Admiral: China’s navy poses growing threat to US
DALIAN, China — In April, on the 69th anniversary of the founding of China’s navy, the country’s first domestically built aircraft carrier stirred from its berth in the port city of Dalian on the Bohai Sea, tethered to tugboats for a test of its seaworthiness.
“China’s first homegrown aircraft carrier just moved a bit, and the United States, Japan and India squirmed,” a military news website crowed, referring to the three nations that China views as its main rivals.
Not long ago, such boasts would have been dismissed as the bravado of a secondstring military. No longer.
A modernization program focused on naval and missile forces has shifted the balance of power in the Pacific in ways that the United States and its allies are only beginning to digest.
Though China lags in projecting firepower on a global scale, it can now challenge U.S. military supremacy in the places that matter most to it: the waters around Taiwan and in the disputed South China Sea.
That means a growing section of the Pacific Ocean — where the United States has operated unchallenged since the naval battles of World War II — is once again contested territory, with Chinese warships and aircraft regularly bumping up against those of the U.S. and its allies.
To prevail in these waters, according to officials and analysts who scrutinize Chinese military developments, China does not need a military that can defeat the U.S. outright, but merely one that can make intervention in the region too costly for Washington to contemplate. Many analysts say Beijing has achieved that goal.
China has developed “anti-access” capabilities that use radar, satellites and missiles to neutralize the decisive edge that America’s powerful aircraft carrier strike groups have enjoyed. It also is rapidly expanding its naval forces with the goal of deploying a “blue water” navy that would allow it to defend its growing interests beyond its coastal waters.
“China is now capable of controlling the South China Sea in all scenarios short of war with the United States,” the new commander of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, Adm. Philip S. Davidson, acknowledged in written remarks submitted during his Senate confirmation process in March.
Last year, the Chinese navy became the world’s largest, with more warships and submarines than the United States, and it continues to build ships at a stunning rate. Though the U.S. fleet remains superior qualitatively, it is spread much thinner.
“The task of building a Sailors with the USS Chancellorsville observe and photograph a Chinese frigate that was following them on their patrol in March 2016 in the South China Sea. Two years later, a naval modernization program in China has shifted the balance of power in the Pacific in ways the U.S. and its allies are only beginning to digest.
powerful navy has never been as urgent as it is today,” President Xi Jinping declared in April as he presided over a naval procession off the southern Chinese island of Hainan that opened exercises involving 48 ships and submarines. The Ministry of National Defense said they were the largest exercises since the People’s Republic of China was founded in 1949.
Chinese warships and aircraft have picked up the pace of operations in the waters off Japan; Taiwan; and the islands, shoals and reefs it has claimed in the South China Sea over the objections of Vietnam and the Philippines.
When two American warships — the destroyer USS
Higgins and the cruiser USS Antietam — sailed within a few miles of disputed islands in the Paracels in May, Chinese vessels rushed to challenge what Beijing later denounced as “a provocative act.” China did the same to three Australian ships passing through the South China Sea in April.
China’s naval expansion began in 2000 and accelerated sharply after Xi took command in 2013. He has drastically shifted the military’s focus to naval as well as air and strategic rocket forces, while cutting the traditional land forces and purging commanders accused of corruption.
Though every branch of China’s armed forces lags behind the United States in firepower and experience, China has made significant gains in asymmetrical weaponry to blunt America’s advantages. One focus has been in what U.S. military planners call “anti-access/area denial,” or what the Chinese call “counter-intervention.”
The centerpiece of this strategy is an arsenal of high-speed ballistic missiles designed to strike moving ships. The latest versions, the DF-21D and the DF-26, are popularly known as “carrier killers” because they can threaten the most powerful vessels in the U.S. fleet long before the ships get close to China.
The U.S. Navy has never faced such a threat before, the Congressional Research Office warned in a report in May, adding that some analysts consider the missiles “game changing.”
The roots of China’s focus on sea power can be traced to what many Chinese viewed as humiliation in 1995 and 1996. When Taiwan moved to hold its first democratic elections, China fired missiles near the island, prompting President Bill Clinton to dispatch two aircraft carriers to the region.
“We avoided the sea, took it as a moat and a joyful little pond to the Middle Kingdom,” a naval analyst, Chen Guoqiang, wrote recently in the official navy newspaper. “So not only did we lose all the advantages of the sea but also our territories became the prey of the imperialist powers.”