055 DDG Large Destroyer Thread

[antiterror13]

I didn't know that Type 055 will offer anything above Zumwalt's capabilities

well, too many you don't know like everybody else (me included)

 

[Blitzo]

Clearly we differ in our assessment of how prepared the PLAN feels it needs to be in the future for an all-out US military assault on the Chinese mainland. Personally I feel that even now the USN will have to go all-in to prevail in a conflict against China. By the time China has 6-7 carriers 30? years from now, the USN will not even consider assaulting China, let alone a China with 3-5 carriers waiting at the docks. Again, carriers aren't meant to sit at docks waiting for some worst case scenario to occur.

Yes it seems we do differ quite markedly in that regard.

How is it a "deceptive term"? Even a target at the extreme range of 1,500km is within range of land-based aircraft. Yes, their endurance will be quite short at that distance, but again, all you need to compensate for that is to buy more fighters and more tankers; if you even anticipate or want to routinely patrol out that far in the first place. That is the point.

First, for the sake of avoiding misunderstanding, I want to add that I don't think you were trying to be deceptive or anything, but the term in this context is deceptive. Or replace the word with "inaccurate".

As for why I think it's inaccurate/deceptive, it is exactly because the range of an aircraft does not reflect the physical presence or capability that they can field in the area of interest, as that requires consideration of at least a few other factors with "endurance @ given range" being one of them.

Buying more fighters or buying more tankers is one way of plugging a gap in endurance@range, but that will also depend on how the maths works out for opportunity cost.

There is no need to resort to a full-on carrier program in order to somehow make land-based aircrafts' lives 'easier'. Carriers aren't there to make land-based fighters' lives easier by relieving them of the need to do CAP at long ranges or to escort sensor platforms at long ranges, something that is surely more within their scope than it is within a carrier's scope in any case.

I never suggested that China should procure carriers only with the goal of seeking to make land based aircrafts lives "easier". A post or two back I described that my proposed peacetime deployment pattern would be capable of responding both to near seas high intensity contingencies as well as blue water contingencies (while also having a single carrier continuously at sea in blue water), it's just that it would prioritize responding to a near seas high intensity contingency a bit more than being able to respond to blue water contingencies (which having two carriers continuously at sea would be more oriented to).

A "certain level of detail"? It sounds like you don't know whether and how your proposal would "actually work" out in real life, yes? So if you are unable to provide this reasoning (I'm NOT even asking for "evidence"), why would you expect that any other "people" would be able to argue anything substantive about your proposal that you could not yourself, especially a strange carrier deployment cycle that nobody's ever heard of and no navy has ever tried? This is about as useful as me throwing out a random proposal that life exists on a planet surrounding the star SDSS J1229 and then asking people to "discuss".

Considering the extent of detail that we'd have to go to to seriously discuss how viable any sort of deployment pattern for anything like a half dozen carriers would be or even something like what the Navy's fleet structure to be, yeah of course I can't provide "reasoning".

I'm not sure what else you're expecting, apart from saying that I think my proposed peacetime deployment pattern is the most effective use of resources to provide a sufficiently flexible array of assets to respond to what China's prioritized strategic and military threats will likely be by that period.

I have already pointed out that a "trend" of FFGs being replaced by DDGs isn't comparable to DDGs being replaced by CGs. How is it a comparison when one ship is a destroyer and the other is a cruiser??? Just because one country is building destroyers where before they were building frigates, means it's somehow a "trend" or justifiable that the PLAN is following by switching from destroyers to cruisers? There is no such "trend". There is no trend of a destroyer to CG transition; there is not even a trend of a frigate to destroyer transition that even remotely involves anywhere near the number of 055s that even _I_ am proposing, to speak nothing of the swarms of 055s that you and Lethe are proposing.

Again, going by what Lethe wrote, I think his idea is that if the entire fleet of frigate sized ships in some nations navies can be replaced entirely with destroyer sized ships, then why is it unreasonable to think that destroyer sized ships cannot be replaced with cruiser sized ships?

And the "absolute" number of 055s isn't really that relevant, because very few navies procure destroyers or even frigates in the kind of numbers that we're throwing around for 055s anyway.

