Poverty Electronically Scanned Array.
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- Thread starter Jeff Head
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I disagree with Tphuang's assessment of 052D and ABs, but you're bringing it too far into the other direction.
How do you see 052Ds and ABs?
Personally from what I've gathered it seems like they are about the 'sameish'/same lvl with flight 2 and maybe a bit behind the flight 3s, although I suppose the 052Ds do get upgrades so it is kinda hard to say.
I think they would, especially with the 3-Burkes-Per-Year plan proposed by the Congress last month.
The Pentagon is particularly worried about the expansion of the PLAN, and they have reasons to do so.
While the USN is retiring more and more ships that are mostly built during the Cold War era, right across the ocean, China is continuously pumping out new warships for the PLAN with capabilities that are closing in, on par, or even surpassing that of their US counterparts. This is not helped by the fact that their destroyer procurement stream was caught in a momentary limbo after having the Zumwalt program cancelled unexpectedly, and that the USN is suddenly forced to return to acquiring the Flight III Arleigh Burkes.
Yet, all those drydocks and facilities that were built for the surge of the Cold War and the 600-ship Navy plan under Reagan's tenure - They are still present today. If the US decides to tear through their pockets once again, I believe they can ramp up their dormant shipbuilding capabilties again to approach or even be on par to the shipbuilding capabilities shown during Reagan's tenure.
Of course, the 600-ship Navy program back then was when the American Dream is still pretty much a thing across American households. The same cannot be said for today, however.
We'll see if the Congress can afford to dedicate 6, 8 or even 10% of the US national budget to the US military and defense contractors at the expense of their people's plight, just like what they did during the Cold War.
I would suggest to never underestimate the adversary. It's fine to be more confident, but don't turn that confidence into arrogance. The US military is still a very credible and potent adversary for China, even today.
Despite the war game simulations by the Pentagon indicating that the US would always lose to China over Taiwan, the US forces in the Western Pacific could still dish out a powerful punch against China's forces in the region.
And besides, those are reported simulations. I'd bet that the US military is constantly finding and refining their methods and ways to better deal with Chinese military in the Western Pacific. Not forgetting the newer weapons, ships, planes, missiles that would roll out into service as time passes by.
The world is always changing.
If you wish to have such confidence, please wait until the Chinese military can actually look at the US military in the same way like how the US military looked at the Chinese military of the 1980s and 1990s.
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Please. "Be humble, young grasshopper" just isn't how I roll. I don't see why that's a problem, we don't all have to think the same. Variety is the spice of life, it takes all kinds to make a world, etc.
Taiwan has very little to do with it. It shows the poverty of the US imagination (as well as its shipborne radars) that it still thinks its fight with China is over Taiwan. This is about who's going to rule the roost in the Pacific and through that, the world - or at least the world that matters. "Taiwan" has become little more than shorthand for that struggle, and any military analyst who still considers "Taiwan scenarios" is incompetent.
Broke: China is waiting for the first opportunity it can get to attack Taiwan and present the US with a fait accompli.
Woke: China is preparing to both invade Taiwan and defeat a US intervention.
Bespoke: China is not going to attack Taiwan at all. It will go to war directly against the US and Japan.
As is China. And it's doing so from a technological base that expands and strengthens by the day.
Certainly, big changes are coming. Changes like the Chinese economy growing to 2.5-3x the size of America's by mid-century, changes like China becoming the most technologically advanced and militarily powerful state on Earth. Hell, who knows if there'll even be an America by mid-century.
HowAboutNo.jpg
Lethe
Captain
They don't even need to wait for this new multiyear procurement plan: USN is likely to commission three Burkes next year and again in 2025.
This is more US-focused than PLAN focused and I am mindful that I don't want to drag the thread off topic. But here is a new chart I just did, showing displacement of surface combatants entering service as a rolling 5-year average of the X-axis year and the preceding four years. I had to use a rolling average because the year-to-year variation is just too great and leads to an unreadable mess.
So, the charted USN peak in 1981 represents the average tonnage commissioned over the 1977-81 period, which in turn represents the outgrowth of funding and procurement decisions made in the early to mid-1970s, under the Nixon and Ford administrations. You will note that this is well before Reagan entered the picture. To a large extent, the Reagan-era Navy benefitted from policy decisions made by previous administrations (including the Carter administration). The key innovation in Reagan's push for a 600-ship navy was to slow down the retirement of existing vessels.
In any case, as my previous post demonstrated, USN has managed to build three large surface combatants per year on a fairly regular basis in the past, and indeed they are on track to do so again as early as next year. For the projection period for USN, I put in two Burkes in 2022, three Burkes in 2023, one Burke and one Zumwalt in 2024, and three Burkes in 2025.
P.S. For what it's worth, PLAN's 2021 commissioned tonnage (the raw 2021 tonnage that is, not the rolling 5-year average) is the highest number in the entire dataset, and by a good margin too. I have not included the Iowa-class battleships in USN's figures, however.
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A Flight III Burke is about 50% heavier than a 052D -- putting it another way, a 052D is about 2/3 the displacement of a Flight III Burke.
To put it in perspective, the difference in tonnage between a 055 and a Flight III Burke, is about the same difference in tonnage between a Flight III Burke and a 052D.
Comparisons of subsystems and technology of the various ships only takes you so far when the ships themselves are so different in size from each other, it almost becomes a useless exercise.
Oh yea, the flight 3s are quite a lot bigger than prior ones, I keep forgetting that.
The Flight III displaces a couple hundred tons more than the IIAs, not that much more.
The biggest jump was between Flight II and IIA where the hangars were added for the helicopters.
We don't know enough about either radar to make such assertions.
To play the Devil's advocate.
We do know that the Type 052D is a substantially smaller ship. Therefore, we could surmise that it has comparatively less onboard power to feed its radars. Until the maturation of GaN HPAs, AESA radars using GaAs were far less power efficient compared to radars built around vacuum tubes. It was not unusual at all for the vacuum tube amplifiers (used in PESAs) to have double the efficiency (60-70%) over a solid state amplifier in AESAs (25%-35%).
Furthermore, SPY-1 is not exactly a typical PESA radar. It's more of a PESA/AESA hybrid. It acts as a PESA on transmit, but behaves much closer to an AESA on receive. Its receivers are divided into 2,175 subarrays or 2 receivers per subarray, so it could conceivably form multiple simultaneous beams on receive like an AESA radar. That's likely still less than the Type 346A radar, but it certainly eats away at some of AESA's strongest advantages over PESA radars.
It's safe to assume that the Type 346 has better sidelobe management and is inherently less susceptible to jamming. As an AESA it's likely more versatile and capable at medium ranges where absolute radiated power is not as critical.
I found this analysis and comparison of the two radars quite interesting:
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