such approach is not really viable. China is too large and its borders are too long for something like that. Plus, strategic targets could all be covered with a far smaller number of SAMs, instead of 'wasting' them along the borders. I've actually done a count, using a map of china and 400 km diameter circles. It takes 47 such circles to surround all od china's borders, while maintaining half decent overlapping. (that does not include additional sams to be placed in the interior of the country) One has to note that most of chinese sams have a shorter range, and even s300pmu2, which does have theoretical 200 km range would in practice, against realistic targets have an effective range of less than that stated figure.
Almaz S-300: China's "Offensive" Air Defense
- Thread starter crazyinsane105
- Start date
such approach is not really viable. China is too large and its borders are too long for something like that. Plus, strategic targets could all be covered with a far smaller number of SAMs, instead of 'wasting' them along the borders. I've actually done a count, using a map of china and 400 km diameter circles. It takes 47 such circles to surround all od china's borders, while maintaining half decent overlapping. (that does not include additional sams to be placed in the interior of the country) One has to note that most of chinese sams have a shorter range, and even s300pmu2, which does have theoretical 200 km range would in practice, against realistic targets have an effective range of less than that stated figure.
I think the MPQ-53 set used on the Patriots would do exactly just that, though the vulnerability is the window where the radars are in fire control mode, they won't be in search mode. That's the reasons why the Russians maintain a separate set to do the search mode, although they're also progressing to the same state with the 30N6E? the radar unit on the S-300PMU2, which was also exported to China. But that was already long after China made the HT-233 and H-200 sets, which suspiciously made have been modeled after the MPQ-53.
On the 052C, when the main PARs are in fire control tracking and locking, it may leave the Yagi, which are long wave volume search radars---an old design that you can see even in the Ludas---to do just that, as well as the much newer SR64 radar on top of the mast, to spot and cue for sea skimmers coming up the radar horizon. While the Yagi sounds old and obsolete, its long wave can better catch flying objects that are "stealthed" against the X and S bands but you have to put up with the low refresh rate. In the future, I think another PAR like the Sea-Eagle-Fregat-alikes seen on top of the 054A, might be an alternative to partner with the main PARs.
On Russian vessels with the RIF-M, and including the 051C, the Fregat would do the air search with the RIF-M PAR is doing fire control. Note that the Fregat used here is actually more advanced than the Fregats associated with the Shtil systems. The Fregat that works with the RIF-M is the MA-710 model which appears to be a full phase array with electronic shifting in both elevation and azimuth. This Fregat also equips the 051C, and so yes, the Fregat on the 051C is a step above than the models used on the 052B and 956EM.
Going active guidance may make the cost of the missile go up a bit, but lessens the cost and complexity of the SAM radar.
HQ-9 also has passive variant known as the FT-2000 which was once offered for export. It was because of the FT-2000 the world has its first glimpse of the HQ-9.
If you're referring to NORAD, it's still there and it's a mix of short-range radar, long-range radar, and assorted combat aircraft.
During Soviet times the Soviet Union's Air Defense Forces manned over 10,000 radar stations, 1,200 interceptor aircraft, & had an inventory of ~8,500 surface to air missiles deployed in over 1,000 SAM sites.
For the PRC to emulate such a network with S-300's, by the time that the deployment is complete, the system is probably obsolete.
man overbored
Junior Member
I know, PAC3 should be short ranged, but i can not find a credible source stating its range, anywhere on the net. And i like to think of myself as a decent googler.Figures i've seen range from 30-70 km, and even some ridiculous 200 km plus claims, which are probably mixed up with standards or something.
Speaking of standards... why would they give them such long range, especially in the sm-2 block IV version if USN didn't have means to guide those missiles to its target? I would think E-2 are capable of providing illumination of the targets, instead of ship based illuminators. They have been tested on guiding phoenixes to the target back in their days.
Bouncing off ionosphere, as far as i know, requires huge arrays. Up to 100 m long, or something like that. And, yeah, precision isn't there, but if the missile had some independent terminal guidance - it could probably be done.
