"PLAN ASW Modernization " Topic

"The Chinese navy has done a lot of modernization in the past 20 years, but some areas have been lagging behind others. Even while China was still buying large ticket items from Russia, there was a lot of talks on China's growing submarine force and anti-ship missiles. Not only did the imported ships have some over-hyped supersonic missiles, the domestic built ships and aircraft were also equipped with a fairly modern YJ-83 missile. The path to modernization in ASuW is relatively small compared to other areas, so it was not surprising that PLAN made the largest jump here at first.

By 2005, Chinese navy was in the midst of inducting Type 052C and 051C capable of providing anti-air area defense. Even including the interim Type 052B class, this was a very significant jump from point defense in most of the surface combatants to having ships capable of detecting multiple aircraft and missiles at long distance, processing them on the combat system and engaging them with modern long range vertically launched surface to air missiles. As Type 054A started to proliferate in Chinese navy and becoming the backbone of many flotillas, this became no longer an area of weakness. With more Type 052Cs joining service and the first Type 052D being commissioned, Chinese fleet has now become modernized in the area of AAW.

The one area that PLAN has always lagged is in ASW. For a long time, most of the surface combatants only had hull sonar and some ASW rockets. By the turn of century, the new ships have been installed with Yu-7 torpedo. However, China's limited number of naval helicopters mean that only a limited number of ships can travel with ASW helicopters. Since helicopters are rotated between ships, that would limit the ships training with them and their effectiveness. Before the induction of 054A, China's most advanced ASW assets were diesel submarines and Type 037 sub chasers. They are both limited to littoral waters and cannot be expected to escort a fleet. Even in littoral water, they are limited by their own noisiness and lack of speed or range. The 093s could be useful in blue waters, but they are also very loud…"
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Amicalement
Armand

That is the area they seem to be weakest in.

Chalfant

Agree.

Amicalement
Armand

The question is how resource-starved is China?

I don't think they're like Japan, and completely resource-poor, but how much coal and oil does China have internally? How much iron ore? How much aluminum ore (and refining)?

Can't feed a war machine without steel, aluminum, and petroleum.

They seem to be resource poor imo. I used to work for BHP Billiton and China made up most of their sales of metallurgical coal (coal used in making steel, not power generation) and natural gas (BHP is one of the largest mining companies in the world) – linkedin had a slide show showing this sometime in the last couple of weeks.

China has a lot of mineral resource deals in Africa and are one of the major buyers of Iraqi oil.