Oh, 1991. Your nitpick is so right on. Cold War over. Wait, let me check Perry construction dates. Yep. They were all still there in 1991. Every single last one.

I'm not sure what the Perry has to do with anything, considering my argument has been about the USN's top heavy Burke+tico fleet, which is what their fleet began to look like by the mid 2000s.

The fact that the Perry made up a significant part of the USN's orbat in 1991 and in the Cold War is not under dispute, because it's not relevant to my point. I never said that the USN didn't have a significant number of Perrys in its fleet in its entire history. What I have said is all related to the period of time where a large proportion of Burkes+Ticos in the USN surface combatant orbat, which is about the last decade or so up to now and which will likely proceed into the foreseeable future even with the USN's adopting of LCS and FFG classes.

In any case, you are essentially using the USN's RECENT historical pattern of top-heavy structure to somehow valid a proposal for the PLAN to create a non-top heavy structure. Why should the PLAN reference the USN's non-similar force structure AT ALL? Your vision for the PLAN is somewhat more top heavy than mine but let's not start citing the USN as the authoritative source for naval force structure when even the USN itself has acknowledged its own recent shortsightedness. Like somehow yours is more reasonable than mine because it's closer to the USN's lack of vision - I mean force structure.

No, okay I'll lay out my logic.

Basically, you think the Chinese Navy inducting a significant proportion of its orbat as 055s in replacing 052D production is unlikely or unreasonable, yes?
Well, for the sake of discussion I've put forward two suggestions of 055 orbat, one for the medium term/before 2030 where the blue water surface combatant fleet is about 24 055s, 24 052C/Ds, and 50 or so frigates, and one orbat for the well post 2030 period which includes 1/3 of the blue water surface combatant fleet being 055s and 2/3 of a new 6k ton frigate. In both situations, the 055 is replacing the 052D in production. In both situations, there will be a significant number of 055s in service in an absolute sense. But in both situations, the 055s will also be a minority proportion in the surface combatant orbat in terms of hulls, with the majority of the orbat being made up of one or more classes of smaller destroyers or frigates.

Now, by bringing up the USN's ridiculous top heavy force structure that they've had over the last decade or so, my point has been to demonstrate the USN has had a very ridiculous top heavy force structure with as many if not many more modern ships in the 9k-10k ton class than basically every other navy put together.

So, by establishing how ridiculous the USN's orbat is (and how ridiculous it is in relation to the rest of the world's navies), I think it serves to demonstrate the idea that Lethe and I have suggested (or thereabouts) OTOH, is a much more reasonable force structure than what the USN has adopted over the last decade or so and is likely to continue with (though to a slightly less intense degree) in the foreseeable future.
Therefore if the USN has adopted such a top heavy orbat, yet is accepted as par for the course then why is the idea of the Chinese Navy adopting a more reasonable force structure (just one that happens to include a fair proportion of 12k ton destroyers/cruisers as part of its fleet) something which doesn't pass the smell test?

This is basically a case of Person A does something ridiculous yet faces no meaningful protest or response, therefore if Person B does something less ridiculous then it should also face no meaningful protest or response given the precedent that Person A has set. However, for this specific example, Person B's action (the 055 orbats I've proposed, both the pre 2030 and post 2030 ones including a majority orbat made up of either 052D+frigates or 6k ton frigates with 055s still being part of the minority proportion of both orbats) I think is far less ridiculous than what Person A has done (adopting an immensely top heavy orbat and having many more modern surface combatants of the 9k-10k weight category than basically every other navy in the world put together).

 

[AndrewS]

Well, we are not going to discuss a direct war scenario.

But we can talk about the fact that the US has these alliances...that they train hard with all of these countries and that their naval forces fit seamlessly. Believe me, they are NOT over stated, and the Chinese planners know this.

Having siad that, I do not expect war either...the fact is that one of the reasons (of many) that it is so unlikely is that precisely because of the NATO and other alliances these nations are tied by agreement to come to the other nations aide in the even of war.

