plawolfits their money and they value it a lot less than their nation’s security. so why on earth should it bother you ?
Oh please, like no-one’s ever tries the lame ‘ its not your country so you don’t know enough to talk about it‘ line. :rolleyes:
That stunt, and stunt is exactly what it is, had extremely little practial value and is all for show. The value for money anyone can get out of it in terms of national secruity is very poor. And there is nothing wrong with anyone pointing that out. Only someone with an alterior agenda would get so up tight about something so trivial.
any effort made that may be of slight use during wartime is worth it, especially
Did you actually read what has been wrote? Or do you just have a hard time grasping the concept of opportunity cost?
when its the case of a Goliath constantly threatening a David.
Cry me a river. Its irrelevent and inaccurate. You want to start a discussion on that, then start another thread please.
you can say what you like, but at the times of tension, if all roads are dividerless and even a few of them can sustain fighter ops, its worth it. dispersed ops is always a lot more difficult to track than a stationary airbase and the military of Taiwan understands that.
Please, the number of stretches of road that fit the bill for fighters to land and take off from are very few, and not designed for fighter ops. And the PLA will know exactly which roads they are. Also, for the vast majority if not all of the possible candidates, you have just one road with no side branches for the fighters to pull into, so everything is going to be stuck in the middle of the road. The implications are blindingly clear.
Then there is the issue of fuel, weapons and parts. A convoy of all the support equipment and crews needed for sustained air ops is not something you can hide under an overpass, nor is it something that is likely to be overlooked by recon and intell.
The very best the ROCAF can hope for, in war time, with this is that some of the fighters it sent up in the first waves that aren’t shot down can make an emergency landing on a stretch of highway before they run out of fuel and have to eject from a perfectly good airplane because their home bases have smoking crators all over their runways, if they still exist at all.
They can clear the roads before hand and they can have fuel trucks and air defences set up around the roads etc, but that will just make it more obvious which bits of highway they are going to use. They will be targeted either in the innitional bombardment, or left for the second wave to mop up while the ROCAF fighters are still milling on the ground.
Unlike Sweden’s roads, Taiwan’s road network was never designed to operate as emergency airfields, as such, using roads is never going to be a viable option unless they invest huge sums of money and decades to redesign and rebuild their roads. As it is, there are too few stretches of road suitable to even land a fighter on in Taiwan. Making it easy to narrow down ALL possible landing sites and to either hit them or monitor them; The roads were never designed with fighter ops in mind, as such don’t have conveniently placed fuel nodes or side roads for landed fighters to taxi onto so as to clear the highway for others to land on; There are little if any bits of cover near the highways for landed fighters to take shelter under etc. And there are dozens of other important charateristics of Swedish roads that Taiwan’s lack, and they are the difference between a viable option of using roads and highways to launch sustained fighter ops from, and just another ill thought-out, hair brained scheme that only desperate people would take seriously.
plawolfWell what else so you propose they do?
Not wasting large amounts of cash on ‘crowd pleasers’ that have little actual operational value would be a good start don’t you think?
If they build more airbases that’s just another target. At least this way they could, if they had a warning, prepare the roads a few days before a war. Also it even if it was not used it would tie up parts of the airforce that has to bomb them.
As I pointed out in my last post, readying these highways too early will only mark them out as obvious targets. You will have the massive operation of removing the dividers and sweeping the surface, which will stic out like a soar thumb.
Although fair points on the part about diverting resources to bomb them. However, with so many SRBMs and stand-off cruise missiles available to the PLA and the small number of places suitable to act as makeshift runways, the effect is likely to be very marginal.
Everything that poses a threat to an invading force has to be considered. So Taiwan might never seriously think of using it, but the thought of them useing it would be another thorn in the PLA’s side.
There are costs to considering things too carefully. Persuing every hair brained idea is going to burn big holes in your budget that could have been spent on better things.
Besides, this is hardly any ‘thorn’ worthy of the name. You have roads that are wide enough and long enough to land one or two planes at a time if you are lucky. You have nowhere to move the planes once they are on the ground. They will be out in the open, parked in neat straight lines with no means to re-fuel or re-arm, never mind repairs and maintance. That’ll be one sweet target for anything that spots them. One J7 can take out an entire line of F16/M2k/FCK1s with just its guns on one pass!
Not that it matters. I don’t think that China will risk everything over Taiwan. They have everything economicly to lose and not much to gain.
Exactly, it doesn’t matter. This is just a party trick some hardliners are using to try and maintain the illusion that the ROC can still have a good chance to holding off a PLA attack to try and whip up support for independence.
