Nuke,

Someone could appreciate that if a navy, whetever it can be, is facing with a stuff like the Granit it could be …”scared” by that even if the exocet or the deus ex machina NSM could be more praticat? It’s not a so small advantage even if theoric, a 500 km range 8and a ipotetical Nuke warhead)

Seahawks’ got this dead right. Before entering into an action any professional service will perform a threat reduction exercise. This is an evaluation of what assets the opponent has, what their strengths and weaknesses are, and how best to deny the situations that give advantage to the enemies systems. Sounds obvious you might think. Facing the P-700 you know that the targetting platform is the key to the systems operation – knock them down and you are unlikely to see any Shipwrecks.

Further you know that unless you are sailing towards Mother Russia the opponent doesnt have many, readily deployable, missiles. The North Korean Peoples Navy might take delivery of 4 Oscars, for example, but theyre unlikely to have more than a couple deployable at any one time. There, simply, arent all THAT many P700 shooting plaforms in existence. Knowlegde of the likely scale of an attack is VITAL to the disposition of your defensive assets to counter it.

Facing an adversary with NSM the threat reduction exercise is a horror story. Essentially any platform you see, however distant or seemingly innocuous, could be targetting you. As Seahawk described any old day fighter capable of of carrying a pair of 350kg weapons and a datalink could pose a serious threat. As such developing tactics to defeat a specifc threat is nearly impossible. Your forces simply have to be ready to counter any threat from almost any axis, at any time, with very little warning time.

Sevvy,

Hmm, the huge size of Granit makes you build a huge launcher for it. Mostly these huge launchers have a huge spare space and buoyancy, hence more SAMs. If you look at the surface ships that fire Granit, they all have more than 300 SAMs and several guidance radars for all that…

I’m sure I dont need to tell you that several developed navies exist that dont have 300 SAMs in their total inventories let alone sending one ship out with that warload. Nice for those who can afford it, but, today just who is that?.

I wasn’t talking about the target MOVING from A to B or C, I were talking about your bearing… The ESM bearing you said, is just a bearing, no range. Or does it give range too? without range, hence your target, seen from your plane, could be in A, B or C.

Aah yes I see what you mean. I thought you were meaning geometric plane instead of plane = aircraft!.

No matter. In your case with an additional asset up you would be attempting for a triangulation between the NSM shooter, say a frigate, and the aircraft. If you correlate a bearing of, for example, 060 from the ship and 300 from the aircraft (see diag attached – position A) the warfare team aboard the ship, knowing the position of the aircraft, will be able to plot the intersection and derive a set of target coordinates and range.

As shown also in the diagram (position B), either asset, ship or aircraft, can steer an offset course for a fixed distance to give themselves a baseleg for triangulation. This obviously will take more time and, if available, the aircraft can resolve to coordinates and link them back much quicker. Hopefully the diagram shows though that a single surface vessel can achieve targetting coordinates all by themselves and completely passively. In the real world defensive scenario you would, probably, have several ships spread out, at the extent of their comms capability, plus choppers, plus Marpat assets so any ESM contact would be fixed by multiple receivers very quickly.

I mean if everyone is so damn sure: the proof then, please! Not
fantasies, fairy tales, presumptions, scapegoats!!!!

Ahh of course, sorry, I forgot about your persecution complex!. Anyone doubting the authenticity of a news report ‘highlighting Chinese prowess’ is automatically a fantasist or in some way just anti-Chinese.

In the Cold War, Edisonmascot, RN and USN SSNs shadowed Soviet SSBNs all over the Atlantic. They did so tailing them all the way back to the North Sea and beyond without giving away the fact that they had ever been there. Sometimes good tactics and seamanship allowed the Soviets to counter detect, but, more often than not the SSBN’s went back with surface contacts only in their logs.

Until Walker blew the whistle on NATO sonar superiority the effect that this covert surveillance had was to provide the Soviets with a false sense of security. They believed their missile boats were safe on station and, had it come to shooting, that carefully fostered confidence would have seen their strategic missile capacity cut off at the knees.

I’m not saying this IS the sort of thing thats happened with the Ming as we cant tell either way – the precedent certainly fits though.