They would not sit it out because they would never want the US to "sit it out." Those alliances do mean something...and China knows it as well as the other nations.

As you said, for many other reasons...but never forget or discount that one too...it is very unlikely that such a large war would materialize.

There may be incidents...but we have already had a couple of those. On the US side when it sailed through the Taiwan straits several years ago. On the PRC side when its plane ran into a US surveillance aircraft and when its ships bumped US Naval vessels.

Ina ll of those incidents which could have led to much worse conditions, the nations figured out ways to talk together and get past them.

I expect we will continue to see that precisely because:

1) The US advantage of its own, but especially with all of its allies ic compelling...and,

2) The Chinese have developed their own assets so efficently that it would, short of something incredibly unlikely, simply be too expensive to start shooting over it.

Let's hope it stays that way.

At the end of the day, going to war is a political decision, not one that the military decides.

Look at how NATO Turkey sat out the Iraq war and rejected US requests to use a Northern invasion route. The political leadership simply over-ruled the military (which in Turkey is way more influential than in SK/JP/AU/Europe) as the politicians decided that it was not in their interest.

If the US asked SK to go to war against China, would SK do this, knowing that the consequence is a land war against a combined NK/China army?

The termination of the SK-US alliance would probably be preferable, rather than for SK to be dragged into a US-China war where the result would probably result in SK being conquered.

As for Europe, well, if NATO refused to follow the USA into a war with China, what would happen?

Sure, the US could threaten to abandon Europe, but so what?

France and Germany alone have the economic and industrial capacity to check the only threat which is Russia. We'd probably see France increase its nuclear arsenal so that it can threaten sufficient targets to deter Russian nuclear blackmail, but that is affordable and achievable. From an economic perspective, Russia faces an EU Population some 4x larger and economically some 10x larger. So in peacetime, Russia is already effectively a resource appendage to the EU.

And if NATO declared to war against China, we will see something close to a full-fledged alliance between Russia and China.

So would we see Chinese soldiers on trains to Poland and Germany?

I find it very shoresighted how senior US naval officers do not recognise that China can force the USA to fight a land war.

 

[AndrewS]

Still quite a limit to operational flexibility. Dogfighting and dashing are both less fuel efficient than cruising. Forcing your fighters to operate on a fuel budget puts them at a large disadvantage.


Again, if China were fighting with Japan, carriers wouldn't be operating alone. If we removed carriers from the equation, a larger fleet of destroyers with no close air support would be just as, if not more, vulnerable to Japanese fighters operating right next to their own air bases. If you used ground based fighters to provide that support they would, once again, be operationally limited compared to carrier based fighters. Those ground based fighters would be at a significant fuel disadvantage against fighters flying close to home base. Persistence is essential. This point not only makes the case for why China needs carriers to contest the first island chain, but why they probably need carriers that can field a larger air fleet than just 48 fighters. If China only built a small number of carriers the size of 001 or 002 and spent more money on a larger fleet of destroyers/cruisers, I would argue they would still not be in a position to contest the first island chain effectively.


Tankers can also fuel carrier fighters.

If you were contesting the first island chain with a fleet of destroyers, would you park your fleet in the middle to provide better air defense for them? No, because that would defeat the point. The goal is to contest the first island chains, not to occupy the middle of no man's land. If you can only go as far as middle distance toward the area you're trying to contest before you lose effective close air support, that's a case for needing carriers, not against.


500 km is the edge of China's missile deterrence. It's a bit imprecise to say that's where they "plan" on sinking US carriers. The likelihood of China sinking a US carrier at 500 km off shore is rather slim. The odds get better as carriers get closer. Note though, any missile deterrence that can sink carriers can just as easily sink a fleet of destroyers. This is not a great argument for why you should build more destroyers over carriers.

Furthermore, to pose that threat China has had to make significant and deliberate investments in ground and air launched missile capabilities at high volume, which we haven't seen Japan do yet, and which the US isn't positioned to do as it's presence in the region is based on forward deployment. The missile capabilities each side poses are not congruent.


