Thanks again
@Patchwork_Chimera for your insights.
You don't need to sink a carrier to take it out of action at sea, enough damage to flight deck will render it useless, may also need to pull other escorts to run it back to port.
I am aware of that some damages can be repaired at sea, but given the complexity of today's warship, unless it's a fender bender, most likely the ship has to return to port to be repaired.
Keep in mind that AGM-183A had a warhead of just 150lb in order to be carried by B-52 and have range of 1000 km and reach hypersonic speed. That's with a 5000 lb missiles with 25.9 inch diameter (650 mm) and 232 inch long (5.8 m).
For something launched from UVLS, it will use about the max diameter, let's say 850 mm and max length of 9m. It's going to be about 2.5 times the size of AGM-183A. In order to achieve hypersonic speed from sea launch and reach desired range (let's say at least 1000 km, ideally 1500 km), it's going to have a very small warhead. Even at high speed and dropping straight down, it's not a given that type of impact will even render a flight deck useless. My understanding is YJ-18 will make greater impact on a warship than any other AShM launched from UVLS. I would think it's unlikely to sink a larger destroyer or even a 7000t "frigate" with one UVLS launched hypersonic strike. As such, the initial strike will probably just vastly deteriorate the compact capability of the ship that got hit. And render them unable to counter follow on strikes like air launched YJ-12s or UVLS launched YJ-18s.
That's why I would expect 055 to carry a variety of high performance anti-ship missiles. Also, they are probably going to have a lot more YJ-18s than hypersonic missiles.
That book is sort of "meh" for a variety of reasons, which I'd rather not get too much into, otherwise I'll end up writing a reply about as long as the book itself.
Thanks, I did read some of Blake's commentaries and found myself rather unimpressed.
Do note, DF-21D is not their mainstay AShBM as people seem to believe for some reason. It was practically a tech demo for what is now their "main" IRBM, DF-26 - which has hotswappable anti-ship, conventional explosive, or nuclear payloads. Right now, they're sooorta standardizing around the DF-16/17 platform as an MRBM system, DF-26 as an IRBM system, and are procuring DF-100s as their GLCM system.
That's my understanding also regarding DF-21D and DF-26. Question on DF-100, have you seen it being used in an anti-shipping rule or is it mostly a ground attack platform?
Do they still have a SRBM platform or is that reserved for MRLS now?
DF-26 as a platform is a pretty good deal more capable than DF-21, being (kinetically) a higher energy system (pushing interceptor Pkss numbers down) with more modern internals, whereas DF-21 is basically a JL-1 with land-loving characteristics lol. Thus, even if that 82 munition estimate were in line with reality (it isn't, the author is just a goober - we don't even typically have 80 SM-6 aboard most CSGs that hang out in 7FLT AOR), the number of DF-26 required would be a decent amount lower.
Which makes the entire idea of utilizing SM-6 for anti-shipping duties quite preposterous.
Furthermore, any anti-shipping action against a US CSG would be a fairly extensive, mult-component effort. There isn't much reason to waste munitions by generating low bandwidth, high depth salvos - when to penetrate missile defense systems, what you need is high bandwidth at all costs. In addition to AShBMs, there would be a *very* high munition volume YJ-12 and YJ-18 threat to deal with, in addition to EW, the subsurface threat, etc.
lol, you are saying the exact things that some of Chinese commentaries have said. It would be quite foolish not to give defending system different looks and flight profiles to worry about. Outside commentaries also do seem to underestimate Chinese EW capabilities (even though US military have warned how good it has gotten).