Perhaps next time when you see such news articles you might stop, think about the scenario as a whole, and wont be so quick to use them to invent accolades that others will see through immediately?.

Horse droppings Edison!. Mings are warmed-over twin screw Romeo’s!

It is rumored or
suggested that Mings are now as stealthy as any other top rated diesels in the world

Can you provide an objective source for these suggestions and rumours?.

Gary,

One solar-powered surveillance radar is hardly a COMPREHENSIVE targetting capability is it!. Go back and read the article I posted again. That satellite has a 93 minute orbital period!. Great you have a relatively low-powered radar that can get a hit on your targets once a bloody hour, IF, you can maintain the track! It has an ELINT capability but what bloody use is a single satellite for passive triangulation ?.

That satellite is a cueing asset to steer other platforms in. Localisation and tracking, to provide targetting data, will require another platform entirely. That satellite, by itself, is not a targetting-capable platfrom!.

There is no reason why a large power like India couldn’t sow the Indian Ocean with hydrophone sensors that would give it knowledge of naval traffic in the area out to very great distances. Using GLONASS satellites or this new European system proposed the Granit could be modified to fly to the target area without any warning. It is the year 2004 and new methods and technologies can be applied.

Yes Garry BUT they havent sown the IO as such and, for a comprehensive network, you would be looking at an expenditure that would dwarf the US SOSUS arrays – a very expensive undertaking.

The Indians, in this example, would have to be damn sure that they were going to have to face down the US Navy before embarking on that kind of expenditure. They certainly wouldnt have to go that far to counter anyone else!. In fact the only reason I can think of for deploying that kind of system would be for the employment of a missile like P-700!. Like I said – expensive missile!.

OTH-B at 10MHz gives a range resolution of about 10km and an angular resolution of about 1.5km and it can only do this under the correct atmospheric conditions. I can quite see the poor officer in charge of the site explaining to his superiors that he’s terribly sorry but he cant target the American fleet today because the ionospheric conditions aren’t right!. Even if the ionosphere is playing along with the team it still offers insufficient resolution to target missiles from, so is just another cueing asset that requires an additional platform to augment, and, besides anything else, costs quite a lot to field. Additional costs for the weapons system there.

Roel,

There is a vast difference between a missile requiring the kind of targetting support that Uspekh or Legenda was required for to provide prelaunch data to the Russian ships and for example, an intermittent ESM contact passed from a patrolling MPA being sufficient to launch NSM on irrespective of the target environment.

The difference is Roel that P-700, Yakont, Klub, Kh-22 and all the rest cannot be practically employed without offboard targetting. They all have to be fired at identified targets. While I would agree that NSM could be better used with offboard support the weapon can still be employed without it which is a VERY considerable advantage. To give you an illustration of this the Argentine Neptune that cued in their Etendards at the RN taskforce in 82 was patrolling over the Belgrano wreck hundreds of miles away popping up to get intermittent ESM fixes – it was never seen as a threat to the group. This platform would not have provided accurate enough data to launch heavy Russian weapons on from that range. Had the Argentinians been equipped with NSM, that day, though the RN would have been facing numerous weapons inbound that they would have had no clue were on the way until 15nm out from the first picket. That would have been a slaughter.

Any group of modern ships with systems like Aster and other weapons can be very well protected enough to warrant a powerful anti ship missile like Granit. If you are defending youself no calibre is too big as long as you can use it effectively.

Low altitude approach for Granit is 100ft and its the size of a small aircraft. This is NOT a hard target for any modern area or point defence SAM. That profile is within the envelope of elderly systems like Sea Dart and SM-1 let alone Aster, ESSM, SM-2. It is not an uninterceptable weapon by a long reach. P-700 isnt doing 700m/s at low altitude either its closer to 500m/s. Thats perhaps 50% faster than a high-subsonic weapon and its visible a hell of a lot farther out!.

All this and it STILL does not address the major problems – those of employment and targetting. The exact same ones you are all trying so very hard to ignore. Irrespective of how powerful the weapon may or may not be to employ it you need a Kirov, Kuznetsov or Oscar class vessel or you need to develop a new, and BIG, platform to deploy it from.

