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The warheads counted for a lot.
But I think the Soviets leapfrogged or sidestepped the US on military tech more often than China has – maybe that's just vibes.
I'm not making a "China can't innovate" argument (in fact my understanding is for some period, perhaps continuing to this day, they were building iterative designs of major warships to keep pace with their evolving mastery of technology and technique, which certainly is not blind adherence to formula), but the impression that I have gotten is that China has for the last oh 20ish years focused on building out its tech base, bringing it in-house, and bringing its designs up to a modern standard. Their approach has been good and pragmatic but they have been pushing the limits of American military capability by sheer quantity and by exploiting hideous blind spots in American post-Cold War defense drawdowns, not by cutting edge or even funky designs, with maybe a few exceptions.
Nevertheless I tend to find that I am more impressed and amused by Soviet and later Russian engineering than Chinese engineering – perhaps because I have a tendency towards mild Russophilia, perhaps because I pay less attention to Chinese systems, perhaps because their innovations are still classified, but I find Soviet/Russians designs unusual and capable of solving problems in ways that are elegant even in their brutality.
American designs in my opinion are often overly perfectionistic [which I think is tolerable for some high-end systems but the tendency has begun to wag the dog after the Cold War] and Chinese designs lend themselves towards being calmly pragmatic. They are, I think, just now in the past decade or two beginning to feel increasingly confident in many areas of stepping out of the shadow of Russian engineering, and one of the most interesting things about the recent aircraft reveals from China is the chance to see truly unusual airframes that are likely to be very different from their American, European, or Russian counterparts.
China has made the supercarrier obsolete. Is that not impressive? You know those Iskander missiles that have never been intercepted yet because they evade and allegedly can also drop countermeasures? Well, China has gliding anti-ship versions deliverable across half the planet. Is that not impressive?
This is a really common sentiment in internet military discussions that is incorrect. Things don't become obsolete in the military because they can get blown up (or blown up easier), they become obsolete when something does their job better than they do.
Tanks aren't obsolete because drones 1/1000th of their cost can make them explode. They are more vulnerable, but they are still useful. Having a giant gun that is armored and can move fast is still useful in 2025.
Human infantry can be killed in ever more creative, precise, and cheap ways. Are human infantry obsolete? No, because we have nothing that can replace what they do.
Carriers are more vulnerable now, the Chinese have a very impressive array of anti ship missiles and sensors to take them out. Does that make the capability of having a floating and mobile airstrip less useful? No. Is there anything that can replace a floating and mobile airstrip? No.
There's also a benefit to having a weapons system even if your enemy can blow it up. It forces them to direct resources into making things that can blow it up, instead of making other things they'd rather make instead.
If militaries stopped using weapons systems every time someone else invented a way to blow them up, militaries wouldn't have any gear, because if you try hard enough you can blow anything up.
They are obsolete for what matters most: peer warfare.
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On the other hand, battleships can perform a function (armored mobile very large gun batteries) that is both useful and not directly replaced by other capabilities, but they were deemed obsolete anyways. It could also be the case that something is obsolete because the special capabilities they do bring are just not worth the enormous cost.
My initial response was going to be "no, they were replaced by carrier launched airplanes and guided missiles, both of whom could make things over there explode better than a BB"
But I don't have a good argument for why that doesn't apply to tanks. So good point, I'll have to think about that.
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The proper term is Senile. A senile weapons system can still do the job, but a steadily-increasing cost that can grow by orders of magnitude.
I think Ian McCollum would use the term "obsolescent." E.g., the M1911 and M1 Garand are incredibly out-of-date designs, but they absolutely cream revolvers and bolt-actions for combat practicality. The latter are obsolete, the former are obsolescent.
I think "Senile" comes into its own when you're talking about more complex weapons systems. A senile weapons system might work just fine, and in fact it might be the best system available for the job it does. The problem is that to do the job, the system requires ever-greater expenditure of effort and resources. As long as the effort and resources can be provided, it keeps working, but at the cost of cannibalizing a greater and greater portion of the procurement budget. And of course, the more resources a system and its auxiliaries consume, the more valuable they are, and the greater the need to protect them, so the more spending on additional complexity and auxiliaries is justified...
Yeah, I suppose this probably does describe, say, the A-10.
(And now to wait for the shitstorm to hit...)
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No they have not.
I probably would not take either side of this bet.
