“China’s car­rier has gone to sea” was the head­line of one Asian news­pa­per. The event — the story implied — marked the long-awaited oper­a­tional debut of the for­mer Soviet air­craft car­rier Varyag. In real­ity, the ship got under­way with har­bor tugs pro­vid­ing the power, mov­ing the ship from a pier in the port of Dalian to a nearby dry dock, a “voy­age” of about two miles.

As of this writ­ing, no major work on the ship has been observed since she arrived at Dalian in north­east­ern China on 3 March 2002. The ship was painted a few years ago, but lit­tle other effort has gone into the unfin­ished giant despite peri­odic press claims that the car­rier was being “clan­des­tinely” completed.

While the ship was being towed to the dry dock on 27 April the Varyag was exten­sively pho­tographed. Those pho­tos reveal much about the ship: She rode high in the water and, with the lack of “patches” on her flight deck, it is obvi­ous that engines had not been installed in the ship. Her flight deck lacks arrest­ing cables and oper­a­tional mark­ings, and her island struc­ture is void of the aeri­als, elec­tronic domes, and radar anten­nas that inun­date air­craft carriers.

The ques­tion is: Why has the Varyag moved into a dry dock. A num­ber of rea­sons are pos­si­ble for her brief voy­age and dry dock­ing. These include:

(1) Completing the car­rier — which was laid down at the Nikolayev South ship­yard as the Soviet Riga in the Ukraine in 1985. This would involve the com­plex task of installing engines and other machin­ery (assum­ing that they are now avail­able), aux­il­iary equip­ment, mess­ing and berthing facil­i­ties, radars and other elec­tronic equip­ment, etc.

(2) Carrying out gen­eral main­te­nance on the hulk, includ­ing clean­ing her under­wa­ter hull, and tak­ing other mea­sures to sim­ply pre­serve the Varyag until a def­i­nite deci­sion is made con­cern­ing her even­tual fate.

(3) Permitting naval archi­tects and oth­ers to exam­ine the ship’s under­wa­ter hull, pos­si­bly to assist in efforts to design and con­struct an indige­nous Chinese air­craft carrier.

There can be no ques­tion but the Chinese Navy’s lead­er­ship wants to acquire air­craft car­ri­ers, pri­mar­ily to pro­vide air cover for naval oper­a­tions in the South China Sea, an area of great inter­est to China because of off­shore oil activ­i­ties. In long-range plan­ning, the Chinese may also be con­sid­er­ing their increas­ing polit­i­cal and eco­nomic inter­ests in Africa and South America. However, despite peri­odic press reports — some say­ing that the first Chinese car­rier will be com­pleted this year — there is still no pub­licly avail­able evi­dence that con­struc­tion of such ships has begun in China. Indeed, even com­mer­cial satel­lites would have detected such efforts.

Chinese ship­yards, which are pro­duc­ing advanced mis­sile destroy­ers and nuclear-propelled sub­marines as well as large mer­chant ships, can cer­tainly build a large air­craft car­rier. Completion of the ship — which would take prob­a­bly four years or more from the start of con­struc­tion — would have to be fol­lowed by a lengthy work­ing up period, with exten­sive ship and then air­craft tri­als and qual­i­fi­ca­tions. Thus, with at least a year from the deci­sion to build such a ship until actual con­struc­tion would start because of the need to order com­po­nents and mate­ri­als, if that deci­sion were made today the first Chinese car­rier could be ready in about six or seven years.

– Norman Polmar

This arti­cle first appeared in Aviation Week & Space Technology.

A super­cruis­ing com­bat air­craft is a high pri­or­ity of the Chinese navy, the country’s top admi­ral says in a reveal­ing offi­cial inter­view that gives strong clues of per­ceived short­com­ings and future direc­tions for the mar­itime force.

Adm. Wu Shengli also says China must step up work on pre­ci­sion mis­siles that can over­come enemy defenses, and the nation should move faster in devel­op­ing large com­bat sur­face ships — prob­a­bly mean­ing the air­craft car­rier pro­gram that looks increas­ingly immi­nent.

