Now the Navy famously threw a snitfit when the Sea Shadow didn't include a "paint locker"(sic) and had a small crew - thus tipping over "decades" of Naval tradition according to Ben Rich in Skunk Works. His boss Kelly Johnson liked to say that the USN will break your heart because they get all Teenage girl when it comes to new projects.

So are Secretary Mabus, working with Adm. Greenert totally behind some rad new ships are are they so the drama?

I liked when they talked about how there new shore launched ASM could sink an amarcian carrier.

....

When it had no guidence system, needed a whole truck to itself, and then overlooking that it would have to go through multiple Agis cruisers, the Rolling Airframe Missiles, and CWIS, if by some shere stroke of luck it even found its target...

...

With no internal guidence.

edited 3rd Sep '15 9:58:00 PM by Imca

Taira: You still trotting out the Sea Shadow Myth of the ship that was never meant to sail and strictly built as a technology development and demonstrator? You know the ship that lacked the berthing for even its small compliment which the navy actually wanted. The same ship which had no means to store food for more then a few days and its kitchen facility comprised of a microwave and a fridge? One that didn't even have a full half of the adequate storage needed to be sea worthy? You know the ship that was never mean to sail beyond showing the concept could work? That ship?

Never mind that, I wonder what on earth do the PLAN have in that magic missile of theirs that can One-Hit Kill a CVN without resulting in a near-immediate nuclear escalation.

A really big damn conventional warhead either that or the mother of all KEP projectiles.

If they can get that thing through all of that then they can have the carrier.

They deserve it.

China building two new aircraft carriers according to Taiwan One is being built in Shanghai, the other in Dalin. The two will be the size of Lianiong.

My impression was that the DF-21D was guided—possibly satellite with terminal radar or imaging. They'd be useless otherwise, and China made it a point to showcase stuff at the parade that was operational or close to being so.

It is only guided right before impact apperntly, and at a range that long that is not a smart move....

Ships...

Are surprisingly manoeuvrable.◊

Earlier versions had none at all.

edited 4th Sep '15 11:38:12 AM by Imca

Their ballistic anti-ship missile barely hit the silhouette of a carrier drawn in the desert, I doubt it manage to hit and even sink a carrier without using Macross Missile Massacre or going nuclear, which would be a great way to start WWIII over nothing.

edited 4th Sep '15 11:51:11 AM by AngelusNox

It's useless in the anti-ship role without guidance; with guidance, even if the CEP isn't so good, that's no problem. Do the Russian thing and swamp your target with a hundred missiles. (You'd want multiple launches anyway to account for attrition due to defences, unreliability, targeting glitches/ECM...)

It has guidance two guidance methods in fact Inertial guidance which gets you more then close enough and terminal radar for the actual attack component. Barely hit the carrier? Funny last I checked they hit the target twice no problem. Oh and they hit a target area smaller then the entirety of the carrier. That and the missiles attacking component bears a striking resemblance to that of the Pershing II MARV which is pretty accurate in and of itself and uses similar systems to attack.

http://www.g2mil.com/Ballistic-ship.htm

I'll be impressed when they hit something moving at 10 knots at the sea instead of an oversized brick in the middle of nowhere in a position they could take their sweet ass time to get the firing solution.

edited 4th Sep '15 2:47:19 PM by AngelusNox

I would take anything from G2 Mill with a grain of salt. He is part of mike sparks crew and seems to not know they fixed the Osprey a while back.

edited 4th Sep '15 3:22:29 PM by TuefelHundenIV

I just wanted to post the picture, but it is hotlinked, but screw that guy he is another retard.

Yeah he is another weirdo. The sad thing is he cites Sparky.

While yes there is a difference in static vs moving a guided weapon even inertial guidance alone has a rather good chance of hitting none the less. This one uses terminal radar which can up the accuracy quite a bit. As in hit 30m area and a carrier even the smaller ones are bigger then 36m across. We American sure do love the big carriers.

edited 4th Sep '15 3:33:29 PM by TuefelHundenIV

Operationally, it's pretty much the same threat that prevents a navy from getting in too close to a hostile shore, lest they find themselves on the receiving end of a truck-mounted Exocet or Silkworm—except the ballistic missile has quite a bit more range and is harder to shoot down.

Except once agian, ships are fast and nimble, not slow and lumbering.

They do not just sit there and make good targets even with great guidance, IIRC a CVN can hit over 70 knots even if there top speed is clasified, and considering it can do a 90 degree turn in just 400 meters, that gives it plenty of time to simply avoid something that needs to travel hundreds of kilometers.

Even then, IF it finds the strike group, there is multiple Agis to deal with, which have a 33/37 intercept success rate, and if you get by them you have RAAM and CWIS to deal with.

...

A carrier is about imortal when it comes to balistic ASM.

