Hmm,
yes Jonesy said some nice stuff that might indeed make sense.
But the case is that I just returned from a ride through the South Chinese Sea 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.
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.
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. Hence knowing when to expect one and where it could possibly operate. Not going through Suez might mean going around Africa, taking a huge time loss. Also, refits and maintenance might take more than two weeks and that makes your subs take six weeks from leaving till arrival in Chinese waters.
If you can do this, then even, China has the way of purchasing all its oil from Russia and Russia will be glad to do so. China is not ONLY dependant on these overseas supplies like Japan was.
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.
You don’t really have to go within the range of the ASW rockets to get bad effects from it. As you know these things have a nasty blast-radius when they explode and the blast will also disable the passive sonar (and I suppose also the active one if “on” by turbulence) for quite some time, the escort can move quite undetected after a salvo of these rockets and can show up from an unexpected angle when your sonars get on it again.
Now indeed I agree this is completely far-fetched and unrealistic and certainly only an academic exercise as Mr Steve says.
And just as a note, has anyone noticed the fact that this thread is called “SURFACE WARFARE” and now only handles about submarines and submarine tactics…
On the SSMs, it might indeed be true that they just followed the Indians and mounted 16 of these missiles on their ships. The newest ships seem to have only 8 “assumed-supersonic” missiles. Maybe they count on the possibility of getting on through the defences. Like 16 of the slow ones, because they are unlikely of getting through and 8 of the fast ones because they have more chances of a hit.
Also the 16 allow the ship to give a 8-missile salvo instead of a 4-missile one before turning the ship entirely.
As for them, in Asia, this might indeed be a good thing, since no-one really has the good AD ships to fend of an attack of such a number of missiles (not taken in account the new Delta-frigs). And indeed the West doesn’t seem to get the point of it and does not follow this rule, relying on their Air Forces. For example the Italians might get a beating in such a battle, because their carrier isn’t large enough. Yet the new Horizon frigates might be a part of a solution. Spanish also building F-100 frigs, Netherlands, Norway, UK, are all building these anti-air defence ships against these large-number attacks. Yet the offensive capability to sink the enemy before launch might be quite inadequate. Damn don’t have time to tell more now.
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