I suspect a nice CG - do you think its the Wuhan-Mockup #6,464 ?
I suspect a nice CG - do you think its the Wuhan-Mockup #6,464 ?
I would not be surprised if J35 sortie rate from 003 is higher than J15 especially if elevator can take 2 x J35
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.
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.
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.
then you know very little about carrier warfare USN has built Carriers for over 100 years including now 80 full Aircraft Carriers
Although there are operational circumstances in which the ability to generate large numbers of sorties rapidly would be important, for the most-stressing scenarios, this will likely not be the case. 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.
At this point, it is not the ship’s characteristics that limit SGR but the distance and time the aircraft are required to fly to complete a cycle. If every mission required a longer cycle time to complete, there would never be an advantage to faster sortie generation. As we have noted, there are likely to remain missions flown at short distances for which higher-volume sortie generation will be desirable. But these do not seem prevalent enough to warrant making SGR the sole operational performance KPP. Although there is no penalty for being capable of a high SGR when it is not needed and it might be of considerable value in certain operational environments, designing a carrier with this as a principal and overarching characteristic is seeking a capability that is highly relevant in only a very narrow set of circumstances
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.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:
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?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.
The question is how expeditionary the PLAN is going to get.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.