Chinese SLBM missile launch: Tell me, do you really think that this is an airliner and not a missile launch, as the Jane's expert is calling it and as the former Under Secretary of Defense is calling it???
Posted on 02/07/2011 10:14:55 PM PST by ErnstStavroBlofeld
Reports are swirling around that the People’s Liberation Army Navy has successfully tested Submarine Launched Ballistic Missiles. If so, this achievement would represent an important advance in China’s strategic capabilities.
Norman Polmar, the respected naval and intelligence author. mentioned this at a presentation Wednesday evening while discussing his new book, Project Azorian. Since then, we’ve been trying to get more details. Polmar says in an email that the missile test submarine is a Soviet-built Project 629/Golf diesel-electric submarine. The only public mention of this so far (in English) comes in a South Korean newspaper, the Chosun Ibo. This is what the South Korean paper says the Chinese daily said: “The Changcheng 200 smoothly accomplished scores of test-launch missions of ballistic missiles over the past 46 years. It received the title ‘vanguard submarine of underwater test launches’ from Hu Jintao, the chairman of the Central Military Commission, last August,” the daily said. (We can’t find any mentions in English.)
This week: The Pentagon is gearing up for the budget presentations on Feb 14. The Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessment previews the budget during its authoritative briefing on Thursday. The Air Force is developing its game plan on the tanker contract award. Congress is pretty quiet this week, though the House Armed Services emerging threats and capabilities subcommittee holds a Friday hearing at 11:30 a.m. on cyber issues. Tomorrow morning, we’ll run our commentary by Dean Cheng of the Heritage Foundation about just what was accomplished during the recent Washington visit of President Jun Jintao. And we’ve got breakfast on Wednesday with Paul Kaminski, head of the Defense Science Board, one of the best brains operating in the U.S. defense world.
(Excerpt) Read more at dodbuzz.com ...
Good, the Chinese should continue to waste billions of dollars seeking a technology that is utterly useless. They should develop even greater stealth technologies for these boomers, and spend even more money building the largest fleet ever. Hope Russia revives their boomer program and spends billions on it as well.
A DF-21D carrier killer missile is not useless technology. The U.S. Navy is extremely worried about this missile.
You never underestimate your opponent/enemy.
It was a missile launch from Vandenberg AFB that was unscheduled. If we had the radar tapes from Santa Barabra Airport it would give us the answqer
Unless the Chinese are silly enough to spend billions converting a portable launch unit into a submersible launch unit, I'm not sure what point there is to bring it up. Ballistic missiles being used against slow moving targets has been proposed, explored, experimented with, and ultimately discarded. If you have a overly cautious and easily spooked enemy, launching any ballistic missile for any reason is going to elicit a strong and likely fatal response. And if you've managed to come up with a method of differentiating between a conventional or nuclear payload, I'm sure a whole lot of countries in the world would be very happy if you shared that information immediately.
An anti-carrier ballistic missiles is money well wasted. That said, the real danger is in China selling these portable launchers to other nations who'd be stupid enough to use them. So long as they're in the hands of a nuclear power, they're too dangerous to use.
The DF-21D anti carrier missile was based on the Persing II missile. They managed to turn it to a game changer in the China Sea.Anyone who manages to reverse engineer a former missile that was in the US nuclear inventory is extremely dangerous.
If we had the Santa Barbara Airport radar tapes we can solve this mystery.We can deduce its location from the signature.
It won’t surprise me one bit if Obama is giving the ChiComs missile secrets.
I'm sure you've read this somewhere, and have come to believe that this is important in some fashion or another. ARTCC Los Angeles (Lancaster) would be the more useful datapoint who's already come out to say that there wasn't any missile launches.
Further, what is honestly the difference between launching it at a carrier with 5,000 souls aboard and a small town in the United States? Either's going to get you killed.
What is the revolution period of the radar that feeds the ARTCC? Probably 12 seconds (5 rpm) , maybe 6 (10 rpm) or 10 (6 rpm) . The missile would be up and out of range, in little more than a single revolution. Might get one hit on it, and it would be hard to tell from ground clutter. Even if you got 2 hits, it would be near impossible to correlate them, they’d be a good long distance apart.
Vandy is shadowed from both Santa Barbara and Lancaster, but more so from Lancaster. So that cuts down on the visible, in range, and detectable time. (Missiles are not the best radar targets for radars designed for aircraft.)
The picture you posted shows China’s first real test of their SLBM.
They tested one off of LA a while back.
Could be.
But many are reporting that the Pentagon is quietly saying “Chinese” ...
as with many other current mysteries, who knows , but no one is talking about it either.
The picture you posted shows China’s first real test of their SLBM.
I agree.
As do many others.
There is no proof of that. Every ocean in the world is monitored by the SOSUS network.The SOund SUrveillance System (SOSUS) provides deep-water long-range detection capability. SOSUS enjoyed tremendous success during the Cold War tracking submarines by their faint acoustic signals. SOSUS consists of high-gain long fixed arrays in the deep ocean basins. The U.S. Navy would have picked it up.
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