Then to target and fire them, before the weapons systems that the US Navy will be fielding in a decade or so can be launched, you need to acquire or develop the capabilities to put surviveable, high-endurance, surveillance coverage out to a depth of 400-600nm from your coastline.

Who can afford any of that Garry?. More so who can afford that who would see the need for such systems?.

P-700 is a weapon that today cannot be used by the people who developed it as they have a) no likely target and b) no comprehensive targetting ability. It cannot be used by anyone else as no-one has the units or targetting infrastructure to employ them. In short what value is there in a weapon no-one can practically use???.

I wasnt the one decrying the US development of NMD was I though Roel. Just wanted to introduce the balance that Russia knows quite a bit about the employment and strategic potential of a limited BMD system seeings they have had one for several decades!.

Without an ABM treaty then limitation or even reduction of strategic weapons is pointless. It is like a gunfighter in the wild west having an agreement with the local gunslinger that he will only load his pistol with 6 rounds… even if he has an automatic, and he wont buy a derrenger or a rifle and then he finds out the guy he is fighting is having a bullet proof vest made… it will be crap and may not work 100% of the time, but should he still be bound by agreements on the weapons he can have if the other guy is getting protection that he agreed before not to get?

http://www.fas.org/irp/imint/4_gal_01.htm

“Pot, this is Kettle, colour check…over”

Garry,

The reality is that air defences for naval vessels have improved… not gone backwards since the early 80s. Why would the russians ignore a technology they spent quite a bit of money creating? The main rival remains the US whether the cold war is over or not… why else would the USAF need F-22s?

This is partly my point as well though. Air defence HAS moved on since the 80’s – not only that shipborne sensors, both radar and EO, have improved exponentially in terms of capability, ship design impact and affordability. What I am saying is that the approaches developed for defeating Cold War defences now offer little guarantee of success without resorting to saturation fire. A new approach is required to defeat todays defences and the Russians know that hence 3M-54E – a weapon I’ve already said looks very scary IF it works reliably. Something that has not been shown yet.

One would expect older AEGIS class cruisers being freed up for export by more capable designs… both exported handmedowns and new and improved replacements would all warrant continued development of the weapons designed to defeat them.

AEGIS with SPY-1/SPG can be defeated by subsonic saturation fire though – we know there are limits to the number of SAMs that the SPG-99 director component can actually provide illumination for in the endgame. Further BAe are on record as pointing out the limitations of APAR to a saturation attack down a single bearing to overload a single APAR panel. A saturation attack with subsonics will surely require more weapons to be launched, as more are likely to be intercepted, but smaller missiles are easier to deploy in large numbers.

A submarine with maybe 2-4 rounds instead of the number Russians would fit to their subs. And for guidance passive radar homing with active radar homing for terminal backup homing.

So, to make this work, the Argentines would have had to get the Soviets to develop a sub-launched Moskit, an SSG new-build design AND some manner of getting accurate offboard targetting to deploy 4 missiles. Instead they could buy a dozen light strike fighters off the shelf complete with antiship weapons. One seems like a very fearsome capability the other looks like a practical, affordable soluton.

No, you are right… a 4,500kg missile would be easily blown from the sky by a little cobbled together missile based on components from Sidewinder, Stinger and Hellfire.

How very silly of me – the weapon is 4500kgs of solid steel isnt it? A little peashooting RAM wouldnt make a dent!. Perhaps your forgetting about the slightly vulnerable control surfaces, seeker electronics, fuel tank etc, etc?. Plus everyone always talks about the massive kinetic energy that these antiship weapons store up on their flight. What kind of energy release are we talking about IF a RAM happens to physically hit the inbound weapon?.

And the best way to destroy a heavy bunker is with a large nuclear weapon but what if that option is not available?

You used Iran as an example. Whats easier for them to achieve?. They could acquire a platform to launch P-700 or pay for its modification to a land-based role then deploy it and the infrastructure to employ it. Alternatively they could station one of their Kilo SSK’s in or around the Hormuz Strait. Your call!.

The instant the lead missile stops transmitting another will replace it.

