From Inside the Ring

[Jack Ray]

No rest for the wicked.

Inside The Ring
By Bill Gertz
Washington Times
July 10, 2008

China targets carriers

China is close to deploying a new conventionally armed strategic missile capable of hitting U.S. aircraft carriers and other warships at sea.

A defense intelligence official said a test of the new weapon is expected, but the timing is not known. A second official also said the Chinese anti-carrier ballistic missile effort, including an anticipated test firing, is being watched closely.

Defense officials said the new missile - a precision guided CSS-5 medium-range missile - is as great or greater a concern for some military planners as China's new anti-satellite weapon, which was first tested successfully against an orbiting Chinese weather satellite in January 2007.

The reason: The backbone of U.S. plans to defend Taiwan from Chinese attack calls for rushing more than half the U.S. aircraft carrier strike groups to the island in the event Beijing follows through on threats to use force to reunite the island with the mainland. Carrier-killing missiles are viewed as one of the most important strategic weapons in the Beijing arsenal because they will be able to block the rapid deployment of U.S. forces to the region considered vital to any Taiwan defense or defense of other allies in the region.

Richard Fisher, a specialist on the Chinese military with the International Assessment and Strategy Center, said the upcoming test of a medium-range anti-ship ballistic missile (ASBM) would not be China's first. "It would appear that the [People's Liberation Army] may now be developing three types of ASBMs," he said.

Two of the missiles are based on the CSS-5, also known as the DF-21, and Chinese Internet photos reveal what looks like a maneuvering warhead on the missile similar in design to warheads deployed on the U.S. Pershing-2 medium-range missile. The Pershing-2, dismantled in the 1980s, used a radar-digital map guidance system, and Mr. Fisher thinks the new Chinese anti-ship missile could use a combination of active radar and optical or infrared guidance.

A third anti-ship ballistic missile is expected to be a longer-range variant of the CSS-5 first seen in 2006 that may have multiple warheads.

"It is bad enough that these missiles are being developed and can soon target U.S. naval forces from China," Mr. Fisher said. "But we should also expect that China will eventually place these missiles on ships and submarines and sell them to its rogue allies."

"The Ahmadinejads, Castros and Chavezes of the world would love to have these missiles to hold the U.S. Navy at bay," he said, noting that the U.S. needs a similar capability to target China's growing navy.

U.S. Navy missile defense interceptors also should be upgraded to counter the new Chinese carrier killers, he said.

Bill Gertz covers national security affairs.

[Werner]

Time to supply large numbers of SM-3 to every Ticonderoga.

Thank you, Ronald Reagan for having the foresight to demand development of a sea-deployable antiballistic missile.

[Gerarddm]

If they can get diesel subs inside the escort like they purportedly recently did, who needs ballistic missles?

[chuck]

First, what are the implications of this hypothetical carrier seeking ballistic missile technology:

1. Hitherto all ballistic missiles are designed to strike stationary targets. A conventional ballistic missile re-entry vehicle that can hit a carrier at sea must possess extreme degree of terminal maneuverability that would be as far as I know unprecedented in any ballistic missile re-entry vehicles. Such an reentry vehicle would be extremely difficult to intercept since it can obviously be programed to utilize its terminal maneuverability to make radical maneuvers to thwart interception.

2. If the wonder carrier-tracking warhead is fitted to the top of an Intercontinental ballistic missile instead of intermediate range ballistic missile, it could in theory arrive over any spot on earth in under 40 minutes. So the existence of an carrier seeking ballistic missile capability implies the existence of the capability to strike from China at our carrier forces not only near china, but anywhere in the world, within less than 1 hour from the moment when the Chinese decides to do so.

3. Even worse, If the technology exists to enable an ballistic missile reentry vehicle to strike a carrier, that same technology can be applied to warheads not only sitting on top of an actual ballistic missiles, but parked in low earth orbit. In other words, the Chinese could in theory hide a couple of dozen of these carrier tracking entry vehicle in orbit disguised as satellites, and then at the right moments suddenly de-orbit them and strike American carriers with just 2-3 minutes of warning. Basically effecting another Pearl Harbor, but without requiring that our ships be in port.

Now second, is this story of a carrier seeking ballistic missile warhead from China likely to be true?

