Though there are few places to nit-pic, there is a superb, data-thick, long form report from Rueters by David Lague and Benjamin Kang Lim on China that is well worth your attention.
As many of us have been warning for well over a decade, as the USN enters a huge challenge in the 2020s, the Chinese Navy will be accelerating in numbers, capability, experience – and more importantly, confidence.
“We thought China would be a great pushover for way too long, and so we let them start the naval arms race while we dawdled,” said James Holmes, a professor at the U.S. Naval War College and a former U.S. Navy surface warfare officer.
You simply cannot spin this any other way. The Chinese know where they are, more people on this side of the Pacific need to as well;
A generation ago, from mid-1995 into early 1996, China lobbed missiles in the waters around Taiwan as the self-governing island prepared to hold its first fully democratic presidential election. Washington forcefully intervened to support its ally, sending two aircraft carrier battle groups to patrol nearby. The carriers, then as now the spearhead of American power, intimidated Beijing. The vote went ahead. The missiles stopped.
Today, with tension again running high, Washington still backs Taiwan. Chinese President Xi Jinping on January 2 renewed Beijing’s longstanding threat to use force if necessary to restore mainland control over the island. But the United States is now sending much more muted signals of support.
On Sunday, American ships sailed through the Taiwan Strait. This was the seventh passage of U.S. warships through the narrow, strategically sensitive waterway since July. Each time, though, just two U.S. vessels have ventured through; this week, it was a pair of destroyers. No powerful flotillas and certainly no aircraft carriers. It has been more than 11 years since an American carrier traversed the Taiwan Strait.
Especially as a regional power with interior lines of communication in WESTPAC, numbers matter.
The PLA navy now has about 400 warships and submarines, according to U.S. and other Western naval analysts. By 2030, the Chinese navy could have more than 530 warships and submarines, according to a projection in a 2016 U.S. Naval War College study.
A shrunken and overworked U.S. Navy, which has ruled the oceans virtually unchallenged since the end of the Cold War, had 288 warships and submarines at the end of March, according to the Pentagon.
The Chinese are even getting a bit cheeky;
Globally, the U.S. Navy remains the dominant maritime force, the power that keeps the peace and maintains freedom of navigation on the high seas. Chinese military and political figures say that while their nation’s fleet has more ships, America has more powerful ones, and overall supremacy at sea.
“The Chinese navy is at least three decades behind the United States,” a retired Chinese naval officer told Reuters, requesting anonymity. “It is too early for the United States to fret.”
Read the whole thing, but keep this in the back of your mind;
Every Chinese school child learns that China’s suffering arose partly because of the lack of a modern navy. Infamously, in the final years of the Qing Dynasty, the Empress Dowager diverted funds earmarked for naval modernization to building a new Summer Palace. This contributed to China’s heavy defeat in the 1894-95 war with Japan, in which a rising Japanese navy smashed the Chinese fleet.
Baring some dramatic internal strife, odds are significant that China will challenge us in the Western Pacific.
The balance of our fleet that will meet her challenge is either under construction or waiting approval for the same.
Those programs that are PPT think or vaporware … even those we are close to entering production with, will at best be just past IOC.
Look at how long it has taken for the MV-22 to reach the fleet in any substantial numbers as a benchmark. Take that timeline and move it forward.
Wake up.
