Modern Carrier Battle Group..Strategies and Tactics

Re: The End of the Carrier Age?

Also,
for back ground reading, I suggest IronsightSniper try to dig up A-6's wing design. its in a open lit.
Grumman actually modified the basic design and used in Gulfstream IIIs ( and mounted on a pivot for F-14).
it is the good transonic high L/D wing that gives A-6 its range. the wing is designed for range.

F-18's wing on other hand is designed by a totally different philosophy. a turn and burn dog-fighter wing. not a bomb carrying long range strike wing.

Re: The End of the Carrier Age?

bd popeye said:

I agree with Jeff in that the DF-21 needs to be tested before being deployed. Any other thinking is incorrect. No military on Earth would deploy a weapon with first giving said weapon a full field test.


and..


How will you counter the Aegis ECM being emitted? And ECM from Prowlers and Growlers?? That ECM will make it difficult to find anything.

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As in engineering, It all comes down to requirement, if a "full field test" means the target parameters is same as what the actual expected target is time of war, then very few complex weapon systems would meet this criteria. (analysis backed with simulation takes you the rest of the way. the success rate and hit probability you see in brochures are all product of these analysis, no one actually went out and shot 100 missiles and established the sucess rates.) it would defintely not be true for SM-3 or NMB interceptors. both of which I would argue got a IOC cert based on a much dumbed down test + other analysis that DoD deemed was sufficient for it to be useful.



and as for ECMS, why would I counter a ECMs? they are what you are looking for: emissions.
Prowlers and Growlers ECMs are designed to specifically fool tactical systems. not the ones that is designed to pick up emmissions. even the initial DF-21 warhead coming down is a dumb warhead filled with portland cement, it would still force the Carrier battle group to open up the jammers and radars.
mission accomplished.

Re: The End of the Carrier Age?

You fellows can decipher what I posted all you want. The DF-21 still needs some sort of test to be deployed. I don't like it when people nit pick what I stated. What you read is generally what I mean.

Once again I feel the missile needs to be tested before deployment. Simple...Let me clarify that...

The DF-21 missile needs to be tested against a moving ship at sea before it is deployed. Just my and a few others opinion.

Re: The End of the Carrier Age?

bd popeye said:

The DF-21 missile needs to be tested against a moving ship at sea before it is deployed. Just my and a few others opinion.

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fair enough.
and it may be the opinion of PLA that their analysis plus subscale tests are good enough to establish an IOC.

I am just telling you how actual industry does these things.

Re: The End of the Carrier Age?

i.e. said:

also don't assume that AshBMs are going for carrier only and by themselves. that is a bad assumption.

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Indeed, I have always believed that it is perfectly feasible and probably more useful to design the warhead of any AShBM to airburst over the target and pummel it with thousands of medium cal. sabots.

A DF21 class missile could carry thousands to tens of thousands of them depending on the cal. and range they want the missile to achieve. They will be airbursting the warhead, so a direct hit is not required, lowering the engineering challenge, and with each sabot traveling at M10+, they will impact with many times the energy any conventional gun can shoot them out at, even at point blank range.

These will not be carrier killers, but they can absolutely devastate the escorts as I cannot imagine any AB would react well to the equivalent of being strafed a few times by A10s.

Even used against the carrier, it could cause massive damage by taking out any planes on deck. At M10, the sabots would have a decent chance to punch straight through the flight deck and nail the parked fighters underneath, if that happens, even if the carrier is fine in all other respects (unlikely), it is of no further use until it goes home and gets a new flight wing.

The biggest advantage of such a weapon is that its effects can be measured. The PLA would be able to disable an entire CVGB without completely destroying it. It serves as a very good warning for the US to butt out while avoiding the mass US casualties which might make such a decision impossible politically for an US president.

If the message is not strong enough and the US sends more carriers, an overwhelming strike package can follow the next AShBM wave in and wipe out the crippled ships with minimal risk.

They can easily configure a wave of AshBM to include dedicated anti-radiation warheads as well as active radar homing war heads or even IR (IMHO the most likely option, as the termal bloom of 4xLM2500 is bit different from a nuclear flat top ) that pre-programed to target AEGIS ships.

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Anti-radiation sounds like a good idea, IR does not.

When the warhead is moving at M10+, the air friction on the nose will make any IR sensor blind to the heat from 4 LM2500s running out in the open, even mind them being hidden deep inside a warship.

