If the study on super long range SAM, deployment of PL-17 (and the possible AESA/IIR dual seeker arrangement), and alleged role of J-20 are indications, one of the options is to knock something like a C-17 or C-130 carrying Rapid Dragon right out of the sky before it can be a threat.
055 Large Destroyer Thread II
- Thread starter Blitzo
- Start date
Why do you think US strategic planning assumes the other side won't try to strike back in a large scale conventional warfare scenario?
If you think about it, one of the main reasons they are scrambling to develop a large scale saturation attack capability is exactly because the ability of PLAN to defend and strike back against extant strategic/theatre fires is getting better and better with each year passing by.
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kwaigonegin
Colonel
Huh? The DoD, the war college and bunch of other entities s are constantly running war simulations, reevaluating opfor using the latest intel they have on China, Russia etc. forces.
Do not confused the average American civilian and certainly politicians on matters of war and war fighting.
There are many extremely smart and highly capable analysts and strategic thinkers in the Pentagon and other places.
I can guarantee you those folks definitely would not be assuming that countries like China won't strike back. If anything they would likely overestimate Chinese capabilities not to dissimilar to the 1980s when the Pentagon almost w/o fail almost always overestimated Russian capabilities from unit level to training, preparedness and strategies.
The same with Gulf War I, II etc. Why do you think we won the war so easily? Because we significantly overestimated Saddam's warfighting capabilities and planned it as such.
The United States also has severely underestimated their adversaries before. Such as China in the Korean war and Vietnam war, the biggest two wars that the US fought since WW2
because their procurement reflects this. Rapid Dragon uses slow, expensive and high RCS cargo planes that they have a limited number of to launch land attack standoff weapons with ~900 km range over open ocean. note that reaching land in a straight line is not enough, many targets are inland or defended, so effective range is within a few hundred km of the Chinese coast.
the only rational explanation is that they expect slow, high RCS cargo planes to be survivable or expendable. Since they're expensive, they're probably not expendable. so that means they expect them to survive, which means they think nobody is shooting back.
I see that definitely as the first choice solution for specific circumstances, like when there is robust support from PLAAF and a long range sensor platform along that vector. However, there would definitely be times, and possibly even the majority of time, where long range land based platforms wont be available, or that they are not detected before launch.
Seems like the planners on the defensive side would have plans fororganic capabilities to defeat that. Since PLAN is much faster than most navies in terms of designing and deploying counters, i would assume they have something in the works. Something organic to the task force seems to be required.
CIWS seems a loigcal solution of low cost. Currenly a single gun based CIWS and a 24 close range missles arent going to be sufficient for large scale rippled salvos. The US navy actually faces a similar type of issue from different type of platforms, and a big part of their answer has been ESSMs in large numbers. You do need layered defense in those scenarios.
Valid point.
However, I wouldn't exactly call C-130s expensive in the minds of US planners. If you think about them as being used to paying for a platform with limited weapons loadout for a large fraction of 1B like the constellation (although it is a very survivable platform with long endurance), and close to 2B for the likes of the San Antonio.
FriedRiceNSpice
Captain
I don't think Rapid Dragon is designed to be employed in isolation. I would envision it would be used in tandem with other platforms/systems as part of large scale saturation attacks. A weapons system can offer value outside of its direct use, ie causing an adversary to divert resources to counter it. At a procurement level, resources being channeled for R&D and production of ultra long range SAMs to counter Rapid Drston will result in less resources for procurement of other weapons systems. At operational level, more VLS tubes on board 055s/052Ds being dedicated to SAMs to defend against saturation attacks will result in less tubes available for carrying offensive missiles.
I'd say at this point in its historical, economic and political development that organizational myopia is a genuine issue in the West. But there's certainly loads of idiot fanboys who think they can underestimate the opponent. Plenty of morons on both sides of the Pacific.