The sinking of South Korean Corvette Cheonan

plawolf said:

Try recon SAR satellites. The PLA has been putting quite a few SAR birds up these last few years.

The satellites, radar, processing power and software are all beyond the dream of what the Soviets had back during the cold war.

The Chinese have also been putting serious resources into long range long endurance UAVs and their subs are much quieter then anything Soviet era. One surfaced within visual distance of a USN carrier a few years back as you might remember.

But this is all off topic and has been discussed to death already in a number of other threads. Lets stick to the topic shall we?

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I digress. Broad surveillance systems are known so any detection method is countered either by denying sensor information, misleading, or providing expected results consistent with something else (such as instead of a carrier group, a SAG composed of destroyers and frigates). Satellites operate in known orbits, are predictable, and their sensing capabilities known, and thus a carrier group can move quickly from one location to another taking advantage of this fact. So the track is varied, weather is sought out to hide in when vulnerable, blending into sea lanes (while staying out of visual detection range of ships) and such techniques.

Much of the process of finding and targeting is determining which of the many contacts detected is the one you are looking for. Most techniques rely on exploiting the Achilles Heel of Radar and Communication. To work, you have to transmit, and by transmitting you tell the opposition who, what and where you are. Don't transmit, and he has to find you the hard, old fashioned way, by visual identification searching the vast ocean area 10sqnm at a time. If the opposition is going to search with active sensors such as radar, he is also telling you where he is and who he is. So, fighters can launched and run out the ESM line of bearing and bag the recon aircraft or strike pathfinder before it has a chance to find anything. If that recon aircraft stays silent, then it is forced to search 10sqnm at a time. And that process is slow, if everyone else stayed where they are. And with ships moving at high speed, the carrier group can easily move into a area a recon aircraft searched an hour or two ago while the recon bird is off searching other locations.

You can also provide a false contact reference. If a searching aircraft is intercepted they can draw an operational radius of previously observed intercepts and conclude the carrier is in that area. That allows a concentrated search. Now if we deliberately intercepted him at an extended range and then moved the carrier at high speed in the other direction the search effort is concentrated at the wrong point. This works even better if there is a large neutral merchant ship in the area, as one can launch aircraft running on silent at low altitude, pop up over the merchant ship, and operate as normal. The searchers locate the pop-up point, actually detect a target at the point that the flight patterns indicate. In wartime they commit, they lose their strike assets, and the carrier then has a free ride.

Even if a group is detected, it takes time to organize a strike and attack. With two hours warning for example, a carrier group commander could dispatch a Tico or a Burke to lay a missile trap 60nm down the threat axis, station the CAP Outer Air Battle Grid, put the group as a decoy stationary, and run another 60nm down range and off axis in a silent mode. Then your strike assets locates a likely target at the expected point, runs into a missile trap, the fighter ambush, and a target that can defend itself without ever threatening the carrier. It's game over for the strike assets they all get blown to pieces by the trap they entered.

A sub vectored out to find the carrier group has to have some idea of where to look. If the carrier has freedom to operate it can avoid contact by "random and dynamic" movement. Only if the carrier locks itself to a set operational area and pattern (as in most structured exercises which lends itself to the prevailing myth of submarine superiority) does it become predictable and hence, vulnerable. If the carrier moves it forces the sub to move to catch it, thereby making the sub more detectable. Of course, one could run over the sub by accident in which case it falls to other carrier groups to take up the battle. Such is war.

Actually while we are all wowed by the progress of the PLA in recent decades and I acknowledge their capabilities, which was very much better than what the Soviet have in the past.

But cold war is in the 60s...

And although China had progressed far... lets not forget that US had progressed too... and very fast too.

While all focuses had been on China... and while we are wowed... I believe in a great deal... it was because China didn't had what she has now... and in actual fact, we might not be that impressed when the US showed their results... and that may be because... the progress of the United States as compared to what they have in the past is really not such giant steps forward.

However if we pit both countries technologies together - lets face it... China still have a lot of catching up to do.

ff I saw this Economist article reprinted in our National newspaper this morning

titled : "When every indian becomes a chief" As a substitute for pay rises and bonuses, bosses are dishing out ever fancier job titles.

In it it said Kim Jong 2's titles amount to over 1200

they include

1/Guardian diety of the Planet

2/Ever Victorious General

3/Lodestar of the 21st century


4/Supreme Commander at the Forefront of the Struggle against Imperialism and the United States.

5/Eternal Bosom of Hot Love.

and so on

bladerunner said:

ff I saw this Economist article reprinted in our National newspaper this morning

titled : "When every indian becomes a chief" As a substitute for pay rises and bonuses, bosses are dishing out ever fancier job titles.

In it it said Kim Jong 2's titles amount to over 1200

they include

1/Guardian diety of the Planet

2/Ever Victorious General

3/Lodestar of the 21st century


4/Supreme Commander at the Forefront of the Struggle against Imperialism and the United States.

5/Eternal Bosom of Hot Love.

and so on

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If Kim acknowledged all these bullshit names... then he indeed is a man with serious inferior complex and problems. You never heard of real power's leaders like US president, China's chairman, Russia (Soviet) chairman calling himself any of those name. I think even Mao didn't have such shameless name.

