6th December, 2009
Last Updated: Mon Jan 27 11:18:09 UTC 2014
Modern Surface to Air Missile (SAM) systems are formidable area-denial weapons. They are the agile Kings on the checkerboard landscape. While one SAM battery searches and tracks, another shoots and guides. Others move to new locations, denying an enemy an effective attack. These systems are networked, and may use diverse frequencies to penetrate ‘stealth’ designs. They feature redundant elements, so if the enemy is lucky and destroys one element, others seamlessly take its place. The missiles are fast, high flying and deadly, with advanced guidance systems and high resistance to electronic jamming. To further confuse and deny an enemy a shot, realistic dummies and electronic decoys draw fire away from the real equipment.
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The latest
APA technical report by Dr Carlo Kopp and John Wise, which explores recently revealed Chinese military radars, shows that there is more that we do not know about China’s indigenous air defence weapons development program than we do know, but what we do know shows a rapid advance towards mastery of state-of-the-art SAM system technology. This study follows Dr Kopp’s recent
technical report on the HQ-9 design.
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The radar makes use of all of the anti-jam design features the Russians cleverly built into the SA-10 and SA-20. One Asian source is claiming a basic Low Probability of Intercept capability for the radar, which would make it extremely difficult to detect and track by its microwave emissions. And the 8 x 8 and 10 x 10 vehicles used make it just as mobile as the latest Russian SAM designs, for highly survivable ‘hide, shoot and scoot’ operations.
The HQ-12 is a much shorter ranging system, intended to provide an inner layer defence, inside the footprint of the HQ-9. It is also mobile, and the radar looks to be based on much the same technology as the HQ-9, making it hard to detect, hard to track and hard to jam.
For all intents and purposes, the HQ-9 and HQ-12 are modern technology SAM systems, designed for contemporary high intensity conflicts.
The three new HQ-9 acquisition radars are the Type 120, Type 305A, and Type 305B, all self-propelled high mobility designs carried on licence built Mercedes-Benz NG 80 ‘North Benz’ heavy trucks – a wise decision that provides reliable transport with a low implementation and operating cost. Like the latest generation Russian designs, these radars are built to automatically stabilise on hydraulically deployed legs, and automatically unfold and elevate their antennas using hydraulic rams. The Chinese have yet to comment on deployment and stow times, but five minutes would be a reasonable estimate. In short, these are true ‘hide, shoot and scoot’ designs built for modern war-fighting.
The Type 305B is a variant of the established and relatively new YLC-2V battery acquisition radar, and appears to be the standard for the HQ-9 and HQ-12. This is a modern mechanically steered planar array with electronic beam-steering for height-finding. It is similar to a good number of US and EU radars in this category, but is built for greater mobility in the field, making it harder to engage and destroy.
The Type 120 appears to be entirely new, but substantially based on the recent JY-11B series. Like the Belarus Vostok D/E series, it uses a hydraulically elevated mast to increase low altitude coverage. Interestingly, this design appears to operate in the L-band, unlike the earlier JY-11B, which it otherwise resembles. This change is clearly intended to improve detection range against stealth aircraft and cruise missiles, most of which are difficult to detect at operationally useful ranges in the S-band.
The most interesting of the trio is the Type 305A, which Kopp and Wise assess to be most likely an S-band AESA based the same technology used in the KJ-2000 AWACS and KJ-200 AEW&C AESA radars. This technology makes the radar equivalent in antenna technology to the new Thales-Raytheon Ground Master 400 series - reliable, difficult to jam, and difficult to locate, with agile beam-steering of the kind seen in US systems like the Aegis SPY-1. As we have seen with latest generation Chinese smart bombs, their most advanced products are very close to the US and EU built benchmark-designs.
Export variants of the HQ-9, HQ-12 and nearly all PLA surveillance and acquisition radars have been actively marketed across the world. Latin America has been buying Chinese surveillance radars in significant numbers. In Asia, PRC clients like Pakistan and Myanmar have been sold these technologies, and
Pakistan is claimed to be procuring the HQ-9 system.
FD-2000 / HQ-9 SAM - China's Strategic ‘Game Changer’
