JonesyClarification…
PLAN and PLAAF does use shooter assets for recon. There are JH-7A and J-8H recon versions. Not exactly real time but still employed.
OK Hallo. You would accept though that neither of those types routinely engage in long-duration maritime recon of the type being discussed here.
JonesyI appreciate the baseless and childish insults
Please believe me that if I were insulting you…you would know about it. I started my post with an apology and an attempt to keep my post somewhat light-hearted despite the fact you were ridiculing my ‘opinions’ when i was actually stating fact.
I’ve provided a clear example of a situation where a “force” much weaker than the Chinese forces could engage a US Naval group.
No, you have decided that MC02 is relevent to the PLN/Taiwan/USN scenario and then tried to claim it as fact!. Intellectual honesty – I think not?. I’ve explained to you why MC02 doesnt transfer anywhere else and especially not to China/Taiwan. If you want to ignore the fact that the USN start firing saturation TLAM strikes 500km offshore…well beyond the range of anything deployed in MC02 to counter….thats entirely your business.
How exactly do you intend to “divorce” recon and shooter assets? What I mentioned were clearly both, since simply finding an enemy task-force is relatively useless if you can not even attempt to engage it if the need be. The Soviet/Russian Air Force and Naval Aviation has always run these assets together, for example. Otherwise, it would be a broken network.
Why would you waste shooter assets tooling around looking for targets when their job is to get the missiles into firing position?. The AV-MF used unarmed Bear variants for its long-duration patrol work because carrying heavy antiship missiles reduces endurance and eats through the missiles carriage life uselessly. This is very, very basic stuff man.
It is an enduring wonder to me me why people, intent on trying to emulate failed Soviet-era strategies, are so suprised when you tell them that, using a fraction of the assets the Soviets intended to use, their strategy would also fail – or, more fairly, offer a very low probability of success. The greater irony is, for me, that I believe that the answer to China’s battlespace surveillance and targetting problem could quite well be in this thread if the concept is grasped and the resources made available.
JonesyFrosty,
Thats the closest thing I’ve seen yet to my view on how we need to carry the fleet forward!.
Just a couple of niggles?.
The C1 you show as having Aster15 capability yet there is no multi-function radar capable of providing the update-rate necessary to MCG the missile?. Artisan-3D is offering performance thats good for a Mid Range Radar, but, its just, basically, looking like a re-hashed 996 more than anything fancy like Aster requires. Aster for VLMICA or CAAM would be a good swap in the configuration you have.
Also there isnt enough chopper capability for my taste. Merlin is our main ASW asset and we need it to be deployable around the task force. For a principle ASW asset hangar space and aviation stores for at least two Merlins has to be critical to the role. VTOL UAV’s will also play a key role in RN ISTAR going forward as well and this, plus C2, are the platforms to embark them.
As to C2 I’m not sure about the VLS either am afraid. Sylver A70’s, even with the deckhouse, are going to go three decks down!. I’m not sure that the kind of space for A70’s will be there on a 4k ton hull. Neither would I be too concerned about a full up LACM on C2. Fitted for – but not with – GWS60 (Harpoon Blk2) might be quite enough. Harpoon blk2 being mostly useful as a 500lb JDAM with a jet engine as far as I can make out!.
Ed,
As already discussed, the other issue is that the C-3 is unlikely to be much over 2000 tons, unfortunately. This means that C-2 is more likely to share the hull of the C-1. On the other hand, I do really like your ideas, they do represent excellent designs.
I’m not so sure on C3. I think Vospers have quite adequately done away with this sub-2000ton C3 with their 3000ton proposal. Its very, very obvious that the mission requirements placed on C3 will not fit on a 2000 ton hull.
As to SeaRAM I’d not get too excited about seeing that in RN service to be honest. This is a Hansard comment relevent to our appraisal of the system:
HMS York (Sea RAM Trial)265W
Mr. Gray To ask the Secretary of State for Defence if he will make a statement on the trials of Sea RAM with HMS York; and what plans he has to procure the weapon system. [50783]
Dr. Moonie [holding answer 18 April 2002]: The Sea RAM trial on HMS York was completed in September 2001. Although the equipment was returned earlier than anticipated, the majority of the trial objectives were achieved. The data gathered will be used to inform equipment capability decisions and to feed into other research and studies.
