jesus christ, this is what it looks like when you have overwhelming engineering and manufacturing prowess. Taiwan's coastal topography has been noted as one of the major impediments to invasion. rather than looking for exclusively tactical solutions to this, the PLA simply tackled it with engineering solutions.
PLA Strategy in a Taiwan Contingency
- Thread starter pugachev_diver
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But even then they are quite large and exposed targets. They'd need something like the C-Dome to protect it from anything from mortars to MLRS.
Construction time seems to be in months
We may need clearer pictures to see if those special barges would be equipped with CIWS or not. Having extra CIWS and short-range low-altitude air defence radar could mitigate such exposures and threats posed by anti-shop missiles.
You don't even necessarily need the barges themselves to have it -- the nature of the distances involved means low draft escort ships with their own SAMs and CIWS could do the job.
I could even see them building relatively light displacement, low draft "escort barges" that are only a few hundred tons but are installed with SR SAMs or gun based CIWS to act as closer in last ditch defenses.
This is ignoring of course how such an operation would have substantial air and naval escort and overwatch in general, not to mention it would be preceded overall by a large scale bombardment of the immediate beach, and having secured air and sea control with requisite interdiction of identified adversary artillery and fires groups and C4I, to overall reduce the ability of an adversary to resist a landing with either maneuver forces or residual artillery forces.
And this continuous fire support role would be played by the Army's 300/370mm MLRS units?
I never used the term "continuous fire support".
Overall bombardment and fires would likely be multidomain, but yes 370mm PHL-191 would likely play a big part. I wouldn't be surprised if the air environment was sufficiently sanitized for aerial glide PGMs to be employed on a larger scale as well.
A combination of widespread bombardment of the landing area and its adjacent areas, as well as more targeted strikes, would likely precede the landing itself (in context of multiple days/weeks of prior bombardment).
Rick, do you have any ballpark to how much the 370mm PHL-191 rockets might cost?
you are missing the point. these barges will greatly expand the availability of beach area as potential landing spots, thus confounding the allocation of ISR and fire for defenders.
Not particularly