I don’t think its China that is likely to start any war in the straits. Time is on China’s side. All they have to do is continue as they are and in a few years the balance of power would be so skewed that there would be virtually no chance of Taiwan breaking away with force. Then its just a matter of continuing and increasing economic and social ties until the two sides are so interwined they might as well be one.
plawolfthose are great images hyperwarp. That white I’d assume satellite comm link seems rather aerodynamically inefficiently installed. Probably an afterthought.
Since they are placed right behind the canopy, they would be unlikely to have much of an effect aerodynamically, so its probably not much of an issue.
But they do seem to have been a late addition, purhaps further blocks might have a more ‘snug’ niche made for them, but I would think it to be pretty low priority. They should certainly fix the support bars on the intake before moving onto little finishing touches like that.
plawolfWhy is that ineffective? It’s amazing that they can do that. Most countries could not be able to do this. It would take forever for some to take dividers down.
Its ineffective because the time needed to remove the dividers and clear the surface would mean every ROCAF jet stuck in the air without a base to land on would have crashed because of a lack of fuel.
Its ineffetive because removing the deviders beforehand would be as good as putting up a big neon sign telling everyone which stretches of highway can be used/are being used in this manner, if the PLA doesn’t now already. And they would be taken out along with the runways.
Its ineffective because Taiwan’s road system was never designed with this in mind, and there are only a small number of stretches of road that are long enough, straight enough and strong enough to try this on. Look at Sweden for an example of what effective means in this regard.
plawolfHad the X32 looked more like that instead of a beached fish, Boeing might well have won that contest.:p
plawolfUnless US senators are complete morons, no one would fall on such cheap trick. F/A-22 an anti-terror weapon? ROTFLMAO, gimme a break..
Polititions have notoriously shaky knowledge regarding most defence matters, I would not be suprised if a few took such a statement at face value, especially if their home states might get some extra work because of an increase in orders. Often all they want are excuses to further their own agenda anyways.
On the contratry, I just don’t see any Iranian getting too excited over it, even if that happened. F/A-22 is useless against IRIAF since they don’t do anything meaningfully threatening with their aircraft anyway.. And to use it as a bomber? Nothing that B-2As could not do from Holloman, as well.
The Iranians are quite proud of their air force, and there is speculation they might be planning to beef it up with Fulcrum and/or Flanker buys. The US could want to make it transparently clear that even with new Flankers the USAF is still the big dog in the region, so as to not even have the possibility that the Iranian regeme might get ideas.
As for the B2s, well they may be stealthy, but they sure aren’t invisible altogether. Any strike on Iran’s huge and widely distributed nuclear facilities would need to be on a massive scale and conducted with utter suprise if it is to have any change of achieving its advertised goal with the minimal chance of escalation. Thus if the US were to strike, it will be unlikely to have the luxery of being able to totally destroy Iran’s defences before hand and then just walk in and bomb whatever they like.
That means B2s will be going in pretty much unsupported against a fully intact air force and air defences. While the B2s might get in with little bother, their slow speed could cause them some trouble getting out again afterwards. Having F22s fly shotgun would give the mission a far greater safety margin as any Iranian fighter that might stumble upon a B2 will be splashed by the raptor before it even knew anyone else was near him.
Splendid.. Just do it. Russians cannot wait to tweak up their latest SAM systems a bit. Having regular contact with the F-22 is the best way to do it I can think of.. 😉
They can only do that if they are stupid enough to try it on a regular basis. All they would need to do was to fly close in such a manger as to approach a SAM or radar sight in a very gradual way while monitoring it with everything they got. The moment the battery start to act differently and/or there start to be radio chatter, the F22 kicks into supercruise and gets the hell out of there before anyone knows what just happened. The Americans would know the effectiveness of the latest Russian radars against F22s and the Iranians might not even know what they picked up.
The way I see it, Mr.Putin could pay you some regular salary for that proposal.. 😉
And he’ll be very welcome. Never look a gift horse in the mouth I always say. 😉
A must? Hardly. Do you honestly think someone would risk a Raptor lost over Iran?
Refer to early section about why having raptors on station might be of great benefit to a strike against Iran. As for loosing a Raptor over Iran, well please mate. How many battles are the Americans likely to be fighting over US soil in the forseeable future? If the Raptor can only be ‘safely’ used over US soil, then its not going to be doing much in its service life time. And name me one potential battleground on which it would be perfectly ok to loose raptors over.
