Trash Talk, Pop-Corn, That's The Entertainment!

Boy, it is a shitstorm in media since one of PLAN's Admirals, Admiral Lou, started chest-thumping a week or so ago:

His speech, delivered on December 20 to the 2018 Military Industry List summit, declared that China’s new and highly capable anti-ship ballistic and cruise missiles were more than capable of hitting US carriers, despite them being at the centre of a ‘bubble’ of defensive escorts. “What the United States fears the most is taking casualties,” Admiral Lou declared. He said the loss of one super carrier would cost the US the lives of 5000 service men and women. Sinking two would double that toll. “We’ll see how frightened America is.”

I agree, this statement, which may or may not be true, comes across as rather rude and in many respects as a simple bravado. There are number of reasons, including purely ethical ones, that these kinds of statements should be made in a professional manner and not without accounting for the history of the issue. But Lou's statement didn't go unanswered and James Holmes today, in The National Interest (where else) returned the trash talk in a very emotional piece. Holmes exclaims:

Keep talking, admiral. Fighting words make it easier politically for us ‘Mercans to don our game face. Threats help us rally. The United States took a strategic holiday it never should have taken after the Cold War, letting its readiness for major combat slip. The armed forces are now scrambling to make up for lost time. But that’s a separate problem from political moxie. No one from any U.S. political party countenances an assault on American fighting men and women—let alone one that claims more lives in an afternoon than the combined figure from seventeen years of the Global War on Terror. 

But, while I totally get where Holmes is coming from, one is inevitably forced to remind him that the United States didn't encounter peer or even near peer military power in ages, namely since 1945. But realities of modern warfare, both naval and in other environments are such, that massive military casualties are not only possible--they are most likely. I don't know if former naval officer Dr. Holmes recalls it but other, US Army officer, Colonel Douglas Macgregor had no inhibitions in looking reality into the face in 2011:

“In 110 days of fighting the German army in France during 1918, the U.S. Army Expeditionary Force sustained 318,000 casualties, including 110,000 killed in action. That’s the kind of lethality waiting for U.S. forces in a future war with real armies, air forces, air defenses and naval power. Ignoring this reality is the road to future defeats and American decline. It’s time to look beyond the stirring images of infantrymen storming machine-gun nests created by Hollywood and to see war for what it is and will be in the future: the ruthless extermination of the enemy with accurate, devastating firepower from the sea, from the air, from space and from mobile, armored firepower on land.”

And Macgregor is absolutely correct in stating the case in, granted very approximate, numbers of casualties. I don't think Macgregor is well versed in Soviet/Russian military but he is correct in giving order of magnitude of losses when meeting a near peer or peer. 

Holmes, after some general political talk and rebuttal of Lou, goes on emotional defense, and you already guessed it, of US Navy's Aircraft Carriers. Some points Holmes makes are valid:

Whether the PLA could sink two carriers thus depends on its ability to detect, track, and engage vessels operating from opposite sides of the Pacific, and it depends on how U.S. carrier-group commanders handle fleet operations at sea. It remains to be seen (except perhaps in the spooky realm of classified intelligence) whether China’s array of satellites, sensors and other surveillance assets can find and track moving task forces in the vast emptiness that is the Pacific Ocean with any real precision.

True, nobody realistically knows how good Chinese reconnaissance and targeting systems are and if they are survivable in case of a conflict at all. In the end, how accurate realistically is Chinese DF-21, said to be the first ballistic anti-shipping missile in the world, nobody knows. And here is the deal, Chinese do tend to overstate own capability and the first proof of that is steady, continuous purchase of Russian military technology, including a rather substantial number of Russian-made anti-shipping missiles. So, how credible is Chinese anti-carrier threat? It is certainly not just a bluster, China does have at least some capability to inflict the damage or achieve at least mission kill--in case of the fairly short (granted it stays conventional) conflict in theater that is as good as sinking. One also cannot discount gigantic energies hyper-sonic missiles, even in the inert, that is without explosives, release upon the hit on a target. After all Rods from God was RAND's idea--it is as American as baseball (sorry, Canada) and apple pie (sorry, Germany), as is even more terrifying weapon such as a Gay Bomb or even a Fart Bomb--what an evil twisted mind would come up with such a weapon of mass fartification and well, the other one, you get the idea.    

