From Russia
With Love? China vs. India Carrier Showdown
There’s a pronounced aerial component to Asia’s march to
the seas.
The Indian Navy’s newest aircraft carrier, the
soon-to-be-commissioned INS
Vikramaditya, recently
took to the Barents Sea for its
second
shakedown cruise. After putting the ship through its
paces, the Russian shipyard Sevmash will reportedly deliver
it to the Indian Navy at year’s end—culminating a prolonged,
painful, sometimes comical overhaul process that converted
the Soviet “aircraft-carrying cruiser”
Admiral Gorshkov
into a more conventional flattop featuring a ski jump
for vaulting short-takeoff warplanes into the skies.
Meanwhile, China’s first carrier,
the
Soviet-built vessel formerly known as Varyag,
is underway for its
longest
sea trials since first casting off lines last summer.
It will reportedly cruise the Bohai Sea for 25 days. Whether
New Delhi and Beijing intend to build blue-water fleets
around carrier task forces is no longer in question. They
do, and they are.
China Carrier
Which aspiring sea power has the advantage in carrier
aviation, China or India?
Tough to say.
China’s People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLA Navy) probably
gets the nod from a purely material standpoint, whereas the
Indian Navy holds the edge in the all-important human
dimension.
One caveat. I’ve come to doubt how meaningful side-by-side
comparisons of armaments are when abstracted from their
larger political, strategic, and geographic context. They
have an unearthly feel. Battle is the arbiter of which force
is superior. Myriad factors like geographic distance,
logistics, the number and capability of escort ships, and
the availability and striking power of shore-based fire
support shape tactical engagements. Indeed, they can decide
the outcome.
Think about it. If the two fleets met in the China seas,
Chinese commanders would bring not just the PLA Navy surface
fleet but short-range submarines, aircraft flying from
airfields ashore, and
land-based
anti-ship missiles to bear—massing far more firepower
than the fleet alone could manage. The pattern would reverse
itself if a clash took place in the Bay of Bengal. Indian
commanders could hurl additional assets into the fray,
taking advantage of short distances to the theater and
nearby manpower, land-based platforms, and bases.
It cannot be repeated too many times: sea power is more
than the navy. It’s hard to isolate and measure two navies’
relative combat power short of assigning them a set of
coordinates far from either belligerent’s shores—how about
the Weddell Sea, adjacent to Antarctica, or the South
Atlantic?—and instructing them to meet there to fight it
out. That would come close to excluding all external
variables. In other words, it’s hard to run a controlled
experiment to gauge naval power.
All of that being said, it’s worth examining each platform
to see what it may bring to a sea fight. The
Vikramaditya/Gorshkov
displaces about 45,000 tons fully loaded—that is, including
the air wing, the crew, fuel, stores, and everything else a
man-of-war needs to ply the briny deep. For comparison’s
sake, that’s a tad bigger than a US Navy
Essex-class
fleet carrier of World War II vintage. It approximates the
dimensions of today’s big-deck U.S. Navy amphibious assault
ships (LHA or LHD).
The
Varyag, on the other hand, weighs in at a bit
over 67,000 tons fully loaded. That’s roughly the size of
the modernized USS
Midway, the retired
supercarrier that now adorns the San Diego waterfront as a
museum ship. Size matters. With bigger hulls comes greater
hangar and flight-deck space, and thus the capacity to
accommodate a larger, more diverse air wing.
And to be sure, the
Varyag will reportedly carry
about 26 fixed-wing combat aircraft—the official
People’s
Daily speculated that
J-15s
will operate from its deck for the first time during the
ongoing shakedown—and about 24 helicopters. (I hem-and-haw
on the exact figures because an air wing’s composition is
not fixed. The U.S. Navy has experimented with various
configurations over the years.) The
Vikramaditya/Gorshkov’s
complement is a more modest 16 tactical aircraft—Mig-29Ks
were part of the package deal for the ship—and 10
helicopters. The Chinese carrier’s fighter/attack force,
then, is over half-again as large as its Indian
counterpart’s. Quantity isn’t everything, but it is
important in air-to-air combat. Advantage: China.
It’s worth pointing out, however, that both ships are
modest in capability relative to their nuclear-powered U.S.
Navy brethren, each of which displaces over 100,000 tons and
can carry an air wing numbering some 90 fixed- and
rotary-wing aircraft—nearly double the complement for the
Varyag.
It’s also worth recalling that both ships are Soviet relics,
and that the Soviet Navy never quite got carrier aviation
right. Whether Russian or Chinese shipwrights have managed
to correct any lingering design defects remains to be seen.
Whatever the case, it’s fair to say that Beijing and New
Delhi are fielding what some wags term “
starter
carriers” in the
Varyag and
Vikramaditya.
Both navies are pursuing indigenously built carriers for
their future fleets.
My guess is that the Indian Navy commands a significant
advantage over the PLA Navy in the domains of airmanship and
seamanship. As the late U.S. Air Force colonel John Boyd
liked to quip, machines don’t fight wars; people, ideas, and
hardware—in that order!—are the determinants of competitive
enterprises. There is a reason we call it a
trial
of arms. Many outcomes are possible when human wills
interact.
Indians seem to excel at air power. U.S. Air Force pilots
who face off against their Indian counterparts in mock
combat rave about the skills and panache of Indian airmen.
And while the
Vikramaditya is a new class of
flattop and the MiG-29K a new aircraft for the Indian Navy,
carrier operations are nothing new for the navy. The service
has operated at least one flattop for over half a century.
For example, INS
Viraat, a
Centaur-class
vessel built for Britain’s Royal Navy, has served in the
Indian fleet for a quarter-century. In short, Indian
mariners are steeped in a naval-aviation culture that the
Chinese are only starting to instill. Advantage: India.
Both Chinese and Indian flattops—like all warships, and
indeed all weapon systems—remain “
black
boxes” until actually used in battle against real
opponents pounding away at them. This is true even of the
U.S. Navy, which fought its last major fleet engagement at
Leyte Gulf in 1944. Payloads, weapon ranges, and sensor
characteristics can look impressive on paper, but weaponry
often underperforms the technical characteristics reported
in the pages of
Jane’s Fighting Ships.
Faulty manufacturing, inadequate doctrine or tactics, and
less-than-proficient users are only some of the countless
variables that can open a chasm between promise and
performance.
Observers must keep trying to appraise how platforms will
perform in real-world combat. But let’s do so while keeping
the political, strategic, and operational context in which
battle takes place squarely in view. Numbers tell only part
of the tale.
Posts
美國希望
「一體化高超音速」計劃能解決現存的技術問題，在各項基本實驗結束之後，能夠在2016年試飛新型HX高超音速飛行器。HX被認為是一種可回收的
新一代高機動性、遠程高超音速飛行器，它採用附加火箭動力以降低風險。
美國賓夕法尼亞州大學GRASP實驗室近期還展示了一支納米直升機編隊，這是20架同步
飛行的納米直升機。這支納米直升機編隊的目標是使用生物模擬無人機
在儘可能少或者沒有人類監控下實現編隊飛行，並能在動態、資源有限的敵方環境中出現。然而，這種未來版難以探測的偵察無人機很可能將更加模擬自然
環境。
美國的