We have no immediate plans to procure the system, but it will be considered along with other options for a potential enhancement to our close-in defensive capability.
Given the date that the YORK trials with SeaRAM ended, and the fact that no-one I’ve ever talked to knows anything about how the system was evaluated under testing, I think its safe to assume that the system was not something that was viewed as bringing a revolutionary advance to RN antimissile defence. It would, therefore, not be a system I would expect to see any time in the near future!.
JonesySteve
due to C looking like you’d get very wet.
As the original Type42 design proved – get the bows design wrong and you can have a very wet conventional monohull!.
Tumblehome hulls are nothing new and do offer some interesting properties but nothing that outweighs the rather vexed question of stability in heavy seas.
Trimaran is obviously fashionable at the moment and does have a great deal of potential once certain issues such as sponson joint rigidity over time are more fully understood, but, the RN are not going to base a major proportion of its future escort capability on a relatively unproven design layout.
If all you want to do Planeman is develop a potential escort that would suit the role required of a navy wishing to escort HVU’s then all your choices have merits. If you are aiming for some degree of reality for the end product i.e a vessel that would fit in with the RN’s ‘C1’ effort then the answer is A.
JonesyEcho,
You’ll have to forgive me for this but a Chinese ‘internet warrior’ with a need to believe that his forces have the slightest chance against the USN in a Taiwan context is not a novelty on this site. I have no interest in launching into the detailed series of posts explaining why the PLAN, with existing and near-term assets, wouldnt stand a prayer because a) I’ve done it before and b) you dont want to hear it anyway.
If you have the slightest interest in learning something about the real world problems facing air forces in locating, identifying and fixing deployed naval units then there is a thread called ‘Strongest Asian Navy’ or some such thing in the archive of this site. Its very long and has much vitriol but there are some good posts there if you have the intellectual honesty to follow through.
That said though with comments like:
The JH-7 is capable of maritime strike / and some recon. Approx 100 of these.
The YJ-8 MPA which is in service – with over 50 airframes of various configuration.
The Su-30MK2 – optimized for maritime strike.
…it would appear you are unaware of the need to divorce recon and shooter assets which is about as basic a concept in maritime recon as you can get – so I hold out little hope.
The good news though Echo is that there are several posters with similar views to yourself on this forum so you are amongst kin!. They all have a need to believe and have nothing in the way of experience or knowlege to back up their views as well!.
Enjoy the site!.:rolleyes:
Edit: Here’s the link to the thread mentioned earlier – http://forum.keypublishing.co.uk/showthread.php?t=37500&highlight=Strongest+Aviation+Navy
JonesyThere are somany factors in a China Us confrontation that complicates things much more than what is said here.
No one even stops to consider rules of engagement.
Is it realistic to assume that MPA will be engaged upon contact?
Unless the carrier battle group is not focused in the vicinity of Taiwan what is its purpose. If it is then the general location is rather limited in relation to its targets.
RoE’s could as easily be the declaration of a total-exclusion zone around the Taiwanese islands with a free-fire order given within barring certain safe corridors. Given that political factors are a complete imponderable it is best to limit this type of discussion to the technical merits. Its not that RoE isnt considered – its just easier to consider them open in all regards if you want a meaningful technical discussion. This being a policy that encompasses many subjects, not just China/Taiwan, and is a defacto standard on these boards.
JonesyF-35C? This is a stretch.
Why?. F-35C is programmed to be part of the USN Carrier Air Group within a decade. Put in F-35B or F-18E if its less of a ‘stretch’ for you. The fact remains the same. The MPA as an asset is engageable at very long range from the task group and it would be unable to provide meaningful data on the group at those ranges.
What makes you think one lonely recon asset is going to be used.
The answer to a very simple question. How many MPA’s does China (seeings you are now making this solely about China) possess currently. SSK’s are not search assets unless they can stake out choke points – choke points that would be well sanitised by SSN’s prior to a carrier group getting within 200 miles!. Chinese SSN’s are still a few generations behind the curve. Where’s your surviveable search asset?. Or are you still banking on James Bond???;)
So now you are suggesting that fighter escorts can not be replaced with others? Tankers and endurance are irrelevant, we are talking about coastal defense here. What makes you think the US will just get the surprise attack? This is fantasy, hardly real world talk here.
