Type 022 Missile Boat

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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Violet Oboe

Junior Member
@Ambivalent:
You are referring to the engagement sinking Sabalan and Sahand during Operation Praying Mantis?
AFAIK the Iranians actually fired a few old batch Harpoons (delivered to the Imperial Navy in '75) and USN ECM obviously worked. Moreover the USN also employed Harpoons (by A-6's of the USS Enterprise strike group) though as you have mentioned correctly the ´main work´ was done by Standard SM-1ER/2 missiles.

(Interestingly more recent research shows that the Iranians probably never fired Silkworms at USN ships during Praying Mantis though several near misses were indeed observed so your assumption Ambivalent that they fired also old ´monkey version´ Standards is completely possible.:coffee:)

As for your ´theory´ on the attack on USS Stark that the ECM systems were simply not turned on, I can only say that this is not the official version. The semi official work of Levinson and Edwards (Missile Inbound, The attack on the USS Stark in the Persian Gulf, 1997, Naval Institute) states clearly that although human errors were partly responsible especially the SLQ-32 ECM suite was obviously not prepared for a threat by AM-39 Exocet missiles (...though the authors do not elaborate further citing classification of the subject!:D).

Regarding the ECM successes of the Israeli navy I would not overpraise her capabilities since during the war with Hizballah in '06 the Israeli frigate Hanit got hit by a probably Iranian built export version of YJ-82 resulting in a mission kill. Of course (just guess what! :D) the lame excuse was that all high tech ECM systems were not activated since Mossad had ostensibly not a clue that Hizballah had acquired anti ship missiles from Iran. Sometimes we should actually wonder why all these expensive gadgets are built in on warships if they are invariably turned off in case ´something´ bad hits home? :confused:
 
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crobato

Colonel
VIP Professional
Crobato, I work in this business. You are out of your depth and simply do not know the latest technologies.

There is nothing to indicate from your posts, you truly understand these technologies, and you show it by the simple fact, you are trying to state "authority" without coming back with a strong technological argument.
 
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crobato

Colonel
VIP Professional
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.

And what has this got to do with dealing with LPI fire control radar, assuming they are used on antiship missiles? Search radar is a very different beast from fire control radar.

Do you really understand processors? The fastest processors in the world could not analyze pseudo random signal fast enough and produce a counter the moment the echo leaves off the surface, since the next wave will be different. Electrons move across any mediums slower than than the speed of light, any latency means you are trying to counter by prediction what the next wave will be, not the one that already echoed. Even then its dicey, because of the near infinitesimal variation of phase/frequency modulation factored with spread spectrum.
 
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Pointblank

Senior Member
@Ambivalent:
You are referring to the engagement sinking Sabalan and Sahand during Operation Praying Mantis?
AFAIK the Iranians actually fired a few old batch Harpoons (delivered to the Imperial Navy in '75) and USN ECM obviously worked. Moreover the USN also employed Harpoons (by A-6's of the USS Enterprise strike group) though as you have mentioned correctly the ´main work´ was done by Standard SM-1ER/2 missiles.

(Interestingly more recent research shows that the Iranians probably never fired Silkworms at USN ships during Praying Mantis though several near misses were indeed observed so your assumption Ambivalent that they fired also old ´monkey version´ Standards is completely possible.:coffee:)

As for your ´theory´ on the attack on USS Stark that the ECM systems were simply not turned on, I can only say that this is not the official version. The semi official work of Levinson and Edwards (Missile Inbound, The attack on the USS Stark in the Persian Gulf, 1997, Naval Institute) states clearly that although human errors were partly responsible especially the SLQ-32 ECM suite was obviously not prepared for a threat by AM-39 Exocet missiles (...though the authors do not elaborate further citing classification of the subject!:D).

Regarding the ECM successes of the Israeli navy I would not overpraise their capabilities since during the war with Hizballah in '06 the Israeli frigate Hanit got hit by a probably Iranian built export version of YJ-82 resulting in a mission kill. Of course (just guess what! :D) the lame excuse was that all high tech ECM systems were not turned on since Mossad had ostensibly not a clue that Hizballah had acquired anti ship missiles from Iran. Sometimes we should actually wonder why all these expensive gadgets are built in on warships if they are invariably turned off in case ´something´ bad hits home? :confused:

1. It was cheaper to use the Standard missiles over the Harpoon's. Plus for the size of some of the targets involved, a Harpoon would have been overkill.

