PLA strike strategies in westpac HIC

Let me be clear here. I think us military is doing a good job coming up with solutions for a hard to solve problem they face. Using cheaper, attritable drones to complement manned aircraft is where aerial warfare is going. But you have to find a balance of cost vs capabilities. The capabilities that this simulation require is very high. You can get long endurance ucav like predator drones that can fly for a long time, but they are not stealthy and can't fly fast enough to catch up with your fighter jet and they don't carry enough ammunition to threaten advanced surface to air missiles. They can also be struck down by anti drone systems pretty easily.

Underestimating cost of capable ucavs seem like a mistake these war scenarios constantly make. The other question is where are these ucavs taking off from? Carriers can only carry so many. The air fields are far away.

On the flip side, we do know that Chinese drones are a lot cheaper. A lot of them can be used in similar attacks against us bases or even us carriers if they get too close. There are a whole lot of j6 and j7 that can be converted into suicide drones. Depending on how much they want to spend on modifications, they can really make such suicidal drones hard to deal with. They are very cheap, effective and attritable. I don't see how even a surprise attack from us military could take out most of such drones. Also, they can utilize much smaller suicide drones for just Taiwan itself. Of course, Taiwan would probably do the same to landing soldiers. So I think pla is just as capable as launching mass drones attack as us military, possibly even more so. Operating close to its own borders offer many advantages. There are too many possible targets for us military to go after for them to significantly degrade China's ability to strike back and destroy ships and bases within first chain imo. I haven't even brought up the more expensive option of china building its own fleet of more capable and stealthy attack drones.

Sincho said:

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The scenario is this. As the China invasion fleet heads towards Taiwan, suddenly massive drone swarms appear out of the blue to sink the Chinese ships. What do you guys think of this strategy and what are the counter strategies China can use to deal with this ?

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That makes sense as a strategy for the USA.

But I would expect the PLA to be working on their own drone swarms to overwhelm Taiwan's defences for the same reasons. Such a Chinese drone swarm would make an invasion (and subsequent conquest) of Taiwan far easier. However, the biggest difference is that Chinese drone swarms can actually be inexpensive, stealthy and deployed in large numbers because Taiwan is only 200km from China. China can leverage air superiority at high-altitude, then to medium-altitude and then low-altitude and the ground itself..

At the same time, such a Chinese drone swarm is suited to defeating an opposing drone swarm which is also trying to achieve information dominance.

I've previously outlined how (and why) I expect airborne drone swarms to be the future.

And it's funny how they use Uber as the comparison for controlling a drone swarm. The last time I looked, Didi was far bigger than Uber in terms of numbers of taxis and ridership.

They're also talking about using 5G for communications, but remember how China is world-leading in terms of 5G base station deployment. Nobody else is close.

Plus they're also talking about doing sensor processing in the swarm, whereas Chinese swarms have a radio line of sight back to the Chinese mainland with its datacentres, 5G cell towers and fibre-optic cables.

Mohsin77 said:

How are you so sure they don't already have this capacity in theater?

I don't understand this bravado attitude of invincibility that you have. The idea that only you are capable of cleverness, while the enemy will never be able to seize the initiative is quite dangerous, and frankly ridiculous. Especially when a first strike is openly being considered in the US.

This whole thread is about China's first wave options. Why would you assume that it's impossible for the enemy to launch its own first wave first? Never underestimate your enemy.

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I think it will be interesting to start a thread about it.

tphuang said:

I watched the original video. The only important thing I got out of it is that they have done enough work to verify that even under strongest ew environment, the drones can still communicate with each other. It didn't address the basic issue of how you can get drones to fly that far and keeping it cheap enough to be attritable. And how do you make it be stealthy as f35 and keep the cost down? Seems like a lot of these ideas are wishful thinking. Like how they talked about creating unmanned teaming ucavs for b21 and the cost came out to be $300 million each.

Fundamentally, the biggest question for me is how far out the us carriers will be. If they are 1500 km out, then they can't do that much damage. If usn decide to park carriers 500km out from Taiwan while china is conducting large scale exercises, I think we are going to have big problems brewing.

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Swarm is not necessary, indeed LRASM etc. is better for such a task and US has a lot of them.

The key problem is the vulnerability of amphibious fleet does exist.

For me the best solution is not defending their own amphibious fleet (because it’s extremely hard), but keeping US fleets in danger no matter where they are: in San Diego, Norfolk or Mayport. (protect by deterrent)

Mohsin77 said:

This automatically means that China must deal with this threat, despite the difficulty the US faces in pulling it off. No one is saying it will be easy for the US. It will take a lot of planning and resources for them to pull it off. But it's not impossible, and if the US succeeds in a first strike, it's gonna hurt. This isn't a trivial threat. My solution is to avoid it altogether by masking forces, staying 'under the radar' during the build up, and ensure a first strike on the US.

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I think it is a realistic threat that China needs to deal with, just as China needs to deal with America attacking non-military bases on the mainland. I'm just confused by what you mean by succeed in a first strike?

US Navy supposedly has 4000 Tomahawk missiles and let's say they are willing to move 1000 of them to Asian theater in an anticipation of Chinese intervention of Taiwan. Given that they probably don't have the range to be launched from more than 1500 km out, they'd have to be launched from carrier group ships maybe 1000 km off the mainland shores or SSNs from 1000 km out or military bases in the first chain of island.

