JonesyCrobato will you please stop beating your chest for long enough to realise I dont care about the relative practicalities of the situation!.
OK change the subject. The SSN fleet is now no longer intercepting oil tankers its now, wickedly, targetting all your exports of cheap consumer electronics in an attempt to bolster the flagging British manufacturing sector. It doesnt matter one bit what the ships are carrying!.
Likewise it doesnt matter whether some routes to Japan or SK are compromised as other routes to those nations exist. Block the South and East China sea’s and you blockade China nowhere else. Least the way I read a chart it doesnt.
Simple fact is Crobato that you cannot state comfortably that the PLANs ASW component could mount an effective counter to 5 competent SSN’s wreaking havoc in its extended EEZ. You cannot state this because according to every reasonable public source PLAN hasnt got enough ASW to deal with such a threat. Not enough choppers, too few MPA’s, too few comprehensively-equipped ASW escorts, SSK’s that (barring a handful of newer units) mount sonar fits that are dubiously aged.
You know how easy it was to be caught? A USN LA class nuclear sub was detected by an old Taiwan Orion easily. The sub was sitting on the bottom looking for an opportunity to pick up a spent MICA AAMs fired by the ROCAF.
So how many aircraft with an ‘old Orions’ capability does the PLANAF posses? Enough to visually cover all the shallows where an SSN could pounce out from?.
First we don’t know the state of PLAN’s ASW but we don’t believe it is stagnant. You also would have to be fighting numbers of SSKs which are quieter and more maneuverable than SSNs, and these SSK skippers know their territory much better than your SSN skippers. You’re fighting over unknown territory, while they are fighting in their backyard.
Fair comment on the home waters advantage. As to the rest of it the ‘quieter and more manoverable’ SSK is a myth!. RN SSN’s have stalked Dutch, Scandinavian and Italian SSK’s in deep water and shallow. USN 688’s have stalked Aussie and Japanese SSK’s successfully. It always boils down to tactics and endurance. The quietest SSK is easy meat when it snorts and SSNs, with their hugely more powerful sonars, can creep around for weeks prior to a blockade doing nothing more than logging SSK patrol activity.
JonesyThe dont carry enough torpedoes or mines to do a intensive coastal offensive like youre describing.
Wouldnt agree with that Mixtec. I dont think I’m giving away priviliged information if I tell you our S and T boats carry about 20 weapons in a full wartime loadout. That means 5 SSNs firing off their full complement of weapons then each getting just a single resupply puts on the order of 200 weapons in theatre. Using an arbitrary pk of 0.8 that means 160 hits from a position of all weapons being released and a lot of tonnage on the bottom.
A totally airtight blockade it isnt, but, a very successful sea denial campaign it would be.
Jonesywd1,
No chance!. Deepest draught destroyer in the PLAN fleet, afaik, is one of their Pr.956’s at about 25ft. Running at 20ft off the bottom that leaves a massive 40ft or so of clearance!. Thats miles that is!. Standard stuff for an RN skipper on his Perisher course. 🙂
Seriously 150ft is enough for an SSN to operate in but, obviously, deeper water would be sought in the face of serious ASW opposition.
JonesyCrobato,
Dont you start as well! 🙂
You know quite well I’m not cutting orders to dispatch the fleet here pal!. If at any point I’ve crossed into Japanese or Korean territorial waters (i.e their 12 mile limit) with my rough plan then take it as read that it is simply poor artwork on my part and that, operationally, most skippers would know not to be quite so pedantic about it.
Now the patrol zones in the East certainly intersect with both Korean and Japanese EEZ’s. A countries EEZ is NOT the same as its territorial waters though. Technically speaking they are international waters outside of the 12 mile limit. In this scenario though we’re assuming that all involved parties have given the Royal Navy every permission and clearance necessary to set up their blockade and taken steps to reroute all their maritime traffic clear of the blockade zones.
As to the waters in that area, well, according to the charts I’m looking at nowhere I’ve indicated has a minimum average depth above 300ft save, obviously, for atolls and reefs etc. The Yellow Sea basin is shallow and heavily silted but, even if it does average 150ft depth, it is still navigable by a submerged SSN. Even if its the absolute last place on Earth that an SSN skipper would want to be caught.
