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PLA Navy needs own ‘STOVL stealth fighter’ jets to protect territory
Liu Xuanzun
2019/6/16
As China is reportedly building more aircraft carriers and its first group of amphibious assault ships, the People's Liberation Army (PLA) Navy might eventually need its own F-35B-like short takeoff and vertical landing (STOVL) stealth fighter jet to safeguard territorial integrity, Chinese military analysts said on Sunday.
Such warplanes could outperform attack helicopters in landing and island defense missions. Therefore, it would be effective in dealing with potential island disputes, analysts said.
While China has yet to announce any plan, it needs stealth fighter jets for its future aircraft carriers, and has three options: a J-20 variant, an FC-31 variant or a totally new one that might feature STOVL capabilities, Ordnance Industry Science Technology, a Xi'an-based periodical on the national defense industry, said in a Friday article.
A STOVL aircraft can take off from a short runway and land vertically without a runway, with the US' F-35B as an example.
STOVL fighter jets would shine on amphibious assault ships even more than on aircraft carriers. This kind of ship is not designed for a normal fixed-wing fighter jet to take off and land, but a STOVL aircraft can, Wei Dongxu, a Beijing-based military analyst, told the Global Times on Sunday.
China is developing the Type 075 amphibious assault ship, a warship comparable to the US' Wasp and America-class, foreign media reported in May.
In a landing mission, STOVL fighter jets from these ships would be a more efficient choice than helicopters to support amphibious operations, gaining aerial superiority and attacking ground targets, Wei said, noting that they could also be deployed on islands that are not large enough to build proper air fields.
The US has deployed F-35Bs on its amphibious assault ships. Japan is also planning to buy F-35Bs for its Izumo-class aircraft carrier-to-be helicopter destroyers.
But China might still need some time before a STOVL fighter jet is built, military observers said.
If China was to develop such aircraft, it needs to make reliable engines that are capable of not only providing thrust, but also lift, together with lift-providing devices in the middle of the aircraft, like lift fans, Wei said, noting that flight control systems could also be very complicated.
Once developed, the STOVL fighter jet could make an amphibious assault ship a light aircraft carrier and play unique roles in protecting islands and safeguarding China's territorial integrity, Wei pointed out.
Secessionist forces in Taiwan are still taking the chance that the mainland's amphibious combat capabilities could be insufficient to reunify Taiwan by force. But once the mainland has amphibious assault ships with STOVL warplanes, it may become a strong deterrent against Taiwan secessionists and help solve questions involved with Taiwan, analysts said.
http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1154456.shtml
Pentagon’s plan to counter China with robotic ships may be impractical or even bluff
Published time: 19 Jun, 2019 11:35
The autonomous ship "Sea Hunter". ©REUTERS / Steve Dipaola
The US Navy is eyeing a large-scale introduction of robotic surface ships of various sizes as a counter to China’s boosted capabilities. The vision, however, relies on not-yet-proven technologies and may even be a bluff.
The world’s largest navy feels threatened by Beijing, whose advancements in anti-ship missile technologies and large investments in its own naval assets over the past years mean that a conflict near China’s shores may not end in US favor. Among the Pentagon’s plans to deal with the problem is to switch away from larger ships in favor of smaller ones and make scores of them robotic.
A drone ship would be cheaper to build and operate since it doesn’t need all the facilities for the meatbags and the drones may be spread over wider areas.
The US admirals seem confident enough in this vision to request $629 million in 2020 for research and development and want to spend a total of $4.5 billion on the efforts though 2024, according to a recent report by the Congressional Research Service.
Automatization and introduction of drones in combat is a process that happens in many nations, but it’s evolutionary, so it remains in question whether the US Navy can do it quickly, drone expert Denis Fedutinov told RT.
“Obviously, first you build relatively small boats to develop the technologies and then gradually switch to larger crewless ships that can conduct a wider range of missions,” he said.
The US Navy may have been emboldened by the trials of the Sea Hunter, the 135-ton autonomous trimaran ship developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) as an anti-submarine sensor platform. The robotic ship (accompanied by a manned convoy which checked on her systems from time to time) managed to travel from San Diego to Hawaii and back all on her own earlier this year.
Boeing’s experimental large unmanned submarine Orca won a contract from the Navy this year, with four ships in the pipeline now – another testament for the progress of the robotic technologies at sea.
But even if the technology for remotely-controlled or partially autonomous vessels will be there within years, there will be other considerations, pointed out Michael Maloof, a former senior security policy analyst at the Pentagon. Even the vast budgets that the DoD gets these days are still limited. And drones come with their unique vulnerabilities.
“Before you deploy, you’ve got to have a system in place that can counter any means to knock out [the drones] especially given how expensive they are going to be,” he told RT.
Iran claims it hacked and controlled US drones, shows footage from missions as proof (VIDEO)
One widely publicized example was Iran tricking a US RQ-170 Sentinel spy drone to land on its territory by spoofing GPS data, Maloof said. One can imagine a similar scenario could allow somebody to hijack one of the US Navy’s robotic crafts and get access to all the technology on it.
“They could take this robotic ship and turn it against us. Let’s say it’s armed with ballistic missiles, and those get into the wrong hands. There are a lot of consequences here, that have not been addressed,” he said.
On the other hand, he added, the entire buzz about the robotic fleet and how China’s naval build-up would be nullified by it may be the modern incarnation of the Strategic Defense Initiative. The Reagan-era program made the Soviet Union believe that its nuclear deterrence could be countered by the US anti-ballistic missile systems and invest a lot of resources into preventing this outcome. But in reality the SDI was to a large degree fiction.
“It was a big bluff. We still don’t have the technologies for that,” Maloof said.
New Recruit
What can a 135 tonnes Ship can do? They're so small. What kind of weapon that they can take and use?