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Notes -
I have seen one video of Russia doing a bombing run with gravity bombs and zero videos of Ukraine doing so.
I haven't even seen any complaints from Russia about anything but Storm Shadow.
Single missile?
Every ship in the Chinese navy has at least one point defense Gatling cannon and most no doubt have short range air defense missiles similar to e.g. Pantsir, that unlike the US ones do not cost a million dollars each.
A single missile, unless it's hypersonic, low flying and evading probably doesn't have a snowball's chance in hell of getting near.
Bombs show up on radar, show up on IR, cannot maneuver. And are slow - glide bombs go maybe 100 m/s in the end.
Hypersonics glow in IR, and highly likely if you fill their path with metal fragments you are going to get a spectacular light show.
Not saying you can't attack ships, but you probably need a whole salvo and maybe a little luck and/or EW to secure a chance to hit.
Sorry for the delay; I was out.
Both Ukraine and Russia are using glide bombs. If you poke around a bit, you can see videos of them both using unguided rockets in the CAS role.
Yes, and if Storm Shadow can penetrate layered Russian air defenses we ought to imagine LRASM can do the same. (Recall that a B-1 can carry 2-3 dozen LRASMs, so a squadron of them might literally be able to overwhelm a Chinese carrier battle group even if they launch and hit with every air-defense missile; the B-21 seems fairly small, maybe it carries 6ish?)
Perhaps I was too ambiguous; what I meant was it only takes a single missile to hit to render a ship non-combat effective. I agree that it will likely take salvos to hit reliably, although it is worth noting that it did not take large ones in the Falklands War, and that Ukraine appears to have sunk a Soviet cruiser (the Moskva) with a very small salvo of two subsonic missiles (if you trust the Ukrainian claims.) The Moskva had the S-300 – not exactly a slouch of an air-defense system – plus shorter-ranged anti-air missiles and CIWS. I can think of a lot of reasons why the Chinese ships might perform better than the Moskva but I think our priors ought to be that missile salvos will be effective, because they have been in the past and are now.
Anyway, if the LRASM (stealthy) or future hypersonic weapons give Chinese ships the same trouble that the Storm Shadow gave the Russian air-defense crews using similar missiles, I think the B-21 will be plenty scary.
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