After World War II, the influence of the US military-industrial complex on US policymaking has deepened, and finding an imaginary enemy and formulating targeted plans has become a fundamental principle of the US military's top brass.
After the outbreak of the Russia-Ukraine war, as the performance of the Russian military is much lower than Western expectations, and China's overall defense strength has increased significantly, the US military top brass will soon turn to China as a more threatening imaginary enemy than Russia.
For many years, the United States has claimed to be the direct successor of the British Empire, so the control of global sea power is also regarded as the basis for maintaining its hegemony, and the control of the Pacific Ocean coincides with the comprehensive containment strategy of the United States against China.
Therefore, in recent years, some large-scale exercises of the US military have been carried out around taking China as an imaginary enemy in the western Pacific.
From the end of the last century to the beginning of this century, the PLA's naval and air forces and technological level lagged far behind the world's advanced level, so how to deal with US aircraft carrier strike groups and stealth fighters has become the focus of national defense development for many years.
Now, these two signature arms of the US military have gradually lost their deterrent power, so the US military has begun to pin its hopes on two new missiles.
The PLA has a full grasp of how to deal with US aircraft carrier strike groups and stealth fighters
During the "Taiwan Strait Crisis" at the end of the last century, the Chinese Air Force had very few advanced fighters capable of conducting over-the-horizon operations, the technology of naval vessels was even only at the level of the West in the 60 s, and there were also serious problems in the effectiveness of missile units in striking at sea targets.
After the U.S. stealth fighter represented by the F-22 entered service, it opened a real generation gap with other countries in the world.
After years of painstaking development, the PLA has gradually achieved a qualitative leap.
In 2010, when the U.S. military sent F-22 fighters to Japan and South Korea for exercises, the PLA gradually locked the flight trajectory through signal positioning and radar wave frequency changes.
Even after the F-22 penetrated deep into China's territorial waters and airspace, the PLA's electronic warfare planes gradually mastered the complete data of the opponent's fire control radar by intercepting the opponent's communications and other means.
Since then, the mystery of the US military's stealth aircraft has gradually been cracked by the PLA.
Effectively capturing enemy carrier strike groups and stealth fighters requires accurate reconnaissance and positioning technology. At present, the PLA has established a very complete system by using a variety of satellites, high-speed unmanned aerial vehicles, and long-range radars, thus effectively restraining the two signature killer features of the US military.
In the 2016 "South China Sea Arbitration" incident, the U.S. military dispatched a huge fleet, including two aircraft carriers, and even assumed a posture of using force. However, the PLA quickly locked on its coordinates, and as the DF-21D ballistic missile completed an accurate target drill, the U.S. fleet quickly chose to quickly withdraw from the South China Sea.
In 2022, the PLA's fifth-generation stealth aircraft J-20 repeatedly confronted the U.S. military's F-35 stealth fighter in the East China Sea, and with the help of more advanced maneuverability and the Air Police-600 early warning aircraft completely surpassed the opponent's radar, the J-20 finally took the initiative and forced the other party to withdraw from the mainland's territorial waters.
Now, the Chinese Navy has entered the era of dual aircraft carriers, and a new generation of 80,000-ton large aircraft carriers and their supporting stealth carrier-based fighters and fixed-wing early warning aircraft are also about to enter the list.
What makes opponents even more jealous is that the 055-class 10,000-ton destroyer and the YJ-21 long-range hypersonic anti-ship missile launched by it may even directly rewrite the technical pattern of naval warfare.
Strategic bombers dominate the sea with the air, which has become a new strategy of the US military
In recent years, the construction of Chinese ships has been described as "dumplings", so the time for the US military to maintain superiority at sea will be significantly reduced.
According to the war games of a US think tank, if a large-scale war breaks out between the two countries, the US naval and air bases and even aircraft carrier strike groups in the first island chain will be quickly destroyed by various types of short- and medium-range missiles of the PLA.
Seeing that it was difficult for aircraft carriers and stealth fighters to continue to be effective, the US military also began to change its thinking, that is, to develop toward the "bomber mechanism sea" strategy.
As early as World War II, the U.S. Army Air Corps (the predecessor of the U.S. Air Force) actively sent heavy bombers to participate in anti-submarine and attack slow transport ships, and achieved great success.
In the Cold War, for the first time, US strategic bombers were directly assigned the task of participating in naval warfare, and according to the plan, they would cooperate with the carrier strike group with early warning aircraft and electronic warfare planes to launch a salvo of 10 air-launched Harpoon anti-ship missiles in groups, and then weaken the Soviet fleet with saturation strikes.
Since the end of 2016, the U.S. military's B-52H and B-1B long-range strategic bombers have begun to arrive at U.S. military bases in the South China Sea and Japan and South Korea with unprecedented frequency, and they are accompanied not only by fighter jets of the U.S. military and its allies, but also by early warning aircraft, transport planes, and tankers.
The task of these US strategic bomber drills is to use the Harpoon missile's range of 150 kilometers to launch a saturation strike against the Chinese fleet outside the defense zone.