I don't think Holmes' bringing up USS America's SINKEX applies here because if any CVN's ammo storage detonates or its nuclear reactor is damaged we may indeed talk about a complete kill of the ship with horrendous casualties to boot--a scenario which must be avoided. But Holmes still tries to make operational and tactical case for CBGs. 

Task forces can also operate in congested waters, mingling with other traffic to clutter an enemy’s tactical picture. They can operate near shore, using coastal terrain to mask their whereabouts. They can make foul weather their friend. And so on. Creative options exist for forestalling an America scenario and have for many years. U.S. naval commanders should harness familiar standards from World War II and the Cold War while devising new methods of operational concealment, guile and deception.  

I disagree with the argument of congested waters and traffic--this is precisely the environment which will provide good intelligence and targeting precisely for reasons Holmes invokes in his argumentation--other people also learn their lessons and any fishing vessel with basic radar and Beidou, GPS or GLONASS receiver can provide very good real time coordinates of CVN. James Holmes teaches in US Naval War College--he MUST know that salvos of ANY anti-shipping missiles are done, depending on type, as the tangents of a circle with the radius of, roughly, Vcarrier*tfrom detection, or with account of the obsolescence of the targeting data when the datum is a single identification. It is precisely in the cluttered waters where CBG and its heart--CVN are identified easiest and intelligence is provided. Here is the scheme of the salvo by anti-shipping missiles by three SSGNs with the coverage of the area of probable CBG location. 

A big arrow is a general course of CBG when intelligence is verified. That large circle is an area of the launch of ASMs by SSGNs, small one--is CBG's location probable at the launch time. And that brings us to a funny situation, with my piece at Colonel Lang's site few days ago stating, and I quote myself:

While diesel-electric or non-nuclear submarines of PLAN can play crucial role in defense of China's littoral, operations in the open ocean require nuclear-powered submarines. China has problems with this particular type. While PLAN's program of building surface combatants is extremely impressive, nuclear submarines remain its Achilles heel. As one Russian naval analyst observed in July 2018, citing also US Office of Naval Intelligence Report, modern Chinese nuclear powered submarines lag seriously even behind American and Russian third generation nuclear submarines, such as project 671 RTM (NATO Victor III-class)  in terms of quieting—a key, albeit not the only one, tactical and technical characteristic of a submarine.[4] Nobody can predict when and if China will be able to match its nuclear submarines' capability, and a surface force required for support of their operations, with that of the US Navy's but it is obvious that this issue must be high on a priority list of Chinese strategists. Lesson from Admiral Gorshkov can help. The lesson is simple—there is no modern powerful and balanced navy without powerful nuclear submarine component armed with modern weapon systems. 

And here is the news, PLAN, for now, doesn't have submarine force which is even remotely competitive both in numbers and quality with the US Navy's submarine force. All bravado on both sides apart, US submarines in the Pacific are overwhelmingly superior to PLAN's nuclear subs (SSKs are a separate issue). Currently the US Navy operates 32 Los Angeles-class + 3 Sea Wolf-class + 15 Virginia-class SSNs = 50 SSNs ALL of whom, including older L.A. class SSNs are superior to anything PLAN can deploy in terms of nukes, which is roughly 9 nuclear subs, only 6 of which could be considered relatively modern (Type 093). Period. Yes, PLAN does deploy a substantial number of conventional SSKs, but again, this fleet of subs is good only for a relatively short distance deployments in defense of own littoral. 

