Comparing 1990 with today

I would like to thank IDont for showing respect for this thread and actually supplying a number. I'd also like to encourage the others to do the same, preferably explaining their figure.

Also, to answer IDont about s-300, according to news articles commented by the folks at china-defense.com china has 32 launcher vehicles for s300pmu, 96 launchers for s300pmu1 and 64 launchers for s300pmu2. With a launcher carrying four missiles that'd mean 768 missiles ready to be launched within seconds. They also say only 8-16 launchers of chinese made s300 (hq9) have been fielded so far, as its still an evolving design.

Some of you are asking what is the scenario here... well, i didnt wanna make a detailed one on purpose cause i feared it'd turn into this. Another china vs us who is better contest. I merely was interested in a figure of US planes lost if somehow, anyhow, US got itself into a situation where it decided to launch a full scale air war on china. I would assume objective of such a war would be to inflict as much damage to chinse forces, industry and infrastructure as posible. But if you want a real scenario - make one up, i don't mind.

To those who are asking how many weapons US has, i can offer number on three systems: JDAMS number around 25000 in us inventory, tomahawk cruise missiles numbered just over 2 000 after the iraq invasion, air launched cruise missiles (i forgot the name but you all know which one i'm talking about) ranged from 200-300 pieces. After low rate test production throughout 2004 full scale production of tomahawk block IV has commenced sometime in 2005, i think it was summer, but i forgot. Just go on raytheon pages, they should have the news archive up. They cite the plan to push the tomahawk inventory back to 5000 pieces over a course of 6 years. That'd mean 3 thousand missiles in 6 years... that's some 40 missiles produced per month.

Oh, and, i'm sorry, i messed up. The thread title should read 1991, not 1990.

Hi Totoro

I would give you a number, but could you be more clearly about the objective. It would be totally different things, if you just imply that US mission is to make as much damage as it could on the chinese force, infrastructure and industry as possible and gaining air superior. Or US is going to complete destroy the Chinese Air force and Air defence, wipe out all the communication and infrastructure. I think it will be rather impossible, if this is the scenario without US involving every aspects of their force.

bd popeye said:

Hummmmmm

Well Slacpiv, a man of his word, who has not posted in two weeks said it best below......Please read;

http://www.sinodefenceforum.com/showthread.php?p=24258#post24258



I agree with most of waht he posted. I have relugated myself to simple post and posting lots of pictures of the worlds greatest Navy.

Personally I would like to see a strong PRC for the sake of Asia.

Keep smilin'

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Well, Slackpiv is right on a lot of points. But to me, he has his own set of agendas. He seems to think that everything made by the Russians are better than the American stuff from the same generation. I wouldn't use his quotes as a guideline. If you read over some of his past posts, you would see that he is just as biased as some of the Chinese on this forum.

IDonT said:

SampanViking,

We are going to go in circles in this type of threads.
In your scenario, no ground forces will be involved. Therefore, the population density of China is a non factor. In a land war, the sheer numbers of the PLA, if you can concentrate them, will overwhelm US ground forces. In fact, PLA troops are the only troops to drive the US marines from a beach.

You are right of course that China is no Iraq, Iran, and Serbia COMBINED. However, its present threat level is not comparable to the late Soviet Union. It has decades before it can even match it, and at the same time, the US technological gap is widening.

As for my 300 number losses, I stand by it. Why, US uses a lot of standoff munitions in high threat environment, thereby lowering the risk of getting shot down. The threat to actual air assets that actually go "feet dry" on Chinese soil, will be diminished from the stand off attacks, lowering the probability of being shot down. As this hypothetical airwar drags on, Chinese operational tempo will not be able to sustain or keep up with that of the US.



How accurate are those missiles?
The main problem of the US airwar is basing. There are the carriers, Guam, Okinawa, and possibly Taiwan. The carriers are highly mobile and trying to locate and attack them is another discussion entirely. Let's just say they are very very difficult to attack. Second is basing...Guam can host the US bombers while Okinawa and Taiwan will have the US fighter planes. (Hypothetical scenario ignoring political consideration) As far as I know, Taiwan and Okinawa have very excellent hardened shelters. Does the PLAAF have the accuracy of hitting these with their ballistic missiles? Do they have "bunker buster" type guided munitions designed to take out steel reinforced concrete?


