Ambivalent
Junior Member
No, you forget these boats are coastal and their mission is not to go on the offense in the high seas against a carrier group. They are another layer of deterrance to prevent a carrier group from unopposedly approaching the Chinese coast to within 200-300km, just like the land-based YJ-62 TELs. The Chinese military is transitioning from a green water navy to a blue water navy, and the 022 is simply another new layer of naval coastal defense, not one that by itself can stop an approaching carrier group, but as part of a coordinated defense in depth it can certainly add several hundred missiles to the fray should, for example, a carrier group decide to try and sail the American flag through the Taiwan Strait again during a conflict. It is certainly not easy to pick out amongst the radar scatter of the coastline and the multitude of civilian boats and shipping in those areas.
Well, if the US and China are not at war, there is no legal basis to attack a Carrier in international waters, which the Taiwan Straits certainly are. Attacking the carrier in international waters would be an act of war in and of itself, something I don't expect China would commit against the US. If China and the US were indeed already at war, there is no reason to send a carrier through the straits. Yes, that would draw out attacks by all and sundry including every FAC the PLAN could muster, but no US carrier is going to be handled that way in a war with China.
I agree with you, and that has been my whole point ( but thanks for validating my argument Wolvie ) that FAC's are not going to challenge a carrier in blue water. Like I said, there is no earthly reason for the carrier to get inside the range of these craft, it will always be well outside their range.
The 022's will gradually replace legacy FAC's in PLAN service, and carry out roughly the same coastal defense mission as their predecessors, albeit with much higher capabilities against other nations FAC's, corvettes and frigates.
Perhaps this discussion should be moved to a radar thread.
Theoretically, assuming you could detect the entire waveform (spread spectrum and all) and process/playback fast enough and predict the echo your aircraft/ship would generate, you can use a played back copy to cancel the echo, without needing to predict the waveform, making cryptographic protection of the waveform irrelevant.
Practically this seems extremely difficult. The two biggest problems would be playing back the waveform fast enough and at the correct strength. You can imagine an antenna that is closer to the source emitter than the main radar reflecting surfaces of the aircraft/frame and using this brief distance to trade for time for processing. It isn't a lot, say antenna is 3 meters out, so you have 6 meters of time, which is covered by light in 2e-8 sec, a mere 20 nanosec, or 60 cycles on a 3 Ghz processor.
The even harder part would be to match the echo of the aircraft/ship frame, I think. You could precompute the echo for each frequency and solid angle and just use a lookup table. But this assumes you know the direction the wave is coming from, accurately. This all has to be done at the antenna, since sending the signal to the main body of the ship/plane would not be faster than c.
If the radar was an old obsolete set which had predictable waveforms, of course it is asking to be jammed. Who still uses non-frequency hopping, non-encrypted waveforms these days? And how would ELINT help at all when it can't sample the war reserve modes?
Consider that the F-22 and F-35 both use six special ports distributed around the airframe for both detection of signals and the emission of counter measures. You will never see an open source photo or description of these openings, their characteristics are highly classified. This gives the aircraft sensor warning in every direction continuously, and allows the generation of necessary countermeasures signals only in the direction of the threat. The actual processors are the most highly classified pieces of equipment on the F-22. These are very special due to their high speed and tremendous computing power, and are the heart of what makes the F-22 stealthy. These are also the reason the FMS version of the F-35 will not have the full "low observables" package the US and UK will have on theirs. FMS F-35's receive significantly less capable countermeasures and probably no active cancellation capability built into them. This is the source of much angst with foreign buyers of the F-35. The F-35 airframe is quite conventional compared to the F-22's which is why it is for sale and the F-22 is not.
One other consideration. A threat signal will impinge on the airframe of the F-22 or F-35 long before there is sufficient signal strength to generate an echo that will be received by the threat sensor. This buys valuable time for the processors to analyze the threat signal and generate a countermeasure if necessary, or simply fly somewhere else and avoid the signal or stay far enough away to avoid generating an echo, depending on tactical considerations. You also have a lot of ELINT and threat analysis backing up this system, it isn't going it to combat without a lot of intel stored on board about the characteristics of various systems. This is how the system is able to classify each threat accurately.
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