Ballistic missiles are passe.

The number of ballistic missiles and the number of countries and non-state entities equipping themselves with ballistic missiles are increasing, not decreasing.

Why do something what a terrorist network can do cheaper and with much more accuracy?

Because smuggling a nuclear warhead into the US isn’t necessarily as easy as one thinks.

Presence. For every theatre to have a carrier on scene all the time, you’d need 3 carriers to sustain the op tempo. I remember them having a requirement for forward presence at 5 locations (can’t recall where offhand), which meant 15 carriers. But with one carrier forward deployed in Japan, the shortfall was ameliorated somewhat, so the USN could more or less make do with 12, then 11. 10 might be acceptable in the future given that the FORD class have far less downtime as a result of less need for nuclear refueling.

Naval Confrontation: China Pushing U.S. Further Away From Its Territory
Wednesday, March 11, 2009
By Patrick Goodenough, International Editor

The ocean surveillance ship USNS Impeccable uses passive and active low frequency sonar arrays to detect and track undersea threats. (Photo: U.S. Navy) (CNSNews.com) – Disputes between the United States and China over naval movements in the South China Sea are not likely to end anytime soon, analysts say, as the two sides are divided over what activities are allowed. International law on the matter is vague.

Beijing said Tuesday that a U.S. naval ship confronted by Chinese ships earlier this month had been carrying out “illegal surveying in China’s special economic zone,” in contravention of Chinese and international laws.

The Pentagon said the USNS Impeccable, an unarmed ocean surveillance vessel, was harassed for several days by five Chinese ships, including a navy ship, in international waters about 75 miles south of China’s southern Hainan Island.

In the most serious incident, Chinese vessels “shadowed and aggressively maneuvered in dangerously close proximity” to the U.S. ship on Sunday, coming as close as 25 feet away, the Pentagon said. The U.S. has formally protested to the Chinese government, and says its ships “will continue to operate in international waters in accordance with customary international law.”

China’s reference to its economic zone arises from the 1982 U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), which recognizes exclusive economic zones (EEZ) stretching 200 nautical miles (about 230 miles) from a country’s coastline. The U.S. has not ratified UNCLOS.

EEZs aim to balance the desire of coastal states to control and exploit offshore resources beyond their 12 nautical mile territorial limit against other maritime powers’ interests in maintaining freedom of navigation. Experts say ambiguities in UNCLOS language, which is open to differing interpretations by different countries, have given rise to numerous disputes.

Beijing has long sought to prevent other countries from carrying out surveillance or surveying operations within its EEZ, and in 2002 enacted a law outlawing such activities without authorization. (At the same time, however, China frequently sends survey vessels into areas that Japan considers to be within its EEZ; the two countries have clashed for decades over surveying activities in waters both claim.)

Ron Huisken of the Strategic and Defense Studies Center at the Australian National University said Wednesday that “both sides have dug in” and he did not expect that appealing to the “law” would help to resolve the issue.

He said he expected that China, “within the substantial gray areas in international law,” would want to reach informal understandings with the U.S. Navy that “err on the side of China’s interests in pushing the U.S. further away from its territory.”

“Traditionally, however, the U.S. has been fiercely protective of the freedom of the high seas,” he added. “A betting man would anticipate a steady diet of such incidents.”

Is intelligence-gathering a peaceful or threatening activity?

UNCLOS provides for “freedom of navigation and overflight” in EEZs. It says military activities inside a country’s EEZ must be “peaceful” and may not adversely affect the environment or economic resources of the coastal state.

Whether surveillance or surveying activities constitute “peaceful” acts is a matter of dispute, however.

A crewmember on a Chinese trawler uses a grapple hook in an apparent attempt to snag the towed acoustic array of the USNS Impeccable in the South China Sea on March 8, 2009. (Photo: U.S. Navy)In 2002, officials and scholars from the U.S. and several Asian countries, including China, met on the Indonesian island of Bali for a dialogue on “military and intelligence-gathering activities in EEZs,” co-sponsored by the East West Center in Hawaii and an Indonesian institute.

According to a East West Center report summarizing the dialogue, participants grappled with issues such as at what point a coastal country can reasonably regard intelligence-gathering to be a threatening activity.

