The GuardianQuote:
China has moved a step closer to launching its first aircraft carrier with senior generals in the People's Liberation Army finally confirming one of the world's worst kept military secrets.
Officers from the general staff acknowledged the existence of a carrier, which one of them described as a "symbol of a great nation", amid reports that it could set sail within weeks.
The vessel in question is a defunct Soviet-era carrier formerly named the Varyag that was bought in 1998 from Ukraine by a Hong Kong company on the pretext that it would be used as a floating casino off the shores of Macau.
Instead it has been upgraded at China's Dalian naval shipyard with combat sensors and defensive weapons and painted in the colours of the People's Liberation Army. For several years foreigners have been kept out of the area of Dalian where the work has taken place. But the existence of a 67,500 tonne vessel is not easily concealed and in recent months photographs have appeared in state-run media.
Chen Bingde, the chief of China's military general staff, has gone a step further in an interview published in the Hong Kong Commercial Daily (translated link), saying the 300m long carrier "is being built but has not been completed".
His assistant chief, Qi Jianguo, suggested the vessel was both a status symbol and a long-overdue strengthening of China's naval defence. "All of the great nations in the world own aircraft carriers – they are symbols of a great nation," Qi was quoted as saying. "It would have been better for us if we acted sooner in understanding the oceans and mapping out our blue-water capabilities earlier."
Referring to areas where territorial waters are disputed, he said that China faced "heavy pressure" in the South China Sea, East China Sea, Yellow Sea and the Taiwan Straits. But the carrier would never sail into the waters of other nations.
No further details have emerged, leaving military experts to speculate whether the revamped hulk will indeed mark a significant projection of Chinese military power as a "blue water" force or the revamped hulk will hold only symbolic value, lacking the technology and operational experience to challenge the US navy.
The commander of US Pacific forces, Admiral Robert Willard, told the Senate in April that he was not concerned about the carrier's military impact but expected it would make a big impression on public opinion. "I think the change in perception by the region will be significant," he said.
In the past year the Chinese military has surprised many foreign observers with the speed of its weapons development – notably the test flight of a J-20 stealth fighter and a "carrier-killer" missile.
China has yet to announce whether the carrier will be renamed. One report suggests it will be called Shi Lang, after a Qing dynasty admiral who conquered Taiwan – further fuelling unease about its impact on regional stability.
• This article was amended on 9 June 2011. The original suggested that the carrier will be called Shi Lang, after a Ming dynasty admiral. This has been corrected.
Well, evidently they didn't decide to make it into a floating casino.
At this point, the real impact of this is that China will begin gaining experience in operating aircraft carriers, at all levels, from the individual crewman, to the complexities of the air operation, to the tactical workings of the battle group, up to employing it as a strategic asset. It isn't likely to have an immediate strategic or tactical impact except in the psychological sense amongst civilians and reporters who think all carriers are created equal and having one means being ble to employ it effectively.
The other interesting thing to see is whether it will be employed like the
Kusnetsov where the air group is primarily defensive for the ship and escorts, and offensive attacks are expected to be primarily made with shipboard missiles, or whether it will be more similar to U.S. doctrine wherein the air group is the primary offensive arm and the long-range defensive arm against submarines and aircraft, while the escorts provide successive inner layers of defense and supplementary offensive capability with missiles.
An earlier article discussed testing of the Chinese 5th-generation fighter and the DF-21D IRBM which is adapted for use against naval targets in a modern, very-long-ranged adaptation of the idea of a shore battery. It's being referred to as a "carrier-killer" but I find the moniker somewhat overblown. It is a danger to a carrier, but carriers are well able to protect themselves, or rather their escorts are: SM-3/RIM-161 Block IA is definitely in service, and AFAIK so should Block IB as of last year. The SM-3 has a good performance record in testing compared with other ABM systems (none of which have exactly a
bad record), and is the dedicated ABM SAM used by
Ticonderoga class cruisers and
Arleigh Burke class destroyers with AEGIS.
SM-2ER Block IV/RIM-156A and the newly-activated SM-6/RIM-174 also have some ABM capability simply by virtue of being long-ranged, powerful SAMs controlled by the AEGIS system, but I do not know what level of testing in that role they have undergone or how successful it has been. Still, with 122 launch cells per cruiser and 96 cells per destroyer I don't see any real likelyhood that the Chinese could saturate a carrier's defenses with DF-21Ds, especially since any carrier is escorted by several of these ships.
Not every AEGIS ship has received the BMD system upgrade, but any of them should still be able to engage ballistic missiles even without it, although they would need to fire significantly more missiles per kill. Still, not every ship needs to be upgraded; part of AEGIS is that it is a battle management system, so the BMD-equipped ships can control missiles fired from other ships.
The DF-21D is really just a generalized ship-killer and is far more of a threat to the shipping of nations that don't have systems like AEGIS to protect it.
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