From the number of 022 being built, it looked like a large part of PLAN is still focusing in coastal and brown water defences rather than deep blue functions. No many how little crew members a 022 might need, huge number of them still tapped into the manpower resources of the PLAN.
And if the PLAN are a full blue water navy like the US and many European nations, they might not need so much of these small assault boats.
(slightly OT abit here). I am wondering if these 022 can be converted into large unmanned vehicles?
It is my belief that the 022 will form the PLAN's primary long-range offensive force in any potential conflict with the likes of the US and Japan.
Although China has made great strides in developing its blue water navy, its principle surface combatant fleets are still some way behind the USN and JMSDF, and would be unlikely to fair well against them, and especially the USN, in any full scale conflict in the near to medium future.
Thus, sending out the likes of the 054A and 052C would likely to lead to their loss. They may put up a good show, but they have no advantages over their American and Japanese counterparts, and will be hugely disadvantaged by the USN's superiority in naval aviation and SSNs far from home. The PLAN knows this or else they would never have gone with the 022 in such a big way.
The 054A and 052C etc will likely limit their area of operation to the shallow waters near China, where they can benefit from land based aviation and SSK support. Their role will be a mainly defensive one, intended to intercept incoming cruise missiles and fighters before they reach the Chinese mainland, and also providing land based defenses early warning so they can alert units and move assets into position to best intercept the income waves.
The 022 will operate in wolf packs far out to the pacific. They will be all but immune to SSNs, and land based air cover would made any attempt to attack them using air power highly costly for the enemy.
The 022s will rely on off-board sensors to provide targeting info.
Their biggest limiting factor would be the fuel supply, but since the PLAN is building so damn many of they, they could effectively use them like a minefield, whereby a unit will move to a pre-determined holding area, and turn off their engines and just wait for someone to pick up a target for them to engage.
With their engines off, they could stay on station for as long as the provisions hold, and will be undetectable to subs. Any carrier battle group operating under tight emissions control will also be extremely unlikely to detect such formations unless they run them over. In which case, it is very likely that the FACs will also have seen the warships and would have gone active and fired their missiles independently if off-board sensors somehow didn't pick up the incoming ships way before hand.
Such a tactic would force the USN into a difficult position of either sending out search aircraft to actively scan for the FACs (which would be difficult and will have a limited range due to the size and stealth design of the boats). That will give the PLAN a rough estimate of where the carriers be.
If the USN choses not to try and clear the FACs out of the way, they run a very high risk of a mass of AShMs suddenly appearing on their screens very close to their ships, with a very high chance that those missiles will saturate the defenses of whatever ship they are targeted at, and deal it a heavy if not devastating blow.
The difference between FACs and mines is that FACs can be repositioned very quickly, so even if you cleared a pack from the area, you can never be sure another pack hasn't taken its place later, so you need continuous active searches to ensure none are sneaking up on you. That massively narrows the ball park where the PLAN needs to search, and if its ASBM programme is real, then that would go a long way to helping the PLAN resolve the hardest part of locating the carrier.
With the speed of a ballistic missile, they may only need to find a carrier and track it for less than an hour (maybe as short as a fraction of an hour) before an ASBM impacts. For a carrier kill, I think the PLA would be more than happy to re-task satellites to provide continuous real-time tracking of the target.