Maritime Patrol Aircraft, by nature, patrol large sections of the maritime environment for a dozen hours or more. Fighters engage in air combat and have a combat duration of a couple of hours or less. Are we seeing the difference yet?. If you want your fighters to keep up with an MPA thats patrolling 200km offshore and, presumably, be combat effective, then endurance is going to be a key factor. You also state that China will deploy large numbers of patrollers, so, I ask you again how many of your best squadrons are you willing to task to riding shotgun on the MPA’s and how much tanking and airborne radar cover you are willing to assign.
When you understand the complexities of the problem then you can come back and use words like ‘fantasy’!:rolleyes:
Jonesyany form of dedicated recon aircraft, or submarine, could, even in the face of a carrier battle group, have enough time to transmit information about where they are being engaged from
…and what makes you think that the direction of engagement would be the bearing back to the carrier battlegroup?. Even if it were to be the correct rough bearing to the group, without a triangulation, how far back is it?. If the attack is from an F-35C launched AIM-120 the group could be 500kms away – if its an SM-6 it could be 100…the seeker is the same so ESM would offer little. An engagement report is simply not going to give enough for a positional fix so the MPA, and its crew, is dead for very little return.
These recon assets could also be covered by land SAM systems, aerial escorts, etc.
Like I said, if the carrier group is capable of launching saturation fire TLAM or air-launched CASOM strikes from 500kms offshore, land coverage is meaningless. The MPA airfields, fixed C3 nodes coordinating the recon effort and heavy SAM sites are the first targets hit precisely to hamper the attempts at localising the carrier group(s). MPA’s have patrol endurances of anywhere up to 12-odd hours….not many fighters going to be able to keep up with that or are you going to assign whole squadrons, plus tankers and AWACs support to cover the MPA’s???. What was that you said about ridiculous?!.
The Persian Gulf may be a very narrow area where it’s easy to find a carrier group, but Millennium Challenge 2 shows how a severely underpowered enemy can still fend off even a top notch navy battle group.
So you are saying that if caught in a confined sea space against a low-tech/hi-quantity enemy that the carrier group could be in trouble. I’d say thats a no-brainer and make the observation that only the most contrived situation could exist that would allow the ‘low-tech enemy’ to still be in possession of assets by the time the carrier group got close!
JonesyIt was also mentioned in further interviews, that an enemy armed with missiles better than the Styx would have been able to do the same thing, even if the CVBG was farther away. Considering the range on the F-18E/F is hardly unlimited, quite the contrary rather, I find it hard to believe the CVBG would be very far.
Assuming a situation would break out, the enemy navy, not one with 1960s era weaponry like in that exercise, would use its own recon assets to patrol the likely areas where the CVBG would be. A mid-pacific ocean scenario is just childish to imagine.
Also, most countries to have some form of intelligence service that could help immensely in predicting where the carrier group would be, through field agents, etc.
How would the enemy with better missiles do the same thing though?. The Russians had ‘better missiles’ in the Midway incident. How much difference did they make?.
You say an enemy Navy would use its own recon assets. Who’s Navy has the kind of recon assets that are surviveable in the face of a carrier battlegroup?. You may say that an MPA being shot down by a Super Hornet would prove the presence of a carrier group….great. Trick is turning that fact into a position fix….you cant….its basic information warfare. CEC further complicates the situation for the MPA too. You could quite easily see an E-2 racket plotted on one bearing and an SM-6 arrive on a completely different one!.
The intelligence services comment I feel is an odd one to be honest. What will an intelligence operative be able to feed back?. Sailing schedule, UNREP departures….nothing that will provide the realtime positional data needed by an attacker!.
Finding ships at sea even at just a couple of hundred kilometers off shore is very, very tricky. If the ships you need to be finding are launching salvo’s of TLAMs from 500km off or airstrikes 350km off then you cannot afford to be waiting to send out your littorals small boat force in order to replay the MC02 scenario for very obvious reasons.
JonesyIf the debate involves any kind of near coastal of littoral warfare, chances are the US CVBG would have been long found in any real conflict, so whether is was emitting is irrelevant.
