10 October 2000
CONFERENCE ON CHINESE MILITARY AFFAIRS
"Ruminations about how little we know about the PLA Navy”
By
Michael McDevitt
The
PLA Navy –why should we care and how come the PLA doesn’t?
It is my contention that the PLAN, long the stepchild of the Chinese armed forces, is almost certain to play an increasingly important--perhaps the most important-- role in the calculus of Chinese national security in the 21st century. This is not because of a Chinese Mahan-like figure that totally reverses centuries of a land-oriented continentalist strategic culture, but rather for the more prosaic but real reasons of national self-interest, threat orientation, and unfinished issues of sovereignty.
The following strategic considerations will force Beijing strategic planners to focus more closely on China’s “maritime” frontier:
· Beijing's economic center of gravity on their eastern seaboard
· The challenges of the PRC-Taiwan cross-strait dynamic have a decided maritime nature, including the potential of U.S. intervention that would necessarily come from the sea.
· The continued regional competition in the South China Sea regarding sovereignty of the Spratley Islands
· Beijing's increasingly active military diplomacy with countries on the “rim land” of East Asia will of necessity have a naval focus
· The historic reality that China's "century of humiliation" was caused by western nations that came "via the sea"
The central analytic problem I face in making this assessment—as logical as it seems to me—is that there is scant evidence that the military leadership of China shares this view. This then is the central analytic task that PLA Navy watchers face; how important do the Chinese think that the development of naval power is?
An apparent contradiction
One of the many major contradictions that PLAN watchers face is that the seemingly obvious maritime character of China’s strategic future has not translated into a more prestigious role for the navy or naval officers. The PLAN, and for that matter the PLA Air Force (PLAAF), remain very much as junior partners to the Army.
Today, PLAN officers hold no important commands or important positions within the highest echelons of the military hierarchy of China. Only one officer with serious naval experience, Liu Huaqing, has ever served as a principal on the Central Military Commission—and even he came from and returned to the Army.
Among “china-watchers” a broad consensus exists that the PLAN still does not wield a great deal of bureaucratic influence or clout within the PLA, and that the importance of China’s maritime frontier has not translated into greater naval influence in Beijing. One can only conclude that this is not by accident, but by design. But why?
There are a number of possible reasons. A defensive national strategy doesn’t require any particularly insightful naval input. Is it the army’s conceit that ultimately it is they who will do the heavy lifting in the defense of China’s national interests and by definition, therefore, the PLAN is not seen as a "strategic" service in its own right? Is the PLA Navy perceived as nothing more than nothing a maritime “speed bump” intended to slow but not defeat an attacking force? The real job of defense will be left in the hands of the army and air force.
This is not to say that the PLAN is not receiving a greater share of resources to purchase a variety of mainly Russian naval ships, submarines, and cruise missiles. Are these systems are being purchased in small quantities with the hope that China will be able to copy them and produce them in quantity in China, and enable a larger more capable force? This is very much in the tradition of Chinese naval developments dating back to the Qing dynasty in the 19th century. Which all failed dismally.
At the Beginning—a Tactical vice Strategic Imperative
What is the importance of the PLAN’s “historic” tradition to its current bureaucratic circumstances? The PLAN owes its birth to the fact that Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists were able to escape total defeat in the Chinese civil war and escape to Taiwan and other offshore islands. Like today, in 1949 and 1950, the PLA wanted to capture Taiwan to eradicate the KMT, reunifying the country, and thereby end the civil war.
Fifty years ago, the PLA army commander charged with the conquest of Taiwan knew from the outset that he would require both air and sea control of the Taiwan Strait in order to execute a successful campaign. But, the PLA had neither an air force nor a navy. So, in the case of a navy, the first order of business was to create one from scratch.