I think the most impressive part of ballistic missiles (which are fairly simple) is the glide vehicle (as you mention) and also getting the guidance systems necessary for an anti-ship version to withstand the stress and heat of high-speed travel. Definitely very impressive, but essentially just pairing an antiship seeker with a ballistic missile. I tend to find the P-700 (fielded in the 1980s by the Soviet Union, designed to operate as part of a swarm targeting carriers) more conceptually interesting, although Dase may very well be correct that it is too clever by half.
Few modern Iranian missiles were intercepted in the last attack. Almost none. And these aren't as flat flying or as evasive as Iskander. Jamming satellites might work perhaps but it has inertial guidance so who knows how well..
That's your supposition, yank. Ask yourself what is a carrier group going to do when 128 maneuvering hypersonic glide vehicles appear over it.
Ask yourself how the carrier group is going to fare when it has what, 200 anti missiles. Even with perfect interception rates that's only 100 intercepted inbound missiles. Chinese LOVE large number production and they dug 1000kms of tunnels in mountains north of beijing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underground_Great_Wall_of_China
They can shoot a lot of missiles out from China.
The earlier version solved this elegantly, the missiles just delivered guided bombs with a speed of
1000 m/s high up, maybe terminal 800 m/s. You can have seekers then no problem. It'd still probably work because100 of these would be very tough to intercept and even 5-10 hits would seriously degrade operations from a carrier. Ships are hard to sink but the internal operations aren't very redundant for reasons of space.I'm not sure how the later version solve this, the HGV ones.
I mean - the DF-series has limited range, and carriers give a fleet a huge advantage over hostile fleets even if they are forced to stay out of it. Having a floating airfield is pretty neat, and forcing them away from shore does not make them obsolete, it makes them less
Well this sort of assumes some things - I think you're smart enough to know about the kill chain problems with anti-ship ballistic missiles. The US has the same (perhaps better) apparatus to kill Chinese missile launchers that China does to kill carriers, does that make ASBMs obsolete? (The answer is no). I don't think this makes ASBMs useless or carriers invulnerable, it just means that they aren't some sort of magic invincible weapon.
Are you asking realistically, or at full capacity? At full capacity a single Burke can carry nearly 400 surface-to-air missiles if it is simply going for quantity by quad-packing ESSMs. Most likely it will be carrying a mix of anti-air and possibly anti-surface stand-off, and any carrier will likely be escorted by a Tico and two Burkes, maybe more. That's about 314 cells. So even if they don't have full cells because US industrial capacity sucks and some other cells are full of Tomahawks and ASROCs, I think you can guess something like 300 anti-air missiles conservatively (50 x cells dedicated to ESSM, 100 x dedicated to Standard, 100x Tomahawk, 50x empty or ASROC) before getting to SeaRAM/CIWS, and of course the carrier itself can carry hundreds of AMRAAMs and the new AIM-174 which can likely intercept anti-ship missiles.
Now, I don't rate the ESSM as much against ballistic missiles (although they might be useful in terminal defense, I suppose, apparently they can pull 30gs - but I would not count on them) - you're really looking to the Standards to provide you with air defense. Of course, if the Navy really intends to get dirty and play with ballistic missiles, they would know this and so, at the cost of a great deal of time, you might see them send two CBGs with something like two Ticos and a dozen Burkes (the Navy has more than 70). Both the SM-3 (of which the US has probably a couple hundred) and the SM-6 (of which the US probably has four-figures) have ABM capability in theory, so you could in theory put let's say 600 ABM-capable missiles on such a fleet easily.
And, since the carrier can generate strike packages outside of the known range of the DF-21 (albeit with great difficulty due to Dick Cheney canning the A-12 and advanced F-14 variants) the BIG question is if 500 Standards can intercept the DF-26s in the Chinese arsenal, assuming we want to split the difference with the carrier group and let it operate at extreme range rather than risk the more numerous DF-21. Assuming also that the Chinese haven't burned all of their DF-26s on Guam (which frankly is probably a better idea than trying to shoot at a carrier if China can catch the planes there on the ground) they have, what, 200 missiles to shoot at the carrier group realistically (launcher was revealed in 2015, I found a 2021 .mil source that said 100 missiles or so, so let's assume they've doubled that and ignore the question of how many of those are earmarked for nuclear warheads by assuming zero.)
Now in a "shoot shoot look shoot" doctrine the US can "shoot shoot look shoot" all 200 missiles.
