The first Japanese military aircraft to fly across the 25g latitude line which cuts across the northern tip of Taiwan was a new Boeing 767 AWACS early warning spy plane, which had begun operations in 1999. It was vulnerable to attack and was kept well back from possible offensive aircraft. 8 kilometres below, Japan's navy was putting its stamp on the new balance of power in the Pacific. The Kongou class destroyers Myoko and Kirishima and the Asagiri class destroyers Umigiri and Sawagiri sailed through the Luzon Straits into the South China Sea to go to war with China. The amphibious troop and tank carrier Yokohama, with 550 Marines on board, was deployed to take over from the USS Peleliu, but this time both to rescue civilian hostages and recover Discovery Reef and the control of the BP Nippon Oil drilling rig there. Three Harushio class SSK submarines, the Fuyushio, Wakashio, and Arashio, were on patrol ahead. The Yuushio class SSKs Yukishio and Akishio followed. The crews of Sea King and Sea Stallion helicopters dropped patterns of sonobuoys to detect enemy submarines.
100 kilometres ahead of the Japanese task force was the USS Harry S. Truman carrier group. Already her F-14 Tomcat fighters with air-to-air missiles and F/A-18 Hornets with laser-guided bombs and anti-radar missiles had penetrated deep into China's self-declared airspace. Their target was the Woody Island military base on the Paracel Islands. With the Tomcats giving air cover, the Hornets flew in to attack it.
Seven Su-27s scrambled from their base on Hainan Island, and within minutes had engaged the Tomcats in the first ever combat test of strength between the two aircraft. The Su-27 had been designed by Soviet aerospace engineers to beat the American F-14, F-15, F-16, and F-18. They drew from the American design with the advantage that the competing aircraft had already been built and were operational. The Russian aircraft was one of the first to be fitted with air-to-air missiles with their own active seeking device, which allowed the pilot to `fire and forget', or turn away from his target as soon as he had released the weapons. Each aircraft carried ten missiles, six on the wings, two beneath the engine intakes, and two under the fuselage. For ground attack, it had five-round packs of 130mm rockets and could also carry the much-feared Moskit anti-ship missile. A few days earlier, in their missions against Vietnam, this technological edge in performance was incidental. But now, as the Tomcats were in a forward role of air defence to protect an American carrier group, the stark truth had finally travelled all the way from the Pentagon to the White House: Soviet Cold War technology had been transferred to another, more durable Communist power and Americans were facing the consequences.
The fight began when the aircraft were far apart. A Tomcat observer spotted on his warning receiver a signal which he identified as radar guidance for a missile fired from more than 110 kilometres away. The American rules of engagement then allowed the Tomcats to fire. Two had eight long-range Phoenix air-to-air missiles guided to different targets by the track-while-scan AWG-9 radar. Although this was old equipment dating from the 1970s, it had been upgraded and was still a lethal combination. The air was soon full of fourteen Phoenix missiles speeding to their targets, one having misfired on its pylon, and one having failed to guide after launch, falling into the sea. The aircraft with the misfire jettisoned the now-useless missile. But what the Americans did not know before the war began was that the enemy had developed jammers which would confuse the homing heads of the Phoenix that were needed for terminal accuracy. Only two of the seven Su-27s succumbed to the Phoenix attack, and the remaining five closed for the dogfight with their guns and infra-red missiles, which homed on to their targets by fixing on heat generated by their engines. Manoeuvrability and training is the key to the dogfight, and although the Su-27s were more manoeuvrable than the Tomcats the pilots were not as well trained as the Americans with their Red Flag and Top Gun training systems.
The American pilots eluded and attacked the enemy with manoeuvres they called in their jargon yo-yos, max-G turns, offensive barrel rolls, rolling scissors, and diving for the deck. One pilot, who died, was hit not by air-to-air missiles, but by enemy cannon fire when he inadvertently turned his aircraft across the nose of one of the Su-27s, which he had not spotted. One Tomcat observer saw a missile-launch warning from a tail direction. He guessed that from that quarter it would be an infra-red missile. His pilot waited a fraction of a second, broke sharply towards the sun, and the observer fired off flares which exploded into sources of intense heat designed to seduce away the missile. It worked. While up-sun of his attacker, the pilot reversed his turn and in the short time it took his opponent to realize what he had done he was in a firing position with an AIM-7 Sparrow radar-guided missile, albeit at the edge of its capability. The Su-27 pilot heard in his radar warning receiver the Tomcat radar lock on and he released chaff clouds. This decoyed the first Sparrow but not a second which followed in salvo. The Su-27 was hit and spiralled into the sea. Another Su-27 had used its afterburner too much and became stuck in reheat; it ran low on fuel, and one engine failed. It lost combat energy and was soon picked off by a Tomcat, the pilot ejecting as soon as he realized that he was being attacked.
As the dogfight raged overhead, the Hornets kept to their ground-attack mission on the Paracels. Their air-to-air defence capability was limited because their AIM-7 Sparrow and AIM-9 Sidewinder anti-aircraft missiles had been removed so the aircraft could carry laser-guided conventional and cluster bombs together with some AGM-65F Maverick and HARM anti-radar missiles. The formation leader flew a two-seater with a weapon system operator in the back who was able to concentrate on electronic warfare. The Hornets' jammers first sent out a wave of high-intensity microwaves which filled the skies with radar energy across a wide frequency band. This was called noise-jamming. Then the jammers confused the enemy radar further with more sophisticated methods involving cunningly synchronized pulses and Doppler shifts which pretended to be non-existent targets. Sometimes enemy radar screens were almost obscured by massive jamming which produce a series of spikes emanating from the centre of the radar displays completely confusing the radar operators.
The Chinese fired at least four surface-to-air missiles, but these were easily seduced away by the countermeasures, and seconds later the radar and anti-aircraft defences were being destroyed. Fire-and-forget radar-homing HARM missiles took out two radar-guided anti-aircraft positions. The other radars took the hint and switched off. A third SAM site was spotted when it fired a SAM without preliminary radar lock. The aircraft of the pilot who had seen it was equipped with large laser-guided bombs. He released one but unlike the HARM, he had to keep the laser beam on the target until the bomb hit. Although the laser target designator was stabilized and did not need manual aiming, it limited his manoeuvre. He failed to detect a missile fired from high above by an Su-27. By the time his missile warner alarm sounded, it was too late to escape. However, the missile warhead failed to detonate and the missile streaked close by without doing any damage. The Hornet pilot thought he had escaped but the Su-27 had fired a salvo of two e second one worked and it destroyed the aircraft. The bomb, unguided without being able to home to the laser marker on the ground, did not even detonate, having lost laser-lock, a device introduced to avoid civilian damage in earlier wars. The ground attack continued. Once the defences were taken out, cluster fragmentation bomblets with a wide area of effect were used on the runway and aircraft storage areas. Any aircraft on the ground was a soft target and was either destroyed or damaged by the bomblets and ricochet debris. The runway was pitted with small craters and small mines were also dispensed from the clusters.