You still seem keen on pointing out that politically speaking this blockade is totally impractical – something I have repeatedly said myself of course. Let me turn the tables on you though Crobato do you think, given the state of their ASW today that the PLAN could do much against 5 competent SSN’s operating in the patrol area’s I’ve indicated?.
JonesyHi Nirav,
I knew that Sameer was mentioning that ‘capability’ of Brahmos with a view to the action from 1971. Unfortunately what isnt well known, or readilly accepted by some, is that the ‘severe blow’ struck ashore by those OSA-class boats was largely pure dumb luck!
This is mainly because the targetting system for the P-15 missiles was basic in the extreme. The procedure to fire those missiles was to take a series of radar fixes, on the search set, on a clear contact, manually set a range-gate into the missile with a seeker activation time and keep the boat steady on bearing to the target for long enough to fire the weapon. The system back then had no facility to ‘lock-on’ to a target prior to launch.
Now the MR-331 Rangout search radar fitted to those OSA’s was designed to pick out sea contacts against an open background inside of about a 40nm range. It was totally incapable of picking out targets amidst land clutter with any definition. So, what happened could have been one of two possibilities:
a) that the Osa crews either fired on visual bearing to the POL tanks and the missiles either went through seeker activation and hit the first thing that came into their field of view or, just as likely, the missiles never actually locked-up on anything and just flew straight into the tanks on account of their preset altimeter; or
b) that they got a broad aspect radar contact ashore, fired on it, and the missiles managed to fly into something vital that just happened to be in their seeker FoV on activation.
Either way it was not the precision land-attack that many, particularly Indians, like to believe. I’m not explaining this to denigrate the achievements of the IN’s missile boat squadrons back then, as they certainly did an effective job in their more conventional anti-shipping tasks during those missions, but to highlight the limitations of active-radar homing AShM’s in land attack missions in general!.
JonesyWolf,
well, unless you can give a statisfactory reason as why chinese merchants would go through your blockade lines when they can easily avoid it as i have already stated, then your propsed blockade will simply never work. the only way to blockade china is to set a blockade zone fron vietnam to SK, and the RN dont have nearly enough SSNs to patrol such a large area.
I didnt think I’d have to dot every I and cross every T to make a very general point about SSNs, but, attached should be a map showing a rough outline of the patrol zones I’m thinking about. The East China Sea Shelf does make the east coast patrol zone the harder one – by some margin – but the arc of deeper water inside the Ryukyu’s gives the subs a secure operational environment. That is effectively the coverage from Vietnam to SK you were mentioning and 2 SSNs permanently on station in each zone plus, perhaps, a fifth boat on a reserve/roving brief tasked to respond to realtime intel or to short-notice gap fill will be sufficient to fill those patrol slots. It would also be supportable by the size of SSN fleet the RN posses.
Its not airtight by any stretch, hell, even the ‘famous’ USN blockade of Cuba had gaps and that was in their backyard. What it will do is put a heavy dent in China’s maritime trade – which is the point of the exercise.
As to the mining issue I’d tend to be a bit hesitant before I’d go there!. There is little wrong with the idea – the Yellow Sea is THE perfect environment for offensive mining. Also modern mines – like the RN Stonefish – can by configured to ignore certain accoustic profiles i.e that of the deploying platform. The naval analyst Stuart Slade published a terrific article on mine warfare which can be found here: http://www.warships1.com/index_tech/tech-068 which is well worth a read on the subject.
The reason I’d be hesitant in this instance though is that, no matter how well documented and charted they are, minefields tend to lurk around inconveniently after hostilities end. For the kind of limited action were talking of here, a punitive blockade, leaving a legacy like a few dozen mines dotted around is going to be very bad news in the long-term!. Not to mention the slight danger of technology-transfer if certain nations in that theatre were able to recover a mine as advanced as a Stonefish and reverse-engineer the sensor package!.
JonesyThe current Bhramos missile is optimized and designed for sea targets, I believe that u can launch it towards a harbour and the missile will hit things that are big and metalic.
Marvellous. The worlds first anti-crane missile!. How much does a Brahmos round cost again!? :rolleyes:
JonesyKurmitz,
I work, from time to time, with a guy who was on Euryalus in that kind of timeframe. Ask your brother if he knows an Ikara tech called Pete Carpenter. He was infamous, for a short time at least, for jury-rigging a TV aerial in the Ikara FC radome. Well thats what he claims anyway!.
