Re: Chinese sub thread
Yeas...but despite of those differencies, PLAN arruptly adopted the Soviet doctrines and have sticked to them untill last few years when it has begun to show some sings of life....
PLAN has been most of its history led by those who have no understandment of naval-warfare at all. Its has been subsidor to the land forces and this is clearly evident in the past doctrines and even shipclasses produced.
In Soviet Union, despite the proud imperial naval traditions, the navy faced same fait and begun its new migth by applying coastal defence doctrines to the wider scale...And when the navy had build its muscles and was ready to challenge rest, Soviets simply expanded the old coastal defence thinking into wider ocean scale (mostly due the strong political power of the coastal defence branches) and that has been the main motor for the oddities of VMF.
And essentially the idea of navy as a coastal defence element comes when generals draws the martime strategy, not admirals. PRC inherited this as a basis of its fleet and as the navys status has always been neglected in China, it abled China to do the same mistakes as Soviets, even without their advisors.
The bad thing with china was that its mistake was much worser than the soviet one as PLANs goal was not to build muscles to go on for Open seas or Blue water, but remain as brown-water coastal defence branch. The superficially 'fleet-size' units of Luda and Jiangju class ships were only nessesities of chinese long coast line, not attempts to gain basics for bluewater units, despite they actually have been attempts to exploid the desings so when the PLAN begun to show sings of doctrine change.
The good thing of this is that now, when there clearly is a plan to make PLAN a blue water navy, It has begun from the nothing, and started to adopt more rational western ideas of 'Fleet' and avoid the Soviet mistakes made in their road to the bluer waters.