I think intercepting ballistic missiles is hard and would personally prefer never to be in a situation where I was trusting my ABMs to intercept ballistic missiles. Even if you make optimistic assumptions (50% inception rate, for instance) you can still run into bad situations where leakers get through just due to bad "rolls" and contra your suggestion that 5-10 hits would seriously degrade operations from a carrier I am going to courageously suggest that even a single ballistic missile warhead will absolutely ruin a carrier's day unless it is very lucky.
Fortunately, the US Navy doesn't just have to rely on interceptors - the missiles will be using radar, most likely, for terminal targeting. [ETA: it looks like they are also believed to have optical sensors, which have both advantages and disadvantages over radar. I'd say this makes me slightly more bullish on the DF-series if true, but it's not as if optical systems are invincible either.] And radar sucks, modern ships could employ barrage or seduction jamming as well as decoys and chaff. My intuition is that this is especially true if they are actually going to descend on a glide profile rather than a straight-down profile, there are a lot of soft-kill options.
Now, you can sort of "adjust the sliders" to make the assumptions you want here - if you assume US softkill systems work reliably, then you barely need to worry. If you assume Chinese long-range sensors are neutralized early in the conflict, you barely need to worry. If you assume that the Standards will work poorly, or that the Chinese have say 300 or 500 DF-26s they are willing to launch at ships (neither of which seem implausible to me), then it starts to look much worse for the carriers.
All that being said: I would not want to be on a CBG that was going into DF-26 range. There are too many things that can go wrong, and ships don't have a lot of room for error. (This is...worse for China than for the United States in a Taiwan scenario). It's possible the US has Secret Sauce Technology that makes them much more confident in their carrier defense; the same is plausible for Chinese missiles. My main point in writing this up is simply to say - the situation is much more complex than simply "I have a missile with a 3000 mile range and an anti-ship guidance system, checkmate."
(As an aside, I found out while researching this long reply that the Chinese are latecomers to the ASBM game: the Soviets fired the first anti-ship ballistic missile in 1973.)
Also that China does have satellite dazzlers ready. In short US wouldn't be likely to acquire these launchers, wouldn't have much to hit them with - cruise missiles aren't great at following moving targets and also planes wouldn't be able to get near.
I am familiar with the SCUD hunt. I also know what SENTIENT is. Are you familiar with Soviet attempts to find carrier battle groups?
To establish air supremacy or superiority, yes. Obviously it did not take the Ukrainians weeks to penetrate the Russian air-defense grid once they got the right capabilities, nor would it take the US weeks to penetrate it if they wanted to.
I do not necessarily think stealth aircraft are the best assets the US has against mobile ballistic missile launchers. Nevertheless we've learned that modern air defense systems do not render even non-stealthy aircraft incapable.
Now frankly I think it would likely be stupid to waste munitions on something the size of a ballistic missile launcher that might move at any moment. (And my understanding is that US doctrine was actually to avoid striking Chinese launchers anyway.) But my point is that the US having the theoretical capability does not make the missile useless! I agree with you that there are countermeasures against targeting mobile ballistic missile launchers! It's hard to do!
And the US has ways of operating despite dazzlers - stealth satellites, [likely] high-altitude hypersonic recon/(strike?) aircraft, maneuvering spacecraft, non-optical recon satellites, some dude with a quadcopter, SIGINT, etc.
Moving the launchers around constantly is unlikely (although moving them consistently is). (And, for the record, at least some modern cruise missiles are capable of hitting moving targets, although I agree with you that the moving complicates matters.) But as I said above, I think it would be a dumb use of munitions. Which, again, goes to my point: having the theoretical ability to destroy something does not mean that such a course is easy, or even a good idea.
Really, everything you've said about hunting missile launchers is also true of hunting carriers, although carriers are much larger and more valuable targets, making them much more reasonable to target than a single ballistic missile launcher.
I'm familiar China has a satellite constellation for the same and rocket propelled hypersonic drones. And also recently tested a pulse detonation engine for really high speeds.
I don't think is a problem for them. You can't intercept mach 5 drones 35 km up that evade at 15 G.. you simply don't have the dV for it.
China is a panopticon state with a nationalist population.
They only need to deter the carrier groups long enough to secure Taiwan.
Yeah, the Russians also had a satellite constellation. By your telling carriers have been obsolete for 50 years. (Not necessarily implausible but...I doubt it).
