And China would, in retaliation, incinerate some of the larger cities in the USA. People seem to keep forgetting China’s armed with ICBMs and nuclear weapons. “Well, we’ll just use tactical nukes…” sure, and then Los Angeles vanishes.
Aircraft carriers have always been vulnerable to nuclear weapons. Everything’s vulnerable to nuclear weapons. If you’re talking about an honest-to-God direct war between two countries with ICBMs, it’ll go nuclear, and concerns about an anti-ship missile will seem pretty minor.
The balance between ASM and ship defense technology will always tilt this way and that. This isn’t really a major piece of news.
And China would, in retaliation, incinerate some of the larger cities in the USA. People seem to keep forgetting China’s armed with ICBMs and nuclear weapons. “Well, we’ll just use tactical nukes…” sure, and then Los Angeles vanishes.
Regarding the Patriot in Desert Storm. Great at “intercepting” the Scud but pretty much a zero for “shooting it down”. Puzzling?
The ballistic missile or just the warhead from same hurtling down is at Mach something - it’s moving pretty good. The Patriot missile was shooting up at Mach (classified). The radar for the system was able to accurately track the Scud (if it was coming down intact) and actually track the pieces if it broke up (not to well modified and tested). The problems were:
Fuzing. The Patriot fuze didn’t look far enough forward relative to the closing velocity. The triggering fuzes are on the sides of the missile, not the nose which houses the radome. Remember it was designed for aircraft intercept with the target moving at around Mach 1 / 1.5 or less. The explosive train would get triggered as the Patriot was passing the Scud or its warhead. There’s always a delay between initiation of the explosive train (bridgwire - detonator - leads - booster - main charge) and the boom. In this time passage - milliseconds - the target would move past the Patriot warhead. The speed of detonation (we are not talking light speed here) and that of the fragmentation warhead shell simply would not catch up to the target going in the other direction. Might blow up the the tail of the Scud generating a lot of debris. Might deflect the warhead a little but that didn’t matter as the accuracy was “city-wide” at best. Wouldn’t destroy or cause sympathetic detonation of the Scud warhead.
Warhead design. The Patriot warhead’s fragmenting shell was meant to deal with relatively unarmored/unhardened aircraft skins. The shell had 1000s of pre-formed cubes good at tearing up aircraft. A ballistic missile warhead (or its outer shell) has to withstand the heat and shock of atmospheric re-entry. Essentially it’s armored. The Patriot fragments were not sufficient in mass - and relative velocity (see 1 above) - to kill/detonate the Scud warhead.
Tracking. A warhead didn’t look all that different from a fuel tank in a broken up Scud until atmospheric drag took over. It wasn’t all that easy to trach the densest target in the debris storm is the Scud started to break up on re-entry.
Post war analysis led to a number of improvements. Faster acting fuzes that looked ahead further and a redesign of the firing train. Larger but fewer tungsten carbide fragment cubes to penetrate hardened warheads. Finally, kinetic energy hit-to-kill projectiles. At the speeds we are talking, any hit will destroy the warhead. Better target recognition and differentiation was incorporated for the missiles that broke up.
Still tough to hit a bullet with a bullet though - RED not withstanding (see movie)
Aircraft carriers are WW-II era technology used to project power against 3rd world dictators. They cannot be used to wage a war on the scale they were originally designed for because they can’t hide from satellites or nuclear weapons.
The difficulties in shooting down a DF-21D are:
[ul]
[li]It can adjust course and identify targets in mid-flight. No current anti-missile system can deal with missiles like that.[/li][li]It can be launched from a concealed or mobile position on land, and has an amazing range - 1,900 miles.[/li][li]It’s pretty fricking fast - 13,000 mph - and tiny.[/li][li]It comes in at a trajectory that makes it harder to shoot down than traditional missiles. This illustration shows how the magic is done: http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_cys2T5FgJdo/TCzALLLQzBI/AAAAAAAAHmQ/U7eJOiGr7kc/s1600/DODDF21Diagram.jpg[/li][/ul]
What about adavnced diesel-electric submarines? Ships like the HMS Gotland (an advanced Swedish sub)-these subs are very difficult to detect. If China deploys a sufficient number of them, they could make life very difficult for a carrier.
Of course, the actual chances of an armed conflict with China are pretty remote-any “wars” we fight with China will be in cyberspace.
