land based missiles in itself can stand up to carriers. It provides air defense and antiship roles. With the combination of land based missiles, carriers, and submarines, the opponent will not dare to come close to you and will likely be operating very far away.
Next Generation DDG and FFG thread (after 055, 052D, 054B)
- Thread starter ACuriousPLAFan
- Start date
That was the old days; I am saying this is no longer the case.
What can three carriers bring? More planes.
But modern missiles are superior to planes: they are faster and more maneuverable. Thus, the air-to-air battle can be won by SAMs, supported by cueing from an AWACS.
Suppose the US wants to attack a Chinese fleet with three carriers while China has only one. US carriers launch planes to win the air superiority battle. However, those planes need to get close enough to launch their AMRAAMs. Ship-based SAMs have a longer range than those planes. They just need a sensor to cue them toward those planes. An AWACS launched from the one carrier can do that.
Moreover, those three carriers need to get close to launch their planes. China has hypersonic missiles in ship VLS that are longer-ranged and can be launched from ships. Therefore, carriers can be attacked before they can even get close.
For both offense and defense, ships can launch missiles that can defeat carrier-based planes. Consequently, you don't need too many carriers to achieve naval dominance anymore. Yes, you do need some to launch ISR planes, but one can beat three if the ship-based missiles are good and you have enough destroyers to launch those missiles.
Earth isn't flat, stealth is a thing. AWACS can be taken down. Rely too much on single vulnerable aerial targeting nodes - and you have a very obvious single point of failure.
Staged delivery system (carrier - turbofan airplane - munition) trumps over less staged fast attack means in efficiency, i.e. range/payload metrics.
They don't need to get really close. They can if they want to realize their maximum delivery potential, which is a different thing.
You didn't need too many carriers even before, carrier warfare always was and remains unpredictable and highly irrational at its core.
But the only way to get predictable advantage is, who could've thought, numbers.
If we're talking about fighting US on high seas, local carrier parity is a must goal.
At long range, missiles spend most of their time unpowered, so they can't manoeuvre much.
So an aircraft has time to leave the NEZ of a missile.
HQ-9 SAMs have a maximum range of 300km.
However, the radar horizon is 400km
Anti-ship missiles have an even longer range.
So the air battle will happen beyond the range of ship-launched SAMs.
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Having said that, if you look at carrier group formations, the plan is to have picket destroyers on the threat axis, in order to catch out aircraft. But if you have a 3:1 advantage in aircraft, you can take your time and systematically destroy ships from beyond SAM range, before you eventually reach the carrier.
You still have to detect the opposing carriers.
If the opposing side can shoot down all the opposing aircraft, then the missiles don't have a target.
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At the moment, it's ISR aircraft detecting and tracking opposing ships.
But note that the US is not replacing its E-3 AWACs. Instead they are placing their hopes on a space-based surveillance system.
If this works, all surface ships (and indeed, everything) in the world will be under constant surveillance.
So in a blue-water battle, if a side has 3x the naval aviation, they can always stay beyond 1500km YJ-21 ASBM range.
They can then plan for very long range air sorties with airborne refuelling. Given they have 3x the naval aviation, they will still have a significant advantage in numbers.
Yes.
When you look at a carrier group, it's still only a handful of ships.
Today, just one "lucky" hit will disable/destroy a carrier or destroyer.
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Historically, the side with the larger Navy deals a catastrophic defeat on the smaller side because:
1. They can apply more force to overwhelm the defenders
2. They can absorb losses, whilst still being able to conduct their own strikes
Eventually, you end up with a situation where the smaller side is defenceless.
Yes.
To win at 2IC distances, the Chinese Navy can rely on support from the land-based Air Force and Rocket Force.
So you don't strictly need parity in carrier numbers.
Beyond that, it requires more carriers.