If your read my post earlier, one of the things I stressed is AEW. PLAAF is just not up to speed in tracking and organizing those numbers of aircraft plus processing the multitude of information from a fluid air battle. How will they handle IFF? How accurately vector armed aircraft to hostiles, empty aircraft to tankers, and aircraft with no ammo to go down and reload? If you are a SAM commander, how would you know if what your shooting at is hostile or friendly? That is even before we factor in decoys and jamming. IF you only know the capabilities of the Prowlers. It can disrupt both radar AND communication signals. So a PLAAF pilot may received false data, etc...

All I can see is, China is good- but not that good. It still has a long way to go before it can stand toe to toe with the US.

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SOME QUESTION TO GET CLEARED FIRST

1. what is the type of conflict ? total war to destroy china or limited conflict over taiwan

2. where will the US attack from.
India /Russian/ south east asia is unlikely given the reason listed above. this leraves out korea and Japan both of which are withen range of china missiles. they also have alot more to lose then gain in a war with china.

A.korea faces the threat of MR.Kim with chinese support, given the range of SOUL to the border is highly unlikely the will try to piss of China.

B. penality Japan will face will be mostly economical is term of investment lost and trade reduction given the state of chinese nationalism. Natural anti-war elements in Japan will also resist possible conflict.

3.what is the target? is it certin airfield/ factory/military base

or large area in general

I think there are two parts to answering this question:

How well would Chinese SAM's fare against cruise missile attacks?

The answer is probably not too badly, since it is admitted that China is capable of technology that at least equals S-300PMU1 and it produces a diverse range of SAM's. It is also hard to believe that China could lose a production war when defending. The US cannot make cruise missiles faster nor cheaper than China can pump out SAM's.

Since the damage from cruise missile attacks would be very limited, as many posters point out, it is incredulous to think a country as large as China couldn't simply brush them aside.

How well would Chinese defenses fare against air strikes?

If there were no SAM's at all, admittedly the US's superior quantity of fighters would be highly advantageous. Qualitatively, the US has a small handful of F-22's but the Flanker is better than the F-16 or F-15.

But the fact that bases are limited and supply lines are long means the US can't bring all its potential air power to bear. Add to that the near certainty that plenty of SAM's and AWACS will be around, as well as cheap aircraft to swarm the F-22's, mean that the situation is hopeless for the US.

In conclusion: Given the serious quantitative/production superiority and only slight technological inferiority for the Chinese side, I expect a air war to result in 1:1 losses until the US calls it quits.

Even if the US makes a total dedicated effort, it could only maybe destroy the PLAAF's modern airforce and SAM's before it runs out of trained pilots and planes. Even then, there are still old jets under the PLAAF and lower tech SAM's and AA guns operated by the PLA remaining.

Hi Totoro

Well I think you can tell that Kyli, Roger604 and I are all holding roughly the same position.

But thank you for explaining your question better last night, I think I understand what you are after better.

Correct me if I am wrong, but I read your question as "What level of casulaties would the US suffer in a Desert Storm type operation,and over what time duration period, before it attained total Air dominance over China, and how would this compare to the effort Iraq put up in 1991?" You Agree?

OK

Well the honest answer is I do not think the US would be ever able to establish total Air Dominance over Chinese Airspace, which means the conflict would be open ended as would the US Casualty figures. They would continue to climb until such time as the US either gave up and no longer had sufficient material to continue the Campaign.

For the record, I do not believe this is not a unique position. If you poised the question regarding any two parties from the USA, EU, Russian Federation, China and India attacking each other, I would give the same answer. Namely that there is too much infrastructure and territory for any stand alone Air Campaign to succede. With countries of this size, the best you could hope for would be local/temporary Air Dominance, sufficent for a land Invasion to begin, but that is a totally different can of worms, and do not propose to go there.

In Conclusion - I think Iran would have been a better example target for this kind of exercise.

Well I personally think that in this sort of scenario, TWO things come as crucial. Firts is the range where US can conduct these attacks and the seccond is the chinese homeland defences. lot is already said about the latter so i write a bit about the range...

the range is the moust crucial element. Important thing to remember is that currently, US navy lacks the true bomber and EAW/SEAD planes as old A-6s are retaired and the replacements are just flying their test fligths. This leaves USN a pretty much under the range of its F/A-18A/C/Es and that brings it close to Chinese naval forces. And Iraq lacked any capapility to threathen US naval presense, and in scenario size as this one this remains more important factor to US forces, if it wants to conduct attacks trougth it key coastal targets, ports, cityes ec...So the question should be, wheter USN is ready to risk its carriers and Tomahawk launching subs/surface ships under range of chinese naval component and air arm...