2. The official report on the Stark incident states these factors were in play during the attack:

1. The Tactical Action Officer (TAO) and other watch officers made an assumption that the Iraqi aircraft would pass harmlessly, and thus prepared themselves for a routine filing of a report. All were on duty for more than a hour before the attack.
2. Stark's CO was also present in the CIC; he did try to find out what was going on, nor did he correct the Tactical Action Officer's actions.
3. The position of the CIC Watch Officer and the Weapons Control Officer at the time of the attack was vacant. Furthermore, the radar technician in control of the MK 92 FCS and the CIWS was also not in the CIC. All were out on personal business.
4. The CIWS, SRBOC, and the MK 92 FCS were all in standby mode; according to Navy procedures, they should have been active at the time of the attack in response to a aircraft with unknown intentions, as the ROE was updated a while beforehand due to the increased concerns over indiscriminate attacks.
5. The SLQ-32 did pickup the lock on signal of the Cryano IV radar on the Mirage about a minute before the attack. This attracted the attention of everyone in the CIC. However, 10 seconds later, the ESM set detected the radar go back into search mode. As a result, the SRBOC watch officer went up to arm them and returned to the CIC.
6. Due to the trajectory of the Mirage, the Mirage was to pass immediately over the ship. This appeared to be the more immediate concern to the watch officers in the CIC compared to the possibility of a missile attack.
7. The TAO directed that the MK 92 FCS was to be locked onto the Mirage; however, another technician said that they could not do that because the Mirage was in a blind spot. The TAO accepted the response without so much as a question.
8. First detection of a missile inbound was visually, and the report was broadcasted over the ship's intercom circuit. It was passed onto the bridge and to the phonetalker in the CIC, but this information was never passed onto the TAO. In short, those in the CIC didn't know about the missile report until it was too late.
9. The ship's CO made a error in his orders, directing that one officer fill both CIC Watch Officer and the Weapons Control Officer. These should have been separate people.
10. The .50 caliber guns were not loaded at the time of the attack; furthermore, the Gunner's Mate assigned to man the guns was having a nap at his post.
11. The Weapons Control Officer believed that at the time of the attack, the ship was in a less ready alert situation compared to the actual alert level.
12. The ship made no effort to alter its heading to bring the Mirage out of its blindspot. Nor were there any orders to assign weapons or to engage the Mirage.
13. The ship's crew was operating under a misconception that they could not test the CIWS unless the ship was in an area designated for gunnery services.

As such, the official findings are as follows:
1. There was a failure in general by the ship's CO to appreciate and respect the hazard's that the ship in the current location. Furthermore, the CO and the watch team failed to recognize the threat posed by the Mirage and to effectively use the ship's systems to respond to such a threat.
2. The CO failed to properly set and maintain the watch manning and standing.
3. The CO and the watch team failed institute a proper state of weapons readiness.
4. Improper understanding by the CO and the watch team as to how to use the MK 92 FCS system as a measure short of deadly force in warning the threat and securing the safety of the ship.
5. ROE at the time gave sufficient time for the crew to warn the Mirage in a timely manner, and if the warnings were not heeded, more than enough time for the ship to defend herself.
6. The combat systems installed at the time were more than capable of handling the threat if properly engaged.
7. The Stark's CO failed to properly implement a effective means to supervise the readiness of the watchstanders as evidenced by the people missing from their posts on personal business at the time of the attack without proper authority, and the gunner's mate napping at his post.
8. The TAO assumed that the CO was on the bridge earlier when in fact he was in his cabin, and had heard that they had a radar contact with the Mirage, and this disobeyed orders from the CO to inform the Captain directly when the CIC had radar contact with the Mirage.
9. The CO lack personal initiative to keep himself informed as to Iraqi Mirage's location, despite having the inherent responsibility to do so.
10. The TAO did not consider the possibility that the Mirage might indiscriminately attack the Stark, nor did he understand the countermeasures he was required to execute to respond to the Mirage when it was first detected.
11. The TAO was reluctant to lock onto the Mirage as he felt it might be interpreted as a hostile act when the Mirage was over 40 miles away and closing. This was consistent with the command philosophy on the Stark, which was considered to be too conservative. Training onboard the Stark in her systems did not occur frequently, and was often done at night.
12. The ship failed to warn the Mirage in a timely fashion.

As such, the Captain of the Stark, and his second in command were relieved of duty, recommended for court martial and never sailed again, and the TAO at the was also recommended for court martial, and also never sailed again. All in the end received non-judicial punishment and letters of reprimand, and in the EXO's case, a letter of admonition.

3. I would call the INS Hanit's incident almost a repeat of the Stark incident. Poor tactical decision making, insufficient training, and lax procedures was responsible.
 
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Finn McCool

Captain
Registered Member
@Ambivalent:
You are referring to the engagement sinking Sabalan and Sahand during Operation Praying Mantis?
AFAIK the Iranians actually fired a few old batch Harpoons (delivered to the Imperial Navy in '75) and USN ECM obviously worked. Moreover the USN also employed Harpoons (by A-6's of the USS Enterprise strike group) though as you have mentioned correctly the ´main work´ was done by Standard SM-1ER/2 missiles.

I've read accounts of the battle that support both of your positions. From the publicly available literature on Preying Mantis, we can't conclude either way.
 

RedMercury

Junior Member
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.

Unless the special ports can travel back in time or beat the echo using their spatial positioning, they would not work against a securely randomized radar pulse generator. The whole point of encrypting, frequency hopping, and spread spectrum is to make the radar pulse impossible to predict, so the replay attack needed for cancellation can only happen if the replay beats the echo by physical means.