For the reasons mentioned in the previous paragraph, Chinese carriers do not face exactly the same issues that US carriers do. Until US security partners and allies make the same investments in missile defense China has, Chinese carriers contesting the first island chain do not face the same kind of threats US carriers face going up against China. Furthermore, those missile threats aren't isolated to carriers. They apply to any naval asset that floats. This is why despite China's deliberate investments in carrier sinking capabilities, the US's answer isn't to not send carriers in a conflict with China but to enhance their CIWS and naval missile defense capabilities. (every bit of evidence we have on the Pentagon's thinking suggests this).


The bases are small. That's why they can't be the main center of operations. You can't field China's air force with them at significant volume, and being small makes them vulnerable. Furthermore, they may help with the southern part of the chain, but not the eastern parts of the chain. They matter if the area of contest is SEA, but not Japan, which is the scenario we were discussing earlier.


They could, but you have to account for accuracy and target survivability. Cruise missiles are good for fixed targets, but not moving ones. You also need to be able to occupy an area once you've successfully destroyed its assets if you don't want your adversary to redevelop the area you just destroyed. That's why militaries don't just invest in long range cruise missiles to perform their land strikes.


Depending solely on destroyers to both attack ships and planes looking to sink them is a recipe for low survivability and failure.


Cruise missiles can't do everything. They may be necessary, but they aren't sufficient.

Tankers aren't going to get too close to an enemy bastion. So there will be a certain point that they will not cross, and it doesn't matter where the fighters come from (from an airbase or from a carrier).

If you look at the cost of a Chinese carrier, you can buy 3x as many fighters along with the accompanying tankers.

At a range of 1000km, that is way better than having a 3x fewer fighters located on a vulnerable carrier located close to enemy shores.

As for cruise missiles, what is the LRASM but an anti-ship cruise missile? There are proposals to reduce the warhead size to 450kg and increase the range to 1600km.

So China could base a large number of anti-ship missiles on trucks located on the Chinese mainland, and be able to reach every part of Japan.

So as long as China can find and track a target, it can hit it.

 

[delft]

At the end of the day, going to war is a political decision, not one that the military decides.

Look at how NATO Turkey sat out the Iraq war and rejected US requests to use a Northern invasion route. The political leadership simply over-ruled the military (which in Turkey is way more influential than in SK/JP/AU/Europe) as the politicians decided that it was not in their interest.

If the US asked SK to go to war against China, would SK do this, knowing that the consequence is a land war against a combined NK/China army?

The termination of the SK-US alliance would probably be preferable, rather than for SK to be dragged into a US-China war where the result would probably result in SK being conquered.

As for Europe, well, if NATO refused to follow the USA into a war with China, what would happen?

Sure, the US could threaten to abandon Europe, but so what?

France and Germany alone have the economic and industrial capacity to check the only threat which is Russia. We'd probably see France increase its nuclear arsenal so that it can threaten sufficient targets to deter Russian nuclear blackmail, but that is affordable and achievable. From an economic perspective, Russia faces an EU Population some 4x larger and economically some 10x larger. So in peacetime, Russia is already effectively a resource appendage to the EU.

And if NATO declared to war against China, we will see something close to a full-fledged alliance between Russia and China.

So would we see Chinese soldiers on trains to Poland and Germany?

I find it very shoresighted how senior US naval officers do not recognise that China can force the USA to fight a land war.

Already the European NATO countries spend nearly four times what Russia spend on their military. The US demands for 2% or even 3% of GDP to be spend on "defence" is more industrial policy - the wish to sell more military equipment to the allies - than anything else.

 

[Sczepan]

Which part of US-Defence Budget is for NorthAtlantic only?
The US demands for 2 % are only to divide NATO in "good" (following US-Interests in asia for example) or "bad" (thinking by themselves)

 

[Lethe]

The whole destroyer vs. cruiser thing is just emotive rubbish anyway.

Zumwalt is a destroyer (and was meant to be larger than it is). The Ticos were destroyers until it was decided at the last minute that they weren't. Sejong the Great is a destroyer. F125, P17A, FREMM, Type 26 are 6500+ ton frigates. It's all just words.