One area of consensus was the determination that “no specific rules exist governing military activity in the EEZ except that they be peaceful, that is, non-hostile, non-aggressive, that they refrain from use of force or threat thereof, and that they do not adversely affect economic resources or the environment.”

But the many disagreements included different views of the meaning of terms like “peaceful” and “threat of force.”

A SURTASS system in action: an active sonar transmitter below a surface ship sends out pulses of sound that bounce off a submarine underwater and are detected as returning echoes. (Graphic: U.S. Navy)China’s view on the matter was spelled out in a paper written in 2005 by two Chinese scholars, one of them a senior colonel in the armed forces, which stated unambiguously that “military and reconnaissance activities in the EEZ … encroach or infringe on the national security interests of the coastal State, and can be considered a use of force or a threat to use force against that State.”

Submarine detection

The USN Impeccable is a twin-hulled ocean surveillance ship designed to detect quiet foreign diesel and nuclear-powered submarines and to map the seabed for future antisubmarine warfare purposes, according to U.S. Navy data.

Towed behind and below the vessel are two sonar systems – an active one that emits a low frequency pulse and a passive one that listens for returning echoes. The system is known as SURTASS (surveillance towed-array sensor system).

“The SURTASS mission is to gather ocean acoustical data for antisubmarine warfare and rapidly transmit the information to the Navy for prompt analysis,” the Military Sealift Command said in a statement when the Impeccable was christened in 2000.

“China certainly would realize what this ship is up to, and would view its presence in those waters as threatening,” Jon Van Dyke, professor of law at the University of Hawaii School of Law – and an expert in maritime disputes and military activities in EEZs – said Wednesday.

“The U.S. anti-submarine low frequency active sonar is deemed vital by the United States in the event of a Chinese attack on Taiwan, because we would then need to be able to find and destroy China’s subs, which are increasing in numbers,” he said.

During Sunday’s confrontation in the South China Sea, the Impeccable’s towed sonar systems appeared to be a particular target.

One of three photographs released by the U.S. Navy of the incident shows a crewmember on one of the Chinese vessels using a grapple hook in what the Navy said was “an apparent attempt to snag the towed acoustic array” of the Impeccable.

Hainan Island is home to a strategic Chinese Navy base that reportedly houses ballistic missile submarines.

Last May, the Jane’s group of defense publications released new commercially available satellite images which it said confirmed reports about the existence of an underground submarine base near Sanya, on the island’s southern tip.

It said 11 tunnel openings were visible at the base, as was one of China’s advanced new Type 094 nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines (SSBNs), known by NATO as the Jin-class and reportedly boasting 12 missile silos.

The U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence in 2006 said China would probably aim to build and deploy five Jin-class submarines in order to have “a near-continuous at-sea SSBN presence.”

Resolving differences

Van Dyke, who played a key role in the EEZ dialogue in Bali in 2002, said Wednesday that in the course of those meetings it emerged that the Chinese Navy was behaving towards Japan and other neighbors in the same way as the U.S. Navy behaves towards China, “with regard to coastal surveillance etc.” (Let’s see how many times hell boy can scream the word ‘hypocrisy’ :diablo:. Or is he going to take the all new and original ‘lying media’ retort? He tries that and I have a certain burning building to show him :D)
In trying to find a way to resolve its differences with China over permitted activities in EEZs, Van Dyke said, “the U.S. will probably try to convince China that it is in China’s interest – as an emerging naval power – to support the [U.S.-held] view that international law permits naval activities in the EEZs of other countries.”

Another factor that could “reduce the urgency of this confrontation” would be improving relations between China and Taiwan, he said.

Hainan island was also the location of an earlier, serious military-related incident involving the U.S. and China, which also raised questions in international law about legitimate activities in EEZs.

In April 2001, a U.S. Navy EP-3 spy plane on a “routine surveillance mission” was involved in a mid-air collision with one of two Chinese F-8 fighter jets which had been deployed to intercept the slow-moving aircraft. The Chinese pilot was killed.

Following the collision, the EP-3 issued a mayday warning and made an emergency landing at a military airfield on Hainan. The 24-person crew was held there for 11 days before being permitted to leave, and China only allowed the plane to be dismantled and airlifted home months later.