Wu’s demand for super­cruise — super­sonic flight with­out after­burner — hints that such per­for­mance will be avail­able from the next Chinese fighter, some­times called the J-XX.

“One pos­si­bil­ity is that the J-XX is being designed for super­cruise and that Wu is try­ing to build sup­port for a naval ver­sion of the air­craft,” says Richard Bitzinger, a senior fel­low at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore.

The design of the J-XX is unknown. It could be a new air­craft or quite pos­si­bly a devel­op­ment of the J-10, a fighter now enter­ing ser­vice.

The J-10’s con­fig­u­ra­tion is sim­i­lar to that of the Eurofighter Typhoon, which the man­u­fac­turer says can super­cruise at Mach 1.5, although it is likely to be some­what slower with a use­ful exter­nal load.

For the Chinese navy, one advan­tage of super­cruis­ing would be the abil­ity to cover a large defen­sive area in less time — quite use­ful if the imag­ined tar­get is a U.S. car­rier group at long range.

Importantly, Wu lists a super­cruis­ing fighter among a series of tech­no­log­i­cal demands that all look quite achiev­able for the Chinese navy over the next decade or so, sug­gest­ing that he does not regard such flight per­for­mance as a pie in the sky.

“Sophisticated equip­ment is the key mate­r­ial basis for win­ning a regional naval war,” says the admi­ral, evi­dently refer­ring to the pos­si­bil­ity of a con­fronta­tion in the Taiwan Strait. “We must accel­er­ate and pro­mote steps to work on key weapons.

Read the rest of this story, check out Turkey’s new AW149, see a Russian fighter go down and read about the Poseidon’s first flight from our friends at Aviation Week, exclu­sively on Military.com.

– Christian

This is not the first time we’ve cov­ered this issue…

From the US Naval Institute:

With ten­sions already ris­ing due to the Chinese navy becom­ing more aggres­sive in assert­ing its ter­ri­to­r­ial claims in the South China Sea, the U.S. Navy seems to have yet another rea­son to be deeply concerned.

After years of con­jec­ture, details have begun to emerge of a “kill weapon” devel­oped by the Chinese to tar­get and destroy U.S. air­craft carriers.

First posted on a Chinese blog viewed as cred­i­ble by mil­i­tary ana­lysts and then trans­lated by the naval affairs blog Information Dissemination, a recent report pro­vides a descrip­tion of an anti-ship bal­lis­tic mis­sile (ASBM) that can strike car­ri­ers and other U.S. ves­sels at a range of 2000km.

The range of the mod­i­fied Dong Feng 21 mis­sile is sig­nif­i­cant in that it cov­ers the areas that are likely hot zones for future con­fronta­tions between U.S. and Chinese sur­face forces.

The size of the mis­sile enables it to carry a war­head big enough to inflict sig­nif­i­cant dam­age on a large ves­sel, pro­vid­ing the Chinese the capa­bil­ity of destroy­ing a U.S. super­car­rier in one strike.

Because the mis­sile employs a com­plex guid­ance sys­tem, low radar sig­na­ture and a maneu­ver­abil­ity that makes its flight path unpre­dictable, the odds that it can evade track­ing sys­tems to reach its tar­get are increased. It is esti­mated that the mis­sile can travel at mach 10 and reach its max­i­mum range of 2000km in less than 12 minutes.

Read the rest of this story on Military.com…

– Christian

In offices in the Pentagon and the State Department, China-Taiwan experts are scru­ti­niz­ing the lat­est reports from the Far East of the chang­ing rela­tion­ship between China — offi­cially the People’s Republic of China — and Taiwan, the off­shore island “state.” For more than a half cen­tury the United States has antic­i­pated a pos­si­ble Chinese assault on Taiwan. But the sit­u­a­tion is chang­ing rapidly. 