The long range of Standard derives from a humongous rocket and from it's direct route of flight. No fuel is wasted in a proportional navigation engagement. If you follow a SARH missile in flight it flies around inside the cone of the signal from the guidance radar and needs a big fragmentation warhead to assure a kill when all you can assume is a near miss, not a direct hit. SM-2 is launched to a point in space guided by an on board INS unit. It flies directly to this point with no wasted energy. The AN-SPY-1 radars can function to provide mid-course guidance instructions to each missile as necessary. For the final second or less of the engagement the SPG illuminates the target to provide final semi-active guidance. The SPG's are multi-plexed in such a way that several final engagements may be accomplished similtaneously, the number depends on how closely grouped these intercepts are. In a saturation missile attack such as the Soviets envisioned there would be a veritable cloud of targets to engage, hence the need for VLS and something like Aegis with the ability to engage over 300 targets all at one time.
S-300 uses Track Via Missile guidance, not semi-active homing. It does not require a fire control radar as such, but does require multiple missile guidance channels, one per missile per engagement. S-300 and it's radars have nothing like the capability of Aegis to engage multiple targets similtaneoulsy.
If you examine Patriot PAC 3 you will notice that TVM guidance has been replaced with active radar homing. The same is true of Standard. SM-6 is due in the fleet in two years. It uses the same guidance package as AMRAAM with the control laws modified for the properties of the Standard airframe. AMRAAM itself has become an outstanding surface to air missile. The Norwegians were the first to recognize this capability, now the US Army and Marines are replacing Hawk with the surface to air version of AMRAAM called SLAMRAAM. Active radar homing frees the fire control from the limits of the number of guidance channels available or the number of fire control radars necessary to guide missiles to their targets. Now every missile will be fire and forget. Standard SM-6 will leave the launcher headed for an INS waypoint then conduct it's own search. Ditto SLAMRAAM. Russia and China have no answer for these. Not even close.
By the way, the whole article assumes these Chinese S-300 batteries even last two days. If you haven't noticed the first thing western air forces do when engaging a determined enemy is to destroy the air defense radar network. Since Kosovo the US has developed AARGM, which can track and engage enemy radars that have shut down to prevent a HARM attack, and it can track and kill moving targets. Coupled with the advanced jamming of the F/A-18G China might not have too many opportunities to use these S-300's before they are silenced.
I'm not sure if that is correct. Both the S-300 and the Aegis SPY require fire control radars and channels for missile guidance. The Aegis, like everything else, is limited by the number of channels you have for each missile.
First, lets clarify the term fire control radar vs. illuminators. Both terms tend to be used interchangeably, but FCR is more of a broad term that includes a radar that is capable of giving fire control quality tracking information. Basically that means the radar is illuminating the target rapidly to get a stream of returns. An illuminator is in effect, a radar flashlight. For the target, both are in fact similar, the target is getting illuminated so frequently it may appear continuous.
The S-300 needs to keep its main phase array at the targets so it can provide the missile with FQ information. Only when the missile is at terminal range will the ground unit get the relayed responses from the seeker.
The interesting thing about this is that it can be decoy proof, because ground computers are much more powerful than whatever you can put inside the missile, and they can sort out the radar returns and determine better which is the real target and which are the decoys. The ground computers can also compare data between those received from the seeker and from the ground radar.
As for AEGIS, its a basic that any missile requires a seperate channel on each own, especially if you're multiplexing at the terminal basket.
Let us say you're engaging 8 targets. You got four illuminators, and 8 missiles on the air, with 8 channels on the ship. Before each missile reaches terminal seeker range, they each have to be guided via datalink, and for each missile you must have a separate datalink channel, otherwise you don't want them to jam each other or have Missile A get instructions that were meant for Missile B.
4 missiles have reached the terminal point, and at this moment, the illuminators are fired up lighting the targets. At this point, these four missiles can leave their channels, which can leave the channels open for four new missiles to be launched. 4 targets are destroyed, another four has reached terminal range, and the illuminators switched their targets to the next four. At this point the second set of four missiles that were being midguided now go into terminal and leaves their channels.