If the pulse generator gave a predictable pulse, it would be theoretically possible to predict the next pulse and prepare a cancellation waveform for when it arrives. If the time of arrival can be predicted as well, then sending out a cancellation waveform is trivial. Otherwise, the trigger for when to send the waveform has to be very fast and only part of the waveform can be canceled, but perhaps enough to fool the receiver. All that is required is some machine learning on a fast enough processor and A/D converter. And this concept is so simple even I, a non-expert, can think it up. I suspect this is what you are talking about.

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.
Enough time to generate a countermeasure if the threat signal was generated by obsolete equipment. The fact that these techniques are known publicly means the designer has to be remiss in his or her duties not to counter them when the means to do so already exist in commercial cell phone technologies and basic encryption.
 

Ambivalent

Junior Member
@Ambivalent:
You are referring to the engagement sinking Sabalan and Sahand during Operation Praying Mantis?
AFAIK the Iranians actually fired a few old batch Harpoons (delivered to the Imperial Navy in '75) and USN ECM obviously worked. Moreover the USN also employed Harpoons (by A-6's of the USS Enterprise strike group) though as you have mentioned correctly the ´main work´ was done by Standard SM-1ER/2 missiles.

(Interestingly more recent research shows that the Iranians probably never fired Silkworms at USN ships during Praying Mantis though several near misses were indeed observed so your assumption Ambivalent that they fired also old ´monkey version´ Standards is completely possible.:coffee:)

As for your ´theory´ on the attack on USS Stark that the ECM systems were simply not turned on, I can only say that this is not the official version. The semi official work of Levinson and Edwards (Missile Inbound, The attack on the USS Stark in the Persian Gulf, 1997, Naval Institute) states clearly that although human errors were partly responsible especially the SLQ-32 ECM suite was obviously not prepared for a threat by AM-39 Exocet missiles (...though the authors do not elaborate further citing classification of the subject!:D).

Regarding the ECM successes of the Israeli navy I would not overpraise her capabilities since during the war with Hizballah in '06 the Israeli frigate Hanit got hit by a probably Iranian built export version of YJ-82 resulting in a mission kill. Of course (just guess what! :D) the lame excuse was that all high tech ECM systems were not activated since Mossad had ostensibly not a clue that Hizballah had acquired anti ship missiles from Iran. Sometimes we should actually wonder why all these expensive gadgets are built in on warships if they are invariably turned off in case ´something´ bad hits home? :confused:

We were briefed by a weapons officer who was part of the attack planning in that strike group that no Harpoons were employed by US forces, for cost reasons. Only Mavericks and Standards were used, and some Skippers which was a weird hybrid of a Rockeye bomb and guidance unit attached to a rocket motor from a Shrike. I believe the confusion is some fanbois assumed the missiles fired by the A-6's were Harpoons when in fact they were older Mavericks or Skippers.
Stark's version of SLQ-32 was ESM only, there was no countermeasures or jamming capability incorporated into it. The SRBOC countermeasures on Stark were not turned on when she was attacked, despite a direct order from her CO to activate it.
 

Wolverine

Banned Idiot
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.
Of course we are talking about a war. What else would we be talking about? What other reason would China be concerned about the US sending its carriers close to China enough to engage them in anger if not for the sake of prosecuting a war?

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.
There are PLENTY of earthly reasons a carrier group would try to get as close to the Chinese coast as possible during a war, and frankly I shouldn't have to list them for you if you are worth your salt on this board. The 022 is one big 'reason' the Chinese military can give the USN NOT to get too close for comfort. Along with many of the other 'reasons' I've already listed, and you should already know.
 

Violet Oboe

Junior Member
@Pointblank:
Informative and precise post but there are certainly some gaps in the official story for security reasons and we will have to wait until some Annexes will be declassified.

In my POV the INS Hanit incident is evidently worse since USN at least was timely aware that Saddam's air force was buzzing around over the Gulf with highly sophisticated Mirage F1-EQ5 equipped with two Exocet AM-39. However Zahal just thought cruising around 10-12 km off the Lebanese coast leisurely shooting at some coastal targets of opportunity would be an excellent idea since they had done this routinely for almost 20 years during any ´punishment´ operation against Hizballah. Oops, that turned out this time to be a very bad idea... Israeli intelligence failed miserably before and during the war and the rounding up of more than 50 ´spies´ this year alone by Lebanese security indicates that things are not improving for them either.

@Finn McCool:
Exactly, many books and articles about USN's operations in the Gulf 1987/88 are inconsistent and amateurish. Most interesting would be evaluating some Iranian publications about this ´limited war´ with USN. There are probably some books around about this topic since the Pasdaran own several publishing houses being busy churning out many works every year about the ´imposed war´ with Iraq (o.k. many are full of propaganda but they cannot be much worse than what we have got currently!). Hey we need a friend in Tehran shedding light on this subject! :) We will have to hear definitely both sides of the story to draw any lasting conclusions!

@Ambivalent:
Perhaps the Harpoon capability of the Intruder was still classified back in '88?
Besides that is no fanboy chatter since the ´Harpoon story´ originates actually from ret. Cdr. Arthur Langston who was Deputy Air Wing Commander and Strike Group Leader on USS Enterprise at the time of Praying Mantis. He told his version to several scholars and journalists a couple of years ago; why should he lie? Only for his vanity?
 
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