Eurasia Press & News
The People’s Liberation Army-Navy (PLAN) of China was forecast to have become the world’s navy in late 2019, although it still lacks the global power projection capabilities of its US counterparts. The Pentagon has responded with plans for a dramatic increase in the size of the US Navy using smaller ships and advances in artificial intelligence.
The US Navy’s 68-vessel fleet of submarines will be surpassed by China before the year 2030, an analysis by submarine expert, defence observer and open-source intelligence analyst H I Sutton has revealed.
In analysis for Naval News, Sutton points to Covert Shores, US government and Office of Naval Intelligence estimates on the number of submarines possessed by the world’s major powers, plus North Korea. His analysis showed that although the US is projected to drop from 68 to 66 submarines between 2020 and 2030, China should increase their numbers from 66 to 76 during the same period.
Russia, meanwhile, is expected to drop one sub from 63 to 62 in the coming decade. North Korea which is estimated to have up to 71 submarines, most of them smaller, older vessels, many dating back to the Cold War, should slim down to a fleet of 60 subs by 2030.
“The next 10 years could see a major shift in the rankings,” Sutton notes. “Based on current plans and projections, the US and China will trade places by 2030,” he indicates.
For the US data, the analyst cites the Plan for Construction of Naval Vessels report to Congress, which points to plans to build three new Virginia-class subs a year over the coming decades, with the new boats to be commissioned as older ones are scrapped.
The Virginia-class attack sub, designed and built by General Dynamic’s Electric Boat and Huntington Ingalls Industries, has a price tag of $2.8 billion apiece, a nuclear propulsion system, and armaments including Tomahawk cruise missiles for naval and ground attacks and four torpedo tubes for anti-ship and anti-submarine warfare. As more Virginia-class boats are fielded, the US is expected to scrap its remaining four Ohio-class cruise missile submarines, thereby scrapping the SSGN class altogether, by 2027.
As for China’s projected numbers, the analyst cites a report by the Congressional Research Service from March 2020 on China’s naval modernisation plans. That report cites Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) figures. ONI says that PLAN’s proposals include the aforementioned 76 boats by 2030, among them eight ballistic-missile subs, 13 nuclear subs, and 55 diesel-electric powered subs.
Figures aside, Sutton stresses that factors such as “the quality of the boats, their weapons and their crews all come into play. And the US Navy is widely seen as far ahead of the PLAN today. But quantity has a quality all its own. And the US force is much more spread out than China’s, also facing an increasingly assertive Russian Navy submarine fleet. And no submarine, however dated, can be written off as not a threat.”
Size Insecurities
The Pentagon has repeatedly expressed concerns over China’s growing naval capabilities, with officials recently indicating that they would like the already ambitious goal of a 355-ship navy to expand further to between 480 and 534 ships, with the envisaged fleet consisting of a larger number of smaller ships than at present, some of them unmanned or optionally manned and using AI technology, and fewer capital ships such as aircraft carriers. Currently, the US has a 293-hull Navy.
China recently surpassed the US in total naval size, growing by about 55 percent between 2005 and 2019 to 335 ships total
, including two aircraft carriers, eight amphibious dock ships, 34 destroyers, 49 frigates, 71 corvettes, and dozens of missile boats, anti-submarine warfare vessels, landing craft and mining/demining ships.
The Center for Strategic and International Studies, an influential Washington-based think tank, estimates that China’s Navy will expand to 425 ships total by 2030, with quantity to be complemented by quality, including via investments in long-range anti-ship missiles.
