I didn’t really understand it until I noticed the seriousness in the source’s eyes. I hadn’t given it much thought recently, what with all the other stuff going on around us … MRAP, Air Force shakeup, body armor, tanker — you name it.
But when the far-ranging discussion we were having came around to the subject of aircraft carriers, this guy said (and I paraphrase) “you think carriers are irrelevant in a contested environment now, just wait til someone gets an anti-ship ballistic missile capability. That’ll be a game-changer.”
To me, this seemed implausible. Shooting a ballistic missile at a moving ship?
“Did you see the ASAT test? That was 10-times more difficult,” he replied. “And they’re a lot closer than anyone thinks.”
He wouldn’t tell me the country that’s so close to getting this capability, but it’s not hard to guess which one it is.
From the 2008 Chinese Military Power report:
China is developing an anti-ship ballistic missile (ASBM) based on a variant of the CSS-5 medium-range ballistic missile (MRBM) as a component of its anti-access strategy. The missile has a range in excess of 1,500 km and, when incorporated into a sophisticated command and control system, is a key component of Chinas anti-access strategy to provide the PLA the capability to attack ships at sea, including aircraft carriers, from great distances.
That’s subtle — not a whole lot there. But my guy tells me this country that he would not mention could plausibly demonstrate that capability “very soon.”
According to our friends at Globalsecurity.org:
Work is believed to be ongoing to provide this missile with a sophisticated terminal guidance system. According to some reports the Mod 2 version of the CSS-5 will be comparable to the US Pershing II IRBM, employ advanced radar guidance to achieve extremely high accuracy.
Now, here’s what it means: carriers must stay at least 1000 miles off this enemy’s coast. Think how that affects strike planning, surveillance, rescue…any number of factors that go into naval aviation planning. And how do you defend against such a strike? I’m not sure about all the details, but it seems to me there’s a pretty short flight time in which to generate a solution for an anti-ballistic missile interceptor. Maybe ABL could handle this one, but how many can it shoot down at any one time? A salvo of even five or 10 of these could be devistating.
Another source tells me there have been tests of the system but they have so far been unsuccessful. But the source also told me the Russians might have recently delivered a key component to the Chinese to make this system more effective.
We’ll have more on this as it develops and I’ll be interested to see what DT readers might be able to add on this…
– Christian
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WR,
I was being tongue in cheek & facetious about the weather machines.I tried to put the meat of my discussion into the second part after “seriously”.Besides,ever since the “World Weekly News” went out of business,there aren’t any more supermarket tabloids to entertain us with such outrageous stories like Bat Boy or the Alien that always visited the presidents & presidential candidates(now I’ll never know if he,or it,supports Obama or McCain).
DarthAmerica,
Another scenario I gave was maybe putting this missile on a civilian cargo ship like a Panamax/Post-Panamax ship.If the missile had a high supersonic(maybe hypersonic) speed rate,it would be like shooting a gigantic bullet,with maybe the same rate of speed,if possible,at the targeted ship.
The other factor is that element called “fire” and “smoke.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemical_element
heh, I’ll see and raise you, know-it-all.
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=element&x=0&y=0
Oh, and for my opinion of all this:
Short range BMs are not in themselves a trigger to nuclear retaliation, as repeated Iraqi SCUD launches prove.
But destroying a carrier will probably escalate a limited, regional conflict to total war.
DA is right about the challenges in defeating a carrier battlegroup with this weapon system: it is a bullet in search of a soldier and a weapon to fire it. The Chinese do not have the capability to overcome EM attack, accurately point this weapon for a conventional package (and God help them if they go nuclear; that’s a totally different ballgame), and likely intercepts would also be shot down by AEGIS.
More worrying is Chinese subs, or a combination of Chinese attacks: cruise missiles, subs, and this ASBM all coordinated. But that assumes the carrier is pretty much just a target and not forcefully breaking into the theatre. We only have one carrier stationed within reach of these ASBMs (preemptively hit that and Japan’s basically forced into war); the rest will be deployed within weeks from across the globe, ie, not ‘targets’ but firebreathing airbases.
