China's Air Force Goes Underground, or How One Small Bomb Can Knock Out China's Air Force.

At first glance one would think the Chinese are brilliant and have the advantage by building bomb proof bunkers for their air force assets but it is easy to see how the attacking enemy doesn't have to take out the bunkers but simply, preemptively take out the single roads that lead from the bunkers to the air strips, leaving the planes trapped inside the bunkers.

What the Chinese forgot is that you must always leave yourself a second way out

ALWAYS.

Other than a direct hit from an asteroid, China's Air Force can withstand almost anything anyone can hurl at it. While America has been fighting expeditionary wars and consolidating its military bases, China has been forrowing its fleet of fighters and bombers in reinforced hangars, deep underground.

Accessible to everyone, thanks to the amazing technology of Google-earth, images like the one below reveal the runway of this strategic air base, but nothing more. On closer examination, two paved taxiways lead to opposite sides of a mountain [red arrows] which houses the actual hangars and base command.

www.viewzone.com...

reply to post by Thunderheart


Silly thread, roads are easily repaired, probably within a few hours after bombing, repairing roads is easier than repairing 30 million $ planes, also runways can be destroyed too and hangers full of planes are even more easily destroyed so i dont see tour point.... i think the chinese are on the ball here.

It's all very well burying the planes inside a mountain, but all you have to do is cripple the runway, or "close the door " as you have pointed out and it all becomes a bit daft.

It would only make sense tucking planes away like this if you had STOVL type aircraft. The reason the Harrier was built was that we assumed our airfields would be pounded in a Soviet invasion, so they are designed to operate from any metalled road.

Having normal aircraft protected is all fine and dandy, but they ain't much use if you can't get them up in the air. I would imagine though the Chinese are aware of these shortcomings if a weird Englishman has thought of them...

reply to post by auraelium


What could those planes have been doing for those hours the roads are being repaired? Three hours can be a long as time in a war. Three hours of your air support being stuck due to cratered roads could mean nothing or it could mean everything.

What if laser guided bombs drop the tunnels? Then you have millions of dollars of air force stuck in a cave.

Of course penetrating Chinese air defenses far enough to attack these airfields could potentially be a challenge.

All you gotta do is evade China's air defences and bomb the roads to the bunkers.


Good luck with that.

Don't all airfields have the same problem really? All airfields have hangars, and an airstrike against an airbase can destroy the airfield, hangars and aeroplanes in pretty much the same strike.

They've separated the hangar from the airfield, making the hangars inpenetrable. And I think a short airstrip is enough to get the planes up ... the airfield is really only needed for refueling.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but after an initial strike the road infront of the hangars can be cleared pretty fast and the planes can be brought into the air, basically without the main airstrip.

reply to post by ken10


Indeed...

I think at the end of the day, these are there to protect against tactical nuke strikes on their airfields in an opening salvo, so they can then roll them out after the dust settles and fight the war.

Lets compare that to keeping few billions worth of jets inside a carrier.

Assuming its easy to bomb the road means assuming its easy to bomb the carrier.
At least to bomb the road you have to pass hundred of miles of firepower compared to the carrier.

reply to post by NullVoid


To be fair, Carriers are mobile and protected by several layers of defences themselves. It's no mean feat to sink a Carrier.

Looks like a bunch of out dated reverse engineered Migs. Shelters cost more than the planes do and are worth more as well. No wonder so many starve over there if they have to have multi million dollar storage facilities that house Chinese versions of Russian planes that werent all that great when they came out. Well bunker busters will be more cost effective than A2A missles in this case.

reply to post by Thunderheart


Well, now they know!
Thanks for telling them about it!
But really, how do you know they have no contingency plan?
It would be silly not to have a backup.

Originally posted by stumason
reply to post by NullVoid

 

To be fair, Carriers are mobile and protected by several layers of defences themselves. It's no mean feat to sink a Carrier.

Correct, carriers are mobile, other than that pretty much the same standard. Notice the road have straight line, meant as backup airstrip, what about carriers ? Got to dump the "garbage" into sea before usable again.

I believe airstrip have more layers of defense compared to carriers. Its not mobile, but you got to penetrate that far to reach it. Plus on war situation, these stuff keep flying, unlike the jets in carriers - have to wait their turn.

reply to post by NullVoid


i get your analogy but i think its kind of apples to oranges as static(non moving) targets will always be more vulnerable then mobile targets even those as big as a carrier . and while i wont exactly try to compare the air defense of a battle group vs the entire nation of china but getting to either target by air would be pretty difficult in both cases

on the runway issue yes they can be repaired but cluster bombs and other tricks can make that a bit more difficult
ie use the cluster bombs to crater the runway and then drop delayed detonation bomblets or mines designed to take out their equipment that would fix the runways after the initial strike or just come in with a-10s when they bring out the dozers to clear the run way,not to mention if they just hit the entrances with Moabs or daisy cutters (this works for all sides really just different names for the bombs)filling one or two really big holes takes alot more time then fixing then many small holes.