This marks the origin of the PLAN. It was called into being to solve a specific tactical problem rather than any grand strategic design of how sea power could contribute to national security. It is interesting to observe that, some 50 years later, the specific tactical problem the PLAN was created to solve--sea control of the Taiwan Strait-- still remains beyond its reach because its sister service air force cannot achieve air superiority over the strait. Who wants to belong to an organization that cannot, and has never been able to accomplish its fundamental mission and who never shared in the early hardships of the Civil War?
The early PLAN largely consisted of Nationalist naval formations that defected en masse to the communists. As a result, the PLA never fully trusted its erstwhile naval colleagues and placed "reliable" PLA Army officers in charge. Everyone knows that naval officers are more cosmopolitan and independent minded than their landbound colleagues.
In addition, between 1950 and the late 1970s a number of other factors had a very adverse affect on PLAN development:
· Politics: Mao and the CCP leadership depended on "mass movements" to engender broad support. It was the Army that played an essential role in facilitating these mass movements. It had a role as an agent of change.
· The Cultural Revolution: PLA "forward thinkers" were purged. It was better to be "Red" than a technical expert. Navies are inherently technical services and, consequently, suffered inordinately in this environment. Many of today's PLAN senior officers survived in this environment, which should raise questions about their "professional foundations."
· China's economy: China was essentially agricultural, not industrial or technical. More importantly in a naval context, it was autarkic. Historically, western naval development has had a close relationship with foreign trade. This economic spur has only recently become a consideration for China.
· Foreign policy: The PRC's focus through the mid 1980s was on the Third World and land-locked countries. There was no need for a naval presence to show the flag.
· Grand strategy: Mao's assessment--and hence guidelines for planning--of the geo-strategic environment that China would face predicted both "people's war" and global conflicts, and later ideological conflict with the Soviet Union. In all cases, these were conflicts that were based on defending China from invasion. The wars on China's periphery with the United States were based on ideological struggle over territory that, if lost, would put American power directly on China's frontier.[1][2]
It was not until the early 1980s, when the PLAN was assigned an offshore defense role, that it began transforming itself into a genuinely ocean-going oriented Navy.
Soviet and Russian influence
One of the areas that requires research in both Soviet (and now Russian) and Chinese sources is the extent to which Soviet naval doctrine and operational concepts have influenced the Chinese. It is my belief that from the PLAN's earliest days, Soviet maritime thinking, Soviet maritime operational concepts, and Soviet maritime tactics have provided the template that shapes PLAN thinking.
Beyond the obvious ideological partnership in the early years of the PLAN, and the resurgent close political relationship with Russia today, the main reason that China found Soviet and now Russian concepts so congenial is because China and the Soviet Union faced similar strategic challenges from the West and the United States. The maritime coalition of Western states was supreme on the oceans of the world following the end of WW II. Western strategic thinking generally considered the oceans as a highway to bring the military potential of North America to bear on Eurasia. The natural and obvious strategic choice for the Soviets, and today the Chinese, was to seek the military means to defeat this threat.
The Soviets designed a defensive maritime strategy with thresholds established at various distances from their coast. These thresholds became in effect “lines-in-the-water.” This Army-style way of thinking about strategy then formed the basis for the development of Soviet naval and air capabilities designed to deny the use of the sea to the West.
The Soviets reached the “high point” of this sort of maritime strategic thinking in the mid 1980s, and that today, when one compares the Soviet strategy of 15 years ago to what we believe is China’s “first and second island strategic construct”, the parallels are striking. Although it has recently become fashionable to talk about China pursuing an "anti-access" strategy, under examination, this strategy appears to embody the same concepts and capabilities that in an earlier decade would have been characterized as sea denial.
Before the 1980s, adoption of a coastal defense strategy from the Soviets also made sense from a practical point of view. It was the best China could do, given the state of the economy, its technological development, and experience. It was within the state of the possible, and the Soviets, as mentors, were reasonably adept in its execution and had developed reasonably reliable weapon systems with which to implement the strategy. That remained true right up to the end of the Soviet Union. While the Russians today may not be able to field a sea denial force structure, they have the weapon systems and know-how available to help the Chinese do so.