Taiwan became the Republic of China after 1949. Communist armies had over­run most of China and the sur­viv­ing Nationalist troops, led by Chang Kai-shek, fled to the island, then known by its Japanese name of Formosa. 

There fol­lowed sev­eral decades of intense ani­mos­ity between the “two Chinas.” Initially, there was con­cern in the West that the Nationalist armies, rested and rearmed, could invade the main­land, some 100 miles away. Subsequently, there was con­cern for sev­eral decades that Chinese armies would cross the Taiwan Strait to invade Taiwan. 

During the lat­ter period the United States gave con­sid­er­able mil­i­tary assis­tance to Taiwan in antic­i­pa­tion of a Chinese assault across the strait. And, U.S. war plans called for defend­ing Taiwan against such an inva­sion, although the dif­fi­cul­ties of such an amphibi­ous oper­a­tion should have been obvi­ous to all parties. 

Indeed, China did not build a mas­sive amphibi­ous fleet or a large air­borne assault force. Further, China’s marines — cur­rently two brigades in strength — are assigned to the South Sea Fleet rather than to the East Sea Fleet, which faces the Taiwan Strait. While detailed data are not pub­licly avail­able, it appears that the East Sea Fleet is the small­est of China’s three fleets. 

While strong words are still voiced by some lead­ers of both China and Taiwan, there has been a remark­able rap­proche­ment between the two enti­ties dur­ing the past few years. There is now direct postal ser­vice, com­mer­cial air trans­port, and, most recently, ship­ping between China and Taiwan. Also, Taiwan busi­ness­men are invest­ing in China. 

And, in early January the China News Agency announced that rep­re­sen­ta­tives of China and Taiwan were are expected to meet after the Chinese New Year hol­i­days to ham­mer out the tech­ni­cal details of sev­eral agree­ments to be signed dur­ing the third round of high-level, cross-Taiwan Strait talks. According to Straits Exchange Foundation Chairman Chiang Pin-kung, the new set of agree­ments will address issues such as coop­er­a­tion on finan­cial super­vi­sion and reg­u­la­tion, pre­ven­tion of dou­ble tax­a­tion, intel­lec­tual prop­erty rights pro­tec­tion, and coop­er­a­tion on com­bat­ing crime.

(more…)

It appears that the struc­ture of the PLA’s New Heavy Corps will be sim­i­lar to the British 1 Corps in Northern Germany dur­ing the Cold War. The PLA Corps will be struc­tured around brigades and I believe the Corps itself will con­tain a heavy artillery group, a ground manoeu­vre group, an avi­a­tion group and a bat­tle­field sup­port group which would include bridg­ing, elec­tronic war­fare and logistics. 

An early ver­sion of the corps envi­sioned a total of 500 Model 96 or Model 99 main bat­tle tanks in two armoured and two mech­a­nised brigades; 586 ZDB-97 tracked infantry fight­ing vehi­cles (IFVs), 126 155mm PLZ-45 self-propelled guns; 96 120mm tur­reted self-propelled mor­tars; 36 Type 89 30 tube 122mm and 27 300mm 12 tube A-100 mul­ti­ple rocket launch­ers; 12 DF-15D tac­ti­cal mis­siles and 48 attack, 18 mul­ti­pur­pose and 60 trans­port heli­copters and around 2,000 other types of vehicles. 

This was clearly out­side what the PLA is cur­rently able to afford with armored brigades now have three armoured bat­tal­ions for a total of 99 main bat­tle tanks, one mech­a­nised infantry bat­tal­ion, one artillery bat­tal­ion with 18 self-propelled guns and one air defence bat­tal­ion of 18 AAA guns. Each armoured bat­tal­ion will have three armoured com­pa­nies, each of three pla­toons with each com­pany hav­ing 11 main bat­tle tanks; three in each pla­toon and two head­quar­ters vehi­cles. There are no tanks at the bat­tal­ion or brigade head­quar­ters. This is a total of 33 main bat­tle tanks. 

