Until Japan gives proof of what it claims happened nothing else matters.I have nothing to deny since Japan has provided no proof. Unlike South Korea’s handling of the Cheonan incident, japan has given no proof at all. Which makes any claim they have accusations at best.

I’m not suggesting you should deny anything Hallo…you clearly want to try and defend your country’s position here, but, I fail to see how simply denying the thing ever happened achieves that.

At present, objectively, the Japanese position is the far more credible one. This is simply down to the pattern of behaviour on show from China…over the past 12 months especially…with regard to the contested waters in the SCS and here. You have airspace violations, Hainans declaration of stop and board powers, Chinese ‘fishermen’ trying to land themselves a SURTASS array while its still connected to the towship etc!. If this was a Japanese psyops exercise its working because China has setup the environment for it to work in!.

Bottom line Hallo…if you act like a bully then dont go screaming victimisation if someone accuses you of being a bully!.

The big problem the Chinese have with interdicting Japanese shipping out of range of land-based air is getting a carrier group past the string of Japanese & US-controlled & allied islands.

Sortie it ahead of the point when you intend to commence hostilities would be the first thought!.

I’m assuming the US doesnt exist in this context…seeing the nature of the question didnt include them. Otherwise the PLAN’s ASW weakness in the face of the US SSN threat undoes them before they start. Good luck to the Japanese keeping an SSK in trail on a Chinese carrier group in blue-water though.

I dont think I mentioned anywhere that the Japanese developing a CATOBAR capability was either a) practical or b) likely. Not least for the fact that they would be starting from a very limited knowledgebase to put the infrastructure in place to support such a capability. The, very simple, question was what kind of carrier would Japan need if it so chose to progress with one.

Sintra was missing the complexities involved in assembling, coordinating and sustaining a land-based strike package, against a mobile target, a long way out overwater. My point was to illustrate where the carrier comes in to that picture. Yes reflagging and foreign merchies can complicate the picture, but, the underlying point is that a Chinese carrier group, without US interference, could sit 500 miles west of Honolulu, sink everything heading for a Japanese port, and theres very little effectively Japan could do about it.

To Scooter…the sensible answer is the USN deal with anything thats not a local Japanese issue…dont think thats the question you wanted answered though.

The bottom line here is, as JBritchford notes, the question of what the carriers raison d’etre would be. A US-style supercarrier can do power projection or sea control or both simultaneously. They are also becoming unaffordable for a superpower to deploy. Clearly not an approach to pursue.

The vital tasking in any naval scenario with China as a hostile component is sea control…an aircraft carrier is the optimal platform for this owing to its mobility. You present an opponent with a dynamic threat that cannot be left unchecked. Land based air cant do that as it will always be tied to its airbases. Move out of range of the airbase and its toothless. Chinese carrier starts interdicting Japanese shipping beyond range of land-based air and the problem manifests itself.

Sea control as a primary function dictates a fast platform that can operate a number of high endurance surveillance aircraft. Battlespace management and control is king. The Soviet Ul’Yanovsk was a very interesting take on a hull specially set up for the forward sea control mission, but, may be somewhat extreme for japanese requirements. More conventionally then the CATOBAR/Hawkeye/F-35C model seems optimal and that sets a hard limit on the minimum hull size as somewhere just a bit north of that of the Charles de Gaulle.

Start with 22DDH and scale up to 900ft and around 45000tons full load fit with EMALS. Setup for 2 14 cab fastjet sqdns at 3 sorties per day surge…2 sustained. Healthy sized E-2 det and a bigger MALE UAV det. Job done.

What in general?. Sea Skua, AS15TT and the surface-mode capable SAMs like Sea Dart, Standard etc are the ones off the top of the head.

In this context the target was allegedly 3000yds off the Chinese ship so unless their Crotale copy has a surface mode the FCS would be cueing guns.

Just to add an alternate viewpoint…this article is indolent twaddle!.

I work with enterprise-level Cisco networks (amongst other kit) daily. If I’m buying 1000 routers I’m getting discount rates…Cisco do good discounts. I could buy 300 of 1 type…..400 of another….200 of another and the difference maybe 30% off buying the 1000 bigger boxes.

Woohoo you cry a 30% saving?!.

Wrong, sir, wrong!. You now have 3 different types of boxes to configure in hardware and software terms. 3 different trains of software with different feature sets to keep up to date with. Various modules to deliver different capabilities that may not be interoperable between router types. If you do your own support in-house you have to stock many times many more spares items with all the different power supplies, fan modules, memory strips etc, etc.

