Canis Majoris
12/16/2015, 05:49:15
Author Profile | Edit
|
In your example 8 conventional Chinese antiship missiles sunk a ship and 1 stealthy US antiship missile sunk a ship, so the denominator is the same. The question is whether 8 Chinese missiles cost more than 1 US missile. In truth I doubt a single stealthy missile could successfully attack a PLAN ship. IMO what stealth would do is force air defense to begin at the visual horizon of the ship (25-30km) rather than further out, because once the missile breaks the visual horizon there is nothing you can do to hide the missile exhaust, which at 25-30km should be visible to any imaging IR sensor on the target ship. Also, I would imagine that at that distance even a stealthy missile would be picked up by surveillance radar. The benefits of using otherwise sh1tty low-resolution yagi antennas is that stealth simply can't hide from UHF and VHF. Finally, we obviously have no true idea what the actual Chinese:US "effective missile ratio" would be.As far as VL cell numbers go, in the near (to even medium) term this isn't an issue since we would only be talking about a Western Pacific confrontation inside which large swarms of missiles could be generated by onshore planes and missile batteries and offshore Type 022's and SSK's. The contribution from actual warship-launched missiles to the saturation attack against a USN ship formation would actually be minimal. In the long term one would expect that the Chinese military will have caught up to the US both in terms of technology and military expenditure.
|
