China can and will achieve total air superiority over Taiwan

Unless China really can land these missiles with pinpoint accuracy and therefore fit specific kinds of warheads for specific targets, I quite agree.

Despite accusations of being a war Criminal I still say the best use is to force the exhaustion of Taiwan's prime airdefence missiles by sending a small but regular number on a daily basis towards Taiwan's population centres. This is not Area Bombing as somebody said, nor is it likely to cause anything like the number of casualties necessary to be describes as a "War Crime". In fact given the notice and good Air Defences I would not expect many of the missiles to get through and therefore hardly enough to provide a pretext for anyone to involve themselves (assuming they would do in any circumstances let alone that any assistance would heave been invalidated by the Taiwanese actions which prompted the action in the first place).

No this is about disturbing the public, embarrassing the Taiwanese government and exhausting Air Defence missiles. Some would describe such an action as restraint!

Tell me Gollevainen, what would half a dozen SRBM warheads be equivalent to in Artillery Rounds or Dumb Aerial Bomb terms?

thanks

SampanViking:
Indescriminately targeting civilian population centers is a war crime indepedent of the number of casualties.
Foreign intervention might need a certain bodycount, but the pr side might decide if the count is low.
Tv pictures reminiscent of the V2`s hitting London would be terrible for China.

Golly.
Think we agree on this one.
The math gets very ugly for the SRBM guys.
Short summary without actually doing any math

1. Enough missiles to crater the runway at a certain intervals.
The CEP, even at say 50m, gives you a large numbers of missiles.
2. Malfunctions. Every hitpoint needs several missiles actually hitting it. If you only have one, that might malfuntion, leaving a clear stretch of runway, and voila, mission failure.
3. Patriots shoot down some missiles. -> you need and enormous number of missiles to guarantee that all the runway gets cratered. An interesting article in "the bulletin of the atomic scientist" described how americans where targeting Moscwow with its ABM defences. They used more than the number of the available interceptors + some to ensure target destruction.

So its practically impossible to ensure the destruction of the runway with SRBM`s, and if you could crater it, Golly might just need to fill in one or two craters to get aircraft going again.

Personally I dont think is such a bad idea to fire SRBM`s at the airports, but as a part of a larger plan with aircraft and cruise missiles. The SRBM`s would add to the total workload of the defenders if they hit anything or not.

Generally when targeting an airport you do as I said in my previous post, target hard to replace infrastructure, personell and aircraft.
If you target the runway, you would want to crater it (durandals, leaves ca 5m deep and 15m wide crater), and then disperse timed submunitions, anti-personell mines, mines that go off on radio signals etc. to kill the repair guys (golly ) and make it as timeconsuming as possible to clear and repair.

Gollevainen said:

But my point still remains. Most chinese ballistic missiles have around 500-600m CEP.

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have to correct you on this. Even Chinese ICBMs have smaller CEP than that. As I posted before, a DF-5A in the 80s was measured to have a CEP of 250 m after 9000 km of flight. And with adjustment from Beidou, the recent Chinese SRBMs can expect a CEP of 30 m if not even smaller than that.

tphuang said:

have to correct you on this. Even Chinese ICBMs have smaller CEP than that. As I posted before, a DF-5A in the 80s was measured to have a CEP of 250 m after 9000 km of flight. And with adjustment from Beidou, the recent Chinese SRBMs can expect a CEP of 30 m if not even smaller than that.

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Regarding accuracy I'll try to get more accurate info and get back to you on that one.

It may interest you to note that Lee Teng Hui revealed some of the SRBMs were equipped with dummy warheads back in '96 although that idiotic move cost the lives of several senior sources for the MIB. I would bet my money some of the warheads are still dummys although now a far smaller percentage-SRBMs are mainly psychological weapons-expect the real targeting to come from LACMs such as the "DH-10". However in spite of the incessant M-9/11 barrages, the real battle for air superiority will be decided in the air and the situation there is quite disturbing as the PLAAF enjoys a quantitative and increasingly qualitative advantage over the ROCAF.

While I give ROCAF pilots a slight edge over their PLAAF counterparts as well as parity in platforms, in ammunition terms the M-2000s have around 14 MICA warshots for each aircraft while the 146 F-16s have to share 338 AIM-120Cs or rely on the semi active homing AIM-7s while I am sure the J-10A and the Sukhois recieve at least 4 AA-12/aircraft, the rest of the inventory in the Nanjing MR facing Taiwan can act as 'bait' to exhaust the AIM-120s. I personally would junk the Bush stalled F-16C/D deal for now and purchase another 800 AIM-120Cs-it is the only sensible thing to do until Bush leaves office.

Or simply order 66 Rafale with follow on tranches of 128 and 60 to replace the 60 odd F-5s, FCK-1s and M-2000s with a later option of 150 for the current F-16A/B MLUs to keep fighter strength at c.400. For all their talk of excellent "Sino-French relations" I don't believe the French can resist the lure of 200-400 Rafales being sold even to Taiwan given its abysmal sales record while Taiwan gets a qualitatively superior fighter, leverage on existing MICA stocks, possible ToT or coproduction, more French 'goodies' for the other services and quite possible access to the Neuron project.

tphuang said:

have to correct you on this. Even Chinese ICBMs have smaller CEP than that. As I posted before, a DF-5A in the 80s was measured to have a CEP of 250 m after 9000 km of flight. And with adjustment from Beidou, the recent Chinese SRBMs can expect a CEP of 30 m if not even smaller than that.

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Even the longer ranged MLRS, only stabilized, not guided, have much better CEP than that.