While it may be more of a historic curiosity than of any particular relevance to our understanding of the PLAN; the role that Admiral Liu Huaqing has had on the development of the PLAN is an area of interest. Admiral Liu was an Army officer who was assigned as commander of the PLAN from 1982 until 1988. He was then promoted to Vice Chairman of China's highest military body, the Central Military Commission, where he served, wearing his green army uniform, from 1989 until 1997.
Adopting a maritime strategy requires naval leadership with a strong voice in the always-contentious national and military resource allocation process. Most western scholars who spend any time looking at the PLAN believe the architect of China’s emerging maritime strategy in the 1980s was Liu Huaqing. Liu was Soviet-trained, having attended the Frunze and Voroshilov academies in the 1950s, where one of the instructors was Sergei Gorshkov. Liu also had worked for Deng Xiaoping on several previous occasions, which may have given him personal influence within both the CCP and within the PLA as chief of the PLAN.
Liu is credited with framing a maritime strategy to address China’s national security concerns. He wanted to change the PLAN's national mission from coastal defense to "offshore defense." This change could have occurred only in the post-Mao era, when the strategy of People’s War could be reinterpreted. Liu’s new strategic vision for the PLAN thus tied in logically with Deng’s 1985 shift in national strategy. A new maritime strategy would also have to be practical enough to survive in the army-dominated PLA.
Liu established a maritime concept of operations that could be translated into a “requirement” for specific naval capability. By defining three strategic maritime areas that were of great importance to China he could then present a coherent justification for the resources necessary to fill the requirement. The First Island Chain of the Kuriles, Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines, and Indonesia delineates the first of these. It includes the Yellow Sea, facing Korea and Japan; the western East China Sea (ECS), including Taiwan; and the South China Sea. This line demarcates an area of China's vital national interests: territorial claims, natural resources, and coastal defense. Liu hoped to have a PLA Navy in hand by the year 2000 that would be capable of asserting Chinese control, if required, of this maritime area. The PLAN did not meet this timeline.
The second strategic maritime area of Liu’s strategy, is delineated by the “second island chain." It extends the stage one line to run from Japan through the Bonins and Palau, and then to Indonesia, to include all of the East China Sea. The target date for achieving PLAN “control” or at least “denial” of this area was nominally by 2020. The third stage of Liu’s maritime strategy, which was really more of a building plan, was aimed at the rest of the Pacific Ocean. The "strategic goal" was a PLAN that could act as a global force, or at least a pan-Pacific force, by 2050. Western analysts place great importance upon this formulation—at issue is do the Chinese?
Liu Huaqing directed study and elaboration of his strategic concepts but apparently never defined these stage lines in terms of sea control or sea denial. He simply described them as maritime areas of strategic interest to China. When compared to Soviet naval strategy, especially that propounded by Admiral Gorskov's notions of positioning a series of increasingly powerful defensive layers that made it harder for an attacking force to defeat the closer it approached Russia's coast, it appears that Liu's strategy is merely "Soviet naval strategy with Chinese characteristics." This is not necessarily bad, it suits China's needs, but it does suggest that Liu's construct should not be viewed as a unique or novel Chinese approach to maritime strategy. Liu is apparently more of an adapter and popularizer than an original maritime strategic thinker.
Implementation of an expansive and expensive maritime strategy, such as Liu’s, is hampered by two factors. First, Beijing continues to devote only limited resources to military modernization. There currently is no hard evidence that China’s national leadership has decided to shift its budget priorities to the extent necessary to reach the dates he established to realize each stage. Second, Liu's sea denial area encompasses the U.S. treaty allies of Japan, Korea, and the Philippines and therefore implicitly means that the PLAN has to achieve a capability to deny these waters to the United States.
