The Iraqi's have a well developed command and control ability. They needed this ability as the Iraqi military was very centralized.
Completely irrelevent. Whether Iraq had command and control ability does not invalidate the statement that they had a poorly trained military, with little manufacturing capabilities for military equipments, and no R&D capability. No R&D capability means they cannot develop new methods to track a CVBG. And whether Iraq had command and control ability is also not an indication as to whether China can or cannot track a CVBG.
Like I said, different situation. The Iraqi's could track a carrier group that was operating in a confined space with limited room to manoeuvrer. This narrows a search area significantly. If you have the open seas to manoeuvrer, and freedom to go wherever you want, the chances of finding a carrier group drops significantly.
Again, irrelevant.
First, whether Iraq could actually track a CVBG in the first place is a big question. Assuming they could, you would be right in saying
they would have had a much harder time finding the CVBG in the open ocean. However, it is still not an indication of China's ability or lack thereof and my argument still stands.
Second, achieving what Iraq did back then would be as relatively easy as lifting a finger for China today. By extension, a task which is extremely challenging to the Iraqi's is a whole lot easier for China to tackle. Something which Iraq could not achieve does not imply China cannot do it.
You can throw another thousand examples citing what Iraq could not do, they will still be irrelevant and my argument will still stand.
Doesn't matter. And it is not possible to definitively say a passive sonar contact is positively military, and is hostile.
I think you imagined me to claim that all sources of noise in the area are military in origin, whereas my original statement involved the use of acoustic signatures to identify military vessels.
ASW by ships and helicopters can isolate the noise of a submarine from those of friendly ships and pinpoints the sub's exact location. Your scenario where the network being so lousy to the point of not able to pick out military vessels from normal civilian activities is simply preposterous and will not happen. And this won't change just by waving your hands in the air and say "it doesn't matter".
Broad surveillance systems are known so any detection method is countered either by denying sensor information, misleading, or providing expected results consistent with something else. ESM systems rely on active emissions from radars or communication systems. So nothing is radiated. Overhead systems are in known orbits, are predictable, and their sensing capabilities known. So the track is varied, weather is sought out to hide in when vulnerable, blending into sea lanes (while staying out of visual detection range of ships) and such techniques. Deceptive lighting is used at night so that the obvious "blacked out warship" is instead thought to be a merchant or cruise liner. Surface search radar identical to commercial ones are used. Turn count masking is used by the ships. Aircraft maintenance on the CV and other helo equipped ships is limited to prevent transmissions. Military ships can operate under various EMCON states, and warships are carefully designed to ensure that there is no stray emissions.
In NORPAC 82 using these and other tactics the ships of the USS Midway carrier group operated close enough to support each other, but far enough and randomly dispersed to avoid identification by anyone. In one night in bad weather a man went overboard when the group was within 200nm of a Soviet airfield in the Kuril Island chain. Despite launch of helicopters and active search methods by several ships in the successful SAR, including clear voice UHF transmissions, the force is not detected because no Soviet asset was above the radar horizon. No overhead system was cued. The force continued on, undetected.
Much of the process of targeting is determining which of the many contacts detected is the one you are looking for. Most techniques rely on exploiting the Achilles heel of radar and communication. To work, you have to transmit, and by transmitting you tell the opposition who and where you are. Don't transmit, and he has to find you the hard way, by visually searching the vast ocean area 10sqnm at a time. If the opposition is going to search with active sensors such as Radar, he is also telling you where he is and who he is. So fighters and strike aircraft can run out the ESM line of bearing and bag the asset before it has a chance of detecting the task force.
If you are going to copy from
, at least do it right and provide a reference. Copy and pasting paragraphs as your own words is plagiarizing, and it doesn't mean you know what you are saying.
