Engineer
Major
Why do you only count HQ-9 series when the bread and butter of China's AD are HQ-12, HQ-16, and HQ-22?
PLA strike strategies in westpac HIC
- Thread starter SEAD
- Start date
People like him start with a conclusion they want to push and then selectively only look at and share information that reinforces that conclusion. Anything that contradicts that narrative is treated as if it doesn't exist.
HQ-16 is only operated by PLAGF for its brigades. Its a battlefield AD.
HQ-22 is cheaper and also much less capable. Its semi active homing and needs illumination from ground radar.
There also just 130 launchers for HQ-22.
The only AD that is worth mentioning is S-300 bought from Russia. But its imported and old and probably do not interface with newer Chinese systems.
For a country size of Russia, the number of modern fighters and AWACs is grossly inadequate. Might as well be none existence in most areas.
The issue is the largest salvo size that the US can throw at China.
My guess is 200 subsonic cruise missiles maximum.
For comparison, the Shanghai region can likely scramble 100+ fighters with at least 600 AAMs.
As long as there is an AWACs to detect the missiles and coordinate the fighters, all those incoming cruise missiles should be shot down. And that is before we consider ground-based air-defence.
EDIT. Note China has a huge number of modern AWACs aircraft.
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Russian (and also Soviet) doctrine is that they would be at a disadvantage in the air and at risk of losing control of the air.
So they invested a lot into survivable SAMs to deny enemy usage of the air.
In comparison, today's Chinese doctrine is to project power offshore and obtain air superiority over all of the 1st Island Chain. That should be feasible given what we see of Chinese military procurement and what the opposition looks like.
In such a scenario, it means the Chinese military only faces a handful of opposing airbases and aircraft carriers. The incoming missile strikes should be easily manageable.
Subsonic cruise missiles are going to have a very time getting past any sort of decent air defence. The problem for the Americans is that they're used to firing them against foes who don't have any air defence so that's all they really have in their arsenal. And even if all of these missiles hit, they won't cause all that much lasting damage, so how is it some sort of war winning ability? In fact, it's just much more likely that the Americans give up as soon as they run out of their advanced munitions.
The HQ-16 is also operated by Chinese Navy Frigates as a medium-range air defence system against incoming cruise missiles. So if a Chinese Army Brigade is still in their garrison (which many will be), is there a big issue to deploy their HQ-16s as additional area defence?
Is HQ-22 semi-active homing that big an issue for local air defence?
They are the affordable system and presumably being deployed in areas where the Chinese Air Force have air (and ECM) superiority.
And I don't understand why you rate the S-300 so highly. As you point out, the S-300 is old and the HQ-22 likely has better radar and ECM capability.
Plus the S-300 only has half? the number of HQ-22 launchers?
Right.
It's actually even more lop-sided. US only has a few options of launching large salvos.
One is a large strike packages of tactical aircraft. For most of the figher/attack platforms in US inventory, the combat radius would be sub-1000km. So they either need to be based off less than half dozen bases, or carriers. Realistically, they will not be able to get off strike package of even approaching 100, give all the other mission sets they will need to do for their bases / carriers, especially in terms of force protection.
A second option is to use large fleet of tankers to extend the radii, so a much larger number of bases, and put carriers further back. Of course this means that tankers would be well within detection range of ground based UHF and L-band surveillance radars, air based surveillance, etc. Thus easy targets for the likes of PL-17 and R-37, or super long range SAMs.
Yet another option would be to use penetrating strategic platforms. But there only 19 such units capable of penetration of air defences against peer adversaries, until a large number of B-21s come online in the 2030s. The issue is similar for using attack subs, they don't have the mass necessary until a large number of block-V Virginias with VPMs get commissioned. A different issue if they decide to use the converted Ohio boats with TLAM-D/E, which are outdated, slow, and easily detected.
Finally, there are some more novel options like Rapid Dragon, like using JASSM-XR, that usually requires a large contingent of slow and non-survivable cargo planes flying within the A2AD bubble. If successful at all, would be basically a single use surprise attack.