Director of National Intelligence Adm. Dennis Blair told the Senate Armed Services Committee Tuesday that the harassment of the Impeccable was the “most serious” military dispute between the U.S. and China since the 2001 mid-air collision.

http://www.cnsnews.com/public/content/article.aspx?RsrcID=44839

PLAN trying to conduct R&D. 😀

Caption: A crewmember on a Chinese trawler uses a grapple hook in an apparent attempt to snag the towed acoustic array of the military Sealift Command ocean surveillance ship USNS Impeccable (T-AGOS-23). Impeccable was conducting routine survey operations in international waters 75 miles south of Hainan Island when it was harassed by five Chinese vessels.

Date Posted: 27-Feb-2009

Jane’s Navy International

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EMALS forges ahead, says General Atomics
Casandra Newell

The Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System (EMALS) for the US Navy’s future carriers is ahead of its development schedule and preparing to enter phase two of high cycle testing (HCT-2), a senior executive at General Atomics Electronic Systems told Jane’s on 25 February.

Scott Forney, vice-president of the Electromagnetic Systems Division, said delivery of power inverters for the Prime Power Interface Subsystem (PPIS), which delivers power from the ship’s electrical distribution system to the EMALS energy storage generators, would start in March, with HCT-2 following in April.

Involving a dead-load launch, HCT-2 will repeat the test cycle performed at General Atomics facility in Tupelo, Mississippi, in 2008, but will include the new PPIS inverter and its advanced software. The company also intends to assess the launch motor’s durability by testing it inside a hyperbaric chamber filled with corrosive chemicals.

“The launch control system, the electrical system and the rectifier are all being delivered and installed. The system is really starting to look shipboard ready,” Forney stated. A first aircraft launch is expected in January 2010.

EMALS – which employs a linear induction motor to accelerate aircraft off the flight deck – is one of the key technological advances for the Gerald R Ford-class carrier programme, replacing the C-13 steam catapults used in Nimitz-class carriers.

Potential benefits include a reduction in the wind-over-deck required for launch, a higher sortie rate, smoother launch (leading to less stress on airframes), the elimination of aircraft engine and inlet steam ingestion constraints, a smaller thermal signature, reduced topside weight and increased reliability.

The system is intended for installation in first-of-class Gerald R Ford (CVN 78), which is due to enter service in 2015.

Northrop Grumman Shipbuilding secured a USD5.1 billion contract for detailed design and construction of the ship in September 2008. The first steel was cut at Newport News, Virginia, in August 2005 under a separate USD2.7 billion advanced procurement contract and keel-laying is expected in late 2009.

All seems well on the surface, at least.

Last time I checked, local US fanclub claimed xxxxx:0 kill ratio, not xxxxx:2. At least we know how accurate these claims really are

If they were referring to 144:0, or 108:0, then they are referring to results obtained during exercises like Northern Edge, and are/were right at that point of time. And after that there were a number of kills of the Raptor, one by an F-16, one by a SuperHornet. Nobody’s crying over that. F-22 pilots make mistakes too, like djcross said, the whole point of these exercises are to try to find the best way to utilise the Raptors contributions to the fight, and along the way expose (to themselves) any weaknesses they can find in the Raptor, and how they can mitigate that.

At the end of the day, people who believe Raptors are invincible are silly. Even sillier are those who try and criticise the Raptor by ridiculing the Raptor based on their claims.

Even with the awful low probability that pasive Amraams were used in a excercise, such thing show that the 22 LPI radar is not so LPI…

It’s Low probability of intercept, not No probability of intercept. :rolleyes: Do you realise that the Growler has one of the best fighter AESAs out there, and a superb ESM and jamming package that other fighters can’t compete with?

this in my opinion , debunks that eurofighter and Su-35BM are not capable of taking down raptor .

Eurofighter has a excellent EW ability , rather the best or one of the best

What silliness displayed here. Nobody, not even the USAF claimed the F-22 to be invincible. F-22s have been shot down in exercises before this. F-22 pilots are human and can make mistakes too. What matters is kill ratio. If the F-22 can pull off a 200:1 kill ratio, I think the USAF is quite happy to let the adversary celebrate the one Raptor kill they got for every 200 burning enemy fighter scrap heaps on the ground. And forgive me if I laugh when you try and compare EW capability of a Typhoon to that of a dedicated EW platform like the Growler.

I think this incident is a testament though to the capabilities that come with integrating the EW performance of the Prowler, and the AESA and AMRAAM of a fighter.