At the same time, China are concurrently running a ASBM and heavily upgrading second artillery corps. China has the cash now. She is spending up what was neglected in the past. I think she is preparing for conflict with USA while at the same time preparing for more roles she will take in future times of international affair with her CV fleet.
PLAN Aircraft Carrier programme...(Closed)
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At the same time, China are concurrently running a ASBM and heavily upgrading second artillery corps. China has the cash now. She is spending up what was neglected in the past. I think she is preparing for conflict with USA while at the same time preparing for more roles she will take in future times of international affair with her CV fleet.
Generally speaking the more you can do safely the safer it is to rush when you have to. While I agree that there will always be potential for disruptors to make any military technology obsolete, but I think the difference between a battleship and an aircraft carrier is that the aircraft carrier isn't just an offensive weapon but a massively important logistical asset. That alone makes obsolescence a much less likely outcome in the face of new military developments.
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I don't think anyone is denying that. USN fleet is so large that even if a "two nuclear subs a year, two destroyers a year, a carrier every three years" building programme commences tomorrow and USN doesn't add any additional unplanned funding as a response to that, PLAN's fleet would still require another 35 or so years to get to the same level as USN, numbers wise.
And this is the argument for PLAN to go slow, take its own sweet time to field her ships???
NOOOOOOO!!! This should be the argument to speed up its development and deployment of PLAN assets!!!
Indeed, but I've always wondered why it can't be an exclusively logistical asset. For example, why can't we just build a bunch of smaller but integratable runway ships? Need a longer runway? Just hook a few of those ships together! Massive missile wave incoming? Unchain the ships and minimize your losses. With the trend toward modularity, I don't know why navies around the world haven't been experimenting with something like this. These ships would be cheap to build and operate, and be very expendable since they're nothing more than floating runways.
The general operation rule for large expensive military units like Naval ship is that each unit be required to be capable to perform its designated tasks by itself. Requiring multiple units to do one job increases amount of things that can go wrong. The idea of multiple ships chaining together and dispersing on command is a lot lot lot more complex than the words might indicate. (how long, how many steps to go through chaining/unchaining ships, structual strenth, waves affecting runway etc etc) It is better (for now anyway) to simple have two aircraft carriers than to try chaining two runway ships together. An aircraft carrier task force might seem like an example of multiple different units operating together, but each units have it's own tasks and they are required to be able to handle that task independently, with intel shared between.
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Chaining ships together was tried, and failed miserably. See .
Unless China wants to mount an invasion of the US mainland the carriers are not China's answer to a US CVN group, so drawing comparisons is somewhat pointless anyways. China's navy doesn't have to be the equal of the USN to change the equation in the Pacific either.
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