Sina Delenda Est

HOW DOES CHINA'S NAVY COMPARE TO AMERICA'S?
BY DAVID BRENNAN 

Every year on April 23, China’s People Liberation Army (PLA) Navy Day commemorates the founding of the service in 1949. 

This year’s celebrations have special significance, as a chance to display the hardware that will define the country’s future place among the world's great powers.
China is preparing to launch its first domestically produced aircraft carrier, the steam-powered Type 001A, for sea trials. 

Naval operations are scheduled from April 20-28 in the Bohai and Yellow seas, and Chinese experts believe the Type 001A could be put to sea during that window.
China has two particularly pressing strategic concerns in East Asia: the continued independence of Taiwan, and the dispute over territorial claims in the South China Sea.
Type 001A, China's second aircraft carrier, is transferred from a dry dock into the water during a launch ceremony at Dalian shipyard in Dalian, northeast China, on April 26, 2017. The carrier could be set for its first sea trials this week.

Beijing is looking to ensure its domination of the region and therefore must have a military capable of standing up to U.S. hegemony. 

In recent weeks the country made a point of executing huge military drills to signify its determination to protect and advance its national interests.
According to the Global Times, the Chinese Ministry of Defense released footage on social media and official websites that detailed China's nuclear submarines and amphibious landing military exercises, among other achievements.
“The Chinese know from history [that] major powers must have a strong navy, and they are moving quickly in that direction,” said retired Rear Admiral Terence Edward McKnight, who commanded a multinational anti-piracy task force in the Gulf of Aden.
China now fields one of the world's largest and most technologically advanced navies. 

Its first aircraft carrier, the Liaoning, was introduced in 2012, having been purchased from Ukraine. Adding more carriers and ensuring the ability to produce them domestically are further signs of China’s ambition.
The significance of China’s carrier program is practical as well as symbolic, explained Matthew Funaiole, a fellow at the Washington, D.C.-based think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies. 

China is investing heavily in its navy, “and the Type 001A is a massive push in the right direction,” Funaiole said.
“It’s one thing to refit an old Soviet carrier, like the Chinese did with the Liaoning. It’s something else entirely to build one from the ground up, even with the help of some reverse engineering,” Funaiole continued.
This photo, taken on December 24, 2016 shows the Liaoning, China's first aircraft carrier, sailing during military drills in the Pacific.

China likely wants to field somewhere between six and 10 carriers, though not all will be top-tier vessels, Funaiole suggested. 

That would make its navy the second most powerful force in the world by some distance, and belies ambitions beyond the South China Sea and Taiwan. 

Indeed, Beijing has already established a naval base in Djibouti, Africa, and is working on a network of ports and airfields in the Indian Ocean.
“China has an interest in shoring up its perceived security closer to home,” Funaiole explained. 

“That said, it is actively looking to expand its navy for far-seas operations, and it's well on its way to seeing this goal through to fruition. It will be interesting to watch what types of missions the PLA Navy is tasked with, in the Indian Ocean in particular.”
It might be moving in the right direction, but the PLA Navy is still behind America in both technology and operational capability. 

The U.S. has a long history of carrier production and operations, and fields the most advanced launch systems, power plants and carrier-based aircraft in the world.
"With China's fast-growing overseas national interests, the [Chinese] navy's mission will be more complicated and significant. 

China now has only one overseas logistics base in Africa, but in the future, the Chinese navy will need more bases around the globe, especially in key regions, to support its overseas mission," Xu Guangyu, a retired major general of the PLA, told Global Times.
One of the main reasons for the purchase of the Liaoning was training: A carrier is nothing without its crew. 

The U.S. has a major personnel and logistical advantage, and China “will face some hurdles in getting a corps of trained pilots, operators and technicians in place,” Funaiole said.
The U.S. Navy has roughly 325,000 service members and approximately 282 deployable battle force vessels, including 11 nuclear-powered aircraft carriers. 

The U.S. Navy also has 3,700 aircraft, the second largest air fleet in the world—only the U.S. Air Force has more. 

That count does not include around 200 auxiliary and reserve ships.
The PLA Navy has around 235,000 personnel and over 700 aircraft. 

Though it has over 700 vessels in total, the number is bloated by a large number of patrol and support ships as well as outdated boats. 

Only approximately 220 are combat ships. 

Beijing hopes to increase that number to 351 by 2020 and is fast retiring outdated vessels.
China's Peoples' Liberation Army Navy sailors march during Hong Kong's Special Administrative Region Establishment Day on July 1, 2015.
Though the U.S. has the more powerful navy, the gap between the U.S. and China “is getting smaller and smaller each day,” McKnight said. 

American naval leaders are well aware of this and have set an expansion target of 355 combat ships by the end of the 2050s. 

But according to McKnight, America simply “can’t build ships fast enough right now to keep up with the Chinese.”
Projecting force is more difficult than fighting close to home. 

The Chinese “know they would never win fighting us off the coast of California… but in the South China Sea we will have a major problem fighting the number of Chinese forces,” McKnight explained.
It may already be too late to challenge China in its home waters. 

For all its protests, the U.S. has been unable to stop or slow the construction of artificial islands in the sea, which have effectively fortified China’s disputed claims. 

