Japan's Master Plan to Destroy the Chinese Navy

The Surface Navy is Dead

• Our navy surface ships are pretty much only useful for rescuing people at sea or bullying crap-hole third world nations that cannot defend themselves. But in a real war with a modern military power our ships are little more than expensive sitting ducks for high tech missile target practice.
• The end of the traditional navy was there for all to see with World War II Kamikaze attacks. It was just a matter of delivery systems. Between high tech missiles (or Muslim Kamikaze jet pilots) the days of a surface navy are over. But that never stopped politicians and military contractors from keeping the building programs going.

(The National Interest)  -  It seems that Japan is developing plans to craft its own Anti-Access/Area-Denial (A2/AD) strategy—or what one former Japanese official describes as “maritime supremacy and air superiority”—against the Chinese Navy.

The plan itself, detailed by Reuters, makes a tremendous amount of good sense:

“Tokyo is responding by stringing a line of anti-ship, anti-aircraft missile batteries along 200 islands in the East China Sea stretching 1,400 km (870 miles) from the country's mainland toward Taiwan. . .

“While the installations are not secret, it is the first time such officials have spelled out that the deployment will help keep China at bay in the Western Pacific and amounts to a Japanese version of the "anti-access/area denial" doctrine, known as "A2/AD" in military jargon, that China is using to try to push the United States and its allies out of the region.

“Chinese ships sailing from their eastern seaboard must pass through this seamless barrier of Japanese missile batteries to reach the Western Pacific, access to which is vital to Beijing both as a supply line to the rest of the world's oceans and for the projection of its naval power.”

Ka Boom Target ship hit by two P-270 Moskit (NATO: SS-N-22 Sunburn) anti-ship missiles during Russian Navy Pacific Fleet exercises.

The piece also spells out an overall larger Japanese military presence in the East China Sea, which will certainly not please China:

“Over the next five years, Japan will increase its Self-Defense Forces on islands in the East China Sea by about a fifth to almost 10,000 personnel.

"Those troops, manning missile batteries and radar stations, will be backed up by marine units on the mainland, stealthy submarines, F-35 warplanes, amphibious fighting vehicles, aircraft carriers as big as World War Two flat-tops and ultimately the U.S. Seventh Fleet headquartered at Yokosuka, south of Tokyo.”

New American Security (CNAS) report back in 2014:

“the Ryukyu Islands themselves could support Japanese anti-access forces. For example, truck-mounted anti-ship and anti-air missile units dispersed across the archipelago would erect a formidable barrier. In wartime, effective blocking operations would tempt PLA commanders to nullify these gatekeepers. Such exertions, however, would tie down significant portions of China’s warfighting capacity while depleting manpower and materiel. Because the islands hold little innate value to Beijing the Chinese leadership might decide that escalation was not worth the effort.”

Read More . . . .

Kamikaze Attacks

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Kamikaze + Aircraft Carrier = Sunk
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A total of 57 ships were sunk by Japanese kamikazes including 3 aircraft carriers and 14 destroyers.  Some 368 other ships were damaged.  About 4,900 sailors were killed and over 4,800 wounded.
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All this was done with ancient World War II era technology.  But for some insane reason we continue to build super expensive WWII style carriers in an age of ultra powerful high-tech missiles.

Aussie sub live torpedo fire in a war game exercise.