The new mech­a­nized infantry brigade is to have four mech­a­nised infantry bat­tal­ions, one armoured bat­tal­ion, one fire sup­port bat­tal­ion, one engi­neer bat­tal­ion and one com­mu­ni­ca­tion bat­tal­ion. Each mech­a­nized infantry bat­tal­ion has three mech­a­nized infantry com­pa­nies, each of three pla­toons with each com­pany hav­ing 13 infantry fight­ing vehi­cles; four in each pla­toon and one head­quar­ters vehi­cle. A com­plete brigade con­tains approx­i­mately 4,000 soldiers.

(more…)

The Soviet Operational Manoeuvre Group in 1986 was look­ing at cre­at­ing a ‘Shock Division’ of three reg­i­ments, with each reg­i­ment con­tain­ing two tank and two mech­a­nised infantry bat­tal­ions. Armoured divi­sions are too unwieldy in com­plex ter­rain and an armoured bat­tle group (bat­tal­ion sized) is eas­ier to con­trol and exe­cute its mission. 

The Peoples Liberation Army, fol­low­ing on from their expe­ri­ence with the Operational Manoeuvre Group, can now deploy the new mech­a­nised infantry divi­sion and using mod­u­lar forces have cre­ated a com­pos­ite cav­alry brigade for use in com­plex terrain. 

Utilising the deep oper­a­tion the­ory, they can employ am air mech­a­nised and/or fast wheeled force as a ‘lance’ fol­lowed up by the mobile force (tank heavy) to exploit the breach in an ene­mys defences fol­lowed by a hold­ing force (heavy mech­a­nised), that is the dozer blade. 

An arti­cle in the 1/2008 issue of Tanke Zhuangjia Cheliang (Tank and Armoured Vehicle) is titled ‘News From Overseas– Chinese Built Many Light Type Mechanised Units.’ The arti­cle was writ­ten to cor­rect the mis­takes that appear in non-Chinese media about the struc­ture and equip­ment of these new light mech­a­nised units. 

The mech­a­nised infantry brigade has four mech­a­nised infantry bat­tal­ions, one armoured bat­tal­ion, one fire sup­port bat­tal­ion, one engi­neer bat­tal­ion and one com­mu­ni­ca­tion bat­tal­ion. Each mech­a­nised infantry bat­tal­ion has three mech­a­nised infantry com­pa­nies, each of three pla­toons with each com­pany hav­ing 13 infantry fight­ing vehi­cles; four in each pla­toon and one head­quar­ters vehicle. 

Each armoured brigade has four armoured bat­tal­ions for a total of 132 main bat­tle tanks, one mech­a­nised infantry bat­tal­ion, one artillery bat­tal­ion with 18 self-propelled guns and one air defence bat­tal­ion of 18 AAA guns. Each armoured bat­tal­ion has three armoured com­pa­nies, each of three pla­toons with each com­pany hav­ing 11 main bat­tle tanks; three in each pla­toon and two head­quar­ters vehi­cles. A com­plete brigade con­tains 4,000 soldiers.

(more…)

[Editor’s Note: Our good friend Martin Andrew, who pub­lishes an inves­tiga­tive blaster chron­i­cling Chinese mil­i­tary devel­op­ment called the Gi Zhou Newsletter, has some inter­est­ing tid­bits for us this week. And please note, the pic­ture at left is an ear­lier Type 89 self-propelled gun.] 

New 122mm Self-Propelled Gun

In 1966, Luo Ruiqing, the PLA’s then chief-of-staff crit­i­cised the defence indus­try because it was con­cen­trat­ing on R&D rather than on pro­duc­tion. He was accused in the offi­cial Report of Luo’s Mistakes that, ‘he still fran­ti­cally attacked our national defence sci­en­tific research work as going from data to data, from design to design, with­out com­plet­ing any­thing’. Luo believed China was in immi­nent war with the United States, and advo­cated Soviet assis­tance. His crit­i­cism of the Chinese defence indus­try could well have applied into the 1990s as well as today with too many designs that achieve little. 

