The Imperial German Navy scuttled itself at Scapa Flow after spending a war hemmed in by the British Royal Navy.

Its most advanced vessels, however, are clearly expeditionary in nature, including its aircraft carriers, large destroyers, and amphibious assault ships.īut as the examples above indicate, building a big new fleet does not always work out. It certainly has the capacity to fight under the umbrella of China’s land-based air and land-based missile systems, and some of its warships are optimized for fighting in or near China’s littoral. The modern PLAN is most emphatically not being built as an anti-access/area-denial force. The Rise of China’s Navy: Goals and Challenges To say that the PLAN is newer than the US Navy is not to say that it is better than the US Navy. The US fleet has received multiple upgrades to keep its combat systems modern, and the personnel have decades of experience with long-range, long-term naval deployments. Of course, this comparison both obscures and illuminates the USS Nimitz at forty-six years old is a radically more capable platform than the Type 03 aircraft carrier that will enter service in 2024. Twenty-seven of the US Navy’s seventy destroyers entered service in the last century, as did eight of the eleven aircraft carriers, all twenty-one of the fleet’s cruisers, all of the fleet’s SSBNs, and twenty-eight of the fifty nuclear attack submarines. The PLAN has become numerically the world’s largest fleet, although in tonnage it is still outweighed by the US Navy.īy contrast, the US Navy operates a much older fleet.

By and large, these warships carry weapon systems that are internationally competitive, if not state of the art. In the last decade, it has added four aircraft carrying warships in excess of 40000 tons, several modern nuclear ballistic missile submarines, many large destroyers, and many smaller vessels. According to the recent Department of Defense report on Chinese military power, the P LAN currently operates some 355 warships, including 145 major surface combatants. Most of the fleet was obsolete by contemporary standards, with even the newer ships suffering from a technological deficit relative to other naval powers. It possessed a few major units (SSNs, modern destroyers) but rarely deployed these ships for any length of time at any distance from China’s coasts. Twenty years ago the PLAN was a modest force focused mostly on coastal defense. Since 2000 the People’s Liberation Army Navy has expanded at a similarly spectacular rate. The Rise of China’s Navy: A Short History

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