I have no idea how a ballistic missile reentry warhead would seek out and track a carrier with the massive background clutter of the sea fouling its radar and the heat of its own re-entry saturating its IR seeker. So I won't bother to speculate on the likelihood of this being actually doable. So I would focus instead on assuming it is objectively doable, is it likely that the Chinese would be the first to do it. Besides my usual observation about Bill Gertz's integrity and objectivity, I also like to point out that such a development would be uncharacteristic of the Chinese as defined by their past behavior. All the important technological achievements by the Chinese military have hitherto broken no new ground. That is to say each of their technical achievements had been aimed at duplicating a capability already pioneered elswehere, and is aimed at closing the gap with state of the art capability elsewhere. A ballistic missile that can track down a mobile target would be breaking major new ground, requiring the integration of an array of new techniques, technologies, without any template whatsoever. One would tend to think that when a military industrial complex gains the capability to integrate a variety of state of the art technology into a single ground breaking package, that capability will not arrive all at once, but would instead appear step by step, from relatively simple implementations first. This is why I don't really believe that the Chinese military industrial complex, hitherto reactive and imitative, would suddenly unleash a whopper like ballistic missile capable of tracking mobile targets. There should have been a long string of other signs of gradually increasing self-reliance in the area of true technological innovation.

[Werner]

There is a rule of thumb that the faster you are moving, the more gradual are your maneuvers, because of the immense size the impulse motor would have to be to make even a small change at 12,000 mph or whatever. Anyone who watched the movie Apollo 13 knows how long the main engine burn was to correct a few degree course error.

I doubt most of their story, because of how far a carrier moved in 1 minute, let alone 5 or 15. I _really_ doubt they can loft both the warhead, a huge set of reaction motors and their common bus to the carrier so it can perform the precision maneuvers to defend against not one SM-3, but 4 or 6 in salvos of two.

The authority is Clancy, so I don't know if it's even close to true, but according to his story, to save weight the nose cone heat ablative material of an ICBM resembles styrofoam. Even a very distant near-miss would begin the process of throwing the vehicle off-target and destroying it's re-entry material. Even two near-misses, and this national asset would be ineffective at it's job.

Now that you've failed to sink the US Westpac fleet, now what do you do? Surrender at once? You've stirred up a hornet's nest. As the lefties like to point out, the USN is bigger than most of the rest of the navies in the world COMBINED. How many thousand Tomahawk launchers are in the West Pacific at any moment? How many Trident subs are available for retribution? This is a weapon that does not consider what happens next.

The real threat to a CVN is pop-up cruise missiles launched by submarine from within the task force. That's why the current composition of the task group includes probably three SSNs and so many short-range RAM missiles (which are replacing Phalanx).

These things are better than mach defensive missiles that _can_ turn on a dime and are launched in salvos from several ships at once. There are also missiles like the one jointly developed with Australia which confuse and litter the battlespace with mirages and false targets.

Every year since 1941, every power that DOESN'T have carriers has had their top minds working out how to sink them. Ultimately every one - Nazi Germany, Italy, USSR, China - have launched a program to build carriers. I think that means they have little or no faith in their ability to destroy a carrier and it's task force.

[Gerarddm]

I see. So I guess we can hold those SM3s on Ticos, and hold off the thanks to Ronnie, eh?

Uber-silent diesel subs are the real danger, I agree. Not in the open seas, but defending their littoral waters.

Let's hear it for Evolved Sea Sparrows. Now what can we do against torpedoes?

[Werner]

I see. So I guess we can hold those SM3s on Ticos, and hold off the thanks to Ronnie, eh?

Uber-silent diesel subs are the real danger, I agree. Not in the open seas, but defending their littoral waters.

Let's hear it for Evolved Sea Sparrows. Now what can we do against torpedoes?

Not quite. The current administration has spent most of the DoD money on active warfare, so the numbers of SM-3 missiles is very small, as is the number of ships which have received the upgrades to operate them. From a doctrine standpoint, these ships are not integrated into carrier task groups, but will take up predetermined "failsafe" positions in the event a Korean, Chinese or Iranian threat materializes. The next administration will have to order more SM-3s, convert more cruisers and destroyers, change doctrine, and expand the assembly lines.

As far as torpedoes go, there is a substantial, active program of active anti-torpedo systems. I base this statement on DoD budgets and not on any press releases, which are conspicuous by their absence. The amount spent is does not support the idea of decoy or "spoofer" systems, but a device which actually hunts and kills torpedoes. It is possible a limited number of Burkes have been fit with these systems, the cover being a door for a "failed" anti-mine deployment system. A "second generation" or possibly a "competitive system" occupies a VLS launcher cell. It is also possible both parts work in cooperation. Finally, a change in doctrine has added one or several (depending on where you read) SSNs are added to each CVBG (and perhaps other type of battle groups) for the purpose of detecting and eliminating the SSK before it can become a threat to the surface unit. This change, of course, combined with the loss of the P-3 and S-3 units, means a country like Iran can indeed spread mayhem among the shipping lanes for days before the USN could mount any effective defense, unless the USN had adequate notice of the operation.

The USN is just spread too thin since it's last champion left in 1988.

Let's remember that one of the stated reasons Kim was confident in starting war in 1949/50 was the draconian cuts in the USN make by Truman. In 1949 there were only USS Valley Forge and HMS Triumph an position to give any support at all for months. Kim bet the West was unprepared to go nuclear, given tensions in Germany and developments in Russia.