For actively guided missiles, the principle is the same. You need datalink channels for each and every missile, and the channels are maintained until the target is at the seeker terminal range. The real difference is what is illuminating at the terminal range. The radar on the seeker does not have the same emitting power and resolving aperture compared to ship radars by magnitudes. Thus ARH missiles like SARH, require midphase help and guidance via datalink channels.
The real difference between S-300/PAC and AEGIS is that the S-300 needs to keep the channel all the way until it hits the target, where a SARH or ARH missile can leave the channel sooner so that you can rotate different missiles on the same channel faster. Now the question is whether which method, SARH or ARH, can allow the missile to leave the channels sooner.
At minimum range engagements where targets are too close, you can set the seekers to go active or start illuminating as soon as the missile bends over. At these ranges you don't need mid phase guidance since the targets are already at seeker range.
First, lets clarify the term fire control radar vs. illuminators. Both terms tend to be used interchangeably, but FCR is more of a broad term that includes a radar that is capable of giving fire control quality tracking information. Basically that means the radar is illuminating the target rapidly to get a stream of returns. An illuminator is in effect, a radar flashlight. For the target, both are in fact similar, the target is getting illuminated so frequently it may appear continuous.
The S-300 needs to keep its main phase array at the targets so it can provide the missile with FQ information. Only when the missile is at terminal range will the ground unit get the relayed responses from the seeker.
The interesting thing about this is that it can be decoy proof, because ground computers are much more powerful than whatever you can put inside the missile, and they can sort out the radar returns and determine better which is the real target and which are the decoys. The ground computers can also compare data between those received from the seeker and from the ground radar.
As for AEGIS, its a basic that any missile requires a seperate channel on each own, especially if you're multiplexing at the terminal basket.
Let us say you're engaging 8 targets. You got four illuminators, and 8 missiles on the air, with 8 channels on the ship. Before each missile reaches terminal seeker range, they each have to be guided via datalink, and for each missile you must have a separate datalink channel, otherwise you don't want them to jam each other or have Missile A get instructions that were meant for Missile B.
4 missiles have reached the terminal point, and at this moment, the illuminators are fired up lighting the targets. At this point, these four missiles can leave their channels, which can leave the channels open for four new missiles to be launched. 4 targets are destroyed, another four has reached terminal range, and the illuminators switched their targets to the next four. At this point the second set of four missiles that were being midguided now go into terminal and leaves their channels.
For actively guided missiles, the principle is the same. You need datalink channels for each and every missile, and the channels are maintained until the target is at the seeker terminal range. The real difference is what is illuminating at the terminal range. The radar on the seeker does not have the same emitting power and resolving aperture compared to ship radars by magnitudes. Thus ARH missiles like SARH, require midphase help and guidance via datalink channels.
The real difference between S-300/PAC and AEGIS is that the S-300 needs to keep the channel all the way until it hits the target, where a SARH or ARH missile can leave the channel sooner so that you can rotate different missiles on the same channel faster. Now the question is whether which method, SARH or ARH, can allow the missile to leave the channels sooner.
At minimum range engagements where targets are too close, you can set the seekers to go active or start illuminating as soon as the missile bends over. At these ranges you don't need mid phase guidance since the targets are already at seeker range.
Air defence systems can be preserved by simply not switching them on while their existence still limits freedom of action of enemy aircrafts. During Kosovar war, federal Yugoslav army did exactly that, their air defence system suffered minimal damage by remain hidden throughout the conflict, but their presence forced NATO air crafts to fly above 5000m, significantly reducing the accuracy of the bombings. And that was just small calibre AAA and legacy SAM's, for weapons like S-300, they can easily make the attackers avoid certain areas all together, and force the enemy to accompany every mission with SEAD aircrafts, limiting the frequency and scale of air strikes, while SEAD aircraft themselves may be targeted by passive guided weapons.
