I suspect a nice CG - do you think its the Wuhan-Mockup #6,464 ?
J-35 carrier fighter (PLAN) thread
- Thread starter Deino
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Lethe
Captain
Sortie rate is a bunch of wank with little relevance to the primary mission of Chinese carriers: sea control and airspace control. It comes up in USN carrier discussion because the most dreaded, real-world adversary of a USN carrier group is the United States Air Force. In the wake of the 1991 Gulf War, which was itself taken as a model of future conflicts, much was written about how USAF assets delivered far more munitions far more affordably than USN did. That criticism of the carrier group is what drove the design priorities of Ford and its emphasis on sortie rate, which is about maximising the level of sustained firepower delivered on target.
When you appreciate that, especially over the post-Cold War generation of "unipolar dominance", the US armed services chief rivals have been each other, much that was inexplicable becomes clear, particularly on USN's side as it attempted to create and maintain a rationale for its own existence in the absence of a conventional threat. Zumwalt, LCS and Ford all go back to this "relevance deficit". Today you can see the same thing with the US Marine Corps throwing ideas around to maintain their relevance and budgetary allocations in the present and coming era of confrontation with China in which USN is undeniably the most important service with USAF a strong second. The Marine Corps is suddenly coming out with ideas for small-scale intrusion teams, anti-submarine warfare utility helicopters, ground-based anti-ship missiles, etc.
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I'm very confused.
How does sortie rate not have significant relevance to the missions of sea control and airspace control, that would be required of Chinese carriers?
Actually, I'd go a little further -- I would say, holding all else equal (i.e.: the inherent capability of the individual aircraft, like sensors, weapons, range, stealth, networking etc, and friendly force multipliers), that for an aircraft carrier (or indeed any sort of military aviation enabling asset, even ones like an air base).... sortie rate is the foundational key desirable trait for increasing your capability to better prosecute the missions of sea control and airspace control.
I'm going to take a guess, and venture that what you're trying to say is that sortie rate is not the singular only trait desirable relevant for the missions of sea control and airspace control. I.e.: those same things I "held equal" (i.e.: capability of the individual aircraft, like sensors, weapons, range, stealth, networking etc, and friendly force multipliers), are all very important too. After all, achieving a significantly capable sortie rate if your aircraft are obsolete and lacking in range, payload, and friendly force multipliers, is of course terrible.
But IMO it should go without saying that any discussion about achieving a capable sortie rate, inherently assumes that a competitive qualitative capability in other things like aircraft quality, force multipliers, networking etc, have already been attained.
Lethe
Captain
Typing on phone now so apologies for brevity. I am indeed referring to overemphasising sortie rate in the context of other qualities, and in particular this idea ventured above that a smaller aircraft with inferior range, payload, and sensors is preferable to a larger one because it has a smaller deck footprint.
"Sortie rate" in the American context is discussed in terms of generating the maximum number of aircraft-taskings over a defined period, usually days stretching into weeks. Such sustained high-tempo operations are only relevant in the context where you park an aircraft carrier off the coast of a grossly inferior nation and wage an aerial campaign with little to no sea-air opposition, as occurred in Vietnam and the latter part of the Gulf War. It is this context in which USAF emerged as offering much better bang for buck than USN which led to USN to emphasise sortie rate in considering the future of their aircraft carrier program which in turn sunk arguments for even slightly smaller and more affordable carriers.
But this measure of maximum throughout over a period of days into weeks does not reflect how China would be employing aircraft carriers as tools of sea and airspace control and for limited strikes against peer adversaries. In all of those tasks what matters is the ability to maintain a credible CAP and SURGE capacity, meaning how many aircraft can you keep at combat readiness and get in the air at once for a battle lasting minutes to hours. SUSTAINED sortie rate is not nearly as important. PLAN needs its carriers to win battles, while USN needs theirs to wage campaigns.
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asif iqbal
Lieutenant General
then you know very little about carrier warfare USN has built Carriers for over 100 years including now 80 full Aircraft Carriers
Sortie is what defines a carrier and lets look at one example the most recent Carrier vs Carrier War, The Falklands 1982
wars in carrier field are always won by who detects, who launches and who attacks first
during the Falklands war both UK and Falklands were on very equal footing
and due to the better situational awareness the Argentinian Carrier Strike Group actually detected the Royal Navy Carrier Strike group first out at 140 mils away including both HMS Hermes + HMS Invincible
the Argentinians had the element of surprise however they sat just a few miles outside the range of their A4Q Skyhawk attack fighters
the A4Q had 4 Mark 82 bombs and could not be sent down to the hanger rearmed to get decent bomb load
then by a twist of fate the wind in the very windy South Atlantic died down and Skyhawks couldn't take off
by mid-night the attack was called off, due to loss of time, wind, and range
all historian agree this would have changed the outcome of the War
guess what it came down to, yes Sortie rates
how quickly can you react and get your fighters off the deck and recover re-arm and launch again
this is called Sortie rate, and without it a Carrier is completely useless even if you have the element of surprise and best fighters
Carrier + Sortie rate is like a gun with a bullet, no Sortie your dead quick
Lethe
Captain
USN didn't care about sortie rate until it came to design Ford post-Desert Storm when they found themselves under pressure from USAF in the "sustained bombardment of third-world nations" business and from advocates of alternatives to the nuclear-powered supercarrier. Sortie rate was so irrelevant to the Cold War-era USN that Nimitz doesn't even HAVE an official or target sortie rate. It was only after an exercise in 1997 specifically designed to assess sortie rate generation that USN was even able to pluck a number from the air for Ford to beat. At no stage during design or development, or for the first 20 years of operation, did USN bother to codify or discover how many sorties a Nimitz-class carrier could generate for the simple reason that the answer is not particularly important.