The whole point about the Raptor is that its not meant to be shot down, thus can be used in highly dangerous environments that would be suicidal for conventional planes to fly in. Iran is a perfect example of where the Ratpor’s particular talents are just what the doctor called for. Not using it because of the minute risk the Iranians might get lucky or a Raptor might suddenly develop a fault mid-mission is absolutely…shocking. And would be a huge slap in the face for the raptor and its development team for the military to have so little faith in their product.
Besides, worst comes to worst and a raptor does go down, so what? the pilot might be a bit screwed if he can’t be extracted in time, but the wreakage will be atomised in pretty short order after the remaining raptors re-arm with bombs and/or B2s come back to crator the spot again.
Another reason to pay you someregualr salary from Putin.. Plawolf, aren’t you accidentally a Russian agent? 😎
Damn, you caught me! How did you see past my cunning cover? 😮
plawolfWhile the F22, being an almost pure AA oriented fighter would not seem to be the most useful weapon one might want in the ME, a few obvious reasons for sending them that spring to mind are:
1) Home support: Get the F22s out there and drop the two bombs it can carry so that they can sell it back home as being a crutial weapon in the war on terror and hopefully get some more orders.
2) International politics: Give the Iranians something more to think about.
Having poentially hostile F22s on your doorstep is something no one can afford to take lightly.
3) Some real world testing. The US could use the F22 to prob Iranain air defences etc. With stealth and supercruise, it’ll be all but impossible for the Iranians to have any kind of chance of getting any evidence even if they do somehow detect it.
4) War prep. If Bush want to ‘take out’ Iran’s nuclear facilities, having F22s on hand is going to be a must. The pilots and ground crews would also get valuable experience operating in the area.
plawolfI can’t see how anyone can class the F22 as a ‘almost entirely defensive weapon’.
The Japanese will likely get it if they want it badly enough, but there will be objections within Japan as an F22 deal will likely kill off their own aviation industry. China will not be happy, but more importantly, SK will be pretty upset as well, and they will be pushing the US to get the F22 as well if Japan is allowed to have them.
Denying the Koreans access to the F22 while supplying them to the Japanese will not go down will in Soeul, and might push SK further into China and Russia’s sphere of influence. That is something the US will need to think about when deciding on Japanese F22s.
plawolfBoy we’re lucky to have you here seeing how you’re smarter than Northrop and Lockheed put together :rolleyes:
I was just wondering how long it would take before someone pull that one out again. :rolleyes:
So canards are bad bacause Northrop and Lockheed deemed them so? Guess someone forgot to let the Brits, Chinese, French, Germans, Russians and Sweds know. :rolleyes:
There are plenty of experts who like canards and there are plenty who don’t, just like there are plenty of canards designs and there are plenty that don’t use canards. So, ‘XXX is better cos YYY expert says so and built ZZZ plane’ is a poor reason and no bases to start dissing others with.
How about we all act our age and discuss the merits and flaws of both design approaches with knowledge and reason instead of just flag waving?
plawolfIf canards are bad for supercruise, why was the B-70 Valkyrie designed as a canard delta.
Because canards also greatly help to reduce the take-off and landing distance of a plane. It was viewed as an acceptable trade-off to have a little more drag in exchange for not needing rediculously long runways to take off and land on. A major plus in the cold war days as it means the fleet can operate from a much larger range of bases, so reducing the chances of having many birds caught on the ground during a suprise attack.
The Russians went one step further and designed retractable canards on their supersonic bomber IIRC.
plawolfPakistan is too risky to trust with integrating the SD-10 to a non Chinese radar. They still maintain links with the US and Europe..
Thats why the PLAAF don’t use the SD10 but the PL12 instead.
The FC1 is an export oriented plane, and has radars, weapons and avionics designed specifically to be exported, so odds are that the US is going to be able to get a good peek under the hood sooner or later. Having the SD10 operational on more radars means more options when exporting, so is likely to translate into more sales for both the plane and missiles. However, that might hurt the sales of the Chinese radar makers, so I suspect the decision will rest more on which ‘side’ has more political clout in China.
plawolfhttp://www.fas.org/blog/ssp/2007/02/
Implications
The implications of the low patrol rate are significant. The total operational experience for the entire Chinese submarine force is only 49 patrols in 25 years, corresponding to each submarine conducting an average of one patrol every third year.
As a result, Chinese submarine crews appear to have relatively little operational experience and consequently limited skills in operating their boats safely and competently. It suggests that the tactical skills that would be needed for the Chinese submarine force to operate effectively in a war may be limited.