On the positive side from the perspective of the PLAN Liu's three-stage concept not only provides a sensible strategic approach for China to adopt, but it also provides a basis for operational planning. It also acts as a force development template used to establish weapon systems requirements and to rationalize PLAN force structure procurement within the bureaucracy of China. Again, this is my interpretation—do we have hard evidence that the PLA sees Liu’s formulation as a “requirements template?”
PLAN officer corps--education and training
Over the past few years, as some naval analysts have turned their attention to the growth of the PLAN, their focus has been China's shipbuilding programs, its equipment purchases from Russia, and its strategy. Comparatively, analysis of the development of the PLAN officer corps--the ultimate determinate of the success or failure of the PLAN as a viable operational institution--is virtually nonexistent. This is because much of the material is not accessible to outside analysts and partly because researchers have not taken the time to interview PLAN officers about these subjects. In many ways, today's PLAN officer corps is institutionally very "young." Over only the last 20 years or so has it begun to make the institutional commitment to professionalization.
On 23 April 1949, a handful of politically correct and trusted army officers were directed to set up navy command headquarters. Early coastal defense doctrines not only placed the PLAN in a strictly support role to the army, it also gave the army total charge of budget allocations, force development programs, and personnel recruitment. Over the years this led to internal power struggles as newly minted naval officers wanted a greater say in their bureaucratic future.
During the 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution, the PLAN officer corps suffered greatly, and many officers were purged and lost their commissions because they were considered in the faction of Li Zuopeng, the Political Commissar of the PLAN, who was closely associated with Lin Biao. Significantly, virtually all of the PLAN schools were closed during the Cultural Revolution.
This came on the heels of the 1959 break with the Soviets. After the Soviet pullout, the various PLAN schools and academies were forced to replace the major portions of their faculties and rewrite or create new curricula. Finally, Mao's 1959 directive to construct nuclear attack submarines dried up a huge percentage of naval resources, including those dedicated to operations, training, and education.
The combination of these factors, plus the constant tension in the officer corps between technical proficiency and political correctness (the red versus expert debate)--which during the Cultural Revolution was definitely resolved in favor of being "red"--guaranteed that PLAN officers were ill-prepared to lead and manage a modern navy. In 1982, Admiral Yeh Fei, the Commander of the PLAN, resigned, citing a series of "accumulative irreversible problems" that were keeping him from making progress in Ding Xiaoping's directive to the entire PLA to shift emphasis from ideological purity to "modernization and regularization."
Despite these problems, in the earliest days of the PLAN, a systematic training and education infrastructure was established to produce officers and sailors for every branch of the PLAN. This institutional system really began to come into its own because of military educational reforms between 1980 and 1990 and then, in 1994, a CMC Directive to focus training and education on "high-tech conditions."
The earlier reforms divided the education into "command " institutions (what, in the USN, would be considered professional development for increasingly responsible operational billets, i.e., Department Head School, PCO School, etc.) and technical institutions. The technical institutions collectively offer four levels of education--high school level, college level, masters-degree level, and Ph.D.-level degrees in technical subjects. Some of these officers stay on as faculty, others go to R and D institutes, and others return to the operating forces.
The 1994 Directive linked the importance of training and education to promotion. The criterion of "no promotion without completing the required training and education at armed forces academic institutions" was established. This in itself is revealing. This 6-year-old policy change has resulted in PLAN policy that sets minimum standards for assignment as commanding officer of a major surface combatant or a submarine. The officer should hold a university degree--preferably in electronics or engineering. Prospective COs must also be graduates of the appropriate professional schools and have experience on the staff of higher operational headquarters.
The PLAN of today appears to have both the educational infrastructure in place and the policy guidance necessary to produce well-educated, professional officers. What is still not clear is how the shore-based training and education is leavened by operational experience at sea. Moreover, like the rest of the PLA, the PLAN must compete within a growing private sector economy to retain the best and brightest officers. As the current Commander of the PLAN, Vice Admiral Shi, said about recruiting in late 1998, "… those we need cannot come, or are not willing to stay after they have come, while those we do not need do not want to go away."