In such missions, the US Air Force, Navy, Marine Corps, and even special forces under the command of various arms will cooperate throughout the process, and it is not difficult to see that the US military's strategy has been systematized.
At present, the US strategic bomber force is equipped with 76 B-52Hs (all of which have anti-ship capabilities), 62 B-1Bs and 19 B-2A.
However, in the Pentagon's view, such a scale is the lowest since the end of World War II, so the new B-21 stealth strategic bomber is gradually replacing the existing model, which is the core of the future development of the US military.
The B-21 stealth strategic bomber may not only surpass the B-2 in radar stealth capability, but also have a higher level of infrared stealth capability.
At the same time, the aircraft also has advanced sensors, electronic warfare equipment, and command systems, and can carry air-to-sea weapons to carry out out-of-zone sea control missions.
Due to the relatively low price of the aircraft, the US military hopes to mass-produce at least 150 more aircraft. It is not difficult to see that this new aerial ghost will bring unprecedented challenges to the PLA.
What are the characteristics of the two new missiles that US think tanks are trying to tout?
As a missile that has been in service for a long time, the Harpoon series also has the characteristics of insufficient destructive power, short range, and easy interception, and so on; the US military believes that with the improvement of the Chinese fleet's long-range detection and interception capability at sea, it will be difficult for bombers equipped with Harpoon missiles to ensure their own survival coefficient, so in order to make the strategy of air dominance over the sea truly play its value, it is necessary to develop new types of missiles.
At present, the US Air Force favorites the AGM-183A and AGM-158 missiles. The US think tank claims that when the US strategic bombers carry them in air and sea operations, the victory rate can reach 92%!
AGM-183A is a hypersonic cruise missile, and its biggest feature is the addition of a booster on the missile body.
Unlike hypersonic ballistic missiles such as the DF-17, the AGM-183A class of hypersonic cruise missiles will be carried by bombers or fighters, adding additional speed through the acceleration generated when flying at high altitudes and the power provided by the boosters, although its maximum flight altitude will not break through the atmosphere, it can still reach about 30,000 meters, and carry out a certain degree of flexible maneuvering, and when it finally rushes to the target, the maximum sprint speed can also reach Mach 5.
Not long ago, the US military completed the last long-range strike test of the missile, which also marks the entry of this weapon into mass production.
AGM-158 is a subsonic stealth cruise missile. Although its maximum speed is not high, it has a radar stealth layout similar to the principle of a stealth fighter, and it also shields its own electromagnetic signals to the extreme during the whole flight.
When approaching the target, it will also use its own millimeter-wave radar, infrared detection system, data link and terrain matching system for final identification, and even directly hit a critical area of the target, and control the hit error within a few meters! According to calculations, the opposing ship's radar can only detect this threat even from a distance of a few tens of kilometers!
The basic version of these two missiles has a relatively limited range, but the improved no-load version can extend the strike range to 800-900 kilometers.
In contrast, a large aircraft carrier strike group that can carry fixed-wing early warning aircraft can achieve an early warning range of 650 kilometers, while the Shandong or Liaoning ships lack fixed-wing early warning aircraft, and the formation warning range is significantly lower.
What is even more alarming is that the US military has also specially equipped its strategic bomber units with ADM-160 air-launched decoys, which can simulate the signals of all US planes in service, and can even further interfere with the opponent's radar.
How will the PLA crack the new strategy of the US military?
At present, the range of most air defense missiles is difficult to compare with the air-launched improved versions of the two new missiles of the US military, so in order to truly curb this threat from the sky, it is necessary to start from the source and destroy the platform on it as soon as possible.
At present, China's passive detection radars such as YLC-20 can effectively survey the signals inside stealth targets, while active phased array radars such as JY-26 have greatly improved sensitivity and accuracy, which undoubtedly greatly improves the effective warning range of long-range air defense.
In order to truly detect the US bombers that may threaten the PLA fleet from the source, it is necessary to cooperate with far-infrared equipment, space-based satellites and long-endurance UAVs, and then determine their trajectory through the real-time coordinate monitoring of the other side.
With the start of mass production of the Y-20 large transport aircraft, its improved AWACS aircraft will take advantage of the high range of the Y-20 series, and then be equipped with digital array radar and full-frequency electronic warfare technology to greatly advance the PLA's air alert range to the far sea, and finally effectively guide the J-20, J-16 and their supporting loyal unmanned wingmen to capture targets, and timely collect all the signals of the opponent's missiles and electronic jamming decoys and quickly feedback them to the fleet air defense command headquarters.
The US military's tactics of air and sea control are inseparable from the cooperation of tankers and early warning aircraft, and even more so from the second island chain and even the large air bases in the Indian Ocean as support points.
Therefore, in such a big war concerning sea supremacy, in order to ensure the security of the fleet, the PLA should establish an integrated air combat platform of electronic warfare aircraft, tankers, early warning aircraft, long-range fighters, and unmanned aerial vehicles, and not let go of any support units of the opposing bombers.
More importantly, at the beginning of the war, the Rocket Force should also use the DF-26 medium-range ballistic missile and its successor models to destroy the bases where the enemy's large bombers take off and land and their missile storage points as soon as possible.