That would suggest that the lead missile is continuously transmitting data all through the flight. I work in data-networking and datalinks use what are called link-update notifications, known as ‘keepalives’, which are sent every 5 or 10 seconds or so (any more frequently than that starts to impact bandwidth). Most links rely on ‘missing’ at least four or five of these keepalives to drop the connection as faulted. I would be amazed if P700 didnt use an equivalent system with a holdtime in place to verify linkdown state. The alternative is that any little interruption in comms from the lead missile would initiate the succession protocol. There would be false alarms all the time!.

There will be some latency between the loss of the lead missile and the establishment of the secondary, if nothing else, due to the altitude change for the secondary weapon. How long that latency period is will be significant especially for missiles travelling so fast. 30 seconds for missiles travelling at 500m/s means 15km without guidance update.

They are for use against your super dooper all seeing all hearing USN carrier group with fifty squillion km range AWACS and uber Phoenix missiles. At launch or soon thereafter it is assumed they will be detected anyway.

But doesnt this bring us back to the original point?. We’re not discussing an antship missile’s value against a carrier strike group as the benchmark of how good it is as. Even the biggest, most supersonic, most kitted out weapon is not guaranteed to reach target and only a very few nations could afford the infrastructure to successfully deploy it against one of today’s CVSG’s. By any objective standard this cannot place it as a superior weapon in today’s environment.

But it has already been developed… it no doubt just needs to be launched when needed.

The US-PU satellite was developed out of the failiure of the Legenda system. It combines a passive ELINT capability with a low-ish powered surveillance radar (the Russians determined earlier that a RORSAT required a nuclear power source to be effective hence the US-A RORSAT component of Legenda). You would need quite a constellation of these and, with a spacecraft lifespan of about 2 years max, you would need significant expenditure to maintain the capability.

Against a known target there is no reason why a diving supersonic missile with a warhead of 1,000kgs could not split a boat in two with the right fuse setting. Against an unprotected target then multiple hits from subsonic missiles with incendiary warheads might prove more cost effective, but I think 1 ton of HE plus the kinetic impact of such a large weapon would be more likely to cause it to sink. With a modern multisensor guidance system the engine room could be specifically targetted for maximum effect.

Garry Sev sails on the bloody things. He knows what he’s talking about. Also where are the ‘modern multisensor guidance system’ seekers your talking about?. Are they tested yet and what capabilities do they incoporate!?.

Few threats to a nations territory consist of one light Frigate. In such a case a subsonic or just a light AShM would suffice of course.

This is quite the point though – take Europe, North America and Japan out of the picture and only a few nations poses more than a few light frigates!

Name one gun only CIWS that can engage sea skimming supersonic targets. I am guessing they can all take on sea skimming subsonic targets (unless they have no role whatsoever).

Contraves Millenium and Bofors Mk3/3P are two.

And the multisensor Yakhont-M with a 300km range and a precision land attack capability would be useless?

No, but, where is it?. If its capable of low-alt all the way and terminal IIR only operation then it is useful. Low approac for Yakhont is 130km range not 300 though and NSM can do the same in a much smaller, more deployable and cheaper airframe?.

Wonder why they are wasting scarce resources to maintain a satellite in orbit that according to you has no use????

Very thin evidence of good performance that Garry!. Plus even you must accept that a single ELINT bird orbitted isnt much use for ESM triangulation.

My criticisms were based on your using post cold war conditions to criticise cold war designed weapon systems.

We ARE post cold war though Garry and some of these other lads on the thread dont seem to be able to make the distinction between a weapon that had value in the cold war sporting a nuke tip and a weapon that has value in todays environment.

Very amusing… I am sure all targets will oblige the USN and not attack from short range. I remember when the Robo cruiser shot down that airbus they had problems launching their Standard Missiles and they delayed the launch by over 1.5 minutes… with a subsonic airliner it was no problem but if it had really been a supersonic F-14 as they supposedly thought it was then perhaps they might have been in trouble.

This would be the world where all Russian antiship missiles work perfectly every time and all American/Western defensive systems fail with grim regularity is it?. Isnt it more likely that both sides systems are vulnerable to the vagueries of technology?

Nuke,

Dont misunderstand me there is absolutely nothing wrong with discussing that topic, in fact it is definitely an interesting one, but this debate is on the relevance of these weapons now – not twenty years ago. On this thread I’d rather try and keep the focus on that point without wandering even further off topic!