The Chicom Circumnavigation

by David Archibald

11 March 2025

 

Fort Denison in Sydney Harbour was built in 1841 to thwart the potential for a Russian attack on Sydney. In those days, the Russians might have been first sighted as they came through the heads. By the time of WW1, the first indication of enemy warships approaching would have been smoke on the horizon from their coal-fired engines. You might be trading shells with them a few minutes later.

These days you see the enemy ships in port in satellite photos. You can follow their progress from satellites. The wakes they make can be hundreds of kilometres long on either side of their passage.  If you come across a wake, you can follow it up to find out what is causing it. Sound travels enormous distances underwater. Astute class submarines on the eastern side of the Atlantic can hear individual ships leaving American ports on the western side. Individual ships in the same naval class make distinctive sounds which means you can know the name of the ship you are tracking. Ships also stand out against the ocean on infrared and synthetic aperture radar.

Modern AWACS aircraft can detect a jetski on the ocean surface from 200 km away. It is said that the rise of drones is depopulating the front lines in land warfare, because survival means hiding all the time. It is worse on the open ocean, because there is nowhere to hide. The world’s oceans are like the Mediterranean in WW2. There is no sanctuary, because ships can be attacked by land-based aircraft all the time. The bigger and more powerful the ship, the sooner it will be found, tracked and targeted. The Russians have demonstrated this in the Black Sea, where their surviving ships have been driven to the eastern end of it by a country without a navy.

Recently the People’s Liberation Army Navy sent three ships for an excursion south of the Equator:

 

Ship                                                     Tonnage                  Armament

Type 054A frigate Hengyang           4,000 tonnes          32 VLS cells

Type 055 destroyer Zunyi               11,000 tonnes          112 VLS cells

Type 903 oiler Weishanhu               23,000 tonnes

 

The two armed vessels have a one-way range of 9,300 km at 12 knots, which is 22 km per hour. From Hainan Island without the tanker, they could have got as far as Port Hedland before having to turn around. So to make their trip possible, they were accompanied by a tanker that could supply them at sea.

Which means that if their unarmed tanker was sunk, they would immediately have to turn around and head back to China. In effect, most of the combat effort of the flotilla would have to be applied to protecting the tanker. Some 81 of the 112 vertical launch cells of the Type 055 destroyer are devoted to surface-to-air missiles (SAM). Once those are depleted, the ship is defenceless. The range of the SAMs is up to 200 km. Antiship cruise missiles are now being priced down to US$0.15 million per copy. So, in theory you could stand off more than 200 km and fling 81 antiship cruise missiles at the Type 055 destroyer, with a build cost of US$1 billion, and render it defenceless for an outlay of $12.5 million. It could happen with less effort than that as US Navy tests have found that swarming tactics work. If you fling five to seven missiles at a time, at least one will usually get through and hit the ship.

Even a decade ago, it was realised that the cost of sinking a ship is about five percent of the cost of building it. It gets better. Once the VLS cells are depleted, the ship has to return to a friendly port to reload them. From the middle of the Tasman Sea where the Chicom ships conducted their live fire exercise, that is 15,000 km back to Hainan Island. That would take them 28 days at 12 knots. The flotilla could have fired 40-odd cruise missiles, being the non-SAM portion of their VLS loadout, at targets in Australia but it would have been a kamikaze mission.

 

 

 

Figure 1:  Artist’s impression of the view of a Type 055 destroyer from a PrSM Increment 2 missile on final approach at Mach 3

 

This year Australia will be doing some final assembly of PrSM missiles, which have a ground-launched range of 620 km. There is an Increment 2 version of the PrSM (Precision Strike Missile) that has been successfully tested hitting ships at sea. That was from Palau last May. It can’t be spoofed, because it finds its target by infrared imaging combined with homing in on the target’s radar emissions. It is said that the radar of the Type 055 destroyer can detect aircraft up to 500 km away, which in turn means that the location of the destroyer can be determined from twice that distance.

You don’t have to wait for a Chinese ship to get within 600 km of the Australian coastline before you fire at it. Air-launching a ballistic missile doubles its range. Strapping a PrSM Increment 2 to an aircraft means that the range is only limited by the range of the aircraft. In theory, Australian aircraft with a 3,000 km return range, taking off from Darwin, could sink Chinese ships in the Taiwan Strait and thus contribute to the defence of Taiwan.

The Ukraine War has also shown that air-breathing cruise missiles are easily shot down. But ballistic missiles like the PrSM travel at 50 km altitude. There is no existing Chinese SAM system that has a chance of intercepting them until their final dive on the Chinese ship. And intercepting a missile that is coming down vertically at Mach 3 is difficult.

All we need to ensure that Australia is never invaded is having enough air-launched, antiship ballistic missiles. Having the aircraft to launch them from would be helpful too.

 

David Archibald is the author of American Gripen: The Solution to the F-35 Nightmare.