CHINA THREAT, ROUND THREE

Does China’s People’s Liberation Army have the teeth to chomp down on Taiwan? Responding to a twitchy New York Times story from last week, China-​​watcher Jeffrey Lewis said no. But Jane’s Defence Weekly thinks the answer may soon be yes.

An emerg­ing con­sen­sus among long-​​time PLA observers, includ­ing within the US intel­li­gence com­mu­nity, is that the Chinese mil­i­tary has suc­cess­fully achieved a far-​​reaching qual­i­ta­tive advance­ment in its war-​​fighting capa­bil­i­ties since the begin­ning of this decade. The PLA is quickly becom­ing an increas­ingly cred­i­ble threat against Taiwan and could even begin to pose a chal­lenge to US mil­i­tary pre­pon­der­ance in East Asia in the next decade if the momen­tum is sus­tained.
The country’s lead­er­ship has given strong back­ing to the PLA’s trans­for­ma­tion and force-​​regeneration efforts, which has trans­lated into a hefty and sus­tained increase in mil­i­tary spend­ing over the past few years. The offi­cially pub­lished defence bud­get has risen on aver­age by 15 per cent over the past five years from 121 bil­lion ($15 bil­lion) in 2001 to 220 bil­lion last year…
The Pentagon and US intel­li­gence com­mu­nity esti­mates that these pub­lished fig­ures rep­re­sent between one-​​third and one half of actual Chinese mil­i­tary expenditures.

Click here to keep read­ing Jane’s analy­sis of the Chinese mil­i­tary — its leaner, better-​​trained ground forces, its grow­ing mis­sile array, and its next-​​gen ships and subs.

The PLA is engaged in a rapid build up of nec­es­sary assets that includes amass­ing a size­able short– and medium-​​range bal­lis­tic mis­sile force, cruise mis­siles and spe­cial oper­a­tions units and strength­en­ing its strate­gic sur­veil­lance, recon­nais­sance and tar­get­ing capa­bil­i­ties. The Taiwanese Defence Ministry in March 2005 reported that the PLA had deployed around 700 bal­lis­tic mis­siles in the vicin­ity of the Taiwan Strait and was also quickly build­ing an arse­nal of at least 200 Hong-​​Niao cruise mis­siles within the next year
To be able to fight high-​​tech wars, the PLA is shift­ing its recruit­ment sys­tem from a reliance on poorly edu­cated con­scripts, who now serve only two years, to empha­sise the devel­op­ment of a pro­fes­sional long-​​serving cadre of troops. The PLA will reduce its man­power from 2.5 mil­lion to 2.3 mil­lion sol­diers by the end of this year. This comes on top of a reduc­tion of 500,000 troops in the late 1990s.
[With the troops that are left] “the PLA has shifted focus towards amphibi­ous oper­a­tions for a sig­nif­i­cant part of the ground forces”, Dennis Blasko, a for­mer US Army attach in China, points out. This has included the reor­gan­i­sa­tion of two motorised infantry divi­sions in the Nanjing and Guangzhou Military Regions into amphibi­ous infantry divi­sions and the trans­fer of another infantry divi­sion to the navy to form a sec­ond marine brigade in the late 1990s.
Blasko esti­mates that around a quar­ter of all PLA manoeu­vre units, which num­ber around 20 divi­sions or brigades, plus sup­port­ing artillery and air-​​defence units, have par­tic­i­pated in train­ing exer­cises for amphibi­ous oper­a­tions
[Meanwhile] The PLA Navy (PLAN) is rapidly trans­form­ing itself from a coastal force into a blue­wa­ter naval power with a force mod­erni­sa­tion drive that is unprece­dented in the post-​​Cold War era. “The range and num­ber of war­ships the Chinese navy is acquir­ing can be com­pared to the Soviet Union’s race to become an ocean-​​going navy to rival the US in the 1970s,” said a China-​​based for­eign naval attach.
The US intel­li­gence com­mu­nity has reported that since 2001, the Chinese ship­build­ing indus­try has pro­duced 23 new amphibi­ous assault ships and 13 con­ven­tional attack sub­marines.
The cur­rent top pri­or­ity for the PLAN is the replace­ment of its fleet of out­dated Soviet-​​era con­ven­tional and nuclear sub­marines with five new advanced mod­els of domes­ti­cally devel­oped and imported Russian ves­sels
The long-​​awaited Type 093 nuclear-​​powered attack sub­ma­rine (SSN) is also close to enter­ing into ser­vice, with the lead ves­sel already under­go­ing sea tri­als and expected to be accepted by the navy this year. There are reports that three hulls of this new class have already been laid?
The Type 094 nuclear-​​powered bal­lis­tic mis­sile sub­ma­rine, said to be an elon­gated ver­sion of the Type 093 and equipped with JL-​​2 sea-​​launched inter­con­ti­nen­tal bal­lis­tic mis­siles, is reported to have been launched last July and could be oper­a­tional within the next cou­ple of years. This is well ahead of Pentagon fore­casts, which had pre­vi­ously esti­mated that the Type 094 would not enter ser­vice until towards the end of this decade.

(Thanks to reader JF for the tip.)

April 13th, 2005 | Strategery | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.