During this time, I'm assuming there would be high level negotiation between US, China and Taiwan on settling things peacefully. China at this point would probably threaten to attack Taiwan unless certain conditions are met. Taiwan may or may not accept those conditions. They will also probably have to work out with US on what's considered to be red lines in terms of American participation in a war. Let's say America is doing the rather aggressive action of preemptively attacking China rather than waiting for China to attack, then the war becomes an US initiated war against China. China can use the excuse of flattening US military bases all along first chain of island to destroy all the Taiwanese military bases along the way.

Now, let's say that America does start to launch LACMs preemptively from it's carrier group and nuclear submarine fleet, it would seem to me that's something Chinese ships and AWACs should be able to detect fairly quickly. Let's say the observing UAVs (WZ-7/8), AWACS and ships can start tracking these targets at worst 700 km from their intended target, that gives these targets 35 to 40 minutes to react (assuming they fly at mach 0.85 to mach 0.95). This is the assuming the close to absolute scenario where America does not even inform China that they are at war with each other. And this is assuming the spying WZ-7/8 doesn't detect missiles are getting launched. If they do detect the launch, then China would have as much as 60 to 75 minutes to react when they are already on high alert.

The question in this case is how on alert China's missiles launchers and missile defense systems are. Would it be reasonable to assume that Chinese missile launchers, air defense units, air bases cannot get themselves activated during that much time? At the very worst, the missile launchers will have time to get themselves ready to fire an initial round of missiles. The naval ships would be able to do the same. The air defense units should be fully activated. The air bases could get the pilots to fly out the aircraft that are able to fly and move the other ones into well protected hangars. And quickly activate people to be ready to repair runways and such. There are also bases further inside the country that can now activate aircraft for strike missions.

At this point, China's missiles would probably be focused on hitting US targets rather than Taiwanese markets. PLA would use its defensive hot line with US military to say that we see your missiles coming to us, we consider you have declared the war on us and we are going to be retaliating.

At this point, China probably already has several WZ-7 and WZ-8 in the air just spying on US carrier group. I would assume at least a couple of them are stealthy and fast enough to not get brought down by US carrier group. That along with early warning satellites and cuing of AWACS mean they are likely to have the coordinates of the US carrier.

So now, we have some LACMs heading to mainland. Let's say 300 are heading over in an initial launch, which would be quite a few from 2 carrier group and 5 or 6 SSNs. Some of these missiles would get tracked pretty early and intercepted by Chinese naval ships and other ones will get intercepted by short range air defense systems in China and others not find their target due to EW pressure. Let's say 100 hit their intend target. That would be a huge number and probably close to worst case scenario for PLA. Maybe a few Chinese command centers, fuel depot and runways and missile launch sites. It would seem to me that this won't be able to keep even 1 PLAAF base from taking off/landing aircraft for more than a day. Now, if they are only targeting air defense sites, then it's possible that 1 or 2 HQ-9/S-300 batteries get damaged and in short term lose effectiveness. If they are only targeting missile launchers, then it's possible that China will loose some BM launchers and other ones will lose effectiveness for a few days.

While this is happening, the US fleet would be facing a whole bunch of hypersonic missiles (ASBM, HGV and HCM) launched from land, sea and air. They are so close to PLAN fleet that they could even face YJ-18 AShM, which are not exactly each to intercept either. There will be a huge advantage at this point in terms of Chinese VLS vs US VLS. So, the US success in this scenario will ensure that 50 to 100 hypersonic missiles + another 100 to 200 supersonic missiles are heading in their direction and all the SRBM originally intended for Taiwan will all be aimed at US bases.

What is US success scenario in this case? Just firing off the initial round of missiles?

@Bltizo is talking about late 20’s or early 30’s when the US possesses hypersonic missiles that are very difficult to intercept

vincent said:

@Bltizo is talking about late 20’s or early 30’s when the US possesses hypersonic missiles that are very difficult to intercept

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The longer in the future we go, the military balance shifts more toward pla. ballistic Missiles for china is very cheap for production compared to other countries. Hypersonic missiles for us military is very expensive and only certain number of them can be carried at any given time. The mk41 vls aren't large enough imo to carry long range hypersonic missiles, so they would have to be launched from f35 and super hornets. So given the limited numbers they can launch, the amount of damage they can do is also limited.

Fundamentally, us military has a geography problem here. It has fewer missiles, fewer launch platforms and far more targets to go after. Hypersonic missile does not change that fact.

SEAD said:

Swarm is not necessary, indeed LRASM etc. is better for such a task and US has a lot of them.

The key problem is the vulnerability of amphibious fleet does exist.

For me the best solution is not defending their own amphibious fleet (because it’s extremely hard), but keeping US fleets in danger no matter where they are: in San Diego, Norfolk or Mayport. (protect by deterrent)

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The LRASM only has a published range of 300 miles. That makes the launch platforms vulnerable and possess the problem of coordinating enough missiles to be launched at the same time.

tphuang said:

The longer in the future we go, the military balance shifts more toward pla. ballistic Missiles for china is very cheap for production compared to other countries. Hypersonic missiles for us military is very expensive and only certain number of them can be carried at any given time. The mk41 vls aren't large enough imo to carry long range hypersonic missiles, so they would have to be launched from f35 and super hornets. So given the limited numbers they can launch, the amount of damage they can do is also limited.

Fundamentally, us military has a geography problem here. It has fewer missiles, fewer launch platforms and far more targets to go after. Hypersonic missile does not change that fact.

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What if the Americans pull a “Pearl Harbor”, declare war when missiles are in the air, or attack without declaring war?

vincent said:

What if the Americans pull a “Pearl Harbor”, declare war when missiles are in the air, or attack without declaring war?

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The US will still be the aggressor though.