ultimately they get experience in as many as possible.

In that particular one, the admiral decided, since he was completely outnumbered and programmed to lose, to go rogue and off script.

In a real war time environment, they will not be playing to scripts but will be trying to be prepared for anything.

This reminds me of the battle of Lissa where the Austrian admiral pulled off a ramming attack because he was outgunned. For a long time it was then considered necessary that ironclads must be able to ram their opponent. It's the same here, an admiral was once able in a game to cleverly combine and time his resources for a most unexpected strike. That doesn't fundamentally change the whole picture of naval warfare except for armchair admirals who by far do not know all details necessary for that operation.

Large vessels are sitting ducks in this age of cheap, and largely accurate guided missiles. Small, quick, arsenal ships are the ultimate weapon in confronting fleets of oversized surface combatants.

Igor, if true, than the PLA-N should not waste money in building destroyers, frigates, nuclear subs & even having a re-conditioned Ex-Soviet Carrier. Just have the Hubei Class of Fast Missile Boats. Try convincing the top Naval Planners of PLA-N.

advill said:

Igor, if true, than the PLA-N should not waste money in building destroyers, frigates, nuclear subs & even having a re-conditioned Ex-Soviet Carrier. Just have the Hubei Class of Fast Missile Boats. Try convincing the top Naval Planners of PLA-N.

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An arsenal ship has no target coordinates available and is not surviveable if it doesn't get upgraded to what we do already have as naval warships. There are two ways for guided missiles, cheap and plenty and few expensive and refined. Cheap and plenty are easier to defend against with softkill methods (look at Israel vs Syria in the naval Yom Kippur War).
Submarines are very surviveable, but the most expensive missile platform.
I very much value the new US Ohio-class cruise missile submarines with commandos for target acquisition and I consider it possible to achieve similar results with very stealthy surface ships or submersible arsenal&commando ships. However, these don't replace combined groups of warships and submarines with their outstanding sea control capabilities. Very cheap low tech vessels can serve as low level defence in brown and green water where they best deploy a network of intelligent seamines and counter helicopters in asymmetric clashes. The major changes in naval warfare for small combat vessels are twofold. The increased AI of seamines and their mobility in turn needs fewer mines for the same effect and they get much harder to clear. The other ability of light cheap boats is to engage helicopters with sophisticated missiles and compareably cheap detection devices available for heavier surface than aerial machines and thus greatly reduce the sea control capabilities of modern surface combatants that almost all serve as mobile helicopter bases. For such purposes Iran's idea of building simple ground effect naval vessels is not bad, although the execution is not outstanding and displacement still trumps speed for surface combatants (in aerial warfare speed and maneuverability are trumps).