Millennium Challenge 2002 exercises sort of showed how limited the power of a CVBG is once anywhere near land.
A merchant ship could spot a CVBG for all you know.
Echonine,
The brief given of the performance Midway put in above was written by a USN Lt Cdr who was aboard the Midway and flew with that vessels E-2 detachment. His name is Andy Pico and, last I heard, he was working at NORAD.
In otherwords what you read isnt some contrived exercise like ‘Millenium Challenge’ it was a real world operational evolution that put two full CVBG’s in ‘opfor’ waters, conducting flight ops, within the sensor envelope of search and track systems intended to detect precisely those units.
Ex Millenium Challenge was intended to investigate the threat level posed to a CV group by assymetric threats in the naval environment. For those threats to materialise the group was deliberately placed further inshore than it ever would be in a non threat-reduced environment. It has utterly no similarity to the kind of anticarrier tactics discussed here.
A merchant ship, at most, would be allowed to see one of the carriers escort screen. Shepherding innocent and ‘not-so-innocent’ vessels away from carrier groups is nothing new. A smart task group commander might also decide to have a screen vessel ‘escort away’ merchant vessels that arent even on the task groups course track. Good way of getting some conflicting ‘helpful’ reports from merchies wouldnt you say?.
JonesyI’d raise that to certainly – for C1 and C2 if they materialise in that fashion.
JonesyYou’d have to agree with Distiller that, money no object, the Millenium mount would likely be the optimal system. This may not be for the immediately accepted reasoning though. Its performance, by all accounts, is good and the weapon offers as much to the close-in surface threat as the close-in air threat.
What puts it aside from most of the rest of the systems listed though is its ship impact or, rather, lack of it. Any new CIWS solution for the C1/T4x would have to offer pull-through to the rest of the surface fleet – the RN are unlikely to specify a new CIWS for just one class of vessel. Millenium is a very easy mount to spot on a ship….spotting a director to service it might be a bit more of a challenge in integration terms, but, a lightweight LIROD2-type mount per beam should be feasible, with good arcs, on most RN vessels moving forward.
Seeings that money like that isnt going to be available anytime in the foreseeable future my ‘vote’ here would be for G – the Phalanx 1B because it is available, easy to mount, has some capability against the ‘legacy’ AGM-84/AM39/Uran type threat and, as has been stated, offers a good augment to soft-kill. I’m not sure we’d ever hold-back an Aster from an inbound Harpoon or Exocet due to a concept of it being ‘too easy a target’ – we would certainly look at Aster as being the principle line of defence against all antiship missiles – especially the larger supersonic ones – though.
JonesyThe hull you are talking about is C1. The optimisation of the platform, by your criteria, would be C, E, F.
If you try and put in area air defence the ship (1) doesnt get built and (2) probably isnt going to be in the right position to engage in its primary tasking – ASW – as it will be providing AAW coverage.
T45 exists and is the right platform to do the AAW. ABM/ATBM depends on a ‘skytop’ mode in the SAMPSON and an interceptor that will fit in a Sylver cell. These dont exist yet but, I believe, are described as feasible. The only threat that they would service, at the moment, is defence of port facilities against ATBM’s though so it could hardly be described as priority.
C1 or your notional T4x needs nothing more than a competent point defence missile system.
JonesyAgain, without trying to urinate on the parade, there are two seperate questions here. What is the best CIWS and what is the best CIWS for the Royal Navy in the fiscal environment she finds herself in?.
The two questions will produce totally different answers. Not least because primary defence against the more advanced missiles will be the preserve of the Asters aboard our T45’s and not a job for the CIWS.
JonesyYour categories are too broad Planeman.
Land attack could easily mean amphibious landing capability and then the issue becomes what level of land-attack is desired or deemed necessary?. Are we being expected to be able to put forces ashore on the Chinese mainland unsupported or handle unopposed landings on moderate threat states?
Air defence could mean carriers, Hawkeyes etc. What is the threat level we are intending to measure up against?. Again single-handed against everything in the PLANAF/PLAAF inventory or everything in the, for example, Libyan inventory?.
In these types of thread you must set the context before you can detail the force mix necessary to counter it.
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