A new 122mm self-propelled gun has been shown in the online ver­sion of PLA Daily. Titled ‘Artillery troops enhance com­bat effec­tive­ness with new equip­ment’, it shows a bat­tery of these guns. The vehi­cle uses the chas­sis from the new ZBD97 infantry fight­ing vehi­cle with a tur­ret, most prob­a­bly a mod­i­fied ver­sion of the one used on the Model 89 122mm self-propelled gun. 

WZ731 Tracked Scout Vehicle

Identified as a xinx­i­hua zhan­chang (Informationalised bat­tle­field) sys­tem, the WZ731 tracked scout devel­oped from the ZSD89 hull with a low pro­file tur­ret mount­ing two armoured sights, one with a laser rangefinder and CCD day­light sight and the other a ther­mal imager. The WZ731 had a crew of up to six includ­ing a three man scout team. It was 6.62m long, 2.626m wide and 1.88m high at the hull and 2.556m at the top of the armoured sights. The com­bat weight was only 8.1t which gave it a max­i­mum road speed of 80.5 km/hr.

(more…)

I didn’t really under­stand it until I noticed the seri­ous­ness in the source’s eyes. I hadn’t given it much thought recently, what with all the other stuff going on around us … MRAP, Air Force shakeup, body armor, tanker — you name it. 

But when the far-ranging dis­cus­sion we were hav­ing came around to the sub­ject of air­craft car­ri­ers, this guy said (and I para­phrase) “you think car­ri­ers are irrel­e­vant in a con­tested envi­ron­ment now, just wait til some­one gets an anti-ship bal­lis­tic mis­sile capa­bil­ity. That’ll be a game-changer.” 

To me, this seemed implau­si­ble. Shooting a bal­lis­tic mis­sile at a mov­ing ship? 

“Did you see the ASAT test? That was 10-times more dif­fi­cult,” he replied. “And they’re a lot closer than any­one thinks.” 

He wouldn’t tell me the coun­try that’s so close to get­ting this capa­bil­ity, but it’s not hard to guess which one it is. 

From the 2008 Chinese Military Power report:

China is devel­op­ing an anti-ship bal­lis­tic mis­sile (ASBM) based on a vari­ant of the CSS-5 medium-range bal­lis­tic mis­sile (MRBM) as a com­po­nent of its anti-access strat­egy. The mis­sile has a range in excess of 1,500 km and, when incor­po­rated into a sophis­ti­cated com­mand and con­trol sys­tem, is a key com­po­nent of Chinas anti-access strat­egy to pro­vide the PLA the capa­bil­ity to attack ships at sea, includ­ing air­craft car­ri­ers, from great dis­tances.

That’s sub­tle — not a whole lot there. But my guy tells me this coun­try that he would not men­tion could plau­si­bly demon­strate that capa­bil­ity “very soon.” 

According to our friends at Globalsecurity.org:

Work is believed to be ongo­ing to pro­vide this mis­sile with a sophis­ti­cated ter­mi­nal guid­ance sys­tem. According to some reports the Mod 2 ver­sion of the CSS-5 will be com­pa­ra­ble to the US Pershing II IRBM, employ advanced radar guid­ance to achieve extremely high accu­racy.

(more…)

DT edi­tor emer­i­tus Noah Shachtman send us a heads up on a cool post at his cur­rent gig, The Danger Room. Here’s an excerpt:

