Carriers aren’t the only ships you need to attack. For high performing air launched cruise missiles destroyers are a more ideal target.
H-20 bomber (with H-X, JH-XX)
- Thread starter Deino
- Start date
Why are destroyers more ideal targets? Take out the carrier, you neuter a carrier group, taking out the majority of its sustainable land-attack capability. Destroyers to me seem like more ideal targets only if you're trying to thin out air defenses in advance of attacking the heart of the group.
Take out the destroyers and the carriers are sitting ducks for your other missiles since the destroyers are what provides the air defense? Not every single missile needs to be an assassin’s mace?
There are 3 different types of weapon systems the military has: (Low end, Medium end, and High end.)
While I agree not everything has to be "High end". There will always be a need for some of the Lower end stuff.
But I predict the H-20 bomber is going to be a "High end" product.
It's going to be large, expensive, and highly capable.....enough to sink an aircraft carrier.
Furthermore if China wants to reach out to the 3rd island chain it's going to need to develop the capacity to sink a carrier beyond the range of a DF-26 missile. I think the H-20 bomber is going to give China this capability.
There was never a scenario where the air force’s primary job is to sink an aircraft carrier. That’s what the rocket force is for. The job of air launched strikes is to make it easier for the rocket force to land kills on bigger targets. Insofar as the H-20 is a vital platform for attacking the 2nd island chain and out its job is to kill land bases.
Technically the task of Sinking carriers should fall to the PLAN carrier strike groups. Atleast, if they want to fight the US in the high seas rather than only operate within the first island chain. In order to do that, relying on Ship-based missiles is problematic since the amount of VLS cells is limited and must be kept for Air defense duties. So, having good air launched missiles that super/hypersonic is a big improvement. This will make carrier planes much more useful in a blue water battle.
Using carriers to fight carriers is not in line with current PLAN doctrine, but even if it were you should want to allocate your munitions packages for bigger targets to the platforms that can more easily carry and support them, your ships, and offload striking of carrier support assets like group air defense onto your aerial platforms, since they are always going to be more limited in what strike packages they can carry. Ultimately the point is it’s not the job of the planes to be carrier killers. The only time they can be used in such a capacity is if the opponent carrier group loses all its air defenses, in which case the planes don’t need very advanced strike packages to begin with.
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Well, what I am still trying to figure out is - Were the Guancha Gang just referring to the missiles (Beijing Heavy Hammer and target missile) themselves, or inclusive of their respective launch platforms (i.e. H-6N and H-20) as well when making those aforementioned comments?
Because how the sentences/phrases were stated by @Tomboy, @bsdnf and @Jason_ did generate some confusion per se, especially WRT the guess-timation attempts on the H-20's anticipated overall dimensions.
They did say H-6 may finally be pushed to its limit with these new missiles as they are expected to be so large that H-6 may only be able to carry a single one of these similar to the Beijing Heavy hammer. Hence, they speculate the push for heavy bombers could be that there are so many advanced ALCM/ALBM that cannot be efficiently airlaunched by H-6 due to their size.
Understood.
In that case, and considering the push for heavy bombers in the PLAAF as mentioned - If these new missiles are expected to grow so big and so heavy such that the H-6K/J/Ns are unable to carry more than one of them per plane using the underwing pylons, and that carrying only one missile underneath the belly of the aircraft:
One or two (parallel) 10+ meter-long IWBs on the H-20 will (not would) become unavoidable, in this case. This means that the H-20 will have to be considerably longer than the B-2, let alone the B-21. This would also exclude pure flying wing designs with shallower wing sweep angles like the ones found on the B-2 and B-21, otherwise the H-20 would become too massive.
Therefore, the H-20 would be considerably large - Larger than the B-2. Estimated overall dimension could be somewhere around the Tu-22M and B-1B in extended wing configurations (if not wider), whereas the estimated MTOW could be somewhere around the B-1B (~220 tons). High-subsonic-capable only, given the massive combat radius and payload capacity required for the H-20's expected mission set.
Of course, this is only my own interpretation and deduction on the matter, given the limited information available on the H-20 so far.
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