Type-054A class frigate of the PLAN
Posted on 01/25/2011 5:12:09 AM PST by sukhoi-30mki
Back to Flashpoints Building Navies Fast
By James R. Holmes
January 24, 2011
Underestimating the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) is a matter of course for many Asia specialists in the West, as senior US military officials concede. Some reasons given for overlooking China’s naval potential are specific to China. Also commonplace, however, is the claim that a great Chinese fleet won’t take to the sea anytime soon simply because it takes so long to build one. Typical of the genre: writing last year, George Friedman of the private intelligence firm Stratfor maintained that China possessed only:
‘a weak navy that could not survive a confrontation with the United States....China does not have the naval power to force its way across the Taiwan Strait, and certainly not the ability to protect convoys shuttling supplies to Taiwanese battlefields. China is not going to develop a naval capacity that can challenge the United States within a decade. It takes a long time to build a navy (my emphasis).’
History suggests otherwise. Determined nations can bolt together powerful fleets with alacrity. Beijing may even hold an edge over seagoing rivals like liberal India, which likewise covets a world-class navy.
As historian Alfred Thayer Mahan observed: ‘despotic power, wielded with judgment and consistency, has created at times a great sea commerce and a brilliant navy with greater directness than can be reached by the slower processes of a free people.’ Mahan’s point of reference was the French monarch Louis XIV, the Sun King whose navy mounted a stubborn challenge to British naval mastery throughout his long reign.
Over the past 150 years, both authoritarian and free nations have assembled strong fleets quickly. China commenced building an oceangoing navy around 30 years ago, in tandem with Deng Xiaoping’s economic reform and opening initiative. Use that as a benchmark for past naval powers. What had Japan accomplished in the nautical realm 30 years after the Meiji Restoration of 1868, when its emperor set in motion the construction of a modern navy? By 1898 the Imperial Japanese Navy had defeated the Qing Dynasty’s Beiyang Fleet, and it was scant years from sinking two Russian fleets. Such feats of arms established Japan as East Asia’s maritime hegemon.
The United States followed suit. Congress authorized the US Navy’s first modern men-of-war in 1883, after the navy had fallen into decrepitude. Fifteen years later, the rejuvenated US Navy quashed the Spanish Navy, wresting a modest Pacific empire from Spain in the process. By 1913, three decades into the American naval project, the US battle fleet, or ‘Great White Fleet,’ had circumnavigated the globe and returned home in good order. And soon it would grow into a ‘navy second to none,’ to borrow US President Woodrow Wilson’s memorable phrase.
The German Reichstag enacted its First Navy Law in 1898, inaugurating Imperial Germany’s quest for maritime supremacy. So swift was the German naval buildup that Great Britain, the world’s foremost sea power, felt compelled to draw down its commitments in the Americas and the Far East, accepting the attendant risks in order to bring home Royal Navy squadrons to preserve the naval balance in Europe. Nevertheless, the German High Seas Fleet fought the British Grand Fleet to a standstill at Jutland in 1916, only 18 years after embarking on Berlin’s quixotic bid to rule the waves.
The Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 prompted Soviet leaders to initiate a blue-water fleet capable of competing with the US Navy. By 1970, the resurgent Soviet Navy was venturing into traditional US strongholds like the Mediterranean and the North Atlantic. Some 200 surface ships and 100 took part in the Soviets’ 1975 Okean exercise. ‘What they’ve done in just 10 years is absolutely fantastic,’ exclaimed one US officer. ‘From almost nothing, they’ve built up a first-rate navy, and it’s an imposing threat.’ The Soviet Mediterranean Squadron outnumbered the US Sixth Fleet during the 1973 Arab-Israeli war. Shockwaves rippled through Washington as a result.
So, beware of assuming away Chinese sea power into the indefinite future. No iron law of history governs the pace of naval construction. And if one did, the United States and its Asian partners would find modern history disquieting rather than comforting.
James Holmes is an associate professor of strategy at the US Naval War College. The views expressed here are his alone.
Type-054A class frigate of the PLAN
The much ballyhooed LCS is NOT and never can be an FFG-7 replacement, while the DDG-51 Burke-class is just to damn big and way too expensive to build in numbers.
I believe we once planned to build over 30 of the new Zumwalt destroyers. Now we’re down to two and the program is over. Too expensive.
Commence the trade war.
Wake up, people.
“Quantity has a quality all of its own.”
Ask the Wehrmacht and Waffen SS about that one. They saw their Tigers, Panthers, and Mk IVs, crewed by some of the best armor crews in the world, led by the Generals and Field Marshals that invented modern armored warfare, swamped by hordes of T-34s.
All the PLAN needs to do is get enough advanced anti-ship missile launchers in range - and the range of their next generation missile, the Hsiung Feng III, is 300 KM. At Mach 2, the targets will have less than seven minutes to kill the incoming missiles.
The question is, can the air power projected from the carriers keep PLAN’s ships and subs beyond launch range?
The question is, when are we going to stop foolishly providing the money for this?
Wake up people. We need to bring back our industries.
We are seriously, going to need them.