For years, the American armed forces have wor­ried about an attack on US satel­lites; this could be how it begins. The United States mil­i­tary has become increas­ingly depen­dent on space. It uses photo-reconnaissance satel­lites to observe poten­tial adver­saries, GPS satel­lites to guide muni­tions with pin-point accu­racy, com­mu­ni­ca­tions satel­lites to han­dle the flow of infor­ma­tion into and out of a the­ater of oper­a­tions, and early warn­ing satel­lites to detect and track enemy mis­sile launches to name just a few of the bet­ter known appli­ca­tions. Because of this increas­ing depen­dence, many ana­lysts have wor­ried that the US is most vul­ner­a­ble to asym­met­ric attacks against its space assets; in their view US satel­lites are sit­ting ducks with­out any sort of defense and their destruc­tion would crip­ple the US mil­i­tary. Chinas test of a sophis­ti­cated anti-satellite (ASAT) weapon a year ago, Friday — 11 January 2007, when it shot down its own obso­lete weather satel­lite — has only increased these con­cerns. But is this true? Could a coun­tryeven a pow­er­ful coun­try like China that has demon­strated a very sophis­ti­cated, if nascent, abil­ity to shoot down satel­lites at all alti­tudesin­flict any­thing close to a knock-out blow against the US in space? And if it was any­thing less than a knock-out, how seri­ously would it affect US war fight­ing capabilities?

So is China a valid space threat or not? Read Noah’s three part series, start­ing with Part I here.

– Ward

Is this for real?

From the UK Daily Mail

When the U.S. Navy deploys a bat­tle fleet on exer­cises, it takes the secu­rity of its air­craft car­ri­ers very seri­ously indeed.

At least a dozen war­ships pro­vide a phys­i­cal guard while the tech­ni­cal wiz­ardry of the world’s only mil­i­tary super­power offers an invis­i­ble shield to detect and deter any intruders.

That is the the­ory. Or, rather, was the theory.

American mil­i­tary chiefs have been left dumb­struck by an unde­tected Chinese sub­ma­rine pop­ping up at the heart of a recent Pacific exer­cise and close to the vast U.S.S. Kitty Hawk — a 1,000ft super­car­rier with 4,500 per­son­nel on board.

By the time it sur­faced the 160ft Song Class diesel-electric attack sub­ma­rine is under­stood to have sailed within viable range for launch­ing tor­pe­does or mis­siles at the carrier.

According to senior Nato offi­cials the inci­dent caused con­ster­na­tion in the U.S. Navy.

The Americans had no idea China’s fast-growing sub­ma­rine fleet had reached such a level of sophis­ti­ca­tion, or that it posed such a threat.

One Nato fig­ure said the effect was “as big a shock as the Russians launch­ing Sputnik” — a ref­er­ence to the Soviet Union’s first orbit­ing satel­lite in 1957 which marked the start of the space age.

The inci­dent, which took place in the ocean between south­ern Japan and Taiwan, is a major embar­rass­ment for the Pentagon.

The lone Chinese ves­sel slipped past at least a dozen other American war­ships which were sup­posed to pro­tect the car­rier from hos­tile air­craft or submarines.

And the rest of the costly defen­sive screen, which usu­ally includes at least two U.S. sub­marines, was also appar­ently unable to detect it.

According to the Nato source, the encounter has forced a seri­ous re-think of American and Nato naval strat­egy as com­man­ders recon­sider the level of threat from poten­tially hos­tile Chinese submarines.

It also led to tense diplo­matic exchanges, with shaken American diplo­mats demand­ing to know why the sub­ma­rine was “shad­ow­ing” the U.S. fleet while Beijing pleaded igno­rance and dis­missed the affair as coincidence.

Analysts believe Beijing was send­ing a mes­sage to America and the West demon­strat­ing its rapidly-growing mil­i­tary capa­bil­ity to threaten for­eign pow­ers which try to inter­fere in its “backyard.” 

This sounds like a a sim­i­lar inci­dent that occured last year, where another Chinese popped up a lit­tle too close for com­fort next to the Kitty Hawk.

What gives? I mean, Pentagon chief Gates was just over in China mak­ing nicey nice with is Sino coun­ter­parts. Why the shadow pup­petry which is cer­tainly going to give the US Navy a seri­ous case of the jit­ters? I can’t find much more on this story, and the Daily Mail is surely not the most cred­i­ble source…What do you dear read­ers make of this?
(Gouge: CM)

– Christian