We are talking here about overwhelming advantage US Navy enjoys over any PLAN's surface or nuclear power submarine force beyond the First Island Chain. I am not even talking here about remote segments of SLOCs. Yes, Chinese are improving, yes, they are gaining both capability (such as destroying US aircraft carriers) and some operational experience, but it takes much more than that to command the seas. I will also avoid describing some info (very reliable one), I just mention it, that testifies against Chinese tactical and operational maturity, for now--I underscore that, for now. But namely for now PLAN, for all US Navy's huge institutional problems, is not a real competitor in one domain, which today defines command of the seas--underwater. US submarine force is simply better, much better and that's the reality, which Admiral Lou should have considered and James Holmes remembered when trying to respond to Chinese naval officer. As per carriers--you all know my attitude to these ships as being in the process of removal into the niche of pure power projection against weak powers, and at this stage one has to ask the question I raised several days ago while talking to Arctic Fox:

           CAN AVANGARD BE USED AS ASM?  

Something tells me that not only it can but it will be. Once this happens, we might as well forget about surface fleet as we know it today. That will be the entertainment.   

Damned If You Do, Damned If You Don't-III

We already touched upon very basic calculations of Sweep Widths and Rates to give at least some impression about the scale of the tasks ASW faces when operating in the area such as Russia's Far East. Of course, search in general and ASW's in particular realities and math involved are more complex than that, including such funny things as Probability Density Distributions and Probability Maps, which reflect, if to put it in layman's lingo, those areas (often represented as cells on a grid) where the probability of the target is lowest and highest.  The formula used there is not a complex one (unlike a general math concept, which requires a little bit of time to get acquainted with) and it looks like that: 

           

Where in red, obviously, is Probability Density, POA is a probability of the target we search for being contained in some area (it is also goes under POC abbreviation), while A is the size of this area. Not a difficult stuff, really, but if some of you want to ask the question of how the hell has this anything to do with Elmo Zumwalt, the answer is this: as the story goes by some people who had a first hand experience with ASW--it is so complex that it reminds many the story of a man who constantly hit himself on the head with a hammer in order to feel good when he stopped doping this. This is ASW in a nutshell. US Navy's CBGs thought (and still think--hence this series of posts in response to Admiral Richardson's claims) that their organic ASW capabilities (remember those ungainly but crucial S-3 Viking planes?) combined with those of patrol aviation (P-3 Orion then) could provide the safety of carriers. Famous Soviet Foreign Military Review magazine published in mid-1970s the article (by Rear-Admiral Pushkin and Professor Naskanov) with a straight forward title: Anti-Submarine Defense Of Carrier Group. It was a fairly detailed review of the open information on the subject and it had a number of schemes of deployment of CBGs' organic ASW forces. Such as this:

        

 Or this:

                   

Which was pretty generic tactical (and operational) mambo-jumbo, but in the end of this article both authors noted that complexity of technology (mid-1970s, mind you), physiological and psychological loads on ASW crews, other objective factors limited realization of all supposed advantages to... drum roll ...20% of actual capability. There went, through the window, the myth of CBGs' invulnerability. Zumwalt knew that. No, of course, he would continue to extol the value of carriers as a main platform for US Navy but he and a number of his Navy allies, such as Admiral Stansfield Turner, looked at the emerging Soviet Navy's capabilities really seriously--thus the Project 60 was born.  After all, it was THIS Admiral who made it to the cover of the Time Magazine in 1968. 

      

And this Admiral loved his submarines and ASMs. In fact, it was the only way to stop US Navy's CBGs since, as Baer succinctly points out: far from being a platform which can fight for Sea Control, US Navy's carriers themselves depended on it and that meant only one thing--someone else was supposed to fight those nasty Russkies who increasingly were prone to reducing their Probability Densities and were working really hard at noise and other physical fields' reduction technologies. This is, mind you, without mentioning Gorshkov's battle axe of Naval Missile-Carrying Aviation which was specifically honed for sinking carriers, using a variety of means, not least of which were, and you may have guessed it, air-launched anti-ship missiles. But back to the underwater start. 