I don't think this is true at all, THAAD and the SM-3 are both much faster than Mach 5 and should have the dV. I do think their fast drone is one of the better backup solutions for sea control, but the Russians had plenty of MPA aircraft too, and they had trouble finding US carriers even in peacetime when their patrol aircraft weren't at risk of getting shot down.
But if it is true that hypersonic vehicles can't be intercepted, that's...not necessarily good for China.
I am not really sure that carrier groups are needed to defend Taiwan at all.
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Personally, I think more about torpedoes. Some are very long range, with impressively hard to defeat terminal guidance, and they are absolutely ship-killers in terms of payload/mechanism, rather than just mission-killers.
Yes, apparently wake homing torpedoes keep the US Navy up at night long enough that they tried to field anti-torpedo torpedoes onto our carriers before withdrawing them because checks notes they couldn't get them to work.
I am not sure how effective they are, but I also like supercavitating torpedoes because I have not put my inner eight-year-old to death.
However, I am not sure China has gotten their submarine force in good enough shape for it to be a solid option for them.
The trick is to age up to an inner 18-year-old, and enjoy Arpeggio of Blue Steel.
Which, I think, is a big part of why the USN is more concerned with Russian submarines, and why they're still confident the death of the carrier is yet again over-predicted: as long as they can avoid being torpedoed, everything else they can figure out some way to deal with, even if that's just limping back to port after taking a hit.
Yeah. I wouldn't be surprised if they actually keep the carriers out of a Taiwan Strait scenario, though, and detail them to doing interdiction/blockade work outside of DF-26 range. Although the Navy has a lot of pride and a long time to work on the problem, so maybe they feel pretty confident by now.
I liked the way Admiral Richardson discussed it:
And as we've learned, "anti-ship ballistic missiles backed by Chinese spy satellites" are not in fact an insurmountable obstacle for carrier battle groups.
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The current analyst opinion is that in submarines at least, Russia's are far more capable whereas China's building capacity is unmatched. That may very well simply be a reflection of previous national priorities and decades of experience, though.
My understanding is that Russian and Chinese submarines are intended to operate in very different waters and for different purposes. Chinese subs are intended to operate in the South China Sea and within the first island chain, so it makes sense for them to focus on smaller submarines with much less need for nuclear subs. Could they catch up to Russian capabilities? With time, I'm sure, but they don't really have a need to until they take Taiwan and start playing force projection games.
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I think China's manufacturing edge is less than one would think, in submarines.
It looks like since 2010, China has built 4 SSGNs (plus one Qing technology testbed), 4 nuclear attack submarines, and 16 conventional submarines.
The US has built 19 Virginia-class nuclear attack submarines in that period. Those Chinese conventional submarines are about half the tonnage of a Virginia and the nuclear attack submarines are smaller, too, so if I am eyeballing it correctly the US built fewer submarines but more submarine, if that makes sense.
(Sorry, I went off on a tangent: yes, I agree about the submarines. Which is very relevant in a Pacific war, in US doctrine submarines have been the intended ship killers and surface fleets are for ground attack, although I think this may be changing a bit.)
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I think the problem is that Westerners like gimmicks, and Russians/Soviets are not different. We all love our “no analogues!” Wunderwaffes and clever self-contained breakthroughs. That's just how European brains work I believe. But their brains work differently (see 2nd part and responses), their gimmicks are too large-scale to easily appreciate – supply chains, system integration building out entire cities, that's not just ant-like slave labor, they are just predisposed to logistical autism and a lot of cognitive effort goes into this. Yes, it doesn't result (at least not yet) in magic-looking individual devices, but does it matter much if their ships are half a generation behind when they can build literally orders of magnitude more? That's a whole different dimension of magic. I also suspect that Americans overindex on their triumphs through technological superiority – nukes, Desert Storm… But it probably won't apply to the conventional war with China. They aren't that behind, they have functional radars, they have VTOL cells on their ships, it will be reduced to a matter of quantity, which as you know has a quality of its own. Soviets even at their peak could not approach this degree of production dominance.
Semianalysis has just released a report on this Huawei server and it illustrates the philosophy well:
It's truly beautiful in its own way. I am not well versed in military hardware but I think the slight qualitative edge of Western tech doesn't matter as much as production capacity.
This is true lol. I just think Russian gimmicks are often very amusing (as well as being original). But the fish doesn't know the water in which he swims.
On the one hand, I agree.
On the other, I think technological edges are much more likely to matter in sea combat than in land combat. I've revised my estimation of American tech up (and correspondingly of Chinese countermeasures down) as specifically applies to naval combat after Ukraine.