(pp. 42-43) puts it more diplomatically:
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Excellent discussions.
@Lethe you really nail the arguments about the sortie rate. Sortie rate is typically among the first carrier operational metric that people think of. Now when I think about it, what you said make so much sense. If we view carrier operations as some manufacturing assembly lines, then sortie rate is generally NOT the bottleneck in most scenarios.
@plawolf, @Bltizo, @Gloire_bb about F-35 although you guys argue about a number of things, but at least there is consensus, and that is F-35 will achieve air dominance by sheer number/quantity superiority. I've read before the argument that the US can dominate PLAAF simply by attrition in view of the ratio between F-35 and J-20 that the USAF and PLA can deploy respectively. This is indeed a challenge for China at least in short term, but it can be addressed or mitigated medium term as the production of J-20 ramps up with WS-10C.
@Lethe you really nail the arguments about the sortie rate. Sortie rate is typically among the first carrier operational metric that people think of. Now when I think about it, what you said make so much sense. If we view carrier operations as some manufacturing assembly lines, then sortie rate is generally NOT the bottleneck in most scenarios.
@plawolf, @Bltizo, @Gloire_bb about F-35 although you guys argue about a number of things, but at least there is consensus, and that is F-35 will achieve air dominance by sheer number/quantity superiority. I've read before the argument that the US can dominate PLAAF simply by attrition in view of the ratio between F-35 and J-20 that the USAF and PLA can deploy respectively. This is indeed a challenge for China at least in short term, but it can be addressed or mitigated medium term as the production of J-20 ramps up with WS-10C.
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This excerpt, “[...]The most-stressing scenarios—those involving a near peer with significant defensive capabilities—will likely not allow the CSG to close the target area until after significant suppression of the enemy’s air defense and countermaritime capabilities have been diminished.[...]”, ties into my questioning , in the PLAN Anti+ship missile thread, the utility of sub-1000 km coastal-defense missiles.
Absent the deployment of a massive four carrier, 12 cruiser, 12 sub, 24 destroyer, Carrier Super Task Force, I don’t see the US accomplishing sufficient suppression of the China’s air defense and diminution of China’s countermaritime capabilities to allow a CSG to close any farther than just within the maximum un-refueled strike range of the F-18E, i. e., ~700 km.
As is observed in this report, operating at maximum range is inversely proportional to SGR (tho’ this is kind’a simple common-sense). However, in scenarios such as presented above (and, tho’ this isn’t actually what’s being discussed) although sustained SGR would not be a significant consideration, immediate or initial SGR certainly would be. Operating at maximum-range might require getting as many aircraft up at one-time as possible, simply to attempt the degradation/suppression adversary defensive networks/systems.
In other words how quickly how many sorties can be generated must always be a fundamental consideration.
We’re all aware, I’m assuming, that the F-35C isn’t intended to make-up the bulk of USN Carrier air-wings? Based on published procurement numbers of 227, there will be about 24 per carrier. Are we expecting large deployments of USAF F-35As in Japan in addition to Japanese procurement?
Additionally, couldn’t using J-7 pickets ahead of 4th and 5th gen patrols give F-35s a targeting dilemma? Given their limited internal missile payload (in stealth configuration) they’d either have to expend missiles on secondary targets or risk being drawn into WVR engagements.
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The question is how expeditionary the PLAN is going to get.
If you want to annoy American nationalists or Western / NATO nationalists, you can bring up that a ship's a fool to fight a fort, which China effectively is. An aircraft carrier is effectively an extremely expensive mobile airfield that can't be properly hardened unlike fixed airfields. Aircraft carriers are vulnerable, in short, and against a peer adversary aircraft carriers aren't going to cut it because of land-based fighter and bomber assets.
Unfortunately, the same effectively applies to China. If, say, China parked 6 CSGs outside San Diego, ignoring the fact that American deployment is currently spread out, the USAF and USN would rapidly take Chinese CSGs apart because of superior force counts. A Ford-Class carrier can carry up to 90 aircraft, which, if China launched 6 CSGs with comparable aircraft loads, would come out to only 480 J-XYs, against what can easily be twice their number.
In other words, a carrier should be thought of as a siege weapon or an artillery piece. It's a key supporting asset, capable of launching AEW&C as well as providing fighter cover, but it is not, on its own, a weapon sufficient against a peer opponent that has sufficient air defenses.
Considering that fact, the USN's focus on sorties is not in fact a bad thing because the ability of carriers to knock out enemy ground assets is more important than the air defense versus a peer opponent that it can provide. Against a land-based peer opponent, carrier aviation will simply be outnumbered without support from land-based assets.
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If, say, the PLAN goes to 12 carriers like Blitzo believes will happen, then yes, carriers might be able to provide sufficient air superiority. It's very expensive to do so and creates a lot of vulnerable targets, when the US is working on hypersonic missiles of its own. However, right now, with the present generation of PLANAF forces, it's more probable that Chinese carriers will be operating from land-based air cover in most circumstances and are going to be more useful for their sortie rates and payloads than their air defense capability.
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