An F-35C loaded with anti-ship missiles (for instance, the AGM-158C) can fly to and attack a surface ship at a distance of ~2200-2400km from its carrier without refueling (which they would be able to do essentially without restrictions, in a situation where the PLAN has no air cover). Even the most generous estimates for the range of ship-based hypersonics would put them at a range disadvantage in the hundreds of kilometers, and potentially even more given YJ-20 and YJ-17 are significantly smaller than their land-based counterparts (which range around 1,500-2,000km). The entire point of a carrier is that it does not need to get close.
F-35 loaded with terrible subsonic anti-ship missiles will never be able to hit anything when PLA fleets will be defended by type 055. Compare that with a ship based hypersonic missile that will be difficult to impossible to intercept by US defenses. Moreover, if carried inside internal bay of F-35, these missiles will be very small and likely have small range, which means F-35 will have to get really close before they can fire that missile. This allows Chinese AWACS to detect them and launch SAMs or AA missiles against them. This puts them at huge risk.
This is the difference. Carrier based planes cannot carry hypersonic missiles with good range. Only ships can fire those. Ships have the capacity to fire large missiles with longer range or faster speed. This is what planes are unable to do.
Current VLS is also not the limit of Ship-based missiles. China can design ships that carry more bigger missiles. They can even carry huge missiles like DF-26 on VLS or slanted launchers. They can design arsenal drone ships just to carry more missiles. This is again a more modern and superior solution to using planes to attack.
Ukraine war has shown how countries are risk averse and not willing to risk planes getting shot down. So, they mostly stay out of ground based air defense range. I expect this will also happen in a peer war where carrier based planes will not be effective due to fear of loss of plane and pilot.
Ship based Missiles on the other hand are much more useful and expandable.
So, ship based attacks or defense will always be superior to Plane based one.
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The plane is the additional range, and low-observable subsonic missiles, while certainly a far cry from hypersonic ones, have been shown in Ukraine to be fairly capable at piercing dedicated IADS networks, as shown by the effectiveness of such weapons as SCALP-EG and Kh-101 (among others). Moreover, I’m fairly sure there are credible rumors of new weapons in development for the J-35 including an air-launched hypersonic cruise missile (and a low-observable subsonic one), which, if your logic was true, the PLAN would have no reason to pursue, nor would they pour so many resources into Fujian, or the two follow-up aircraft carriers which are both in development and construction right now. Nor would the USAF be developing at least two different air-launched hypersonic weapons for the same purpose (though they’re still far behind the PLA in this domain).
Despite what countless reform-minded individuals seem bent on pursuing, aircraft armed with standoff weapons (which by their nature are unthreatened by ship-based SAMs, because their anti-ship weapons can outrange them by as much as a factor of two, so your "risk-averseness" argument isn't remotely applicable,) are still the most dangerous tool in naval warfare by far, and aircraft carriers are an ideal tool to both employ them and counter them. If you actually want a platform like your "arsenal drone ships" that can circumvent air power advantages by virtue of carrying hypersonic MRBMs/IRBMs at sea, I'd invite you to read up on submarines like the Virginia class and Type 093B, which hold all the advantages of a surface ship with a VLS while also being exponentially more difficult to neutralize with air power alone. But there's a reason those vessels are being procured alongside aircraft carriers, and not replacing them entirely.
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The PLA will of course pursue every option available to them to ensure the US is completely checkmated just for the benefit of long term strategic alone, but that does not mean trying to fight a WestPac war with China from 2000 km away completely dependent on subsonic missiles launched from carrier fighters is a meaningful threat vector for China, especially if the US’s goal is to *prevent China from taking Taiwan*.
Uhh the salvo intensity needed to pierce IADS in Ukraine with subsonic missile is *not* an identical condition to what the USN would have to field to do more than land potshots with long distance subsonic salvos from carrier sorties. The longer the transit time for the package the easier it is to intercept. China is not Ukraine and the USN strike capacity at sea is not the same as Russian strike capacity on land. L
The PLA will of course pursue every option available to them to ensure the US is completely checkmated just for the benefit of long term strategic alone, but that does not mean trying to fight a WestPac war with China from 2000 km away completely dependent on subsonic missiles launched from carrier fighters is a meaningful threat vector for China, especially if the US’s goal is to *prevent China from taking Taiwan*.