“As our young service members fought hard and died in the Middle East the last decade, China has taken control of the South China Sea without losing one sailor,” McKnight said.
Chinese dredging vessels purportedly in the waters around Mischief Reef in the disputed Spratly Islands in the South China Sea, on May 21, 2015.
Admiral Phil Davidson, a nominee to lead U.S. Pacific Command and current head of the Navy’s Fleet Forces Command on the East Coast, told the Senate Armed Services Committee this week that China “is no longer a rising power but an arrived great power and peer competitor.”
The U.S. is moving to meet the Chinese challenge in Asia-Pacific. 

Warships and planes have been conducting freedom of navigation operations near China’s artificial island bases; carriers have been deployed to ports in the region; and new weapons have been made available to Pacific ships. 

America won’t cede influence in East Asia easily.
“They don’t want a war with us, but they want to show us they can control their own backyard—the South China Sea—and be recognized as a true maritime power,” McKnight said. 

“You need a powerful navy to command the seas.”

Why China's New Aircraft Carrier Should Worry India

By Mihir Sharma
THE VIKRAMADITYA HAS BEEN PLAGUED WITH DELAYS.

The launch of China’s second aircraft carrier, expected as soon as this week, will be an important and depressing moment for India. 

The “Type 001A” -- likely to be named the “Shandong” -- will give China an edge for the first time in the carrier race with its Asian rival, a literal two-to-one advantage. 

After decommissioning the INS Viraat earlier this year, the Indian Navy is down to a single carrier, INS Vikramaditya. 

Worse, the Shandong has been built at China’s own giant shipyard at Dalian; Vikramaditya is merely a repurposed 1980s-era Russian carrier formerly known as the Admiral Gorshkov.
Even more telling than the raw numbers is what China’s progress says about India’s ability to provide security in its own backyard. 

Chinese naval strategists have open designs on the Indian Ocean: According to one, “China needs two carrier strike groups in the West Pacific Ocean and two in the Indian Ocean.” 

The government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi has talked a great deal about revitalizing the Indian military; it’s opened the defense sector up to greater foreign investment and is building a much-closer relationship with the U.S. military, largely with China in mind. 

But spending has lagged. 

Worse, successive governments simply don’t seem to have thought through where best to direct those scarce resources.
For its part, the Indian Navy has gone all-in on a strategy that emphasizes carrier battle groups. 

The idea is that India must dominate the ocean that bears its name and needs carriers in order to project power well beyond its shores. 

As a result, it wasted far too much time and treasure on the Admiral Gorshkov, which arrived from Russia six years late and at three times the cost that had initially been promised.
Its efforts to develop a homegrown carrier have been even more misbegotten. 

The Navy plans to name, commission and float the INS Vikrant next year. 

At that point, the ship reportedly won’t have its aviation complex in place, or even anti-aircraft missiles. 

The Navy has puzzlingly refused to buy India’s indigenous light fighter, the Tejas, saying it’s too heavy. 

Meanwhile, the MiG-29s being used instead are enormously troubled, according to India’s government auditor; more than 60 percent of their engines were withdrawn from service or rejected in just four years. 

The Vikrant will only be properly combat-ready by 2023 -- eight years behind schedule.
No one would expect India to match China’s defense spending head-to-head. 

China’s economy is four times the size of India’s; not surprisingly, its defense budget is at least three times larger. 

But the People’s Republic faces a parallel dilemma when confronting the U.S., whose military budget is about three times as big as China’s.
China has approached this disparity with a much clearer strategy in mind, as well as a far more rational evaluation of its relative strength. 

Rather than focusing on matching America’s carrier fleet, China first emphasized asymmetric weaponry such as ballistic missiles and submarines, a reflection of the Soviets’ Cold War strategy. 

Only now -- as its interests and capabilities have grown -- is it pouring resources into developing carrier groups.
By contrast, India’s carrier-first strategy has drained the Navy of resources and left it with just 13 conventional submarines in service. 

Eleven of those are more than a quarter-century old. 

The two new ones, amazingly, were commissioned and sent out to wander the deep sea without their main armament, torpedoes. 

Nor has India tried to counter China’s numerical superiority -- 70 to 15 -- in terms of submarines with specialized anti-submarine weaponry, including helicopters. 

The Indian fleet has less than 30 superannuated medium-sized anti-sub helicopters, the first of which was bought in 1971.
India’s problem isn’t ultimately a shortage of money; it’s a lack of forethought and political courage. Carriers are big and showy, and bolster national pride; diesel submarines don’t, or at least not to the same degree. 

A more rational strategy for India -- and its peers in Asia and the Pacific Rim who fear China’s growing military might -- would ensure that India’s submarine fleet and its anti-submarine armaments are capable enough on their own to deter attempts to control the Indian Ocean, while closer ties with other navies fill in the gaps.
That would require a clear-eyed appraisal of India’s defense and economic capabilities and requirements -- a problem when India doesn’t have an outline of its strategy on the lines of American or Chinese white papers, nor even a full-time defense minister. 

The Navy is fortunately starting to train more closely with the U.S. and other partners such as Japan, which should increase its effectiveness. 

But until it thinks harder about where its money should go, it’s going to have a tricky time keeping China out of its backyard.

1.Granted, China's first aircraft carrier was also constructed around the shell of a Russian vessel, the Varyag, which the Chinese pretended to have purchased to use as a floating casino.