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David AxeContributor
Aerospace & Defense
The Chinese navy's first aircraft carrier 'Liaoning.'
CHINESE NAVY
Don’t look now, but China’s breakneck naval expansion might start slowing down—and for one simple reason.
It takes a lot of time, money and manpower to maintain a big fleet. And even in China, those resources are finite.
That, for American planners, is the reassuring conclusion of a new analysis from Christopher Carlson, writing for the U.S. Naval War College’s China Maritime Studies Institute.
Carlson’s report is doubly reassuring for American officials because the U.S. Navy is struggling to define, and fund, its own plans for a bigger fleet.
It’s indisputable that the Chinese navy has gotten bigger and better—and fast. After more than a decade of major investment, the Chinese fleet now is the biggest in the world in terms of hulls.
The People’s Liberation Army Navy boasts 360 front-line warships. That’s 63 more ships than the U.S. Navy operates. Hull numbers aren’t the only metric of naval power, of course. American ships on average are much bigger, more heavily armed and more sophisticated than Chinese ships are, even if the U.S. vessels are less numerous.
Still, “for the last 11 years, China has racked up an impressive ship construction and maintenance effort totaling nearly 211 million man-hours,” Carlson wrote. “This is approximately a five-fold increase over the preceding 11-year period, with significant jumps in 2011, due to the Type 052C/D and Type 056 series production, and in 2015 with the lay-down of the Type 002 aircraft carrier, Shandong.”
But it’s wrong to assume this level of shipbuilding will continue much longer, as some experts have done. Perhaps most notably, The Diplomat’s Rick Joe last year projected that the PLAN by the early 2030s would have four aircraft carriers (up from two today), as many as 20 Type 055 cruisers (up from eight), 40 or so Type 052D/E destroyers (25 today) and perhaps 50 Type 054A/B frigates (31 today).
Don’t count on it, Carlson wrote. “To achieve the force structure proposed by Mr. Joe, China would have to increase the number of man-hours by 93 percent, essentially doubling the resource allocation from 2008 to ‘18.”
Chinese navy Type 022 missile boats exercising in the East China Sea in 2018.
“This is a very significant increase, one that would require an equally significant increase in funding—a capital investment that would have to be provided from a Chinese economy that is growing at a far slower rate than earlier periods even as labor costs continue to rise.”
And that’s not counting the maintenance burden this bigger fleet would impose on shipyards and budgets. “The maintenance burden becomes quite substantial beginning in 2028 as many of the Type 052C, 054A and 056 ships come due for their mid-life overhauls.”
“Given the fiscal challenges facing China today and in the near future, this very robust force structure projection is questionable.”
Sober-minded analysts for years have been predicting this slow-down. After all, the same dynamics that could constrain Chinese naval expansion have for decades weighed on the United States’ own fleet-planning.
Despite consensus across American presidential administrations and political parties that the fleet needs to grow, the U.S. Navy has managed to add only around 25 large warships since the fleet bottomed out at around 270 front-line vessels in the early 2000s.
“The economic model that propelled China through three decades of meteoric growth appears unsustainable,” Andrew Erickson, a Naval War College analyst, told the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission a few years ago.
What Erickson described as China’s “pent-up national potential” could begin expiring as early as 2030, by which point “China will have world’s highest proportion of people over 65,” he predicted. “An aging society with rising expectations, burdened with rates of chronic diseases exacerbated by sedentary lifestyles, will probably divert spending from both military development and the economic growth that sustains it.”
If Carlson and Erickson are right, the combination of an aging Chinese population, slowing economic growth and rising fleet costs could combine to put a cap on the Chinese navy.
That’s not to say the Chinese navy won’t still be one of the powerful in the world by many measures. It’s just not likely to easily overtake the U.S. Navy in the metrics that matter most.
www.forbes.com
Aerospace & Defense
The Chinese navy's first aircraft carrier 'Liaoning.'