But the war in china will be naval combat for US and land combat for them.
I wouldn't say this. Any confrontation between China and the US will be predominantly by air and by sea. In a Taiwan invasion scenario the US, Taiwan, and Japan will need to sink the Chinese amphibious attack fleet to "win." The Chinese (and US!) land-based forces will be important force-multipliers, particularly the aircraft, but the ships are the vulnerable part.
What's relevant here is that in this time of warfare a single cruise missile or mine that would kill a single tank or even a single person can sink or incapacitate a warship (obviously not necessarily the same system, but the maritime equivalents.) So instead of facing 10,000 targets as you are in a land fight, you're facing a couple hundred.
The reason my analysis of the relative advantage shifted in the Ukraine war is that Russian air defenses - which are generally considered quite good (and have performed a number of impressive deeds) were unable to stop Ukraine from hitting high-value targets with their pocket force of stealthy cruise missiles. The US has a lot of stealthy cruise missiles. Counting decoys, the US can probably deploy more missile "targets" to the Taiwan Strait than the Chinese Navy has VLS cells.
But it's unlikely to need to win a war of missile attrition with China, as sea-based missile interception is notoriously difficult. So my priors have shifted from "Chinese air defense will be relatively effective" to "China is going to have serious problems with leakers" since my guesses are that Chinese air defense is as good or perhaps slightly worse than Russian (I could be persuaded they are better, but I don't see a reason to assume that), but they will perform worse simply because it's harder to do air defense at sea. (Of course this assumption might be wrong, too, because missiles can use terrain masking better at land. The problem with missile defense at sea, as I understand it, is that missiles blend into the churning sea surface very well, but perhaps newer radar systems have solved this).
And that's without even getting into mines, submarines, and simply sinking amphibious ships with artillery, unmanned boats or suicide drones in the last few miles before they hit the beach, all of which will be fundamentally a question of "naval combat" for China.
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Western military might is impressive but fragile. Show that you have the capability to sink carriers and US is contained for a couple of years. You don't even have to sink them - 4000 bodies make peace negotiations hard.
Uh yes but that's not necessarily good for China.
I think his argument is that they won't destroy a carrier with personnel abroad, if they want to have negotiations. Blowing off some surface features as a show of strength would be good (though obviously not too realistic).
Yeah, I (now) realize that.
I agree with you on the realism.
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China showing that they can bitch slap US naval power, but choosing not to inflict massive casualties is absolutely good for china. You can destroy as much material as you like and as long as the body count is low it will be shrugged.
Admittedly, times have changed a lot, but this was the same calculation Japan made in 1941, which didn't quite work out for them as they had planned.
The body count was not low. And it was unprovoked attack on US state. If the same ships were doing freedom of navigation between manchuria and japan and the japanese sunk them, without too many US casualties do you think that the reaction would have been the same?
China doesn't want japan, if they want korea they just have to wait, so the only possible hot war is over taiwan.
The body count was about 2400, about half the personnel count of a modern US carrier. They were provoked by crippling embargos, albeit well-deserved ones. Hawaii was still a territory, and wouldn't be a state for nearly two more decades. If the Japanese had killed 2300 soldiers and sailors in a sneak attack before declaring war but hadn't killed 68 civilians, then yes, the reaction would have been roughly the same.
No real arguments with any of this, though. I suppose there's also the "Thucydides Trap" possibility where the US becomes so unnerved by China's rising power that we provoke a war; that theory doesn't sound quite as silly as it used to.
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Sorry, I misunderstood your comment.
This thinking reminds me a lot of the advice to police and beleaguered homeowners to "just shoot them in the leg." The Chinese have been fielding very large land-based ballistic and air-launched anti-ship missiles, I don't think they intend to tickle a supercarrier as a flex. (Now, it is quite hard to sink a super carrier).
I think this notion will be challenged at some point. Fairly sure that things are more fragile than expected.
Shoot them at the leg is different. If there was strong castle doctrine, killing them would be the best option.
Dealing with another country military is a bit more like trying to kill a made man. Scaring them away is usually the better approach unless you are prepared to wipe their entire organization away.
I just mean they are very big, so it's actually easier to carry out what you propose (damaging them) because they can plausibly survive hits that might sink smaller vessels.
Yes, I believe the US refers to these as "off-ramps." I find the Chinese situation right now fascinating, since their most effective military strategy is arguably very much at odds with their most effective political or diplomatic strategy.
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