Re: The End of the Carrier Age?

plawolf said:

Anti-radiation sounds like a good idea, IR does not.

When the warhead is moving at M10+, the air friction on the nose will make any IR sensor blind to the heat from 4 LM2500s running out in the open, even mind them being hidden deep inside a warship.

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believe or not there are ways to make the IR sensor work in those enviornment. you don't need to have a classic blunt nose lift body for one.

Re: The End of the Carrier Age?

bd popeye said:

How will you counter the Aegis ECM being emitted? And ECM from Prowlers and Growlers?? That ECM will make it difficult to find anything.

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ECCM?

Besides, last time I checked, Prowlers and Growlers were optimized against ground targets or low flying airborne targets. I cannot imagine their jamming pods would work terribly well trying to jam something through the wings and fuselage of the plane itself. They can always fly upside down I suppose.

Its a similar issue with SPY1, with the missile coming almost vertically down onto it, how much of the missile the arrays can see to try jamming it is questionable.

But as I and others have stressed before, one of the biggest benefits to this weapon would be to make the US CVBG reveal itself by turning on their radars and ECM.

The PLA could easily play some bluff games.

Randomly shoot some conventional DF21s or DF15s and see if it flushes the USN out.

If it does, send a conventional strike package.

If it doesn't, fire a few conventional missiles at the CVBG when they do find it and see if they go active. If they do, they just wasted a lot of SMs trying to shoot down missiles that cannot possibly hit them. If they ignored the conventional missiles thinking they were more pot shots, fire some real AShBMs and you won't have to worry about BMD or ECM.

Re: The End of the Carrier Age?

NO tests NO data = no prove of functionality. not sure why people still argue about this. In a complex military weapon system, its crucial to have least few tests in order to prove its working. furthermore there are very little data for you guys to analyze to know its actually working or not. so save some typing on how DF21 will defeat a carrier group defense when there isn't reliable, and enough data to support this. I work in defense industry for many years, and i haven't yet to seen a missle or elint system go to production without rigorous testing.

Re: The End of the Carrier Age?

It has been pointed out already that testing could be done inland.

This is not a SAM trying to shoot down a small fast moving fighter. A carrier is a huge ship, and even at top speed, it cannot be accused of being 'agile' or able to take evasive action to dodge a missile in terminal stage, and the missile will be traveling so fast the carrier won't move anywhere far enough after the missile seeker has it for it to be significantly different from a perfectly stationary large target.

If a missile can hit a stationary target the size of a carrier using its own seeker, it can hit a moving carrier.

Would the PLA prefer to have a full test out at sea? Yes, of course. But that is not a viable option if they want to keep the existence of such a missile under wraps. But I think they can easily live with commissioning such a weapon if they conducted a few inland tests under realistic simulated conditions and were happy with the results.

Unless someone can point out a critical factor that cannot be simulated inland, all this insistence of a sea test just seems strange and unnecessary.

Re: The End of the Carrier Age?

plawolf said:

A carrier is a huge ship, and even at top speed, it cannot be accused of being 'agile' or able to take evasive action to dodge a missile in terminal stage, and the missile will be traveling so fast the carrier won't move anywhere far enough after the missile seeker has it for it to be significantly different from a perfectly stationary large target.

If a missile can hit a stationary target the size of a carrier using its own seeker, it can hit a moving carrier.

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Sorry...this is simply not necessarily so.

The carrier will move a significant distance from the time it is 1st located and the missile is fired from inland, and when that missile reaches the target area.

Whether the seeker on the missile will be able to reacquire the vessel is part of the question. Depending on the ECM state in the area (which is likely to be very high), how far the vessel has moved, the detection and intercept capabilities of the BMD, the range of the missile's seeker, the manueverability of the terminal missile, etc., etc. the attacking missile will have a difficult task.

Then, even if it does reacquire, the speed at which it is moving will limit its own ability to manuever to intercept...while it is constantly bombareded with passive and active electronic and physical defenses and decoys itself.

All of this has to be played out and accounted for and testing it at sea in as close to these conditions as possible will be the best way to do so. Needing to do that is not "funny" or "strange". It will most likely prove the difference between a potentially effective system and one that is not so.

As I said, this particular attack system is playing into one of the strengths of the US defenses...air defense, and patricularly, anti-missile air defense.