055 is slightly ahead of the curve, but then you would expect it to be because it's a new design. Placed alongside its medium-sized contemporaries, it is entirely unremarkable. It takes an oddly rigid, backwards-looking, and US-focused viewpoint to think otherwise.

 

[Richard Santos]

The words destroyer and cruiser no longer has significant difference in meaning, nor does either inherit the meaning they had when these names came into general circulation.

 

[Orthan]

The words destroyer and cruiser no longer has significant difference in meaning, nor does either inherit the meaning they had when these names came into general circulation.

Perhabs they should just create a weight-based classification system, like "heavy" "medium" "light" destroyers.

 

[Iron Man]

First, for the sake of avoiding misunderstanding, I want to add that I don't think you were trying to be deceptive or anything, but the term in this context is deceptive. Or replace the word with "inaccurate".

As for why I think it's inaccurate/deceptive, it is exactly because the range of an aircraft does not reflect the physical presence or capability that they can field in the area of interest, as that requires consideration of at least a few other factors with "endurance @ given range" being one of them.

Buying more fighters or buying more tankers is one way of plugging a gap in endurance@range, but that will also depend on how the maths works out for opportunity cost.

One of your claims about the benefits of carriers was that they provided more endurance/range for a sensor platform at extended distances from the mainland, but as others have also pointed out, the cost/benefit math just doesn't work out for you. Carriers would hardly even be expected to perform CAP for land-based assets anyway, unless under very unusual circumstances. This is simply not any kind of "benefit" of carriers worth mentioning.

I never suggested that China should procure carriers only with the goal of seeking to make land based aircrafts lives "easier". A post or two back I described that my proposed peacetime deployment pattern would be capable of responding both to near seas high intensity contingencies as well as blue water contingencies (while also having a single carrier continuously at sea in blue water), it's just that it would prioritize responding to a near seas high intensity contingency a bit more than being able to respond to blue water contingencies (which having two carriers continuously at sea would be more oriented to).

A contingency is not a use. Your deployment pattern would have carriers sitting at pierside with nothing to do for significant periods of time, waiting for a worst-possible case scenario/contingency that will almost certainly never arrive. Meanwhile what does the crew do? Do you have to pay them and house them in barracks near the docks? I'm not sure if you know this but I have mentioned before that "surgeable" for the USN means a carrier is ready to sail in under 30 days, while for you it sounds like surgeable is far more compressed a timeline than that. Maintaining a higher state of readiness invariably means more money. And of course it's not just the carrier, but also all the escorts and the replenishment ship that need to be ready to go at a moment's notice, but are really doing nothing more than sailing either a short jaunt in the near seas or even worse, doing literally nothing at all, and all the time being maintained at a high level of readiness for a worst-case scenario. You have also not delineated whether maintenance for a shorter deployment is significantly less cumbersome or time-consuming than for a longer deployment. That is why you need to make more than just a "proposal" because these claims are in my view outlandish and out of the normal experience of carrier operations. Carriers throughout history get used for deployments, they don't wait around at pierside for "contingencies".

Considering the extent of detail that we'd have to go to to seriously discuss how viable any sort of deployment pattern for anything like a half dozen carriers would be or even something like what the Navy's fleet structure to be, yeah of course I can't provide "reasoning".

I'm not sure what else you're expecting, apart from saying that I think my proposed peacetime deployment pattern is the most effective use of resources to provide a sufficiently flexible array of assets to respond to what China's prioritized strategic and military threats will likely be by that period.

Come one, let's be honest, you don't really have any details beyond simply claiming that you think you your "proposed peacetime deployment pattern is the most effective use of resources", to speak nothing of discussing the extent of any details. I mean, literally you don't have anything more than this statement.

Again, going by what Lethe wrote, I think his idea is that if the entire fleet of frigate sized ships in some nations navies can be replaced entirely with destroyer sized ships, then why is it unreasonable to think that destroyer sized ships cannot be replaced with cruiser sized ships?

And the "absolute" number of 055s isn't really that relevant, because very few navies procure destroyers or even frigates in the kind of numbers that we're throwing around for 055s anyway.