China would have to be crazy to destroy a carrier. Unfortunately, I am not certain about their mental hygiene. They may be crazy enough to, at least, try.
@ DarthAmerica
Re your comments about my “errors”:
1 – That SM-2 version you’re referring to is not fielded and will not be for another two years (+). And even then it will not have any capability against a missile in the CSS-5 class. (Admitting though, I have no idea about the effectiveness of Aegis BMD and SM-3 against targets on unusual trajectories, plus taking into account coordinated, simultaneous attacks by cruise missiles and subs against a carrier group, keeping the escorts more than busy on multiple vectors.)
2 – Didn’t say anything about radar when talking about OTH targeting. There are options like orbital, aerial, submarines, ELINT, even things like ranging shots and cruise missiles with search patterns. The problem is basically no different from what the VMF had to solve for their P-500 and P-700.
3 – I didn’t talk about the survivability of a carrier being hit. But to lower the probability that a task force is put out of action.
And as a ratio CVN-supercarrier to CV-medium carrier I’d say 3 to 1, making it about 24 medium carriers in case of the USN. (As financial tradeoff the LHDs and LHAs would also be replaced by those medium carriers and the amphib forced entry capability concentrated on LPDs – but that’s another topic).
When talking about fleet survivability, those medium carriers would operate only in groups, e.g. 3 carriers plus 9 escorts (current battle groups also use multiple carriers). Even if one carrier is hit, two others would still operate, whereas the loss of one of today’s CVN’s is a serious blow to the whole task force. With current force levels in a China scenario there would be max two three-CVN task forces, whereas with medium carriers there could be five or six.
To the poster “Brad”:
You wrote: “ships can, within a minutes notice, be environmentally sealed. That’s how they’re designed to keep out that mysterious magical fluid we Americans like to call ‘water’.* If you and your fellow continentals would only just shower, you might have reflected upon that fact without having to need someone to point that out for you. *And yes, sunshine, that includes the top decks of carriers as well. The WHOLE thing. The other factor is that element called ‘fire’ and ‘smoke’. Which means NBC has minimal effects on a ship at sea.”
I’m impressed to learn that thanks to a “shower” (sprinkler system?) ships can not only survive nuclear bombs, but even remain immune against their secondary effects!
Next time just say: “we the Americans”…
To the great
And to all those posters who nurture high hopes for the “survivability” of the entire U.S. American carrier fleet: During the Falkland Conflict 67 % of the 6 Exocet missiles found their marks (= hundreds of times more expensive warships, and the Argentinians had just recently introduced them. They barely understood how to activate their warheads, sparing at least two British warships this way!), and the British had ALL the necessary anti-measures in place too… According to the Scientific American the whole Aegis system is equally useless against extremely low-flying targets (like Exocets) and against “crossing targets”, depending exclusively on last-ditch weapons for its survival, you know: The same ones that failed to fire a single round in the Falkland War and on your pathetic guided-missile frigate “U.S.S. Stark” too.
And when you start gloating about the sea-worthiness and insensibility of U.S. American aircraft carrier hulls against enemy ordnance: Ha ha ha ha…!!!
Why do such names as the “R.M.S. Titanic”, the “H.M.S. Hood” and the “U.S.S. Phoenix” (a.k.a. “A.R.A. General Belgrano”) reflexively come to my mind? Even the late Admiral Hyman George Rickover stated that in any high-intensity (conventional) war all aircraft carriers would last only for TWO DAYS !
You know, reaching always the opposite conclusions from the rest of the World you shouldn’t be too surprised one day if an aircraft carrier gets abducted just like the “intelligence-gathering” ship “U.S.S. Pueblo” was…
Thunder of Erebus, here we come!
Y’all need to go read Payne Harrison.
freefalling bomb is a typical anti-American hater just like the others who troll this site. They are so obsessed with this idea of American invincibility and ‘arrogance’ so they blather on and on about how weak America is, evidently trying to convince themselves.
Let’s see what evidence ffb cites for American weakness:
1) British ships
2) An American cruiser that predated WW2, was sold to Argentina, and sunk by a British nuclear submarine
3) A small (4100 tons) US frigate caught by surprise without having armed/prepared its defenses, which nonetheless survived multiple exocet hits and returned to port.
