Goodbye Poseidon and Hawkeye

It’s been reported that China is developing and has test fired a very long range, hypersonic air-to-air missile (VLRAAM) intended to destroy large, high value U.S. targets like the P-8 Poseidon and E-2 Hawkeye/E-3 Sentry.  According to Popular Science website (1), the missile’s characteristics are,

Length:  19 ft

Diameter:  13 in

Range:  300 miles

Speed:  Mach 6

Guidance:  AESA radar with backup IR/EO

Cruise Altitude:  19 miles

The missile has been photographed mounted on a J-16 during testing and reportedly uses a high altitude glide profile to achieve very long ranges. 

VLRAAM on J-16

Reportedly, the Russians have a similar missile, the R-37 (AA-13 Arrow) which is around 14 ft long, 15 inch diameter and has a range of around 200+ miles using a high altitude glide profile. (3)  It is deployed on MiG-31BM Foxhounds and, possibly, Su-35s.  Guidance is both semi-active and active radar homing.  The missile has a 132 lb fragmentation warhead.  It may have entered production in 2014. (2)

R-37 Missile

By comparison, the U.S. AMRAAM AIM-120D has a range of 90 miles.

For long range shots, the missile reportedly is launched at high altitude and climbs even higher to around 100,000 ft where it “glides” for much of the way to the target.

As we’ve noted on many occasions, range is a very misleading attribute.  Without accurate targeting the longest ranged missile in the world is useless.  This is why the “carrier killer” ballistic missile is such a hollow threat.  In this case, however, the U.S. aircraft may provide the Chinese with all the targeting they need.  An E-2 Hawkeye or AWACS has to radiate in order to do its job and, in effect, provides a massive “shoot me” beacon for the enemy.  This was acceptable in the past since no enemy had an air-to-air (A2A) missile with sufficient range to reach the Hawkeye/AWACS which typically operated well back from the active combat area.  Now, however, with missiles that can reach 200-300 miles, “well back” isn’t even remotely far enough back.  Of course, we can pull our radar aircraft even further back but that’s a mission kill, isn’t it?

The U.S. counts heavily on AWACS as a force multiplier in aerial combat.  Our individual fighters can remain passive and undetected while the AWACS/E-2 direct them.  If we can no longer count on this advantage then aerial combat becomes just a ‘who’s got the best fighter’ contest and the Russians and Chinese are steadily closing that gap thanks to the mediocre F-35 basket that the West has placed all their eggs in.

Consider some of the tactical implications of this (see, "Stealth Air To Air Combat Story").  A carrier group used to be able to count on nearly omniscient awareness for hundreds of miles around the group thanks to the E-2 Hawkeye.  If the Hawkeye is rendered a mission kill, or a real kill, the carrier group’s situational awareness advantage disappears and may, in fact, default to the enemy with a multitude of surface, subsurface, and aerial sensors operating in their “home” water and air space.

Since shooting down an incoming, hypersonic A2A missile cruising at 100,000 ft seems unlikely, we need to come up with other counters and alternatives. 

A purely passive sensor system would be ideal.  Such technology exists in the form of EO/IR (IRST) but the range is far too short to functionally replace the couple of hundred mile Hawkeye/AWACS radar range.

A stealthy and fast version of the Hawkeye/AWACS would allow the aircraft to shut down its radar upon detection of an incoming missile and stealthily and rapidly leave the target area but the aerodynamics of a large radome argue against effective stealth or speed though, perhaps, enough could be achieved to increase survival chances.  Regardless, this again equates to a mission kill.

Another alternative would be to distribute the AWACS function to a multitude (swarm?) of drones.  The logistics of hosting, launching, and coordinating such a continuous and revolving cast of drones would be daunting (UAV carrier?).  Even more challenging would be assembling the individual data streams from each drone into a single, coherent, comprehensive picture.  Even this would only be part of the function.  The E-2/3 act as battle management nodes and this function would also have to be duplicated.  Still, the idea is conceptually feasible.

The P-3/8 Orion/Poseidon that the Navy is counting so heavily on for broad area maritime surveillance will be a sitting duck against these kind of hypersonic, long range missiles.  This is one of many reasons that ComNavOps has been highly critical of Navy surveillance and targeting plans.

Frankly, this is a threat that the US has no ready counter for.

____________________________________

(1)Popular Science website, “China is testing a new long-range, air-to-air missile that could thwart U.S. plans for air warfare”, Jeffrey Lin & P.W. Singer, 22-Nov-2016,

https://www.popsci.com/china-new-long-range-air-to-air-missile

(2)Military Today website,

http://www.military-today.com/missiles/r37.htm

(3)Wikipedia, “R-37 (missile)”,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R-37_(missile)

Bagikan Artikel ini