Imperialists are simultaneously scared shitless of “the enemy” but also incorrigibly convinced of their martial supremacy. Contradiction is a feature, not a bug.
EDIT to add: For what it’s worth, aircraft carriers are little more than floating trillion dollar coffins without effective defense from ballistic missiles and saturation attacks, all of which are a lot cheaper to implement than a single aircraft carrier.
I’ve yet to hear anyone explain how the DF-21D’s kill vehicle gets or performs terminal guidance.
No one who knows the answer would risk the jail time to divulge it. Fortunately, for me, I don’t know the answer, but I know enough about other naval weapons to spitball here. This is all open source, available on Wikipedia and other platforms.
Missiles have few possible guidance systems, falling into four broad categories:
- Active
- Semi-active
- Passive
- Location
Active seeking is an onboard RADAR transceiver.
Passive seeking relies on the target’s own electromagnetic radiation. This category contains heat (infrared) seeking missiles as well as seekers that home on RADAR and radio emissions. It also contains video guided missiles, although those are not historically very common.
Semi-active missiles contain a RADAR receiver, but no transmitter of their own. The transmitter is based on a friendly platform (usually the ship it was launched from), and is typically called a director or illuminator. The missile will either fly along the transmitted beam or the director will illuminate the target and the missile will seek it. The US’s Standard Missile series is an example of this type.
Location is either GPS (or equivalent) or Inertial Navigation (gyros and accelerometers). These aren’t useful for attacking ships, as they’re not stationary, but it can get a long range missile within range to turn on it’s seeker.
Capable anti ship missiles use a combination of the above.
An aircraft carrier is always in a strike group and surrounded by other ships.
Viewed from above, a carrier has a large, flat surface that can’t be coated with radar absorbant material, due to the extreme wear and tear flight operations put on the flight deck. That makes it an enormous RADAR reflector, especially compared to the surrounding ships, many of which are designed to have reduced radar cross sesctions. While the ocean is also a large reflector, the signal wouldn’t be nearly as strong due to the irregularity of the sea surface, especially in rough places like the South China Sea.
American super carriers are nuclear powered, which means they don’t have big exhaust stacks, so Infrared seekers are out.
Each type of ship has different radio emissions, based on the types of radars and communications that are onboard. This can be used to discriminate between classes of ships, and can even be used to identify specific ships (ships operate RADARS on slightly different frequencies to prevent interference. Also, each RADAR and radio transmitter has unique irregularities in it’s signal which can be analyzed and used to determine its source). With how the physics of electromagnetic radiation in the radio spefctrum works in the atmosphere, a passive receiver can detect and identify a transmitter at twice the RADAR’s effective range, so passive detection is an extemely effective way to locate a target. The downside is that it only gives you direction, not range.
A semi-active seeker is extremely unlikely.
GPS satellites would be very juicy targets in a war between the US and China. Both countries have demonstrated the capability to destroy satellites. I am not aware of a China based GPS-like system, and the US controls the GPS system, to the point where, in wartime, the system would shift to encrypted only, making it useless to all non-NATO receivers. But, an Inertial Navigation System (INS) is pretty simple and effective with modern components.
So, to conclude, the likely DF-21D guidance is:
- Inertial navigation to get in the area
- Passive EM seeking to get near the target and discriminate between targets
- Active RADAR seeker in the terminal phase
Sorry if you already know this stuff. To get into any further depth, I’ll have to find what else is freely available.
Satellites and over-the-horizon radar. China’s recent advancements in space exploration tech are all a handy mediatic smokescreen/testbed for their increasingly more technologically advanced satellites.
How does that information get processed and sent to the KV in real time as it is performing reentry and has a white-hot plasma shield in front of it? Sure, a network of satellites providing 24/7/365 coverage of the relevant parts of the Pacific could do this but whether that capability exists is unknown and also untested.
It’s certainly a credible threat but I think a lot of this “death of the carrier” rhetoric is coming way too soon, especially when midair refueling exists.
It’s funny that this makes the naval commanders nervous about sailing carrier groups in the South China Sea, but sadly that just makes them ask for yet more weapons that our government is all too happy to provide.
Yeah, I listened to a whole Radio War Nerd episode about this and the millennium military games. The problem is that interceptor missiles are orders of magnitude more complicated than plain offensive missiles (hitting a bullet with a bullet), and even if the interceptors are perfect, all you have to do as the attacker is wait until they’ve used their last one, laugh maniacally, and then launch your second round of missiles.