Practically all the arguments involving ESM so far assumes the opponent is afraid to use active search and had to rely on visual identification. In the case of China that's just not going to happen. Furthermore, US can use ESM but China can also do so along with active searches. US can use deceptions to hide its fleets, but there is nothing to prevent China to use ruses by "misleading, or providing expected results consistent with something else" to give the CVBG a false sense of security either.
The Americans have lots of options in neutralizing point positions. Don't forget the large numbers of Tomahawk cruise missiles that have a range of 2,500km. Practically every surface and subsurface combatant aside from the frigates and carriers have Tomahawk missiles. Not to mention the vast amounts of stand-off weapons available to the US aircraft, such as the JASSM and SLAM-ER.
The threat of crusise missiles has been known for decades, and methods have been actively researched to deal with this problem. Today, these missiles will have to deal with air defense just as their aircraft counterpart would. If you want to talk about missiles, then you might want to focus your attention on hundreds of MRBMs and thousands of cruise missiles that will be heading toward US bases in the region.
And we are assuming that there will only be one carrier group; the Americans in large conflicts close to the sea operate multiple carrier groups in the region, coupled with other surface groups. For example, Pearl Harbour has a major group of cruisers, destroyers and frigates that are not attached to a carrier group. Not to mention the availability of the LHD's and LHA's with their flat tops of VSTOL fighters.
So? They will still be subjected to the same amount of defenses. And with every additional ship, with every additional aircraft in the sky, the chance of being detected increases. These ships aren't going to be useful unless they get within range of China coastlines, and they can't get into range without getting detected and risk being sunk.
And BTW, we were very effective in our ability to cut submarine cables or tap them without being detected during the Cold War. And that was with the Soviet-style bastion ASW defence, where the Soviets flooded certain areas with ASW assets.
Soviet-style ASW defense is not the same as a detection network like SOSUS. To cut cables within a hydrophone network is like trying disconnecting cameras from a room filled with survillence cameras. It may not be impossible, but it would be extremely difficult. And just like the operator would see statics when you disconntected a camera, the monitoring stations of a hydrophone network would see sensors going offline thus alerting them that someone is severing the cables. There is an issue of locating the hydrophones and their cables in the first place.
Despite this, civilian and neutral shipping will still be in the area. You can't assume that if you declared a war and a exclusion zone, there will be no neutral shipping in the area. So you have to visually identify and verify your targets otherwise you cannot commit assets.
Nope. Waving your hands in the air and saying "in the area" means absolutely nothing. If there is a usual number of civilian ships, they are going to be kept outside the perimeter of a CVBG, thus putting enough distances between the CVBG and civilian ships for a hydrophone network to differentiate the two. However, there
isn't going to be a usual amount of civilian activities within a war zone. Claiming otherwise and asserting that the opponent must visually identify its targets is as absurd as saying soldiers have to shoot carefully because there are candy stalls in the middle of no-man land.
Despite this, if we are able to partially disable various sections of the sensor grid, you have holes in coverage. Remember, bombs are cheap. The Iraqi's had an advanced air defence system, and we blew large gaping holes into their early warning system on the first night of Desert Storm.
Nope. You will have a degraded sensor grid, not holes. Sonar, and by extension hydrophone network works by triangulation. Triangulation requires a minimum of three hydrophones. Of course there need to be more of them in a real-world application. In any case, if there are hundred hydrophones and you manage to cut fifty of them, the resolution of the network and the fidelity of the data will decrease, but you still wouldn't get a blind spot.
Also, you do know we are discussing an undersea hydrophone network, right? How you imagine bombs and cruise missiles would take out undersea sensors is beyond my comprehension.
As to what Iraq had during Desert Storm, it is completely irrelevant.
Ships in a CVBG never operate in close proximity to each other. Warships are dispersed over a broad area to ensure any detection system does not see the classic "bullseye" formation made famous in countless Public Affairs shots, which is never used in operations. As such, carrier may never see her escorts while on operations.
And precisely because ships in a CVBG is spread out, that's why a hydrophone network will be able to pick out the military vessels.