More research is needed into typical career patterns in order to develop a clearer understanding of how operationally competent the officers of the PLAN are likely to be.
When China adopted its "reform and openness" policy in the early 1980s, one of the actions taken was to initiate a policy of defense industry conversion in order to reduce central government expenditures. The shipbuilding industry's experience with conversion is unique; it is a success of sorts. It has consistently been one of the most profitable and highly converted parts of the defense sector. It rapidly moved into commercial shipbuilding with an immediate international orientation that has allowed it to have sustained access to foreign technology. This industry also provides the PLAN with warships, submarines, and other vessels and, as a result, is a nexus between defense conversion and military modernization. Access to foreign technology, foreign capital, and foreign management techniques has allowed Chinese shipbuilders to improve capability and capacity.
In terms of tonnage launched, it is the third largest in the world, although this tonnage is largely confined to construction of relatively simple ships (they exported 67 ships displacing 2.29 DWT in 1997). The point is that China has the potential and basic national infrastructure (3 yards capable of building 100,000-DWT ships, with construction on a 150,000 ton building dock under way) to build the large ships. China’s nuclear weapon and ballistic missile programs are evidence that if enough resources and human talent are focused on a high-priority national program, the Chinese may be capable of building complicated warships. Will they afford the building of sophisticated warships this sort of priority? This is an important point because it is probably impractical, not to mention expensive, to essentially buy a first class navy. The U.S., Russia, Japan, the UK, France and even Italy and Spain essentially build their own warships—or at least collaborate in the construction of modern warships. Assessing China’s industrial potential in this regard would be a valuable project.
Submarines
Chinese thinking about a submarine force dates to 1949, but the creation of the force was not sanctioned by the CCP until 1956. Submarines were seen as important to coastal defense, and today the only offensive mandate for the submarine force is against Taiwan. Otherwise their operations and tactics remain defensive in nature--very much in the tradition of their Soviet mentors. The principal tactical evolution to date has been the expansion of the defensive area from coastal to the "First Island Chain" and beyond. This expansion of strategic depth has been enabled by improvements in communications capability--a VLF communications station in 1982 and, since 1984, a series of communications satellites, the most recent of which was launched in January 2000. Because the PLAN exercises tactical control of its underway-submarine force from ashore, longer-range missions followed once longer-range communications were in place.
The biggest problem for the PLAN submarine force today is poor open-ocean surveillance and the resulting inability of shore-based commanders to locate enemy naval forces and vector PLAN submarines into attack positions beyond the first island chain. This problem has plagued the use of submarines in an interdiction or defensive role since Donitz unsuccessfully fought the Battle of the Atlantic in WW II.
The PLAN's 64-boat submarine force is organized into 6 flotillas of approximately 10 boats each. Three flotillas (2nd,12th, and 62nd) in the North Sea Fleet, two flotillas ( 22nd and 42nd), which include the new Kilos, in the East Sea Fleet opposite Taiwan, and one flotilla ( the 32nd) in the South Sea Fleet. The South Sea Fleet is receiving the newly commissioned Mings. The fact that the newest submarines in the PLAN inventory are assigned to the East Sea and South Sea Fleets is one more indication that the PLAN's strategic orientation is shifting south, away from Korea and NE Asia, where the offshore territorial issues of Taiwan in the South China Sea have a higher probability of leading to conflict.
The PLAN has done a credible job of building an impressive submarine force. At issue is its tactical proficiency. On paper, PLAN submarine officers experience a training continuum that is similar to their western counterparts--with special courses designed for basic submarine skills, department head, commanding officer, and flotilla commander. It takes about 10 years' commissioned service for a PLAN submariner to be assigned as Executive Officer and about 13 to 15 years to be assigned as CO. Commanding Officer tours can last as long as 6 years, which ensures a great deal of familiarity by each commanding officer with the particularities of his submarine. This experience is leavened somewhat by the fact that each submarine does not spend a great deal of time at sea. Apparently, a submarine CO may spend only some 300 days at sea during his entire multi-year tour.
