Self Propelled Gun/Rocket Launcher

siegecrossbow said:

You can see them with aerial or even satellite assets.

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Assuming they are not heavily camouflaged. Forest branches and leaves also play havoc on ISR and this is why shoot and scooters like to hide on forests.

On the other hand, HIMARS rockets has proven vulnerable even to Buks, and China has its equivalent.

To find shoot and scooters, the trajectory has to be tracked by defense radars, traced to a possible grid location, send a loitering munition or UAV, discover. If loitering munition finds, strike. If UAV finds, you call a ballistic missile strike. Or even with a loitering munition, you can call a ballistic missile strike, use the loitering munition for damage verification, then expend the loitering munition on the survivors.

The whole kill loop needs to be accomplished within minutes.

Temstar said:

Hmmm, obviously HIMARS launchers are not easy target to catch given what we've seen in Ukraine, and you can see how much effort PLA is putting into catching them in Taiwan just from watching this exercise.

Is the reverse also true for PHL-191 given it's larger size?

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Thanks to optical cameras on long range munitions like Gerans, Gerbara, Italmas or even satellite linked FPV drones, the Russians appear to be in a kill streak against HIMARS, Patriots and the Ukrainian radar defense network.

lcloo said:

24 hour aerial observation over the size of Taiwan island is feasible by rotating surveillance satellites and high altitude drones, in addition to radio communications interceptions and aerial radar and EW platforms like the Y9/KJ series and KJ2000/3000. And also they have people on the ground who might have been living in Taiwan for decades as the locals.

The advantage to PLA is that they already haves years and decades of mapping Taiwans's defense depots, firing positions, routes etc. Tracking of ROC's heavy long range equipment, including Himar could be an ever on-going exercises in peace time, and intensify before the AR. This will ensure detection, tracking and destruction of most of these equipment at the early stage of AR.

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Taiwan has an inherent disadvantage over Ukraine is that being an island, there isn't much to run around. Ukraine happens to be a really big piece of place.

Still it's likely that something like HIMARS would get the first shot, but which will end up revealing it's location.

SAMs would have to intercept the rockets, with ground based radars tracing the trajectory to it's source.

As final defense there's going to ECM against GPS, and it does appear that due to this, HIMARS might end up being less accurate.