So when the size factor that you gave as ten, then count the factor that chinese resisting capapility is way different class than iraqians....I would say if US wants to win anything with assault like that, it would need a hell of a good reason to do so...

bd popeye said:

Hummmmmm

Well Slacpiv, a man of his word, who has not posted in two weeks said it best below......Please read;

http://www.sinodefenceforum.com/showthread.php?p=24258#post24258



I agree with most of waht he posted. I have relugated myself to simple post and posting lots of pictures of the worlds greatest Navy.

Personally I would like to see a strong PRC for the sake of Asia.

Keep smilin'

Click to expand...

The talk of a confident American indeed! And if war was just a match of the specifications of a weapon that would be just great. But surely the Vietnamese and Korean war has learnt us that underestimation is the biggest mistake to make, and USA is an expert on it... Just look at Vietnam, Korea and why not the Iraqi quagmire....

Possibly as a comparison should we look at US airforce losses during the
Vietnam war ?

To KYli: Lets say US objectives are these: to destroy every military airfield, to destroy every plane/helicopter on the runways or any other place where they could be located. To destroy all the known command centers, to destroy most of military communcations network throughout the country. To destroy military ports and all the capital PLAN vessels. To destroy all the factories of military equipment, ranging from plane assembleys, tank factories, missile factories to shipyards capable of producing military ships, etc. And, of course, to destroy all the SAM sites ( basically every sam that has range more than 10-15 km) and all the chinese fighters that might get in the way of achieving the previously mentioned tasks.

Not counting the mobile targets, i would say these listed fixed targets would number in hundreds of sites, most of them large enough and spread enough to require dozens of bombs to be destroyed.

I will also use this chance to comment on following claims:

"If the people here believe that china can hit a moving target the size of vessel when no missile can do that against a static target, then let them."

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I would like a clarification of this. What kind of missile is talked about here? If we're talking about a conventional ballistic missile - then i agree that they can't be used against a naval fleet with any sort of efficiency.

"If they think China can launch their 200 - 300km missiles at US naval assets without being harrased by F-18S, sea wolfs, LAs, then they can."

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Harrased? Of course. US wouldn't sit still, it'd inflict heavy losses, maybe and probably bigger ones than it'd suffer itself - but in the end, it is quite within the realm of reality that US assets would also be hit. Exact range of damage and loss is a matter of scale of the attack versus scale of defense.

"If they think that they can launch missiles without over the horizon reconaissance, then they can."

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You can launch, you can't hit anything. We agree.

"If they dont believe that the sm-3, sm-3, ESSM, sea ram, or the phalanx can intercept their missiles when they number in the hundreds in a US carrier group, let them."

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Yes, they can intercept a certain number of missiles, surely numbering in hundreds.

"If they think the only thing to stealth technology is an airframe and paint, let them."

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I'm claiming, when it comes to radar stealth, that airframe shaping (on a macro and micro level), construction material, paint, then finally size (also in accordance with construction design) have an impact on probability of detection. Various active antiradar measures not included but yes, they are out there too.

"If they thin the 093 is more powerful than anything the Russians have to offer when every other soures days it's in the same class as the victor III, let them."

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I don't believe 093 is more powerful, not by far. I do believe it is quieter than victor 3.

"If they think the J-10 is more capable than a su-27 when most sources say it's on the same level as a f-16 blk 30, let them."

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I would, actually, agree j-10 is on same level as said f16. is j-10 more capable than su27? Overall - no. But in a dogfight it probably does have the upper hand.

"If they think China can catch up in engine, radar, and avionics technology in less than a decade to match the f-22 let them."

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Nope. I don't think china can match f22 today. radar and other avionics tech is some 10 years behind while engine tech might be even 15 years or more behind the US.

"If they think cheap labor can get them cheap advanced fighters, let them."

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if by cheap labor one means cheapest available in the country - then i say thats impossible. If it's as expensive as US one in relative terms (while still being cheaper in absolute terms) then i do say - such labor can produce cheapER advanced fighters. On same tech level - what US may produce for 150 million, china can produce for 75 million. If we're talking about tech advantage US enjoys - then china needs to invest additional money and time to produce same level tech.

"If they think that they can take on 4+ US carriers at once, let them."

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I don't believe china can do that. It can take on two at once, max. Maybe three if its willing to lose pretty much all its fleet and air force.

"If they think they have the same level of missile saturation ability as the soviets did in the hieght of their power let them."

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I do believe they can have a higher level of missile saturation, as long as the target is within some 1000-1500 km from china's coast.


To get more on topic, sort of. I toyed with the idea of comparing the vietnam US losses too but decided against it as it was a different kind of war, where a majority of losses for the US were due to combat air support missions. Here there would be no such missions.