One thing I’ve never really understood about this conversion of ICBM/SLBM to utilize guided conventional warheads: how is the defender supposed to know which warhead(s) the missile is packing? IOW, to a DSP bird, isn’t this DF-21D going to look exactly like a DF-21D with a ~10MT warhead until it hits? And the US Navy is going to blithely wait while it’s under “nuclear” attack and not retaliate massively? Seems to be a very destabilizing weapon—not in the sense that it’s impossible to stop, but I would think it’d have a big chance of my conventional naval engagement dramatically escalating to exchanging nukes.
This goes for all of those US proposals to convert Trident SLBMs to a conventional payload too. For those citing Desert Storm to counter the idea that IRBM/ICBM use automatically equals nukes are being lobbed at you, the Iraqis never shot any SCUDs with NBC warheads, nor do I believe it was seriously feared that Saddam had a nuclear warhead for his SCUDs.
I’d be curious to know the cross-range capabilities of the warhead, and see how big of a “basket” you could lob the missile into and have it hit. Precise target acquisition of a CVBG—as opposed to just picking up the E-2’s radar, and knowing a CVN is out there “somewhere”—seems to be a bit challenging. Re: target acquisition/missile launch from SSKs—they are extremely quiet on battery/AIP, but they are susceptible to active sonar. So no driving the SSK right up to the CVN. Usually. Accordingly, the attacker gets a really good idea where the outer ASW screen is, but isn’t that much closer to getting a bead on the CVN. Unless of course, the terminal guidance and cross-range is so good, that knowing the CVBG location to within 2500 sq miles is good enough.
Anyone have any data on how accurate the Chinese CLAIM this thing to be? I mean, with a range of 1900 miles, and flying on a ballistic trajectory (presumably in autonomous mode) it’s not exactly going to be a laser guided bomb. How sophisticated is this thing really supposed to be? It’s got to hit a pretty small target…and it’s got to choose which target is the carrier, and which target is one of the many escorts. And it’s got to do this in a relatively short period of time, since it’s coming in at high velocity. And it’s got to be able to adjust to the targets throwing up ECM and maneuvering. And…
Well…you see the problem here, no? The Chinese can claim they have this magic weapon, but I’m a bit skeptical that the US or Europeans (or Japanese or SK’s) could produce something with this level of flight and performance characteristics to hit a moving target with active defenses with any sort of high probability, let alone the Chinese.
Also, if China fires off ballistic missiles to attack a carrier group, how would we know the difference between that and a regular ICBM attack? Wouldn’t it be, um, fairly risky for the Chinese to launch such a weapon if things were tense between the US and China? Might we not panic and retaliate with sub launched missiles of our own?
Certainly, and this is why it would be a bad idea to put a carrier in the proximity of Chinese waters if the weapon is as good as advertised.
We might as well send a guy dressed as Uncle Sam in a rowboat if all the good he’s going to do is to provoke a missile exchange. Or, you know, outsource the actual dressing up and rowing bit to China, which would be cheaper and probably about as impressive.
I suppose there will be a public test carried out sooner or later, probably sooner. One of the articles mentioned within a year. However, there doesn’t seem to be anything incredibly improbable about a cheap, highly efficient ship-killer. After all, the Chinese routinely launch spacecraft and certainly manufactured the MacBook pro I’m writing this post on.
And with military bases in 156 countries, why is there a need for hugely expensive, floating airfields? Sounds more like pork than a sound strategic choice to me.
Your cite struck me as funny, since strategypage’s immediately previous article 20101228 concerns the DF-21. Evidently the Chinese are relying on RORSATS to acquire the CVBG and terminal guidance will be IR. Neat trick on an ICBM; I would’ve thought the warhead’s residual heat from air friction would swamp any passive IR signal from a ship. Perhaps they mean a LIDAR, similar to the radar terminal guidance for Pershing II?
Moreover, as the comments to the linked post note, I wonder if AEGIS/SM 3 is capable of confidently defeating the warhead and also engaging the RORSATS? 600 km orbits aren’t that high, as ASAT-capable weapons go.
China discovered the 1960s? Lines like this one from from the article you cited always make me scratch my head, “If so (and it may well not happen at this time), this would be the world’s first live public test of an anti-ship ballistic missile.” Anti-ship ballistic missiles aren’t a novel concept, the Soviets toyed with killing carriers with SLBMs in the 1960s. From here:
There are too many technologies out there which could potentially threaten a carrier. Ballistic missiles, super-cavitating torpedoes, surface-skimming missiles. It’s reasonable to assume that China is going to master these technologies. If they throw dozens of these missiles simultaneously at a carrier from different directions what are the odds, every single one of them will be defended against. Pretty low. The US would be foolish to rely on carriers in a naval war against China (admittedly a low probability event). Carriers could still play a role against lesser powers like Iran but even some of them could develop these technologies in a decade or two.