JonesyGoogle,
F803 is the Dutch De Zeven Provincien class ship ‘Tromp’. Pretty isnt she!.
JonesyPLA,
On the contrary you’re not quite getting the point and I’ll try and explain why.
its entire east coast is effective one massive continous port, and you need to patrol it all to true cut china’s sea lanes off.
Wrong. Tankers, like pretty much all merchies, need port facilities to offload their cargoes. You cant just drop anchor in any little fishing harbour and throw a hose over the side running from the oil bunkers to a waiting queue of road tankers!. Likewise its a bit hard to get cargo containers or bulk material off a cargo ship without some fairly decent sized cranes.
This being the case a Chinese merchantman would have to make for one of several distinct locations on the Chinese coast i.e a port. No neutral merchant vessel would HAVE to pursue such a course. To get to SK or Japan neutral vessels do not need to head for the Taiwan Strait. They can use a sea lane that keeps them well clear of the danger zone. Chinese ships do not have that option, whichever routing a chinese ship takes it has, ultimately, to head for its destination port and will have to cross the blockade line at some point. No other nations shipping HAS to do that unless they are heading for a Chinese port.
Ask Severodvinsk, he’s a Merchant Marine officer-under-training, whether he’d choose to take his ship, crew and cargo through a naval blockade line when a safe, albeit longer, route is available along existing sea lanes to the same destination. I think you’ll understand then why picking out a goat from the sheep won’t quite be the impossible task you believe it would be for the SSN CO.
sure, RN SSNs would be unstoppable by the PLAN if it was the battle of the atlanctic, but its not,
Wrong again strangely enough. The blockade only works because the Chinese ships HAVE to sail into the SSN patrol zone. SSN’s can only control a bubble 80nm’s or so in diameter. This is sufficient for a pair of discrete boats to keep a blockade line 2-300nm long patrolled, but, not enough to hunt a naval taskforce over the expanse of an ocean on their own. This is veering off the point of the thread though!
JonesyTwo Ikara Leanders: HMS Galatea and HMS Euryalus
An amusing postscript to these images one of the other Ikara boats, HMS Leander, after decomissioning was sunk as a target in Op Sharp Spear in ’89. She took a Sea Dart missile and no less than 3 MM38 Exocets without going down. Eventually a 1000lb bomb had to be put into her to finish the job. Pretty tough for a little ship!.
Picture credits go to the excellent http://www.leanders.plus.com site
JonesyPLAwolf,
the geographic realities of the region means its almost impossible to darw a box in which only chinese merchants sail and where everyone else is (well, not unless you call the chinese EEZ the box).
The map below (hopefully) shows the patrol zone that I’ve been talking about and the paths of the sea lanes in the area. Rerouting SK shipping to follow the track south of Taiwan adds extra time and expense for shipping lines but compared to the insurance premiums (if insurance is available) that would be incurred sailing through the blockade zone that expense would be tolerable. Japanese traffic already goes via the lanes south of Taiwan.
The only traffic that HAS to go through the patrol zone is shipping bound for Chinese ports and shipping heading for Taiwan. How they, the Taiwanese, would react is anyones guess but the outcry from SK, Japan and whoever else certainly need not be that loud.
The whole point of the thread is the discussion of the ASuW warfighting arena and the differing philosophy’s regarding the value of antiship misiles in Western and Eastern doctrines. What I’ve tried to illustrate in all this is how and (more importantly) why SSN’s are considered more valuable in RN doctrine than surface vessels with huge batteries of heavy antiship missiles for ASuW.
This being the case whether China will eventually field an SSN with modern SLCMs to threaten Faslane or if China can, overnight, lose all its maritime oil supply and suffer no ill effect is largely irrelevent. The fact is that any nation possessing even a modest fleet of SSNs CAN deploy them to the other side of the world and perform effective sea denial operations against even regional superpower level opposition. That is more my definition of effective ASuW than the question of whether a destroyer embarks 8 or 16 SSMs in its battery.
JonesyHi Crobato,
It’s pretty shallow right to the coast of Japan to the Ryuku island chains, down to Singapore, all along Indonesia to its eastern most island. It’s all littoral waters. Not a good place for SSNs.