Another example; I am afraid, of the US talking about freedom and democracy in East Asia and yet never following through. So now we have seen Japan unable to exercise is sovereign authority over the location of foreign bases on its soil and South Korea not permitted to have control over its own forces in the event of wartime.

Come clean guys, its not an alliance, it is an occupation.

The United States and South Korea have agreed to delay until December 2015 the transfer of wartime operational control of troops on the Korean peninsula to South Korea, the two nations’ presidents announced following a June 26 meeting in Toronto.

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rhino123 said:

If Kim acknowledged all these bullshit names... then he indeed is a man with serious inferior complex and problems. You never heard of real power's leaders like US president, China's chairman, Russia (Soviet) chairman calling himself any of those name. I think even Mao didn't have such shameless name.

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the only one i know with that name had a really long one...and his name is idi or something..the last king of scotland

and wtf is lodestar of 21st century anyways? i've heard of loderunner and that's from a gameboy game 15 years ago

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Back on topic:

PLA is going to hold a live ammo missile test in the Yellow Sea in the near future (Late June/Early July) and has declared a no crossing zone for ships in the area. Is this a response to the U.S-South Korean exercise?

siegecrossbow said:

Back on topic:

PLA is going to hold a live ammo missile test in the Yellow Sea in the near future (Late June/Early July) and has declared a no crossing zone for ships in the area. Is this a response to the U.S-South Korean exercise?

Click to expand...

Rumour/Idle speculation?? suggests it might be the DF21?

I have been absent from this thread for quite a while, and since I found I had missed some of the earlier posts as well, I went back and read through the whole thread. I have found some interesting things.

First none of the positions people have taken have surprised me. What I mean is that everybody (including myself) seems to be responding to this case according to their political pre-dispositions. In other words, everybody responds to the "facts" in a way that fits their normal skepticism or "faith" in whomever is presenting these "facts", or according to whom they seem to vindicate. This is not surprising, first of all, because we don't actually have the evidence in front of us. But what strikes me is that we, in fact, are having a political discussion, sometimes, directly, when people analyze the possible motives of the SK or NK government, for example, and sometimes by proxy, when we discuss the shape of torpedoes, the character of anti-submarine warefare, etc. In both cases, I find peoples positions (although not necessarily their actual observations) to be quite predictable, based on other posts in other threads (with the exception of new people, of course).

A second, related observation, is that we are not necessarily wrong in acting this way. After all, the saying goes something like "war is the continuation of politics by other, i.e. violent, means." Whether the Cheonan sank after being torpedoed by the North, either deliberately, or by mistake, or by a "rogue" element, or whether it was a "friendly fire" accident, either by SK or US forces, or a grounding/collision accident as that SK investigator concluded, it seems clear to me that it would take much less than 24 hours for every actor in the area to see all the possible "uses" of such an incident, just as people in this forum have been able to see this. In other words, regardless of how it actually happened, the actors which actually control "the facts" (SK govt, US) could be expected to scramble to find a way of using the incident to further the policies which were already theirs to begin with. The actors which do not control "the facts" (China, NK, SK opposition), in reacting to the SK govt/US spin, are also simply continuing the policies which were already in place before the incident. The principal actors then, are proceeding just like the members of our forum.

So what are these pre-existing aims and policies? First, I think it is safe to say that back in the 50's, all parties wanted to "win" the Korean War. The US and South Korea wanted to end up with a single state belonging to the "free world", while North Korea and China both wanted a single "communist" state. Things were seen through an ideological prism in those days, and I think most people on both sides of the divide thought that a "communist" state would always be allied with other "communist" states, while a "free" country would follow the ways of the West and would be allied with them. The Korean war ended in a stalemate after lots of destruction and expenditure, however. Essentially, this means that everybody involved reached the conclusion that this war was unwinnable, at least in the near and medium term. In other words, desireable as unification may be, it cannot be achieved through war.

I think this is a fundamental conclusion that still guides everybody's thinking and policies on the question, whether US, China, the Koreas or Japan. But both Koreas still want unification, and each one wants it on their own terms. And both the US and China at least voice support for unification, but I suspect, each for their own reason, can wait forever for it. This is where the similarities end.

Many people in the posts I read tried to characterize the South Korean position, but few made any reference to the internal politics: there are two South Korean positions and they are kind of incompatible with each other, to a much greater extent than the positions of Democrats and Republicans in the US, for example. The current government wants to work towards a regime collapse in the North. Thus unification could be achieved without war, supposedly, just as happened in Germany. Thus, it works, as other GNP governments have worked, towards the diplomatic and trade isolation of the North. To this end, it also works to increase tensions with the North in a controlled way, so that the DPRK has a harder time devoting itself to economic construction. This incident has been used by the GNP government in SK precisely to further these aims.

For the ROK opposition, the best policy is one of finding ways to promote economic cooperation, trust, etc.: the so called "sunshine" policy. Of course, its policy has always been hampered by the fact that NK always knows the Korean DP will not last forever in power. And it is hampered by the fact that the US openly and uniformly prefers the GNP policy, and in the end, everybody knows who the boss is. The Cheonan incident was used by the DPK to accuse the government of being warlike (apparently to good effect, as the elections showed). In this way, the DPK is also simply following the policy it had before.

I would like to continue with the other "players", but I will put that off for some other day, as this is getting too long.