I didn't say it's unreasonable, I said the COMPARISON is unreasonable. Just because you are scaling up on a similar relative level in terms of tonnage doesn't mean the analogy necessarily extends from one size to another. Costs don't necessarily scale from one size to another, even for the PLAN. And yes absolute numbers DO in fact matter for the very reason that few navies build ships in the kinds of numbers that we're throwing around. I have no idea why you think this is some kind of disqualifier when in fact it is a major part of the reason the comparisons don't even remotely translate.

I'm not sure what the Perry has to do with anything, considering my argument has been about the USN's top heavy Burke+tico fleet, which is what their fleet began to look like by the mid 2000s.

The fact that the Perry made up a significant part of the USN's orbat in 1991 and in the Cold War is not under dispute, because it's not relevant to my point. I never said that the USN didn't have a significant number of Perrys in its fleet in its entire history. What I have said is all related to the period of time where a large proportion of Burkes+Ticos in the USN surface combatant orbat, which is about the last decade or so up to now and which will likely proceed into the foreseeable future even with the USN's adopting of LCS and FFG classes.

I brought up the Perrys and the LCS program to demonstrate that it wasn't the intent of the USN to go mostly heavy in the last decade, and that yes it has only been a recent phenomenon.

No, okay I'll lay out my logic.

Basically, you think the Chinese Navy inducting a significant proportion of its orbat as 055s in replacing 052D production is unlikely or unreasonable, yes?
Well, for the sake of discussion I've put forward two suggestions of 055 orbat, one for the medium term/before 2030 where the blue water surface combatant fleet is about 24 055s, 24 052C/Ds, and 50 or so frigates, and one orbat for the well post 2030 period which includes 1/3 of the blue water surface combatant fleet being 055s and 2/3 of a new 6k ton frigate. In both situations, the 055 is replacing the 052D in production. In both situations, there will be a significant number of 055s in service in an absolute sense. But in both situations, the 055s will also be a minority proportion in the surface combatant orbat in terms of hulls, with the majority of the orbat being made up of one or more classes of smaller destroyers or frigates.

Now, by bringing up the USN's ridiculous top heavy force structure that they've had over the last decade or so, my point has been to demonstrate the USN has had a very ridiculous top heavy force structure with as many if not many more modern ships in the 9k-10k ton class than basically every other navy put together.

So, by establishing how ridiculous the USN's orbat is (and how ridiculous it is in relation to the rest of the world's navies), I think it serves to demonstrate the idea that Lethe and I have suggested (or thereabouts) OTOH, is a much more reasonable force structure than what the USN has adopted over the last decade or so and is likely to continue with (though to a slightly less intense degree) in the foreseeable future.
Therefore if the USN has adopted such a top heavy orbat, yet is accepted as par for the course then why is the idea of the Chinese Navy adopting a more reasonable force structure (just one that happens to include a fair proportion of 12k ton destroyers/cruisers as part of its fleet) something which doesn't pass the smell test?

This is basically a case of Person A does something ridiculous yet faces no meaningful protest or response, therefore if Person B does something less ridiculous then it should also face no meaningful protest or response given the precedent that Person A has set. However, for this specific example, Person B's action (the 055 orbats I've proposed, both the pre 2030 and post 2030 ones including a majority orbat made up of either 052D+frigates or 6k ton frigates with 055s still being part of the minority proportion of both orbats) I think is far less ridiculous than what Person A has done (adopting an immensely top heavy orbat and having many more modern surface combatants of the 9k-10k weight category than basically every other navy in the world put together).

So basically you are comparing your OrBat to a ridiculous OrBat and saying "look it's less ridiculous than that OrBat". Therefore what? Your structure is awesome, or reasonable, or rational? No, it's simply less ridiculous, it doesn't somehow become the opposite of ridiculous just because it's less so. That's essentially identical to comparing your child to a mentally retarded child and saying "see, my boy is less retarded than that kid, so my boy must be a genius". No, he's just less retarded; nothing further can be implied. Sorry, you got nothing here. You really shouldn't have compared your OrBat to the USN OrBat and then claim that you actually come out of the comparison on top somehow. It's a rather low bar and you're really not saying much here.