CHINESE NAVY
Don’t look now, but China’s breakneck naval expansion might start slowing down—and for one simple reason.
It takes a lot of time, money and manpower to maintain a big fleet. And even in China, those resources are finite.
That, for American planners, is the reassuring conclusion of a new analysis from Christopher Carlson, writing for the U.S. Naval War College’s China Maritime Studies Institute.
Carlson’s report is doubly reassuring for American officials because the U.S. Navy is struggling to define, and fund, its own plans for a bigger fleet.
It’s indisputable that the Chinese navy has gotten bigger and better—and fast. After more than a decade of major investment, the Chinese fleet now is the biggest in the world in terms of hulls.
The People’s Liberation Army Navy boasts 360 front-line warships. That’s 63 more ships than the U.S. Navy operates. Hull numbers aren’t the only metric of naval power, of course. American ships on average are much bigger, more heavily armed and more sophisticated than Chinese ships are, even if the U.S. vessels are less numerous.
Still, “for the last 11 years, China has racked up an impressive ship construction and maintenance effort totaling nearly 211 million man-hours,” Carlson wrote. “This is approximately a five-fold increase over the preceding 11-year period, with significant jumps in 2011, due to the Type 052C/D and Type 056 series production, and in 2015 with the lay-down of the Type 002 aircraft carrier, Shandong.”
But it’s wrong to assume this level of shipbuilding will continue much longer, as some experts have done. Perhaps most notably, The Diplomat’s Rick Joe last year projected that the PLAN by the early 2030s would have four aircraft carriers (up from two today), as many as 20 Type 055 cruisers (up from eight), 40 or so Type 052D/E destroyers (25 today) and perhaps 50 Type 054A/B frigates (31 today).
Don’t count on it, Carlson wrote. “To achieve the force structure proposed by Mr. Joe, China would have to increase the number of man-hours by 93 percent, essentially doubling the resource allocation from 2008 to ‘18.”
Chinese navy Type 022 missile boats exercising in the East China Sea in 2018.
“This is a very significant increase, one that would require an equally significant increase in funding—a capital investment that would have to be provided from a Chinese economy that is growing at a far slower rate than earlier periods even as labor costs continue to rise.”
And that’s not counting the maintenance burden this bigger fleet would impose on shipyards and budgets. “The maintenance burden becomes quite substantial beginning in 2028 as many of the Type 052C, 054A and 056 ships come due for their mid-life overhauls.”
“Given the fiscal challenges facing China today and in the near future, this very robust force structure projection is questionable.”
Sober-minded analysts for years have been predicting this slow-down. After all, the same dynamics that could constrain Chinese naval expansion have for decades weighed on the United States’ own fleet-planning.
Despite consensus across American presidential administrations and political parties that the fleet needs to grow, the U.S. Navy has managed to add only around 25 large warships since the fleet bottomed out at around 270 front-line vessels in the early 2000s.
“The economic model that propelled China through three decades of meteoric growth appears unsustainable,” Andrew Erickson, a Naval War College analyst, told the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission a few years ago.
What Erickson described as China’s “pent-up national potential” could begin expiring as early as 2030, by which point “China will have world’s highest proportion of people over 65,” he predicted. “An aging society with rising expectations, burdened with rates of chronic diseases exacerbated by sedentary lifestyles, will probably divert spending from both military development and the economic growth that sustains it.”
If Carlson and Erickson are right, the combination of an aging Chinese population, slowing economic growth and rising fleet costs could combine to put a cap on the Chinese navy.
That’s not to say the Chinese navy won’t still be one of the powerful in the world by many measures. It’s just not likely to easily overtake the U.S. Navy in the metrics that matter most.
The Chinese Navy Can’t Grow Forever—The Slowdown Might Start Soon
It takes a lot of time, money and manpower to maintain a big fleet. And even in China, those resources are finite.
www.forbes.com