Build ships is the easy part. Finding the men with the ability to fight those ships is a lot harder. That comes from experience and experience takes years to develop.
this is the chinese. they do nothing in small numbers. it’s not how they think
when they start their push for a navy, it won’t be like we do it. they won’t have a handful of ships produced while wringing their hands over whether or not its right. they will look at their adversary (the US) and move to overwhelm it. think what we did for WW2... and multiply times 10, at least
i would be shocked if they aren’t pushing to have at least 100 carrier groups (i believe we have 7... though i’m sure 0bama and progressives would like that to be 2).
sit and ponder that for a minute. what would it require and how would you defend?
require? it’d require vast resources... like they have been stockpiling/using for years. and don’t think they would use just conventional building techniques/materials.
how would you defend? they would have 10 carrier groups, 10 jets, for every 1 of ours. short of going nuclear... you wouldn’t.
and what are we doing? we’ve got progressives dismantling our nuclear arsenal daily (we under 2500 warheads yet? it was 3100 last i heard). we’ve also shutdown F22 production for the F35, yet i have heard no rave reviews of the F35. 1000 F22 like planes from the chinese, as disclosed last week, would be enough to dominate the skies (i believe we only have 180 F22s). main ships? last i heard, it’s under 150.
and if we actually wanted to keep up? how long would it take for us to produce 100 carrier groups? decades, as we wouldn’t be producing them in parallel, but serially.
in the 80s, my godfather was with the thunderbirds when they went to china. of all the stories, the one that stuck with me was his observations of their factories. they gave him a tour (he was a general) of one such location... and he said they were making jets in the same factory they were making bikes. he said the conditions were nothing like what we had. he asked me, why do you think all their bikes are black? i had no clue. he said, because that’s the color of the paint used on the jets.
he wouldn’t have thought it to be a major issue... in 1987. we didn’t push all our factories in china until 1994.
my point being, all those factories we shipped to china.. which they promptly made duplicates of... each could be re-tooled for military production. it’s how they think.
as an example, my brother-in-law was attempting to get a toilet manufactured here in the US. he had very few options and all were exceedingly expensive. then he looked to china. in one ‘village’ alone, there are 1200 toilet manufacturers. 1200! just in one ‘village’.
our scale of thinking does not come close to how the chinese operate
Like Mullen and Sestak?
When was the last time anyone fought a MAJOR naval war?? The closest I can think of would be the tanker war of the 80s. Drawing too many conclusions about the PLA-N based on lack of experience is not a very wise thing to do.
... add in the German “High Seas Fleet” of WW1.
A truly successful Navy needs fleet bases with easy access to the open ocean. The Germans & Soviets never had that. They were potentially (and actually) bottled up.
China has easier, but by no means easy, access to open water. Taiwan & Japan pretty much cut them off in the North, so they are focusing efforts around Hainan in the South.
Which is why the USN is investing so much in directed energy weapons.
The USN needs to up the output the AESA “death ray” radars and install ‘em on all of our screening units!
The High Seas Fleet was another example of quantitative inferiority.
The Germans had better ships than the Grand Fleet, but not enough of ‘em. The Grand Fleet had a decisive advantage in numbers and weight of fire. Jellicoe almost had ‘em at Jutland, but Beatty let him down. The Germans kept trying to pull the Grand Fleet into a submarine or destroyer ambush to even the odds, but never quite succeeded.
The High Seas Fleet was another example of quantitative inferiority.
The Germans had better ships than the Grand Fleet, but not enough of ‘em. The Grand Fleet had a decisive advantage in numbers and weight of fire. Jellicoe almost had ‘em at Jutland, but Beatty let him down. The Germans kept trying to pull the Grand Fleet into a submarine or destroyer ambush to even the odds, but never quite succeeded.
Oops.
Our company was in the business of manufacturing electric power generating systems for aircraft: generators and controllers and test sets to test the black boxes. We'd built a modular test set to test black boxes for both the Boeing 757/767 and Airbus A300-600 and A310. Then the A320 came along and we decided go to a software driven test set that could accommodate the A320 as well as the other boxes. OK, but we'd come up with a new design for the Airbus boxes and that meant you had to support the older “legacy” box testing as well as the new production units.
There was also a change in operation between “legacy” boxes and new production boxes: the generator control unit (GCU) boxes worked in the air and on the ground (no change), but the ground power control unit (GPCU) worked only on the ground for “legacy” boxes and worked in the air and on the ground for the new units.
We were running the test for the new “legacy” GPCU and it failed its test by reporting a wrong fault code. Worse, it reported several different codes. After some study and analysis, we discovered why. The old GPCU “went to sleep” when the plane went airborne (+5 volts turned off). When the plane landed, the +5 volts came back and the box “woke up”. The first thing it did was to look for an “I'm OK” pulse from the other GCU’s at regular intervals. When it didn't get the expected response, it thought there was a fault and wrote a malfunction code.
We asked ground support engineering for a fix and they quoted six months and $50K to fix the software. We had to ship the test set in a month. The solution was to simulate the “I'm OK” pulse by pushing the ENTER key on the keyboard until the right code appeared on the display. we rewrote the test directions and that's the way the test is performed today. A simple fix, but you had to understand the differences in different system operation on different generations of aircraft.
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