Good job Jura, you have demonstrated that you are a thinking man, the balloon is a "decoy" designed to "fake out" the missile as it re-enters the atmosphere, launched by a destroyer defending the CBG, the missile would lock-on to the decoy, and the carrier and escorts would take evasive action moving away at Flank. If you read it in the Air Force Magazine, it is peer reviewed, and the readers would also be incensed as the audience for AFM are mostly retired/active duty Air Force, who are members of the Air Force Association, they do not tolerate "feel good articles". In truth people would like to defend the viability of their future weapons, and don't want to contemplate that their potential adversaries might have an effective counter.. perhaps bd or Jeff might weigh in on the viability of the decoy???? brat
Brat, peer reviewed or not doesn't make it more truthful. Manhanism was only dead after pearl harbor and the 2nd world war; you talk to any navel college or admirals about air power dominating navel combat prior to those events would be heresy. Or should I cite Kalingol and Poland for the same about blitzkrieg? Or even earlier, about flexible roman legions system against rigid hellenistic heavy infantry system prior to the latter being crushed in the mecedonian wars?
We should not dismiss these peer reviewers as they do have their merits, and without doubt; bias.
What is critical of the article is its distortion of probabilities. Yes, any system can fail. To hit a ship with a Mach 10 warhead is hard, it requires a lot of support system that are vulnerable to interception/influence. The same is true the other way round, to fool an indepth array of sensors to locate a CVBG is hard, to have sufficient EW to hide it or to deter incoming missiles is hard; to intercept such missile is very hard.
Yet, the article is willing to believe that the advantage lays with the CVBG because of some perceived superiority in material and people is a bias. This is a classical armor vs gun debate, it is always easier to build a bigger gun to overcome armor than to build better armor, active or passive to defeat the incoming munition. How much did it cost the mujihadeen to build a bigger IED to overcome the 2 billion USD mine resistant vehicles the US used? well a 2 kg mine to a 10 kg mine doesn't cost that much.
I am not against the US. Just think about it this way, if the pentagon state that they have developed a anti ship ballistic missile based on the trident, would you dismiss this missile to a Russian CABG sailing to Cuba because the warhead can be intercepted and the Sovs can deploy balloon decoys?
Prowing the south china sea within the 1st island chain are 22 modern Chinese DDs currently, 45 modern FG, 100+ missile boats, 400+ 4 gen fighters, a dozen AEW&C planes, 30+ radar stations at the coast, a sonar chain under the SCS, with about 70 satellite launches we can be quite sure that coverage of the SCS exist. The area is also covered by a thousands of long range anti ship cruise missiles.
Simply put, quantity have a quality of its own. how many missiles can a CVBG intercept before running out of countermeasures? how many incoming missiles can be intercepted at the same time? how many radar system can strike platforms (and by its nature attrition) take out before the missile director systems becomes impotent?
It is a war of economics as well, lets say a DF21D cost 10 million USD a piece? the nimitz is 4.5 billion USD per hull san aircraft. each aircraft it carries costs 67 million USD a piece, each DDG in the CVBG cost ~1 billion USD san missiles it carry. Can a CVBG take a 450 (just the equivalent cost of the carrier itself) missile strike and be sure to walk away? Can someone launch a coordinated 450 missile strike? I don't know. But the fact of war is that there will not be a single missile incoming missile as the article suggests; especially since Russian anti CVBG tactics of the 80s-90s was already to swarm one with 200-300 anti ship missiles. Nor would they be used alone, sure, if the CVBG is violently evading incoming missiles and is successful, how much of a CAP can it have when the wave of strike aircraft arrives after the last missile have landed?
We don't know the full capbility of each, it is only stupid that the article is so readily willing to dismiss its potential of the missile.
(launching from the middle of China would be noticed and tracked by the US and Russia; aiming at sea with an empty, lonely ship on it, as any traffic around would have to be stopped, would likely cause an increased surveillance of the area all around, especially the airspace)
