China now possesses the biggest navy in the world by number of hulls, the U.S. Defense Department confirmed in its recent
report on Beijing’s armed forces.
But that’s not necessarily the metric that matters. “There’s more to the comparison than number of hulls,” Jerry Hendrix, author of
To Provide and Maintain a Navy. “The real number in the competition is the number of missile tubes.”
A warship is only as powerful as its weaponry. A popular criticism of the Royal Navy, for instance, focuses on the relatively anemic missile load-out of the British fleet’s otherwise big, high-tech vessels.
Comparing the offensive missile capacities of the U.S. and Chinese fleets is illustrative. Yes, the People’s Liberation Army Navy has 355 front-line warships at least as large as a corvette—and more than 400 if you also count small coastal missile boats. The U.S. Navy by contrast has just 305 front-line ships.
But the American ships pack more than twice as many offensive missiles—and that’s not even counting the missiles that the U.S. fleet’s carrier air wings could bring to bear.
The disparity makes sense. At 4.5 million tons, the U.S. fleet displaces
more than twice as much as the Chinese fleet does. Assuming reasonable weapons-loads, tonnage is a rough analogue of combat capability.
In this count, any over-the-horizon land-attack or anti-ship missile counts as an “offensive missile.” The tallies count missile tubes or launchers, not the munitions themselves. It’s always possible that a ship could sail into combat with fewer missiles than its launchers can hold, owing perhaps to a shortage of weapons.
In any event, the U.S. fleet in theory can sail into battle with 10,196 ship- or submarine-launched offensive missiles such as Harpoon and Naval Strike Missile anti-ship missiles and Tomahawk land-attack missiles.
That count is uncertain, as it’s unclear how many anti-ship missiles the U.S. Navy’s 52 attack and cruise-missile submarines routinely carry. The actual total number of USN offensive missiles might be closer to 10,500 or even higher.
It’s equally unclear how many missiles the PLAN’s 55 attack submarines carry. Giving the Chinese sub flotilla the same number of missiles as the U.S. undersea force yields a total PLAN offensive missile count of 4,168.
It’s worth noting that almost all of the USN launchers—9,804—are Mark 41 vertical-launch-system cells, which are compatible with a wide array of munitions. It’s highly unlikely an American fleet would sail with only offensive missiles in its VLS cells. A fleet must defend itself, after all. It would need anti-air missiles.
Then again, the Americans’
latest anti-air missile also functions as an anti-ship and land-attack weapon.
The balance of the American munitions are Harpoon or NSM anti-ship missiles that launch from fixed, angled launchers or torpedo tubes.
The PLAN’s launcher configuration is very different. Just 2,576 of the Chinese fleet’s missiles are in VLS cells. No fewer than 1,592 missiles launch from angled launchers or torpedo tubes.
An enemy crew facing an incoming missile barrage doesn’t care whether the munitions launched vertically or at an angle. But VLS cells inherently are more flexible, which is why the balance of vertical to angled launchers in the Chinese fleet by the year shifts more toward the former.
The Chinese fleet is expanding as more destroyers and frigates join the fleet. The PLAN’s missile holdings surely will grow in coming years. No one expects the USN’s own missile count to increase, however.
As older cruisers and guided-missile submarines decommission over the next decade
before new destroyers and subs can replace them, the U.S. fleet could lose a thousand tubes. Assuming, that is,
robotic vessels don’t fill the gap.
It wouldn’t be surprising if, by 2030, the PLAN sailed with 5,000 or 6,000 sea-launched offensive missiles, while the USN sailed with fewer than 9,500. It will be much harder for the Chinese fleet to catch up to the U.S. fleet’s air-launched firepower, however.
The PLAN is just now beginning to form its first modern air wing for its first modern carrier, which is nearing completion at a shipyard in Shanghai. The USN meanwhile is adding new and longer-range missiles to its own nine air wings.
All this math belies one huge Chinese advantage, of course. The entire PLAN can concentrate in the western Pacific Ocean. The USN’s ships on the other hand split roughly 60-40 between the Pacific and Atlantic Fleets. It’s not impossible in a crisis to shift a vessel from east to west, but the move might not happen fast enough to matter in a potentially quick, destructive clash.
But then there’s an American advantage that might matter even more. China has no dependable allies.
The United States has many. This summer, the U.S., British and Japanese fleets formed a massive fleet in the waters south of Japan—one with three aircraft carriers, a helicopter carrier and many hundreds of offensive missiles.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/davida...n-the-us-navy-but-its-got-far-fewer-missiles/