Last edited:
man overbored
Junior Member
Aegis does not use dedicated data link channels for missile guidance. TVM uses a data link to feed steering commands to each missle from the fire control unit. Aegis is nothing like this. Each missile is given a waypoint prior to launch. Once launched the missile flies to this waypoint using it's inertial navigation system. The Aegis shooter does not need to feed it steering instructions for the missile to reach this waypoint. Aegis may use link 16 to communicate a waypoint to a missile on another ship in the force however. Aegis was designed to allow non-Aegis ships to fire missiles that will be guided by the Aegis ship, thus the Aegis ship becomes more than just a guided missile platform, it is a battle management platform, and non-Aegis ships are in essence missile barges or outboard magazines for the Aegis ship. This is the reason a lot of Spruance class DD's were outfitted with VLS cells. They became magazines for the Aegis cruisers.
Aegis will then track both the targets coming in and the missiles outbound on their intercept tracks. If necessary, the AN/SPY-1 radar, not a data link but the actual radar transmitter, can communicate an updated waypoint to a missile. This is nothing like the data links necessary to send steering commands to a missile like S-300 or Patriot PAC 1 and PAC 2 which use TVM. On those the missile's antenna reads the reflections of the ground radar off the target much as a semi-active radar does but then relays this information to the ground fire control unit, which in turn reads this data and sends each missile it's steering commands. Aegis is noting like this. Each missile flies autonomously to an inertial waypoint navigating from it's on-board INS.
Only for the final fraction of a second does a fire control radar ( the SPG ) illuminate the target so the missile can complete it's intercept. On Aegis ships the illuminators can illuminate several targets at once, allowing several intercepts per illuminator. Since the illuminators are not used for the duration of each engagement but rapidly switched from target to target, several hundred engagements may be managed ( and that is the term ) at the same time since they won't all complete at exactly the same moment.
As for AARGM, it is a new seeker on the old HARM airframe that can find a radar than has been secured, even a mobile radar, and destroy it. The old tactic of shutting off the radar to avoid the anti-radiation missile will be useless. HARM in fact can hit the last known position of a radar after it has been secured, AARGM expands this to find and nail moving radars or radars that were never turned on. By the way, the Serbs lost almost all of their search radars to HARM, their air defense system was completely disabled. Nato could fly all over Serbia with impunity and lost only two aircraft in that conflict. Credit HARM shooters and the EA-6B working together as a team. Today it would be the E/F/A-18G and AARGM.
Aegis will then track both the targets coming in and the missiles outbound on their intercept tracks. If necessary, the AN/SPY-1 radar, not a data link but the actual radar transmitter, can communicate an updated waypoint to a missile. This is nothing like the data links necessary to send steering commands to a missile like S-300 or Patriot PAC 1 and PAC 2 which use TVM. On those the missile's antenna reads the reflections of the ground radar off the target much as a semi-active radar does but then relays this information to the ground fire control unit, which in turn reads this data and sends each missile it's steering commands. Aegis is noting like this. Each missile flies autonomously to an inertial waypoint navigating from it's on-board INS.
Only for the final fraction of a second does a fire control radar ( the SPG ) illuminate the target so the missile can complete it's intercept. On Aegis ships the illuminators can illuminate several targets at once, allowing several intercepts per illuminator. Since the illuminators are not used for the duration of each engagement but rapidly switched from target to target, several hundred engagements may be managed ( and that is the term ) at the same time since they won't all complete at exactly the same moment.
As for AARGM, it is a new seeker on the old HARM airframe that can find a radar than has been secured, even a mobile radar, and destroy it. The old tactic of shutting off the radar to avoid the anti-radiation missile will be useless. HARM in fact can hit the last known position of a radar after it has been secured, AARGM expands this to find and nail moving radars or radars that were never turned on. By the way, the Serbs lost almost all of their search radars to HARM, their air defense system was completely disabled. Nato could fly all over Serbia with impunity and lost only two aircraft in that conflict. Credit HARM shooters and the EA-6B working together as a team. Today it would be the E/F/A-18G and AARGM.
Last edited:
And how is the AARGM suppose to know whether the radar even existed if it has never been switched on? I am not talking about switching the air defence systems on and then switch them off to avoid attacks, I am talking about not switching them on at all to keep the enemy in the dark about their number, location and technical characteristics.
The Serbs were forced to sacrifice some of their search radars to provide early warning inorder to protect vital targets as they did not have any passive detection systems and they did not have any home-on-jam weapons to engage SEAD aircrafts.