to be fair being underground does protect them from loosing the whole air base at once to a surprise attack(in the sense that all fighters would be destroyed as opposed to the roads)so it does have merit.

coincidentally isn't this the same thing the Chinese do with some of their naval bases for their subs (underwater or coastal sea caves hollowed out in to sub bases)so that their naval assets are less vulnerable and supposedly makes them more stealthy when they sortie out from unseen bases? on the surface it seems that the primary chinese doctorine is to not strike fist but await and survive the first strike and keep as many of their military units alive as possible for counter attacks or later strikes at least thats the vibe i get from them

en.wikipedia.org...
en.wikipedia.org...
en.wikipedia.org... french
208.84.116.223... interesting read on the subject

and as only countries that havent signed the ottowa treaty can use these weapons as others are subject to the rules on cluster bombs and mines etc they are not as wide spread as they once were

Just to throw in some perspective, it isn't the project with the Chinese, IMO. It never is any one thing we see. It's always scale with them. I see one very secure aircraft shelter that, indeed, one bomb could put the whammy on.

Now how many hundreds of aircraft shelters are within a few miles in any direction? Perhaps dozens there and not hundreds..but how many more? That is what blows me away about the Chinese. If they need a new widget, they don't build a factory to make widgets. They make a CITY of factories to build millions of them.

In the case of tunnels.. Well... They dig like moles on crack, apparently

The researchers at Georgetown University, led by a former senior Pentagon official, concentrated on a 3,000-mile network of tunnels dug largely in Sichuan province by the Chinese Second Artillery, a secretive unit responsible for protecting the country’s nuclear weapons.

Source

Now that article isn't about planes or their Air Force, but that isn't why I mention it. It's the fact they need to test something? Why they just bore themselves tunnels longer than the drive from New York to Los Angeles.

I'd never take one thing we see...like this OP example....and figure we know anything by it. Not really...China is just in a class all their own for scale of effort and games within games for what the world sees and thinks it knows about them too... Just my two cents.

reply to post by KilrathiLG


Yeah, I get that vibe too, the Chinese dont like a head on, they prefer longer campaign. Just look at North Korea and Vietnam. They dont like "all or bust" method. But really, their military need updating and is being updated.

reply to post by NullVoid


Mobility is protection. So is a carrier battlegroup loaded for bear. It has many defenses, anti-missile-missiles, CIWS, soon enough lasers, sensors and electronic warfare equipment, and the carrier air group itself, all concentrated for maximum mutual defense. Also, you know not where this battlegroup is until you find it or it finds you.

You can't find a battlegroup on google maps bomb five bits to take out a whole air unit.

However, the Chinese seem to be going for defense in depth and have a lot these installations, as well as the rest of their integrated air defense network.

I wonder just how interconnected these bases are underground. If there are rail tunnels between bases that could fit aircraft then suddenly the Chinese airforce has high mobility as well. Mobility with many feet of rock and earth keeping the Yanks from messing up their day

Originally posted by ken10
All you gotta do is evade China's air defences and bomb the roads to the bunkers.


Good luck with that.

>implying the U.S. Navy's orbiting rail gun would not be an option.

Originally posted by Thunderheart

Originally posted by ken10
All you gotta do is evade China's air defences and bomb the roads to the bunkers.


Good luck with that.

>implying the U.S. Navy's orbiting rail gun would not be an option.

I would not be surprised at all if the USA has orbital weapons platforms. I wonder how long after hostilities start until the Chinese start chucking anti satellite missiles at them though? If the satellites can't defend against missiles then that will allow the Chinese to continue their legacy of filling the orbits with with space junk.

reply to post by Mkoll

I wonder how long after hostilities start until the Chinese start chucking anti satellite missiles at them though?

For what it's worth....I think that's China or Russia's first wave of weapons to launch and very first action in any open fighting against Americans that may ever come.

Without GPS and Satellites to feed all our super-gizmos....we're much closer to their level of fighting a war and they invest in almost insane numbers of lower tech systems. In a world where High Tech isn't giving us the edge? Well... I think the Chinese play a mean game of Chess while we're still playing checkers..

With a billion or more pawns the chinese are certainly adept at playing chess....they have the pawns that they can afford to lose in trade for higher valuw targets.
Without this vast human resource they are sunk however.....
the loss of a huge segment of Chinese population would level the playingfield somewhat.
Dont think i advocatesuch strategy, but i aam sure some general somewhere has offered up the plan to nuke the # out of Chinas population centers......thus leaving the country in dissarray totally.
These underground facilities are not the only ones in the world.........id say that a good portion of the missing trillions are invested in such tunnels all over the globe....
China,Russia, The USA, Briton, and the scadanavian countries are well dug in, as is germany after the ww2 constructions.....