More range but easier to shoot down, Agis are hella effective at what they do.

edited 4th Sep '15 5:26:40 PM by Imca

I'd find the ballistic missile threat a lot more convincing if not for the fact that the USN basically owns the ABM mission, not only for the United States, but for also Europe, South Korea, and Japan.

That and if you read the Chinese military press the DF-21 has been their F-22 in terms of maintenance.

^ Worse, unlike the F-22, the Dong Feng is never going to see action or real duty. If war with the PLA ever broke out those DF missiles would be the first targets by Tomahawk cruise missiles. They'd be lucky to get a dozen missiles in the air before the majority of their launch sites are taken down.

And I'm factoring in the prep time to set up, calculate a firing solution, fuel the missiles and fire.

Meanwhile SM-3 is ready to fire on demand. Dong Feng is not. It's a waste of money.

Worst of all? What if a Dong Feng launch is mistaken for something more sinister? A simple attempt to scare away ships quickly turns into Armageddon for the Middle Kingdom.

And China ain't got enough nukes for MAD.

edited 4th Sep '15 6:07:57 PM by MajorTom

Imca: Except carriers are not that nimble. Carriers are not doing any high turn maneuvering any time soon at max steam or even at mid steam and even then again that pesky problem with guidance. Last I checked the US does not consider even inertial guidance a non-threat and is instead quite the opposite for a number of very good reason. Terminal radar is hard to counter because it is just that only used in the terminal phase and success rates against it are at best very variable. No the carrier is not immortal from ASBM. That is beyond stretching and shooting beyond absurdity.

Pretty much all missiles require regular and expensive maintenance and yes that includes ballistic missiles. I certainly hope none of you think regular Tomahawk maintenance is cheap or really any missile for that matter especially ballistic missiles. Having a maintenance cost does not mean anything in terms of performance unless they are completely unwilling to pay for it. Given they are willing to pay for a lot that is not a bet I would make any time soon. That and the possible trade is worth a lot more then what they are putting in.

Aegis has trouble with regular cruise missiles especially super sonic what makes you think it will do any better? RAFM and CIWS are not designed for hyper sonic weapons that is why the US is looking at things like lasers and rail guns for the painfully obvious reasons. The laser tech has a long way to go and rail guns aren't quite there yet and their deployment will be limited for a long while to come.

The US doesn't actually own the ABM mission we just recently came into it. While we were fucking up the missile shield and Star Wars by the numbers Russia had that ability across multiple systems. That by the way was the other reason we needed a bomber that could spam cruise missiles or that we developed stealth cruise missiles. They did with their launchers what we only recently did with Patriot and THAAD.

There is also the tiny catch China is one of those countries we can't guarantee any sort of EW supremacy over at all they are in fact one of those countries that fuck with us with back and have demonstrated an overt ability to do just that.

Tom: While they are unlikely to use them doesn't mean they wouldn't work. That is probably the most dangerous assumption ever. Chances are pretty good they will get off more then a dozen before any Tomahawks reach them. By the time they are firing its is a bit too late. In fact your likely to only find after they fire considering these things can and have been hidden from modern tracking and detection repeatedly in the past. Also SM-3 is not ready at a moments notice they also require rather sophisticated tracking and targeting to be directed to the target and they also take time to track, target, get a solution, and launch. If someone is doing their best to fuck with that guess what gets a lot harder and takes longer to do. They can also be fired from TEL units which means they have no fixed locations as in no silos or conveniently targeted launch points that never move. Kind of the point of the whole deal.

You folks are being wholly unrealistic in deeming this a non threat and it is based almost entirely around the premise "it is China". It is a lot more telling that quite a few of the experts disagree. They say there are some possible ways to reduce effectiveness overall none of them ever label it a non-threat or even come close to suggesting that. China is a modern military power that is a bit more then a paper tiger. While they don't project power there is a world of difference when you roll up into their sphere of power under your own volition. Russia couldn't project power very far outside of land routes they didn't have the global base set up like the US did either. yet they were quite possibly one of our most dangerous and capable competitors. The exact same clap trap used to be said about Russia that most of you are saying about China and hind sight showed that was a set of dangerously stupid assumptions.

'd by Teufel.

re: Tom and Imca: Actually, many of those statements are outright wrong.

DF-21 is solid-fueled and truck-mounted. It doesn't need a big complex silo to launch; as soon as there's a targeting fix by some offboard sensor, it can launch. This means the reaction time isn't comparable with an old 1950s ICBM or a Scud, but a shore-based Exocet or similar weapon. Reaction time can potentially be measured in minutes, not hours.

A USN CVBG can theoretically make 30 knots, not 70. The only ships that can hit 70 knots are hydrofoils and the like; even fast corvettes top out in the 40-50 knot range. This means that in the less-than-half-hour before impact, the entire task force will only be able to put about 15 nmi of distance between the initial datum and the warhead impacts. This is more than sufficient if the weapons are not guided—but against active radar seekers, it's not nearly enough.