P-120 Malakhit (NATO SS-N-9 Siren)  already had a serious impact with its range. Indeed, what were the probabilities of the CBG, with its immensely expensive and mission-crucial carrier in the middle, to defend against the salvo of 2, 4 or maybe 8 of such missiles? Crisis in Mediterranean in 1973 showed that what Soviet Navy cared about was, as Admiral Kapitanetz later recited, "how many missiles we had in the first salvo". The operational concept of having a missile revolver at the temple (carrier) of each US Navy's CBG had its own flaws, to be sure, people and ships (also known, and for a good reason, as kamikaze) would die but then again--the game in those days was too damn serious. Project 60, which was a US Navy's internal document, was seeking to withdraw carriers into the second echelon for pure power projection, that is only when the battle for Sea Control will be won against Soviet Navy and that meant a massive ASW campaign both in Atlantic and on the Pacific theaters. The centerpiece (or rather four of them) of Project 60 was a ship which would give any US navy's aviator an aneurysm--Sea Control Ship. This was a blasphemy, a sacrilege, really (for US Navy's "aviators union") to have a relatively inexpensive ($100 million--compare with $1.44 billion for nuclear carrier then)  ASW and escort missions capable ships whose task was, actually, to fight Soviet Navy and its subs. Look above, at the first picture where it is namely a helicopter ASW sweep ahead of CBG which was tasked with immediate safety of a carrier. This was the same concept, except that this time, those helicopters would fly from a ship which was almost 15 times less expensive than carrier and whose loss wouldn't entail a massive escalation and a political and psychological crises in the US. Seems reasonable, after all--the second Project 60 key item, a venerable FFGs of Oliver Hazard Perry-class reached unheard of number built--71 (!!!) and I guess that was because these were ... excellent (in reality outstanding) and inexpensive multi-purpose ships?  They sure as hell fell into Arleigh Burke's paradigm handed by him to Zumwalt:"We need numbers"(c). They also proved very survivable, granted that the crew was properly trained. But if Project 60 was able to push through those ships, Sea Control Ships were an absolute no-no. Guess why? I am sure you already have guessed. There was a problem, though--with ASM salvo a defending unit (CBG) is limited by the radio-horizon--this is as far as CBG can theoretically detect and track incoming ASMs (we will touch on this later). So, the best way to defend against this salvo is not to allow this salvo to happen, to not allow this salvo to happen one had to:

1. Detect the Soviet carriers of ASMs before they launch;
2. Destroy them before they launch. 

If the carrier of those ASMs was some TU-22 or TU-95 US Navy theoretically had the answer--F-14 Tomcat and AIM-54 Phoenix, which allegedly could also shoot the incoming  ASMs. The real tasks of  Tomcats, however, was to shoot down primarily carriers of those ASMs. Theoretically some measures could be taken against Soviet surface kamikazes keeping cross-hairs of their ASMs on US carriers--a practice called tracking with the weapons (slezhenie oruzhiem). In the end, those kamikazes were on the surface, they could be tracked visually and by radar, so there were some chances. But submarines--this was a completely different game. And the only answer was a massive and extremely well-coordinated ASW effort with probabilities which would be at least satisfactory for US Navy's carriers to carry out their force projection tasks. Well, I am about to make a statement which some will not like: once the anti-shipping missiles learned how to launch from underneath the surface of water, those probabilities were never in this "satisfactory" range. And, indeed, what is this satisfactory range? I would say, for CBG's safety it has to be in the vicinity of 0.85-0.9 under the most adverse (combat) conditions. The problem, however, was that against near-peer, let alone against peer achieving such numbers was simply horrendously difficult. Today, it is absolutely impossible, because those very near peers and peers spent decades developing means of.... making Elmo Zumwalt and Project 60 correct--that modern US CVNs can not realistically fight for Sea Control and survive, totally different classes of ships are required and I don't mean LCS.    

To be continued....