The professional ability and competency of the PLAN submarine force is an area in which much work needs to be done.
Naval Air Force (PLANAF)
The PLAN Air Force is a 26,000-person force, slowly modernizing, equipped with some 750 mainly old aircraft. Ken Allen has done the best (only) work on this subject, and his paper presented at the April 2000 conference on the PLA Navy is the most comprehensive source on this subject. In his paper, Ken cites a telling 1998 quotation from VADM Ma, the current PLANAF commander:
With equipment becoming increasingly sophisticated, the PLANAF's need for personnel with high tech knowledge has become more pressing. In order to meet this challenge, the ratio of officers with college education rose from less than ten percent in the early 1980s to eighty percent in 1998. The PLANAF has deployed new types of aircraft during the 1990s, but these new aircraft have shown some new problems. Notably, some airborne equipment has had high failure rates, poor reliability, and low hit probability. Because of the shortage of funds, it has not been possible to replace them with costly new equipment or to provide replenishment on a large scale in a short period of time. The PLANAF has attempted to solve this problem by upgrading the tactical and technical performance of existing equipment selectively according to operational requirements on a step-by-step process.
The PLANAF has spent the past 20 years trying to recover from the disastrous effects of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), when the headquarters and schools were abolished and combat pilots flew less than 30 hours of training annually. The PLANAF has begun a gradual retirement of obsolete aircraft, but, unlike the Air Force, PLANAF force modernization has been slow and poorly funded, forced to rely on upgrades to older aircraft such as the F-7, F-8, and B-6.
Although the PLANAF became operationally subordinate to the PLAAF during joint campaigns in the 1950s, this situation changed during the 1960s when the PLANAF established its own fleet-based air defense organization. The PLANAF and PLAAF share responsibility for air defense along the entire coast. The PLANAF defends the coastal areas near the three fleet headquarters, and the PLAAF fills the gaps in between.
The PLANAF's missions include protecting Chinas coastal airspace, providing air support for naval forces at sea, including air defense and maritime strike, and conducting maritime search and rescue (SAR) operations. Although open-source reporting has noted the PLANAF conducting training in these missions, there is a tremendous lack of detailed information on the PLANAF's actual performance.
In terms of long-range strike at sea, the PLANAF still has a way to go before it can mount a cruise missile threat to ships at sea similar to the Soviet Badger and Backfire threats of the Cold War. The PLANAF has converted a small number of its Badger-equivalent bombers, the B-6, to long-range cruise missile shooters. The B-6D, as it is known, can carry two C-601 anti-ship cruise missiles (about 54 nm range missiles).
However, the PLANAF has a potentially capable airframe in hand that can take a "Backfire-like" mission profile--the FB-7. This aircraft originally was designed around the Rolls Royce Spey 202 engine. But, China purchased only some 50 of these engines before the post-Tiananmen sanctions from the UK hit. The big question is what engine will the PLANAF use if it wants to make the FB-7 its long-range naval strike aircraft. The aircraft can carry the C-801 cruise missile, and the export version of the FB-7 can apparently carry the improved C-802 (90 nm). There is no question that the PLANAF is thinking long range--it has the PLA lead in developing aerial refueling.
Finally, even though the current PLAN Chief of Naval Operations is an aviator, the judgment is that the PLANAF would receive any more than its “share” of the traditional PLAN budget. The slow pace and primarily indigenous flavor of these upgrades indicate that both the Air Force's modernization with Russian aircraft and fleet surface ship and submarine modernization programs have taken clear preference over the PLANAF's modernization.
Speculation on the future of the PLAN
The apparent consensus among the handful of PLA Navy watchers is that PLAN force-structure developments in the future are unlikely to deviate dramatically from the slow modernization and expansion pattern of the past decade. In the broadest terms this means:
· A decline in patrol craft and minesweepers as PRC’s defense perimeter moves away from the coast. Although China’s increasing dependence on foreign trade implies a growing vulnerability to the mining of its major ports, is the PLAN making a mistake in permitting its mine countermeasures force to dwindle?