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There is this notion that subsonic cruise missiles are a kind of 1950s training targets waiting to be shot down just because they lack that .1 mach.
First of all - it is just not the way. Even faster low altitude cruise missiles don't really fly at mach 3 entire course - you can't fool atmosphere density, you can't fool thermodynamics. As most ASCMs (unlike many LACMs) do in fact cruise at high subsonic speeds at low altitudes - the difference is more around 1.5 times at most.
But it comes with low signature, which can be very low for small objects designed with stealth; note that our whole object exposed projection is comparable/below some LO-optimized wavelengths (052C/D, but also KJ-600!). And stealth itself can be nasty: it's one thing to design reusable bird of prey without any inconsistencies in surface finish (and somehow service it later). It isn't really that hard to design a single use missile this way; think of LRASM. Radar return in targeting bands can be stupid low.
It comes at small size, skimming just over the surface of the sea, in a zone highly inconvenient for bands either way of X-, and X- is the one affected by LO the most (which btw is immediate problem for anything other than perhaps 055 and 054B; in the opposite direction - what a shame that after DBR failure, no US surface combatants have effective high band radar at all). Ships train a lot against subsonic seaskimmers(in practical rather than electronic shots) not just to write off HHQ-9/SM- missiles, rather because it is an actually demanding task. Nothing magical for a well trained crew, but there is a lot to train, and not that much has to go wrong for a disaster.
Often with simple and effective onboard EW, as (for obvious reasons) there are some very simple and effective ew techniques right over the "screen".
It often comes very dodgy, as same transsonic regime allows small（~PL-15), rigid unmanned craft to perform very radical maneuvers. Especially since modern variants can in fact have onboard RWR.
Last but not the least, it's very easy(and very american) to tightly pack subsonic missiles in very highly concentrated groups, which almost guarantee something will get through. Supersonic weapons....can, but in practice rarely form truly tight packs. Sufficiently smart supersonic missiles till this day are just rarely encountered in such numbers.
Against all that, most supersonic weapons only really have much shorter engagement window - which is more than offset by their larger profile; and no, we aren't in 1960s, almost all somehow effective interceptors don't have problem leading faster bogey more.
Other than that, their true main advantage (ToT - much better ability to prosecute patchy targeting data) - is Soviet/Russian-specific, it is not that paramount for PLAN as of 2025.
Supersonic missiles are in most cases much larger, have much larger signatures since take off, can't afford lololo trajectories for safe launches(and their booster ignitions aren't exactly subtle anyway) and in most designs don't overwork themselves hiding launch "spark" anyway(that's Kalibr/YJ-18 btw, speaking of relevance). They don't really give their seekers comparable work conditions.
There is no supersonic ASCM in existence which doesn't have any vulnerability mentioned above - all have some.
Hypersonics are btw even worse from these points - as they don't work at low altitudes at all. Yes, they're truly fast, but that speed comes at a corresponding size and cost.
It is someties ironic on this forum, as more PLAN ships(and aircraft) employ subsonic, rather than supersonic missiles. I still remember wild dissapointment in 054B thread, when some members were terrified to find YJ-83 instead of YJ-12. When it was objectively a superior weapon choice for China since mid-2010s at the latest, more so for frigate missions in particular. Times when the only ray of hope standing between Fuzhou and 7th fleet carriers were 4 suicidal Sovremenny doing their first and last heroic sacrifice are gone(though ironically older destroyers still carry out this standing homeland guard thing).
When question stands "supersonic or subsonic" - there is no simple answer, and if a navy should choose just one, all things equal, subsonic missiles are better at "one size fits all"(especially since they're often as cheap or cheaper than interceptors), from RIB to supercarrier.
The higher level, the more complicated it gets, but rule of thumb is there are no simple answers even in high end warfare as we understand it.
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