They don’t have a carrier; they now have three, with a fourth on the way.
China has been operating carriers since 2012 and are perfectly aware that just possessing and operating one doesn’t make it combat ready. Liaoning was commissioned in 2012, declared combat-ready by its political officer in 2016 but was still classified as a training ship until 2019, when it was shifted to a combat role. Repeating the old saw that they don’t know how to effectively use a carrier has gone the way of saying they can’t mount an amphibious invasion of Taiwan. That was true 20 years ago, but it’s no longer the case. It hasn’t been for a while now. The PLA has gone through dramatic modernization since the turn of the century, and the PLAN has undergone a dramatic expansion in size as well. Imagining that the PLA has nothing but knock-off Soviet and Russian equipment that they’ve reverse engineered as was the case last century is something done at one’s own peril.
It’s not at all clear that the US Navy is still capable of doing carrier operations at tempo in a wartime setting anymore. The Navy has had more than a decade of terrible leadership and culture that has resulted in tanking morale and a number of high profile operational disasters.
There was the collisions of both the USS John McCain and the Fitzgerald with commercial ships within 6 months of each other in 2017, the fire aboard the USS Bonhomme Richard while docked at port in 2020 and USS Nimitz losing two aircrafts within 30 minutes of each other just last month.
Post-mortems have linked the same root cause of all of these incidents and yet the Navy culture stubbornly refuses to change. We’re now at the phase where even fairly senior officials have never known a navy that wasn’t like this.
2017: Is The U.S. Navy Suffering From A Catastrophic Morale Problem? [Infographic]
2021: More Than Just a Fire: The Bonnie Dick Reveals a Navy in Shambles
2024: U.S. Navy's Afloat Accident Rate Hits Decade High, Led by MSC
2024: I Blame the Navy’s Strategic Woes on the Chiefs of Naval Operations
At least they’re not dropping aircraft off the carriers… oh, wait.
I guess the other question - for the Chinese and now for the Americans - is to what extent favouring political loyalty over competence for promotions will affect the capabilities of the armed forces?
A carrier also seems the highest-value and most vulnerable of targets to American SSNs. Sure, America’s own carriers were always vulnerable to some extent to enemy diesel and nuclear subs, but China’s would probably be more vulnerable given that the U.S. Navy’s LA-class, Seawolf and Virginia-class subs arguably pose a greater threat to enemy carriers than enemy subs pose to American CVNs.
For one of each out in the middle of the ocean that’s true.
But the situation is not that simple. If it ever got to a shooting war, it’s rather likely the USN would want to deploy carriers off China’s coast and make attacks on their mainland. Conversely, China’s carriers would not be off Hawaii or California. Instead they’d be near whatever third country China is trying to conquer while the US interferes in that effort. The waters off China greatly favor surface ships over subs. The water within a couple/few hundred miles of China’s coast is defended by extensive shore based land-to-ship missiles. The US has exactly zero such shore batteries.
War is a team sport and is always played on an unequal playing field using teams configured very differently. One on one comparisons on a vast empty symmetrical playing field are worse than useless; they’re actively misleading.
Doesn’t stop lots of people, pros, pundits, and amateurs, from trying to think that way though.
I think the US has people sitting in a room thinking about exactly these sorts of scenarios and how to best “win” each scenario. I’d bet my lunch money that China does the same (and likely almost every country).
I think most countries are mostly just looking at the one or two nations on their border - either as potential threats or as potential targets.
No doubt. My point was that talking heads and armchair experts love to do these hardware dick-measuring contests that are not relevant to real world outcomes. But fill hours years of Youtubes.
The other problem is that drones and such have changed the nature of a potential war so much I don’t know if even the respective militaries completely understand the complexities involved.
The war that the parties were planning for WWII wound up being completely different than what was actually fought.
I’ve often wondered how that war would have proceeded had the American carriers been destroyed on December 7, 1941.
It would have ended the same. The ultimate outcome was never in doubt, unlike many other wars. That is, unless the US decided to stop, which wasn’t really likely.
Yep… it would have been more of a situation where the US forces may or may not have landed in the Philippines by the time the Manhattan Project came through, and it may have taken more than two nuclear bombings to convince them to surrender if they were relatively stronger at that point, but the end result would have eventually been the same.
There’s so much more involved in the decision to surrender by Japan than the atomic bombs, but I think that would really get into a hijack of this thread.
My point was that all the parties went into WWII believing that it would be particular types of warfare, and they prepared for their anticipated war, rather than what actually happened.
For example, Japan built a couple of super battleships that contributed very little to the war. The US believed that high level bombers would work against warships. All the countries had various problems.
I don’t want to turn this into a WWII thread, but rather, ISTM that drones and other new weapons and tactics have changed the potential battlefield enough that it’s really diffiult to anticipate what will happen.
Thirty years ago, counting up carriers, planes and missiles could have given a better idea, but how much do we know about all the drones the China, Taiwan and the US have, and what would happen?
Unlike the Pacific War between Japan and the Allies, a potential war between China and America (and whatever countries become involved), it’s not as likely to lead to a total defeat for either party.
Like Japan in WWII, China doesn’t have the ability to force the US to surrender. It has regional power, but not the ability to put boots on the ground in Hawaii, let along march on Washington.
It’s not likely that the US wants an all out war with China, either, and having nukes in the mix makes decisions much more difficult.
It seems that China is attempting to have enough military power to take Taiwan and push other countries around in the South China Sea.
We know a bit about US drones. There was one guy holding one high above his head in the recent Washington military parade.
In the context of naval warfare, “drones” doesn’t mean man-portable quadcopters.
It means autonomous subs that are sort of “cruise torpedoes” by analogy to aerial cruise missiles. It means autonomous small boats that are sorta like teh suicide speedboats that took out the USS Cole, but without a crew on board. It also means both low and high speed uncrewed aircraft.
All of these things are smaller, more maneuverable, usually faster, and most importantly, potentially far more numerous than either traditional manned vehicles or the more traditional munitions that can be launched from those manned vehicles.
It’s mostly the numbers that alter all the equations of offense and defense. It’s sorta the difference between a single soldier needing to defend themselves against an attack by a bear versus an attack by a swarm of mildly poisonous bees. Defeating the bear is doable, but is a genuine contest that could go either way. One on one the soldier defeats the bee no contest at all. One soldier vs 1000 bees is very different battle.
“Generals always prepare to fight the last war.” ~ Georges Clemenceau
See:
What we know about the Poseidon, Russia’s new super torpedo
Russian President Vladimir Putin boasted this week that Russia has tested a nuclear-powered super torpedo, the Poseidon, that was unstoppable and more powerful than a nuclear missile, the second announcement in a week of Russian trials involving nuclear-capable weapons systems.
There’s also the question of how invested the US and China are in drones. Ukraine is using them heavily, because they find themselves in a very asymmetrical conflict, in which they need to gamble on new tactics and technologies in order to survive (and that gamble has gone very well for them). But larger, more established militaries are more conservative, and usually slower in fully embracing new technologies and tactics, at least until they’ve seen the old, traditional tactics fail horribly. And they have to see them fail horribly for themselves: Just watching those tactics fail for other countries, there’s too much temptation to say “But our systems are different; that would never happen to us”.
China is quite invested.
The United States started slow and perhaps still is slow, but is finally getting onboard too. The Army is planning to get 1 million drones soon.