This is his so-called evidence that a US aircraft carrier at over 100,000 tons displacement would be vulnerable and easy to kill, despite the fact that the carriers have numerous escorts designed to protect them from enemy aircraft and missiles.
“To me, this seemed implausible. Shooting a ballistic missile at a moving ship?”
This initial assessment seems right on the money to me. Ballistic missiles are inherently unsuitable for anti-ship applications. There’s a reason the US Navy has never employed a weapon like this; it’s not as if China holds any technological advantage over us.
—–There’s a reason the US Navy has never employed a weapon like this;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballistic_missile
PLA is not US navy.
US Navy has balistic missles.
—-it’s not as if China holds any technological advantage over us.
you are the first guy in the world who is sure about..
I think we should lure the chinese commanders into pointless comment fights and so block their ability to make informed decisions by totally confusing them. Then we shout ‘LASERS!’ and they will love us!
.
Seriously, you should all know that stuff like this is possible if you spend enough money and time on it. It’s not new, it’s just a more advanced (combination) of existing technologies.
.
Besides: blowing up a carrier is one of the most aggressive military moves you can make. If it comes to that it wont be just this one carrier, but near-total war.
About chinese led toy, toothpaste etc.
Statisticly seen, chinese product are even safer than American product, this according to a Japanese statistic at least, it’s just the share huge quantity of chinese export product that makes ppl think alot of chinese product is of bad quality, but if u look at the procentage, it’s not bad at all.
Chinese military tech. is overall about 10-25years behind the USA, but they are catching up quite fast, their yearly university graduate already exceed the US from several years ago, chinese is the number one source of foriegn student in most western nation University, Silicon valley is full of Chinese(and Indians), East Asians(Chinese, Korean, Japanese) are averagely THE highest educated ethnical grp in the US, this should also tell you something.
Dear Sirs,
Recalling Yale Jay Lubkin’s lessons that radar guidance uses minute quantities of energy reflected from the target…imagine the effect on the receiver when a directed energy “weapon” is shined on the incoming missile with a billion or more times the power; like a non-eye safe laser right in the eyes…and you’re permanently blinded. That is why DARPA is asking for directed energy weapon countermeasures now…just read the solicitations.
We want this protection now because we have the ability to kill radar receivers with our AESA emitters…like the F-22 has, but some of the largest and most powerful ever are found on DDG-51s. The ships can track objects in space, so sharpening up the beam at RORSATs will complicate targeting as well.
Killing this latest conventional “threat” would likely just involve software or antenna array changes you’ll never hear about. A nuclear warhead near hit would still be devastating, but China can do that now.
If this is conventional warhead missile, it will just splash in the water alongside the “super-jazzy fast” radar homing cruise missiles. The really powerful lasers we are testing now will make short work of IR missiles as well…
The missile jig is almost up, China.
Is this the Chinese decade of its Chinese century?
http://forum.atimes.com/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=6364
Whether or not this ASBM system works at the present time is irrelevant. as long as it is rumoured to exist and can send a 5000 man carrier to the bottom with a non-zero possibility that it can get evade any plausible defence that a US carrier battle group can put up, that’s all that’s enough to keep the US carriers at bay. oh let’s not forget about the “possible” existence of those silent Chinese attack subs. Your Caesar never saw the end of the Roman Empire coming…
The new Chinese ASBM can strike carriers and other U.S. vessels at a range of 2,000 km+, maybe up to 3,000 km in time to come.
The size of the missile enables it to carry a warhead big enough to inflict significant damage on a large vessel, providing the Chinese the capability of destroying a U.S. supercarrier in one strike.
Because the missile employs a complex guidance system, low radar signature and a maneuverability that makes its flight path unpredictable, the odds that it can evade tracking systems to reach its target are increased. It is estimated that the missile can travel at mach 10 and reach its maximum range of 2,000km in less than 12 minutes.
Supporting the missile is a network of satellites, radar and unmanned aerial vehicles that can locate U.S. ships and then guide the weapon, enabling it to hit moving targets.
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