The Kalibr is a family of cruise missiles. You have the standard subsonic version (land attack), you have a version with Mach 3 supersonic terminal stage (anti-ship, land attack), you have a version which carries a torpedo (anti-submarine). It can carry a conventional or nuclear warhead. You simply cannot compare it to the simplistic Harpoon or Exocet. It also has a much longer range than those missiles.
054B/next generation frigate
- Thread starter Blitzo
- Start date
YJ-83 is much smaller and flies very low over water.
Moreover, as the war in Ukraine shows - problem typically isn't really to get through air defense (it's matter of weight of salvo, though often just surprise is enough), problem is to classify, filter out, and hit something not too obvious as a target, and time-critical.
Preferably - without hitting neutral civilians.
As a result - while Russian ASCMs completely cover the whole theater - Russia can't stop Ukrainian small naval activities.
Long-range capability is not discrete enough (Onyx batteries were better used against Ukrainian airfields rather than ships). And after stupidly losing some vessels to Kh-31As (read: YJ-91A) from aircraft, Ukraine managed to hide their remaining and new small vessels between civilian traffic - enough to make rather dumb seekers of fast missiles worthless. So they still operate in, say, port of Odessa, or even in isthmus of Bug river.
Against fast attack boats or USVs Russian anti-shipping complex has proven to be largely worthless - cool huge fast missiles everyone likes in this thread - basically don't work against them. To the point that Lancet(!) is more impactful.
And btw, Russian naval aviation also scoffed at Kh-35s(still only radar, but a relatively smart one), preferring cooler faster (but not smarter) Kh-31As instead. Now they have to use dumb bombs instead.
Yes, YJ-83K is slower, smaller and not very cool in a size-measuring contest. Typical (PLAN) frigate target isn't that obvious simple ship in the first place - frigates aren't PLAN frontline ships, nor are they realistically expected to survive in general fleet action, well ahead of the force.
What it can do, however, is to find and precisely take out those exact maneuverable, not very obvious, time-critical targets with great precision. I.e. they are worse for forum competitions - but better for the exact work a second line ship fighting in SEA or ECS theaters can be expected to do. It has far better lift - so while range isn't super long, its time in air is much longer - it isn't hard to make it run search patterns, and maybe even transmit back the video feed through a drone/LEO satellite datalink. Fooling missile seeker(even if combined) is one thing - fooling ship-based data fusion with human operator is going to be much tougher.
And then we come to actual realistic targets - USVs, USMC fast boats, pontoons, small attack craft from ROCN and other (potential) unfriendly nations hiding against coastal clutter, in crowded river deltas and among civilian traffic. Or against a damaged surfaced submarine - a target that any cool supersonic missile can easily miss. Maybe even sneaky LCS.
They can also strike land targets at will - both Kh-35(YJ-83 counterpart in Russian service) and R-360 Neptune have found good success in this role. Yes, often they're intercepted. Even more often they're used against targets of opportunity without any defense at all - because no military on Earth has anywhere near enough AA to be everywhere.
Like again - USMC batteries.
And even Moskva was sunk by this exact type of a missile. Yes, it wasn't combat-capable. WW2 experience shows that finding a ship not at a stellar readiness isn't a problem; missiles just tend to leak through even when fired at. And quite often, be it during WW2, Cold War (Stark?) or now - ships happen.
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Among the russian 1990s cruise missiles, Kh-35 seeker is known to be by far the smartest, all other(P-800 Onyx, Kh-31, 3Mxx Kalibr) are either more limited(speed/search pattern limitations, angular restrictions), or outright dumber.
It is important, because many chinese ASCMs are at least related to them - and aren't that much of an improvement (being weapons from the era when copying and satisfying basic need was by itself an accomplishment). It refers mostly to YJ-91, but importantly - both YJ-12 and YJ-18 are suspects here, too. Yes, it is a guess, and they can be completely built from scratch down to a single bolt, keeping only similar shapes and form-factors. Or they may not.
YJ-83Km however, is 100% new, and it is known to have a much more capable seeker(specifically aimed at discretion, you don't mix imaging IR and X/Ku band seeker without this goal) without any Soviet/Russian links/legacy.
So it's far more reasonable to expect 2010s Chinese electronic capability from it. That's on top of advantage of smaller, slower, colder plane-like platform with much more search time to work with.
K is air launched, J is ship launched, and A is land based. When you air launch stuff, max range is increased because the plane itself can be used to get around the problem of countering the effects of gravity, and if you launch from higher altitudes, the air resistance is lower.
You must be joking...
The stock ones are just garbage in electrics, rumours imply that Su35SK also has bad reputation consequently. J16/11BG are integrated with far advanced AESA radars, a similar guess of improvements can be adapted to other made in China variants.
X-35 or Kh-35 Uran is the closest analog to a YJ-83 in the Russian arsenal, and it's Neptun twin in the Ukrainian arsenal.
The Uran has managed to take down a number of Ukrainian AD systems including S-300s and various radars, which one can say has been more successful than the Kh-31P doing SEAD.
Ukraine shooting down multiple Kaliber missiles is BS, given the near shut down of the Ukrainian power grid and many observed hits.
Even the Ukrainian Neptun has managed to hit a Russian S-300/400 system once or twice.
In contrast, supersonic missiles like the HIMARS and ATACMS have been consistently shut down, and need to blitz through Russian AD through brute force, covered and mixed with other supersonic rockets, like Tochka-U and Ohlka. These missiles are shot down among other things, by Buks, whose Chinese Navy analog is the HHQ-16, the SAMs on the Type 054A. Granted there is a learning curve required to shot down these rockets. Hence it was a big mistake for the US to even use ATACMS at all because the Russians now have recorded flight and trajectory data on it, and this data can be used for air defense simulation that can be used to refine the AD software. This data can be potentially shared to the Chinese in exchange for other favors.
Faster missiles gives a bigger impression on radar through Doppler effect. The faster you fly the greater the Doppler.
Faster missiles also are forced to fly higher due to the greater air density at low altitude that can either burn them up or slow them down. There is less distracting clutter at high atmosphere than when flying low, where a missile or a drone can hide from the clutter and use the curvature of the Earth.
The weapon that has taken out the most number of Ukrainian radars and even a number of AD systems, is non other than the Lancet drone, which only travels at a speeding automobile speed. Yet it's undetectable and unstoppable.
Returning to the YJ-83, the advantage of the modernized ones, like the X-35U and Neptun, is that they now have dual role seekers and can be used to attack land targets. This can be valuable against ground launched antiship systems, such as which both Japan and Taiwan have, and can deploy inside small islands and rocky coasts.
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Note that the Doppler effect doesn't make a difference between subsonic and supersonic speeds for missiles, unless you can reduce the speed to that of a flying bird. Once the speed is above the radar filter threshold, it's the RCS that matters for stealthiness, not the speed.
Also using the Ukrainian war to demonstrate the superiority of low altitude subsonic missiles isn't very convincing because both sides, especially Ukraine, lacked qualified AWACS. This gave low altitude missiles an even greater advantage that will not exist as soon as an AWACS platform like the E-2 is available.
Note that I don't deny that the YJ-83 may still be a competitive missile, but using the experience in the Ukrainian war as a basis for this could be very misleading.