China continues – at least for now – to use its submarine force as a coastal defense force.
An interesting article with some useful info if correct, but the conclusions are just strange and boarders on wishful thinking.
Firstly, there is no definition what what a ‘patrol’ is, only guesses, and very questionable ones at that.
Secondly, the suggestion that the PLAN lack operational experience based on this undetermined ‘patrol’ rate is unprofessional and boarders on wishful thinking. Subs, even diesels, don’t come cheap, and judging from the rate the PLAN is pumping them out and buying them, they must be viewed as high priority and only an idiot would assume that the PLAN just buying them to keep moored up at harbour without training with them.
The low RECORDED ‘partol’ rate could quite easily be explained by a number of reasons, such as:
– The new generation and much quieter subs is making it harder for the USN to find and track them when they do go on ‘patrol’
– The definition of ‘patrol’ might very likely involve long voyages, for which the PLAN’s mainly diesel sub fleet is not well suited for, thus the recorded ‘patrols’ may be exclusive to the PLAN’s tiny nuclear fleet, and/or the few times when diesels have ventured far from home, thus the decline in recorded ‘patrols’ may just reflect on the reduced use of the few Hans as the more experienced of their crews are likely to have been skimmed off to start training on the new gen SSN and SSBN the PLAN are building or have already launched.
– The article’s own guestimate of what amounts to a ‘patrol’ is active attempts at foreign sub hunting and/or long range intell gathering/harassment. Thus the lower recorded ‘patrol’ rate may either suggest that the PLAN has adapted a less aggressive attitude and is avoiding situtations where their boats might come into contact with subs and anti-sub forces of other nations (might be because it will take time for crews to be truely proficient at using their new subs). Alternatively, it could signify that they PLAN is getting better at sub hunting and anti-ASuW as they are detected less.
It also seriously challenges the theory by some that the Song jumping the Kitty Hawk was just about sending out hords of subs every time the carrier goes off on excerising and hoping one would get close enough to surface and grab a few headlines.
plawolfthat wasnt my question, as babur can carry 500kg war head more than 500 km away and its a copy of DH-10 (which is completely developed and underproduction after first test!)
Completley baseless. If there was even a shred of evidence to support this claim, you can be sure the Indian government would be the first to brandish it in front of the world.
then its completely violates the rules of MTCR.
Firstly, even if China did ship DH10s to pakistan for them to paint a different cammo on, it would not violate the MTCR because China never signed up to it.
Secondly, the MTCR is only a volentary, non-binding commitment. There is no basis in international law to enforce it. The US or any other signitary can back out today and there would be nothing anyone can do about it other then voice their disapproval.
So my Q was, “is any country using Pakistan against India giving her WMD and long range missiles voilating international rules ?” :rolleyes: :rolleyes:
Again, zero credible evidence to support that claim. Nor is it breaking international rules if China did provide such help, since the time such alleged transfered occuured was before China signed the NPT.
People living in glass houses should do well to avoid throwning stones, least someone forget that the nuclear programme of another country in the region is based largely on commerically supply canadian nuclear tech that was abused to make weapons with. But I digress…
plawolfAll this talk of ‘cells’ is dangerous. It implise that there is only a small number of individuals who are responsible for all these shoot downs, and that if they were taken out, then all the losses would stop.
It simply isn’t like that. Once one ‘cell’ has developed an effective method of taking down US helos, they are not going to keep it a secret and hope to patent the idea. They are going to be telling anyone and everyone who would listen about how to do it.
Once insurgents learn how to shoot down helos, the bell can’t be un-rung, and the marines seem to be on the right track with their sea king upgrades.
plawolfOk missile treaties aside, a number of chinese companies were sanctioned by the US for delivering sensitive material for Pakistans nuclear and missile programs. This itself must show China has a level of trust for Pakistan otherwise it wouldnt go this far.
Just a small issue, but those sanctions were American sanctions, not UN. The US was merely expressing their disapproval by not allowing those offending firms to trade with US firms or on US soil etc, it has no baring in terms of international law.
But the main thrust of that post is valid in my opinion. China and Pakistan do enjoy a very special relationship that has been strong through thick and thin for decades. Its very rare to see such good and consistent inter-state relations and there is no sign that it is fundermentally changing.
In fact, I am always a little reluctent to use the term ‘special relationship’ because of the US-UK connotation that term usually tend to be assumed as impling. If anything, China and Pakistan have a much more mature and healthy relationship in that it is based on mutual respect as well as being far fairer for both sides. But thats just my view. 🙂
Sign In