Charts I’ve got show the bathymetry of that region differently!. Yes there are lots of shallows round the mouth of the Yellow Sea and up its length that would be bad news for SSNs but, from what I can see, most of the waters in the region are in excess of 200m depth and, where the continental shelf falls away, there are waters inside the Ryukyu chain well over 2000m deep! Plus, you must remember, the JMSDF has been building SSK’s that are only about 10m shorter in the hull and within 1000 tons displacement of an S-class boat!. They know those waters intimately and dont seem to think there will be manoeverability or depth issues.
Won’t work considering that much of China’s oil is increasingly coming through Siberian and Asian pipelines. Not to mention it has oil reserves of its own and is capable of synthesizing them from coal.
Well China Daily from the start of the year doesnt seem to agree:
http://www.china.org.cn/english/2003/Dec/82272.htm
With a quote from this being:
China’s oil product imports soared 49.3 percent year-on-year to 23.74 million tons in the first 10 months. Fuel oil, which accounts for the bulk of imports, reached 20.1 million tons, exceeding full-year imports by 22 percent.
Anecdotally it looks like some of this increase is being fed through increased maritime traffic. Look here:
http://english.people.com.cn/200303/27/eng20030327_114103.shtml
With a quote from this article being:
North China Port Reports Crude Oil Imports Surge
Imports of crude oil at north China’s Tianjin port in February reached 66,600 tons, worth 15.04 million US dollars, up 21 percent and 76.5 percent year on year respectively, according to local customs.
Also there is this article:
http://www.ocnus.net/artman/publish/article_13683.shtml
However, the northeastern port of Qingdao rose quickly to become China’s largest fuel oil import destinations in June 2004, a position that until recently went unchallenged to the Huangpu port. The Qingdao customs processed 974,101mt of fuel oil imports in June, up 62.34% from May and 444.73% on the year.
JonesyHMS Jonesy……hmmm yeah I quite like that! 😀
Unfortunately seeings as our next SSNs are the A-class I fear I’ll be long gone by the time the next J-class rolls around!
The one thing you are dead right on Indian is that there is more than one sheltered anchorage that we could make use of for UNREP purposes east of Suez and we have, IMO, the finest and most professional support fleet in the world in the shape of the Royal Fleet Auxilliary. Its very unlikely that our boats would have to return to UK waters for refit/resupply but I wanted to use PLA’s no-UNREP comment to underline the flexibilty of the SSN platform.
As wd1 put it Pearl Harbour is extremely handy for such purposes and few in the RN are unaware of the history the USN has with us in ‘lending a hand’ even when they, perhaps, shouldnt have done!. 😉
Severodvinsk (Roel??)
….and finding these Chinese ships might be a little harder than you think. We were bound for Japan, yet still crossing the South China Sea and only turning below Taiwan. If you want to lay in the Taiwan strait to hunt for Chinese ships, you’ll have some trouble, since the water is VERY shallow there, not a good area to go with your SSN.
You turned to the south of Taiwan following the lanes running to Japan right?. Well there are further defined lanes running to and from Hong Kong and from Malacca to the north east, through the South China Sea, to the Taiwan Strait. I would not for one second propose a sub campaign in the Taiwan Strait itself as it would be all too easy for PLAN’s limited ASW resources to be focussed on such a narrow stretch of water and ‘bottle up’ any sub there. Also it would run the risk of escalating the action bringing in Taiwan – bad news!. This is why I defined a patrol area bounded, in the east, by Scarborough Reef!.
That 272 is certainly not a good number, it might be good if that number only counts for VLCCs and ULCCs, maybe including supertankers, but nothing below that. In the entire world, there are about 48.000 ocean going ships. This of course does include the inshore traders.
272 is listed by CIA as the number of oil tankers in the Chinese merchant fleet. I agree there are lots more afloat but I’d doubt maritime insurance policies would allow many of them to sail through a declared maritime blockade line!. The 272 sailing under the Chinese ensign would be the prime targets without doubt.
Also, even if RN would be capable of getting these 5 SSNs there for 6 months, which I still deem unpossible (crewing problems, timeproblems, these SSNs can not pass everywhere without a problem, and Chinese intelligence might catch them in the Suez Canal or somewhere else, eventually being capable to follow them all the way up to England and back.