If you dont do support in-house your SMARTnet contract with Cisco is every bit more convoluted as the in-house solution is…and they will make you pay for that. 1 router type is easy to cover…1 model of power supply (and its dual mount and hot-swappable so the site should never be emergency-down from a single power supply fail…so no need for expensive 4hr turnaround times)…1 model of chassis…1 model x, y and z. Its easy to stock in the depots. So its cheap. You have 3 or 4 types of router and associated bits and its no longer easy and the price goes up.

I’ve worked on annual support contracts worth a million plus for years…and thats in £’s not $’s. If you hike up your annual support contract cost US$300k over 10yrs thats a $3mn additional expense on the bottom line. With all the bits and pieces in the network maybe you need to keep some consultant time on retainer…$100k a year at minimum…theres another $1mn over your 10yrs….and you’ve not paid out for the initial cost right-sizing or done anything to improve your network over that 10yr time yet…..

The more things are different the more things go wrong. I’ve personally seen instances of a replacement router for a site in Texas turn up in Aberdeen because some contracts muppet got confused and put a head office address into the ‘site address’ box and the vendor dutifully and unswervingly was going to send the kit to the site address on his list!. When you are trying to restore a site to operation in a 4hr agreed window that sort of thing leads to serious drinking problems.

These guys with all their nice 3945’s (and they are solid decent mid-range boxes that will be as future-proof as anything you’ll get) will have a much easier time actually living with their network day-to-day….and they’ve built in some spare capacity to try new things. If thats at the cost of a couple of hundred thousand more than they absolutely had to spend up front….then they’ve seen money well spent!

What you really want to ask is why are the japanese JMSDF shadowing the PLAN? Is it provocation?

A trailing vessel 3000yds astern is no justification for anyones ship to illuminate with a fire-control set. What was the PLAN vessel intending to do that it didnt want close Japanese scrutiny?

Thobbes

The Iskander is not battlefield artillery. It’s a TBM that is used for interdiction (i.e striking assembly areas, artillery parks

So when Iskander-fired submunitions are raining down on your deployed artillery batteries or hitting your defensive positions that isnt ‘battlefield artillery’?. Seems like it might be quite an academic difference to those on the receiving end?!.

Then why the hell are they still using AH-64s, AH-1s and A-10s as well as low level passes?

The hint was in the use of the word ‘legacy’. Also I’ve not suggested anything at all regarding attack helicopters as they are not within the scope of the thread.

Still like this concept of giving up ground in a conventional engagement. You’re somehow assuming the bad guys are dumb enough to not spot the withdrawal and not advance forward.

Well we used to refer to something called ‘suppressive fire’ that could be laid down from the main gun. I’m assuming that putting shedloads of rounds on to the target would still have a similar effect today and that a) falling back a few hundred yards doesnt necessarily mean your force throwing its weapons aside and pelting off waving their hands in the air screaming for mummy and b) not every scenario will involve a force able to exploit the window of a couple of minutes while the tacair rolls in.

I think you’re overstating the lethality of air defences especially MANPADS as well as their proliferation.

Go to Liveleak…search for ‘Igla’ and ‘FSA’. MANPADS proliferation has been with us since the 70’s. Difference is they are really bloody nasty now…there’s footage online of Igla’s blowing right past flares en route to blasting a fastjet target.

Yet guns persist and even the RAF ended up putting them on the Eurofighter Typhoon.

Fine. I may be wrong but I believe that the RAF Typhoon force has released more PGM’s on ops than it has performed strafing runs. Might be worth checking up on…as that is the key point!

…and equally Swerve there are times when you have a target compound in view at 500yds and have no issue calling down 1000lb class ordnance with friendlies pulled back to clear the splat zone.

At the other end of the scale there are urban situations where, shock and horror, CAS is of no value. The ‘statistical average’ is of course somewhere in the middle of those extremes.

Thobbes is trying to paint a picture that 80’s legacy CAS systems are still viable despite evidence to the contrary stretching back two decades or more. By picking out very specific tasks and ignoring inconvenient realities like the proliferation of murderous VSHORADS systems…something that will get worse and not better for the type obliged to fly through their lethal envelopes…he’s trying to interpret that picture to support an assertion that it just doesnt.

Do you have to use a strafing A-10/Jag/Su-25 if your target is not suited to receiving an SDB….no of course not. There’s a whole suite of lighter PGM ordnance specifically developed to put effect on target with minimal collateral disruption – DMB, Viper Strike, LMM, Saber etc. It may even be, as noted, that a system like Jumper or a similar ground based capability may be more suited. The point was that the SDB configured F-15E is likely the optimum current CAS platform for the widest scope of engagement scenarios.