Chinese → English transcript

Our mom quietly updated a news post about the Jiutian drone carrier’s first test flight. Do you realize how explosive this news is?

They even still have time to stare at Thailand and Cambodia pecking at each other like noobs, while the model of future warfare has already been completely overturned, you know that?

Some people might think a Jiutian drone that flies slowly and is a big target can just be swatted down with a single medium-range air defense missile.

“What’s so impressive about this thing?” That’s not wrong, if you look at Jiutian in isolation you really can pick out a whole pile of flaws.

But if you treat it as a key node in the cross-platform, system-of-systems combat network the country is building,

you will see what’s badass about it. Jiutian’s greatest value lies in being able to tailor itself to actual combat needs

by switching mission pods to achieve different strategic objectives. When you see this monster with a range of seven thousand kilometers and a six-ton payload on the edge of the battlefield,

and you have absolutely no idea what exactly this thing is carrying in its belly, you’re very likely to have to fold at that point.

Let’s run through a few scenarios that are highly likely to become real combat in the future. This is the distribution map of all the radars on the Taiwan island.

And of the air defense missiles and anti-ship missiles. Does it look pretty formidable?

Pay attention to the largest pink circle, that is the range of the Sky Bow III, which can almost cover the mainland coastal areas.

The smaller pink circles are the ranges of medium and short-range air defense missiles similar to the Sky Bow II.

We deploy five Jiutian drones along the Fujian coast, with each Jiutian carrying a swarm of two hundred CH-817 micro drones,

for a total of one thousand drones. In the first wave, skimming the edge of the Sky Bow III’s range, we release around five hundred swarm drones.

Their targets are the radar stations spread all over the Taiwan island. The CH-817, this tiny gadget that is small, slow, and flies low right above the sea surface,

has a very small radar cross-section, and its signal is easily drowned out by sea clutter.

Whether it is air-search or sea-search radar, it is extremely hard to detect them. Many times the drones are practically in your face before they are picked up.

This drastically compresses the opponent’s window for command decisions and interception response. In the simulation you can see that,

the drones have almost reached the coastline of the Taiwan island before the island’s air defense system reacts. After the first wave of attacks,

basically all the radars on the island and half of the air defense missile sites have been knocked out, the Sky Bow III sites in the south are already gone.

For the second wave, the Jiutian can move in close to the island to release drones. After roughly three or four waves of strikes,

all radar stations and air defense positions on the island have been completely wiped out. Now the island looks a lot “cleaner,” doesn’t it?

And this is only the effect of a drone swarm launched from the air operating on its own. If we add our surface drone carriers into the mix…

The UAV launched from the Type 075 amphibious assault ship and the UAV launched from the land airfield

With an integrated triad of sea, land, and air, we sweep through like autumn wind scattering fallen leaves, now let’s move on to the next round

A U.S. Nimitz-class carrier strike group approaches the eastern side of our Taiwan island by several hundred kilometers

00:02:02,750-->00:02,05 ,750

It is detected by our KJ-500 early warning aircraft taking off from Taiwan island, which spots five Burke Flight II destroyers escorting

The E-2D and F-35C in the sky have already formed a defensive formation, to be fair, this ironclad formation

There are not many people on this planet who could break it, and it just so happens today is Sunday

The Rocket Force is all on holiday and resting, so what do we do, let’s first send five Jiutian to test the waters

When attacking a carrier, drones are not that useful, so this time we rearmed Jiutian with small anti-ship missiles

We don’t care about speed or performance, we just emphasize quantity and being filling, on the radar screens of the U.S. carrier strike group hundreds of anti-ship missiles suddenly appear, swarming in

Not daring to slack off, the destroyers immediately launch all kinds of air defense missiles to intercept, the F-35C also fires AIM-120D to assist in interception

Honestly, this density and quality of air defense is pretty scary, but it cannot withstand the fact that we have so many missiles

A single Burke Flight II only has a few dozen air defense missiles, plus a few dozen AIM-120D in the sky

Even if you intercept one hundred percent, so what, the incoming missiles still outnumber your interceptors

Even if they were all grenades, they could still blow your carrier to the bottom, and as expected

The five ships are completely dead, the U.S. commander says, no way, I need to reload the save, there is no way to intercept all those incoming missiles

This time I will prioritize attacking the enemy drone carrier, OK, the U.S. respawns for round two

They prioritize attacking Jiutian, our strategy remains unchanged, whatever your strategy is, I just press A and charge straight in

Anyway, drones are expendable, if they’re gone, they’re gone, it doesn’t hurt, they just need to throw out as many missiles as possible before they die

The defensive effect this wave is obviously much better, all five Jiutian drones are shot down by the combined efforts of the F-35C and Standard-6

But there is still a huge blob of anti-ship missiles over the sea, and in the end three Burke Flight II survive

One of them is heavily damaged, the defense this round was not bad, there’s something there, now we move on to round three

The U.S. strategy is still to prioritize attacking the Jiutian drone carrier, while our tactics still do not change

It is just that the number of Jiutian has increased to twenty, after all, production capacity for us is just drizzle

One Jiutian of ours only costs tens of millions of dollars, trading one hundred of them for one of your carriers is worth it

Simulation starts. Well, the bad news is, twenty Jiutian jets were almost completely wiped out. The good news is there is not even scrap left on the sea on their side.

The U.S. commander said, no, you are cheating, and you are not allowed to use anti-ship missiles next round. We have always been happy to oblige.

All right, start of round four. This time our tactics have changed. Ten Jiutian jets just stayed over Taiwan Island and did not fly forward.

All their payloads were switched to decoy rounds. The U.S. commander stared at the radar screen, full of dense echoes from aircraft.

He started cursing, Rabbit, you cannot take a loss, can you? Where did you pull out so many fighters from?

Even though he knew these were most likely decoys, he did not dare bet that there were no real ones mixed in.

He could only grit his teeth and order an interception, but how could their limited air defense missiles compete with so many decoys?

All he could see were swarms of fake planes, blanketing the entire airspace of the carrier strike group.

You are out of air defense missiles, right? Then it is our turn to attack. The dozens of Type-6 bombers that took off from land bases earlier have arrived.

Mixed in with the decoy missiles, we air-launched a wave of YJ-12s, and the Nimitz had to swallow its anger again in the northwest.

Previously, our anti-ship denial at sea relied heavily on the Rocket Force’s anti-ship ballistic missiles.

To lock onto U.S. carrier groups in the open ocean, we used to have to fight brutal air-superiority battles.

Now it is completely different, from our east coast to the U.S. west coast is just over ten thousand kilometers.

Jiutian’s seven-thousand-kilometer range with high-altitude release can further extend the range of drones or anti-ship missiles.

So Jiutian taking off from our homeland can throw drones or anti-ship missiles into most of the Pacific.

Once this bug-like thing joins the blue-water battlefield, it will completely overturn the pattern of naval warfare.

Everyone, please spam “awesome” in the public chat.