Navies request the ships they need, built to a design that fits their war fighting philosophy
Politics and Economics places constraints on the fulfilment of those requests and designs
The Type 056 represents the PLAN's view of an affordable light frigate
Hypothetically, if 30 Type 056s met 30 Burkes, all 30 056s were sunk and 10 ABs were damaged that would be a tactical defeat but a strategic victory.
Of course in the fantasy world some would argue no Burkes could ever be damaged because of superior USN seamanship and the mythic forcefield like properties of the star spangled banner, in the real world, however, this is somewhat debunked by the rather large holes in the sides of the Fitzgerald and John S McCain!
For those who can't comprehend tactical defeat and strategic victory perhaps yelps of of ignorance should be left off the table
How do you think a growing Navy should train their officers for command and provide experience for the ratings?
- Give them each a big destroyer and bankrupt the navy
- Leave them all on shore to train in a "stone frigate"
- Have a vessel that you can produce in numbers take out to sea perform a useful function without breaking the bank
The PLAN picked option 3, who would have thought!
Winning Wars is not about who's got the fanciest or biggest toys but how they are deployed and used.
At the evacuation of Crete, when told that the navy would lose too many ships Admiral Cunningham replied "It takes the Navy three years to build a ship. It will take three hundred years to build a new tradition. The evacuation will continue".
In wars there are consequences, people die, difficult decisions have to be made, It's not some X-box game, send out XYZ ship that will vaporise the opposition!
Real world naval actions do not support the notion that smaller vessels are useless and every navy should dispense with them and build bigger and badder ships.
If it did then after the Bismark sunk the Hood the Kriegsmarine should have decimated the Royal Navy instead a bunch of "inferior" ships tracked and sunk it.
Likewise the destroyers and cruisers that attacked the Scharnhorst should have stayed in port and left things to the Duke of York because the Scharnhorst was much bigger than any of the destroyers and cruisers and would have just sunk them all killing everyone.
If it's just down to my ship is better than your ship then Nelson would not have prevailed at Trafalgar because the combined French/Spanish fleet had both the numbers (41 vs 33) and size of vessel (The Santísima Trinidad was 50% bigger and carried 30% more guns than The Victory) on their side.
In fact when the shooting starts it's almost always the opposite, large numbers of smaller "inferior" vessels are produced rather than big show boats!
So stop with the "point scoring", meaningless comparisons and playing arm chair admiral, if I need my fix of click bait partisan clap trap I'll go read the nationalinterest.org, not here