China’s Third Aircraft Carrier Could Be Nuclear (And as big as American flattops)

medium.com blog War is Boring ^ | June 20, 2014 | David Axe

[sukhoi-30mki]

China’s first aircraft carrier—the refurbished Ukrainian-built flattop Liaoning—entered testing in 2011. The People’s Liberation Army Navy is building a second carrier itself—a conventionally-powered vessel like Liaoning.

A third carrier currently in the planning stage could be bigger than her two predecessors—as big as an American Nimitz-class supercarrier, in fact—plus nuclear-powered, just like U.S. flattops. Atomic propulsion confers greater sailing range and supports more sensors, weaponry and other systems.

Lots of countries have one or two aircraft carriers. But none build flattops as big and capable as America’s 11 Nimitzs and new Ford-class CVNs. Evidence indicates that’s about to change.

In mid-June, Chinese Internet forum users circulated photos from an official event in Zhongshan. The photos depict what is “certainly a model of the first Chinese nuclear-powered aircraft carrier,” according to China Defense Blog.

Like arms companies all over the world, Beijing’s state industries routinely show off scale models of new weaponry designs before beginning construction.

The model “represents a final design for the new CVN [that] has been approved by PLAN for production,” China Defense Blog asserted. The ship’s features apparently mirror those on the latest American carriers—three elevators for efficiently moving planes between decks and four electric catapults for quickly launching them.

China Defense Blog apparently guessed the flattop’s planned size by comparing the scale model to the miniature jet fighters on its flight deck. The blog likened the new Chinese CVN—hull number 18—to the American Nimitzs and Fords, meaning CVN-18 could exceed a thousand feet in length and displace 100,000 tons, a third bigger than Liaoning.

A ship that size could carry 75 or more warplanes.

With Liaoning for experiments and trial deployments, China is quickly developing its at-sea aviation capability. U.S. Naval War College analyst Andrew Erickson expects Beijing to produce “more than three” homemade flattops, presumably by the 2020s.

Nuclear carriers aren’t cheap. America’s first Ford-class ship is costing $13 billion just for construction. A single atomic-powered vessel can require hundreds of millions of dollars a year for operations.

Beijing seems to consider the ships worth it. “Developing such a capability is the only way for China to achieve robust sea control and long-range maritime power projection,” Erickson wrote.

Law requires the U.S. Navy to maintain 11 large carriers, of which two or three are usually at sea. The Americans also possess nine active “big-deck” amphibious assault ships that can carry Harrier jump jets and, starting next year, F-35B stealth fighters.

[nathanbedford]

I quite agree with your description of the modern aircraft carrier as a platform for projecting power. I would analogize it to the role of British gunboats in the 19th century.

We have a window until the Chinese can launch carriers which can hope to compete with ours. Meanwhile they are trying to change the balance of power by developing missiles with the ability of taking out aircraft carriers, thus neutering our advantage. We still have a window of time in this field.

My belief is that the Chinese will offer a credible threat, not a decisive threat, but a threat grievous enough to change the balance of power and compel a reassessment of strategy by the United States. Food for thought: if there is a dustup and three Chinese carriers are sunk for one American carrier, who won?

We should be building interlocking alliances with the smaller countries that ring China to the East and South encouraging them to supplement their forces, especially their air forces, using our carriers under an umbrella of land-based air power to project military force from a place of relative safety toward the Chinese. The Chinese must be confronted with a united front which somehow affects their vital interests. It will not do just to win a sea battle, China is vast with teeming population and can swallow setbacks and still carry-on. But it cannot sustain its ambitions if it the sea lanes lanes are closed, depriving China of the commodities (and markets) it absolutely requires.

If China intends to keep the sea lanes open with aircraft carriers, they become extremely vulnerable to submarines etc. The equation which runs against us when we try to impose a perfect security system in the waters around China now reverses and favors us. Beyond their capabilities as gunboats, how does the aircraft carrier fit into a global strategic defense system? We can intimidate smaller countries with our aircraft carriers as China clearly intends to do but I do not think that we can intimidate the Chinese, nor they us, with aircraft carriers.

In the world to come the Chinese will be using aircraft carriers to say to Taiwanese, Vietnamese, Japanese and Filipinos we have commensurate power with the Americans but the difference between us and America is we will use it and they might not. Can you trust an ally with your very existence which elects a series of Barack Obamas as commander-in-chief? Your only hope is to align yourselves with the future.

To counter this disruptive force, which we will also see in the Middle East, the United States must demonstrate that it will maintain military superiority and that it will use it. More, and perhaps most important, the United States must seize the window of opportunity we now have to move toward the next weapons system beyond the aircraft carrier in order to create a new paradigm which sets the Chinese and the Islamists back into the age of the gunboat.

[fso301]

Nuclear carriers aren’t cheap.

Chinese labor is.

[Jimmy Valentine]

I still think that the Chinese are securing their back door i.e. The China sea. They will then turn their attention toward everything east of the Urals. That is their historical path.

[Psalm 73]

I doubt they can build one - not functional, anyway.

[octex]

It’s taking the US 7 years from laying the keel to commissioning a Ford Carrier, and that’s largely because we’ve been building nukes for forty years already.
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Disagree. It’s because the workers are members of labor unions. The unions ‘milk’ the system for every cent.

I served on a carrier that was twice in the Brooklyn Navy Ship Yard. The union workers (sand crabs) were often found in various hidey-hole places on the ship just sleeping instead of working.

Our yard time probably could have been cut in half, if non-union workers and their employers were being paid via Fixed Price Incentive contracts, which provided bonuses for reduced cost and time performance.

[wbarmy]

Actually, I think the biggest threat to China is what happens if there is significant conflict. We, the US and EU, will immediately stop buying their stuff and cancel their debt. This will cause an immediate halt in their factories, which will cause an immediate halt in paychecks to their citizens. And their citizens have not been in such a good mood lately. There are constant small scale strikes and worker revolts over the fact that we are not spending as much as we used to, and they are getting laid off.

We do not normally see these actions because our media wants to keep us dumb, blind and looking in a different direction.

But the leaders of China see it, and realize on how short a leash the tiger they riding is on.

Plus, their planes are too damn big for the mission given of working on a carrier. They can only get one at a time on their lifts, and it has to be babied into position to fit. Look at the pictures.