Warships can transit Suez freely under the terms of the Treaty of Constantinople, barring any combattants belligerent to Egypt of course, and any Chinese attack on the Suez or a ship transitting Suez is likely to bring a strong reaction from the Egyptians. In their own backyard I’d back the Egyptians against a PLAN taskforce or (owing to their geography) an RN one for that matter!.
NO ONE FLIES HIS FLAG. You’ll have to look what its name is and then search in some kind of inventory whether that ship belongs to Chinese company or not. And you better don’t sink a tanker from a European company, which are going to China anyway.
Remember the ‘Tanker Wars’ in the Gulf back in the 80’s?. Everyone flew their national pennants!. Our Armilla patrol ships carried Union Jacks and White Ensigns 20 and 30ft across!. Any neutral merchantman needing to get to Japan or SK could use the lanes south of Taiwan as you described and be well clear of RN attention. Ships trying to reach the Southern chinese ports have to ‘cross the line’ north of the Spratleys which would trigger a response from an SSN.
PLA
another major headache with setting an exclusion zone is that even if no-one disputes it (extremely unlikely), you will be effectively telling the PLAN where abouts your boats will be, meaning the PLAN can concentrate their assets on those areas, greatly increasing their chances of success (even more so if the PLAN arent that worried about trading boats). and with the small number of RN SSNs, one or two boats sunk or badly damaged and your entire blockade strategy rises going down the tubes.
This is the whole reason I was stressing the PLANs ASW limitations earlier in the thread though. The patrol area I’ve described is about 100 miles offshore and extends for about 3-4000 sq.miles!. Finding two discrete accoustic signatures in that volume of seaspace with their entire current ASW inventory would be a hell of a result and that only deals with one RN hunting ground!.
if it is a convoy, then i would expect there are at least one ASW helo in the air at all times with more on 5 min alert, and at least 2 silent SSKs nearby (unless the PLAN commanders are all a bunch of idiots, which they are not).
Remember the rule – SSK’s dont run. An SSK doesnt pull convoy escort simply as they have no value doing it. Running at 12+ knots with just a slow convoy will oblige a sub to snort every 80nm or so and will offer little extra ASW capacity to the convoy commander. You could route a convoy through a series of friendly SSK patrol zones in an attempt to provide a ‘sanitised’ transit, but, then were back to the SSN vs SSK advantages. The SSN has better ears and endurance. Also your using lots of SSK’s having them sitting on patrol spots waiting for a passing convoy to cover.
also, having boats come back to a fixed base on a regular basis in times of conflict is a major gamble. the PLA can just sit its SSNs a few hundred miles away, have a couple of guys camp near the sub base and call in via satellite when a boat comes in. cruise missiles follow, one boat down and the rest only got whatever supplies they have left as their home base is most likely off bounds for a couple thousand years.
Sub launched nuclear cruise missiles against a nation with 4 Trident SSBN’s?. Besides what does the PLAN have in the way sub launched strategic cruise missiles? Firing off which platform? The Hans? Please – the crew would be dead from radiation exposure long before they got near the Atlantic from what I’ve heard of those boats!. Other than that we maintain a towed-array patrol around Faslane and have done since the cold war days. Was good enough to keep the VicIII’s away and the Soviets had a great deal more practice and experience with long duration SSN deployment than the PLAN!.
well, if we’re talking about near the chinese EEZ, then i think there will be Y8 converted ASW planes plus a lot of helos in the air at all times. Y8s can move in and drop sonar bouys over a pretty large area, and still have room for a fish or two.
How many Y8’s are there? What is their sonobuoy channel processing limit? What are their mission uptime rates like? Where are they based?. Yes there exists a capability there but the question is how much of a capability is it?.
remember, the PLAN only need to be lucky one or two times to cripple the blockade, while the RN boats need to be lucky every time to keep the blockade going.
That I have to agree with of course. Luck does play a role in these events but training, experience and technology minimise the effect and I’d match the RN up against anyone on those grounds.
Jonesy
The above picture is the sensor head of the Thales Sirius IRST system. There is one of those mounted atop the mainmast of the LCF frigates but the ‘stick’ installation up there is a broadband ESM antenna and is likely to be a component of the Thales Sabre EW suite the vessel carries.
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