Here's the thing: DF-21D is terminally guided. (Are you paying attention, Imca?) This isn't completely new; Pershing-2 had a variant of TERCOM to increase its accuracy, and that technology is thirty years old by now, so an active radar seeker that can function at hypersonic speeds isn't so very different. Its flight time is also measurable in minutes, not hours. Terminal homing with radar or optical guidance means that, yes, if everything works it can hit a maneuvering ship. After all, nobody pretends that maneuverability will save you against a supersonic cruise missile; why would it save you against a guided, independently-maneuverable re-entry vehicle? And if it misses there will be a dozen more rocketing down at railgun velocities to follow it.

ABM will help, but not enough. "Kill the archer, not the arrow": the question of how many SM-3s are needed to counter a given number of inbounds is an open one. Yet it should be noted that unlike cruise missiles, SM-3 is your only line of defense. With the Soviet Naval Aviation threat, the outer battle grid of carrier aviation could hope to thin out or turn back the threat before they can launch, with the SAMs intended to mop up leakers, and then point-defence weapons like Sea Sparrow and CIWS as a backstop. Currently, neither carrier aviation nor point-defence weapons are designed to stop an IRBM. (IRBM, not ICBM, so not likely to be mistaken for a nuclear launch.) This strongly suggests that ABM will not be enough.

Now, of course, we get to the arguments that perhaps DF-21D won't work like the Chinese say it will work. Yet the same argument applies to the traditional threat of cruise missile swarms or other advanced weapons like Brahmos or the P-800, yet discussions of those threats never rely on denigrating its effectiveness. So, yes, the weapon system will almost certainly be somewhat buggier than designed. But that assumption is baked into the discussion of every single new weapons system, and paper capabilities are compared to paper capabilities with that caveat in mind.

edited 4th Sep '15 7:32:17 PM by SabresEdge

If all else fails, does the missile have the range to hit Yokosuka? The most impressive ship at sea is still just a target at anchor.

This applies to circumstances where killing the archer adds value because the archer is equivalent to multiple inbounds.

As you've pointed out with the DF-21, this isn't such a case because each launch unit is one self-contained round already. It also applies to circumstances where there is, perforce, likely to be a large number of inbounds at any one time, where with a ballistic missile it is unlikely from both a cost and a political standpoint one will achieve that level of saturation. (Politically meaning that launching too many ballistic weapons at once leads to rapid escalation.)

The other misconception I noted in both cases is that the SM-3 is the only ABM-capable round in the USN inventory. It isn't. The SM-3 is the only mid-course ABM-capable round, able to engage as the round goes overhead to somewhere else. Down at ground zero, with the round coming in at you, it can easily be engaged and destroyed with post-Gulf One SM-2s or by the now-standard SM-6. Every AEGIS ship in the battlegroup, every area AA missile, is capable of engaging a ballistic threat in the terminal phase. (For that matter, so are their 5" guns; a ballistic inbound's engagement time is short but it's easily tracked and not a difficult firing solution.)

As for Teufel's argument about "experts": Well, okay, why don't they get the articles in Proceedings that quote Chinese military literature?

edited 4th Sep '15 8:07:17 PM by Night

Night: You mean the ones that say nothing of it being a non-threat and is yes still a threat just like every other cruise missile and ASM system out there funny you forgot that part.

Also there are more then a few glaring holes in the rest of your post. Neither the SM-2 or SM-6 are for ABM mission at all. They are strictly blast frag missiles meant for cruise missiles that skim in and aircraft. Those by the way are the same systems that have a really hard time with super sonic cruise missiles and yes those missiles that has had the navy scrambling over the last year and a half to fix the gaps that were pointed were wide open. They lack the same targeting capability as the SM-3 which was specifically built for targeting ballistic missile threats and even their upgrades reflect that mission to date. No they can't easily hit or even target a hypersonic projectile.

Never mind the claim about the 5" gun is laughable. No they aren't simple or easily going to be used in anti-missile roles outside of shooting at sub-sonic targets and even then with great difficulty. At best the 5" gun is a desperation maneuver with very little chance of doing anything against even super sonic threats. They have almost zero chance at engaging a hyper sonic target which is yes why the navy wants rail guns and lasers for ABM because the vast majority of Aegis systems just don't really cut it against that kind of threat. AEGIS has exactly one missile system designed for ABM the others aren't even close to being designed for targeting hypersonic weapons and have known issues with super sonic targets.

Did you miss the part where this isn't a ballistic projectile in the terminal phase but a hypersonic glide vehicle that can maneuver that is again shockingly similar to the US Pershing II's system which does the same thing and it is a lot harder to hit.

edited 4th Sep '15 8:34:46 PM by TuefelHundenIV