While I give ROCAF pilots a slight edge over their PLAAF counterparts as well as parity in platforms, in ammunition terms the M-2000s have around 14 MICA warshots for each aircraft

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I have never seen a M2000 with this kind of layout before. I wonder what happens to the plane's "drag". FYI, the ROCAF only has 400 MICA missiles.

while the 146 F-16s have to share 338 AIM-120Cs or rely on the semi active homing AIM-7s while I am sure the J-10A and the Sukhois recieve at least 4 AA-12/aircraft, the rest of the inventory in the Nanjing MR facing Taiwan can act as 'bait' to exhaust the AIM-120s. I personally would junk the Bush stalled F-16C/D deal for now and purchase another 800 AIM-120Cs-it is the only sensible thing to do until Bush leaves office.

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Past ratios of PLA missile buying shows that they are enormously buffered. Over 1800 R-27s and 3600 R-73s were imported for a then much smaller Flanker fleet. That gives you an idea of how many they may have bought for R-77s. PLAN bought 500 Sunburns (KANWA source) for a mere four ships.

These kind of ratios show that the ROCAF cannot afford and simply rarely does firing exercises. In contrast, the PLA has more than enough munitions to spend. Also the J-10 does not use R-77s, it uses locally manufactured stuff, the PL-12.

If you want to use decoys, just use drones or remotely controlled old J-7 and J-6 fighters. Plenty of that around, and its been confirmed tested.

The best way to counter a massive ARH surge would be via ECM, and again, we are seeing quite extensive efforts in this area by the PLA.

Or simply order 66 Rafale with follow on tranches of 128 and 60 to replace the 60 odd F-5s, FCK-1s and M-2000s with a later option of 150 for the current F-16A/B MLUs to keep fighter strength at c.400. For all their talk of excellent "Sino-French relations" I don't believe the French can resist the lure of 200-400 Rafales being sold even to Taiwan given its abysmal sales record while Taiwan gets a qualitatively superior fighter, leverage on existing MICA stocks, possible ToT or coproduction, more French 'goodies' for the other services and quite possible access to the Neuron project.

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Sorry, but French and ROC military relations took a heavy downturn due ot the Kang Ding/Lafayette frigate scandals, climaxing with the mysterious death of a ROCN officer. Many suspect that the French gave information to the PLA in the mainland to placate the mainlanders, and many also suspect that the M2000 and the MICA also have been compromised.

On the subject of SRBM use; based on the evidence presented here (some of the most damning evidence on the effectiveness of the PLA's SRBM arsenal) I would contend that the best way to use the PLA's SRBMs is, to borrow an American football term, to run interference on the ROC's AD network by combing an initial barrage with a simaltaeneous massive airstrike and cruise missle salvo. The idea would be to overwhelm them. It's a blunt tactic, not very clever, but given what the PLA has at its disposal I think that it would be an effective option because it would force SAM batteries to choose targets and would make it very hard for the ROCAF to intercept because (given the fact that the BMs would land as the ROCAF fighters would be taking off to intercept the incoming aircraft) even one or two missles carrying cluster munitions would be able to do quite a bit of damage because the ROCAF fighters would be lined up, close to the runway, out of their shelters, taxing to takeoff. So the airbases would also have to choose; risk a BM strike on almost all the bases planes at their most vunerable or face a coming airstrike with most of their planes still on the ground.

But of course I'm not in charge of the 2nd Artillery. That's okay though, this discussion has gone into hypotheticals anyway.

^ That's absolutely correct. The PLA will not have real time targeting information, so it can only target fixed permanent facilities with its "regular" SRBM's. Since most permanent facilities like buildings are large and can be hardened / entrenched, they are resistant. But runways can be temporarily disabled with SRBM armed with cluster bomblets. I'm not so sure an ad hoc effort with gravel and a bulldozer can really make a runway useful for a jet fighter (maybe take off but certainly not landing).

This gives the PLA about a 10 hour window to launch the real attack while the ROCAF is incapable of taking off.

Roger604 said:

^ That's absolutely correct. The PLA will not have real time targeting information, so it can only target fixed permanent facilities with its "regular" SRBM's. Since most permanent facilities like buildings are large and can be hardened / entrenched, they are resistant. But runways can be temporarily disabled with SRBM armed with cluster bomblets. I'm not so sure an ad hoc effort with gravel and a bulldozer can really make a runway useful for a jet fighter (maybe take off but certainly not landing).

This gives the PLA about a 10 hour window to launch the real attack while the ROCAF is incapable of taking off.

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Using gravel, bulldozer and special mesh / plating is highly effective. This is ofcourse something thats been thouroghly researched and that the airforce trains on.

I also tried to make the point that you cannot guarantee to crater the entire runway with SRBM`s. You might end up with aircraft taking of immidiately. Without any craters you can clear the submunitions with armoured bulldozers.

have to correct you on this. Even Chinese ICBMs have smaller CEP than that. As I posted before, a DF-5A in the 80s was measured to have a CEP of 250 m after 9000 km of flight. And with adjustment from Beidou, the recent Chinese SRBMs can expect a CEP of 30 m if not even smaller than that.

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We are talking about DF-11 and DF-15, the missiles which are even remotely practical to be used with conventional warheads and against Taiwan. Of those the DF-15 is reported with later models and after system modernisation still in development to achive the quoted almoust 30 m CEP. The normal CEP of those missiles is several hundred meters, 500 m at max.

But with the usual "If that one has that, then this can have it too" logic, ofcourse smaller CEPs can be achived and applied to all missiles

I'm not so sure an ad hoc effort with gravel and a bulldozer can really make a runway useful for a jet fighter (maybe take off but certainly not landing).

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Rodger, a homework to you...How long it takes to normal asphalt (AB) to stiff and harder enough to be able to use after its being laid down??