What you need to know: China’s aircraft carriers play a supporting role within the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN), supporting the national anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) strategy rather than serving as the centerpiece of the fleet.

-While the US Navy relies heavily on aircraft carriers for global power projection, China’s defense centers on extensive A2/AD networks in the South China Sea, capable of keeping at bay American forces and deter intervention in a Taiwan conflict.

-These A2/AD systems, featuring ballistic and hypersonic anti-ship missiles, create a protective bubble over Chinese forces, making Chinese aircraft carriers a supporting asset, strategically located closer to home and more replaceable than their counterparts. Americans.

China’s aircraft carriers are NOT the center of its fleet

There is still a grave false idea on the importance of aircraft carriers in the overall force posture of China’s People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) surface warfare fleet. For American observers, the aircraft carrier is the penultimate Naval power projection platform.

Western think tank types cannot imagine a fleet, one that at least wants to be taken seriously, in which the aircraft carrier is not the centerpiece of all activity.

But that is precisely the case of China, a nation that wants, and very well it shouldbe taken seriously as a true rival to the United States.

China currently has three aircraft carriers and a fourth on the way. The first carrier, the LiaoningIt’s pretty mediocre, even with all the modifications the advanced Chinese installed on the ship.

It is a legacy of the former Soviet Union.

China shows its capabilities against Taiwan

However, later Chinese aircraft carriers are built domestically and incorporate some of the most advanced systems imaginable. In fact, China Shandong The carrier has a new system installed that makes it nearly impossible for rival nations to track its massive carriers while they are at sea, or use tracking torpedoes to attack the Shandong.

This is just one of the many features the innovative Chinese military has learned from years of honing its tracking capabilities on the U.S. Navy’s large warships, particularly U.S. aircraft carriers. Last week the Chinese finished a huge war game off the shores of embattled democracy Taiwan, which China greed.

In that war game, for the first time, all of China’s operational aircraft carriers conducted joint operations. It was a signal to Americans and the region that China was truly the most dominant regional player.

Of course, japanese carriers They are still technically more advanced than those in China, although that will change very soon.

More importantly, China’s defense industrial base, its powerful shipyards, are eclipsing the Americansonce considered the “arsenal of democracy.” A Chinese admiral reportedly boasted to Western media that, unlike American shipyards, there were no “bottlenecks” in the production line of China’s new and increasingly advanced aircraft carrier force.

In other words, the fleet that the Americans have is static while China’s fleet is growingand its industrial base is strong enough that it can much more easily replace any lost units or repair them at a higher rate than the Americans.

This is a decisive advantage, considering the high degree of probability that the United States and China will find themselves in a shooting war over the fate of Taiwan soon.

Aircraft carriers are not the main power projection platform of the Chinese Navy.

However, the primary role that aircraft carriers play in the overall strategic readiness of the Chinese navy is not the same as the role that the United States’ massive nuclear-powered aircraft carriers play in its expeditionary fleet.

Instead, Chinese aircraft carriers, while sophisticated, are simply support ships designed to further China’s strategic goal of taking Taiwan.

Interestingly, in this author’s evaluation, the central room of China’s maritime power are the advanced anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) systems that Beijing has spent the better part of a decade developing and deploying around the world. South China Sea (SCS) and along its coast.

These A2/AD networks will be essential for the Chinese military to keep the bulk of the US military on the horizon in any war over Taiwan. The A2/AD threat includes massive quantities of long-range anti-ship ballistic missiles, including hypersonic weapons that can track and destroy US aircraft carriers, known as “Aircraft Carrier Killers”.

All of these systems mean that the Pentagon will be hard-pressed to risk its hugely expensive aircraft carriers, especially if there is a chance that those carriers will not even be within effective combat range of Chinese forces before they can be disabled or destroyed by China’s A2/AD systems.

Carriers are auxiliary to China’s A2/AD network

Chinese carriers are supposed to operate within the protective bubbles that their A2/AD networks will create in whatever operating area Beijing has assigned, likely Taiwan. What’s more, Chinese aircraft carriers are much more replaceable than American ones.

Although they remain technically superior to China’s, US aircraft carriers will face much greater threats to their safe operation than Chinese aircraft carriers, which will operate under the protective shield of those A2/AD networks and will operate much closer to their territory than the Americans.

So the next time you read a think tank in Washington criticizing China’s carrier force compared to the United States’, remember that it’s probably coming from a place of profound ignorance, and mirror imagethe nightmare of all analysts.

About the author

Brandon J. Weicherta national security of National Interest analystis a former member of Congress and a geopolitical analyst who contributes to The Washington Times, Asia Times, and The-Pipeline. He is the author of Winning Space: How America Remains a Superpower, Biohacked: China’s Race to Control Life, and The Shadow War: Iran’s Quest for Supremacy. His upcoming book, A Disaster of Our Own Making: How the West Lost Ukraine, is available for purchase wherever books are sold. You can follow Weichert on Twitter @WeTheBrandon.

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