For example, in the field of drone research and development and application, the concept of “swarm” was first proposed by Americans, but it was applied to reality by the Chinese. In the late 1990s, the US military studied a “future combat system” to deal with the new era of military operations. One of the weapons in this system was a “non-direct-aiming launch system”, nicknamed “Netfire”, which is an over-the-horizon network firepower strike system that integrates unmanned equipment, cruise missiles, reconnaissance, and strikes.
However, the U.S. military’s wild imagination still remains at the PPT stage, while the Chinese have successfully developed a domestically produced “Netfire” Red Arrow-20/50 anti-tank missile vertical launch system. In simple terms, this is a “Mengshi” vehicle with a vehicle-mounted vertical launch system, which can be called a land version of the Type 052D missile destroyer.
According to the U.S. military’s original idea, the biggest feature of the “Netfire” system is the independent modular container-type missile vertical launch device, which is equipped with cruise missiles and precision strike missiles. This ground weapon system can remain unattended for 72 hours, and then use the intelligent information system to autonomously perform target reconnaissance and strike missions. The entire process does not require additional radars to detect the enemy.
With a highly intelligent system in series, cruise missiles or missiles can cruise and detect after launch, and transmit information back to the network center. When encountering ordinary targets, the system will guide the launch of precision strike missiles with lower costs to attack the targets. If launching high-value targets, cruise missiles can attack directly on their own. This weapon concept, which is quite American science fiction, encountered many technical bottlenecks because it was too advanced. The US military spent a lot of research and development resources and finally had to terminate the project in 2009.
What the Americans could not come up with was eventually achieved by the PLA. As early as this year’s Abu Dhabi International Defense Exhibition, the CM-501GA multi-purpose precision strike weapon system exhibited by Poly Group made the Americans shine. The system uses the “Mengshi” CTL181 wheeled 6X6 high-speed motor vehicle chassis and is equipped with multiple vertical launch units. Not long ago, my country launched a Red Arrow-20/50 anti-tank missile vertical launch system, which is installed on the VN21 light wheeled tactical vehicle. From the relevant technical parameters, it can be seen that my country has turned a series of American ideas into reality in the development of “Netfire”.
According to the data, the Hongjian-20/50 uses vertical cold ejection. The missile is placed in a hanging basket that can slide up and down in the launch tube. There is a piston or similar booster device at the bottom. The system is powered by compressed air, compressed steam or propellant gas. Since traditional anti-tank missiles use hot launch, it is extremely challenging for the platform to withstand heat and it is easy to expose the target during launch. The cold launch mode of the Hongjian-20/50 does not produce high-temperature exhaust, avoiding the heat during the launch process from causing thermal ablation to the launch system. It can also reduce the enemy’s detection of the launch position through infrared rays, and its concealment and safety are more prominent.
Some military fans may ask, ground vehicles with vertical launch, which involves a series of problems such as space configuration, balance, stability, etc., how does the Hongjian-20/50 solve them one by one? Indeed, the vertical launch system needs to accommodate launch tubes, missile storage devices, cooling equipment and control systems, and also ensure that the missiles can be stably stored and reliably launched. The standard vertical launch unit systems of the United States and Russia are very large, and have high requirements on the load-bearing capacity of the vehicle and the stability of the system.
The reason why the Hongjian-20/50 does not need to worry about these problems is that China introduced the Russian-made “Tor” system and developed the Hongqi-17 air defense missile system, and then mastered the vehicle-mounted and miniaturized technology of the vertical cold ejection system. Later, we solved these problems through precise attitude control and reinforcement design, and the Hongjian-20/50 system has the ability to fire on the move, and has also achieved the ability to launch multiple types of missiles through modular design.
Speaking of the threat posed by the Hongjian-20/50 to tanks and armored vehicles, it can not only launch vehicle-mounted vertical launch missiles from 50 kilometers away to hit mobile tanks, but also has strong maneuvering flight capabilities. It should be noted that traditional anti-tank missiles are not allowed to change their flight and attack targets after launch, while the Hongjian-20/50 anti-tank missile is equipped with an optoelectronic/infrared dual-mode seeker and a real-time encrypted wireless two-way data link, which truly realizes “man in the loop”. In a battlefield where fighter jets are fleeting, this equipment is also very suitable for attacking the enemy’s armored combat clusters. The deployment of this epoch-making weapon has also enabled the PLA’s anti-tank combat capability to achieve a qualitative leap.