Re: Effectiveness of China's Air Defence?
This is from another thread, but is seems more appropriate here.
They will have to test it before they pour money (and a lot of it) into deploying it. They can try and keep such a test a secret from the press...and perhaps succeed. They will not be able to keep it a secret from a nation like the US who will detect a ballitic missile launch and track it.
So how will the US tell such a test apart from a standard BM test firing? The Chinese are not fools and would not choose to conduct the test when there are US spy sats over the test range. The US might be able to detect the launch and get a track, but they will not get a look see of what the test was about till another spy sat passes over. It's the simplest thing in the world to plan a test to maximize the time till a spy sat passes over next, and use that time to cover up the results.
Hell, for such an important test that could be a real 'game changer' (to use LockMart talk), it's probably worth while to coincide the ASBM test with, oh I don't know, maybe a laser ASAT dazzler test to prevent snooping spysats from seeing the scene till the evidence have been covered up?
Did you not wonder at the time why the Chinese would be conducting laser dazzler tests against foreign spy sats? I mean, to fully assess how effective the system was, surely it would be best to know what the precise effects were on the targeted satellite? And I for one doubt that the US would be as accommodating as to give the Chinese the telemetry data from the dazzler so they can assess its effectiveness.
No, to best test such a dazzler, you test it out against one of your own spy sats first. Both to better refine it as well as to make sure it doesn't do any permanent damage to the satellite. The Americans might be willing to stop at just complaining if one of their birds doesn't get to see what they want it to see, but they would be unlikely to be so meek if their bird was damaged or rendered inoperable from such an incident.
As to the defense against it, the US (and others) are already well along in that portion. The newer versions of AEGIS have a BMD component which has been tested many times successfully against incoming ballistic missile RVs. The US already has missiles deployed that can shoot down incoming ballistic missiles. They are already testing (and successfully) the use of lasers for defense purposes, and at some point will begin testing charged particle beams for the same.
So, the defenses against just this sort of attack are already in place and getting stronger.
BMD's effectiveness is far from proven, and has certainly not demonstrated any interceptions of missiles that will be traveling as fast as a DF21 in terminal phase.
What more, BMD requires the defenders to go active to track the target. As soon as they do that, they will have bigger problems than ASBMs as the entire PLAAF and PLANAF will be scrambling to shoot as many AShMs at the CBG as they could loft, which is more than what any CBG could hope to intercept.
If all the PLA has to do to scare the USN into voluntarily revealing its position is to randomly shoot some DF21s at the sea, I think they would be happy to oblige. Would a CBG commander risk ordering his ships to keep their radars off when he gets notified by the pentagon that they have detected IRBM launches heading his way? If he keeps the radars off and an ASBM is real, even a 100% effective BMD system is pointless. But if he lights up, he opens himself up for a more dangerous attack, as the PLA decides when to launch those missiles, and could have a massive strike package airborne and waiting for co-ordinates when the start firing off those DF21s.
As I have stress time and again, ASBM, if it exists, its not a magic silver bullet that will win a war all by itself. What it does is boost the overall anti-carrier capabilities of entire PLA, and as demonstrated above, complements and enhances the effectiveness of existing weapons systems.
Nonetheless, such a capability, if it existed, to successfully hit a moving warship at sea with a ballistic missile would be a very strong capability and one that retains, even with the defenses, some chance of success. But the Chinese, IMHO, are a long ways from an operational weapon system. When they actually perform a test, shooting a ballistic missile out to sea at a moving vessel (which they will simply not be able to hide) and hit it, then we will know that they are proceeding towards operational deployment.
If past precedent is any indication, when the Chinese shoot an ASBM at a sea based moving target, they would have already operationally deployed the weapon system, maybe years ago and are working on something else.
The PLA does not follow the American pattern of public testing. For the Chinese, public testing is about displaying an operational weapon's capability to world as opposed to a step in making that weapons system operational. Development tests would be done in secret and covered up as much as possible. Such Chinese public tests are often politically motivated and intended to send a message and has nothing to do with developmental requirements.