· Sustaining a current level in amphibious ships, with the possibility of slight decline. However, the relative simplicity of amphibious ships means that China’s large shipbuilding industry has the capability to produce, in just two or three years, a large number of LSTs or amphibious transports. Of course, as the conferees were reminded during a discussion of amphibious assault, any ship can be an LST--once.
· A gradual increase in surface combatants. In this case there is a question as to what the driver for surface combatant force levels will be. As multi-mission ships they are essential to deal with the Taiwan navy. They are also important for antisubmarine warfare, as well as presence and showing the flag. In the South China Sea they provide necessary shore bombardment capability and overmatch the navies of Vietnam and the Philippines. It is unlikely the surface combatant force would be optimized, and hence sized against the USN, because of its vulnerability to both air attack due to poor air defenses, short-range SAMs especially, and to U.S. SSNs because of poor ASW capability.
· A steady increase in attack submarines—both diesel and nuclear powered. Submarines are an essential ingredient in the erstwhile maritime strategy of China, particularly since the PLANAF has not yet developed a large enough force structure to be a major threat to approaching naval forces. Submarines are central to any attempt to blockade Taiwan, and are the best chance the PLAN has to delay or deal with USN carrier battle groups. Any submarine, if equipped with “smart” torpedoes that help compensate for limited tactical expertise, can be a threat. Submarines in numbers place great stress on antisubmarine forces, particularly in periods of crisis before the outbreak of hostilities.
· Aircraft carriers: Perhaps in the long run, if land-based tactical air staged in the Paracels (Woody Island) proves inadequate to provide tactical aircraft air cover over the SCS and Spratleys. Other than this specific mission, the primary near-term motivation for a ship that can take tactical aircraft to sea would be prestige--showing the flag and keeping pace with other Asian navies, particularly India and perhaps Japan if the Japanese build large- deck ships for peacekeeping roles. Prestige as a factor cannot be discounted—China is the only member of the UN Perm Five without a ship capable of operating tactical aircraft at sea. This is an issue that absorbs an inordinate amount of effort. Because any ships takes a long time to build or convert or modernize and are so obvious, should China decide to go in this direction this decision will not be a “secret” for long. There will be plenty of time to speculate over the mission and capability of such a ship.
· PLANAF: The next decade should see several predictable changes for the PLANAF, focusing on a smaller more capable force of around 400 to 500 aircraft. By 2010, all of the B-5 bombers, A-5 ground attack aircraft, and the great majority of the F-6 fighters should be retired from the force. Most of the older F-7s and F-8s will be replaced by upgraded F-7s and F-8s. All new aircraft will probably be air refuelable for operations over the South China Sea. The PLANAF will also have increased its training with the surface forces and with the PLAAF. The PLANAF will work to expand its operating envelope further to sea, going east, beyond the Ryukyu's into the Philippine Sea.
If the thesis that the PRC has essentially adopted Soviet naval doctrine is correct--without the Soviet emphasis on tactical nuclear weapons or on “bastions” to protect its SSBN force--then it follows that the Soviet naval evolution over the Cold War should provide a “yardstick” by which to measure PRC naval developments.
This could also mean that certain Soviet operating patterns that caused difficulties for the USN over the Cold War years may be something to anticipate. These operations could include the forward deployment of PRC submarines equipped with land-attack cruise missiles (both nuclear and conventional) and the use of PLAN ships acting as “tattletales” shadowing U.S. battle groups to provide “perfect” locating information.
Conclusion
In an academic sense, the PLA Navy conference of April 2000 became the first formal step in the United States to open a field of inquiry among scholars into the PLA Navy. There was general agreement that there is much yet to learn about the PLAN, and that room exists for further research across the board. I have highlighted a number of areas throughout the paper that raise important analytic questions for which we apparently have no answers.