plawolf
Lieutenant General
This is just combining two common and obvious mistakes.
1) only looking to platforms and not considering how those platforms fits in the overall system.
2) blindly take the US as the gold standard and assume everything they do needs to be copy pasted.
PLAN DDGs aren’t desperate for medium range SAMs because that’s what they bring FFGs along to carry.
In almost all typical PLAN surface fleets, you will have a mix of DDGs and FFGs with the number of each ship type corresponding to the amount of long and medium ranges missiles the task group needs.
USN DDGs need ESSMs because they don’t have FFGs so their DDGs need to do everything.
China has developed ESSM equivalent quad packable SAMs using the SD10 that have been advertised for export for years. But I think there are performance penalties associated with using such a small missile for medium ranged engagements compared to the much bigger HQ16 that the PLAN prefers fewer HQ16s over having more ESSM equivalents missiles on its 054As.
Personally I believe the biggest factors are speed, KP and type of targets it can engage.
While the ESSM has a high listed max speed, there is no getting around the physical size of the missile itself. It’s propellant reserves will burn out at a fraction of its max engagement range, meaning it’s decelerating and loosing KE and by extension, KP all the rest of the way. The HQ16 OTOH, is in the size class of the US standard missile, and has many times the volume for more propellant and bigger seeker and warhead. It will have much more of its engagement envelope under powered flight, and bring a much bigger seeker and warhead, with correspondingly higher hit probability and bigger kill zone, all adding up to much higher KP as well as allowing it to engage smaller RCS targets coming in at higher speeds and doing terminal manoeuvring.
These factors are extra important for medium ranged SAMs, because by its nature these missiles are meant to deal with threats that have managed to get past the long range defence layer and are much closer to your ships (and thus more dangerous). All you need is look at the rumoured requirements for the PLAN’s quad packed 5-5-5 MR missile to see its next to impossible they will be able to get that sort of performance out of an ESSM sized missile, so that 5-5-5 missile will probably only be quad packable in the larger UVLS cells.
