That is the equation that ought to be kept in mind when reading about China's finishing the construction of an old Soviet aircraft carrier and training pilots. For if China intends to operate her carrier at any significant distance from her home port in China, she will need at least three, if not four carriers in order to sustain one at sea.
Three is the bare minimum. Four is better. Four gives you one ship on station, one ship in a major maintenance availability (ie, an overhaul), one ship working up to deploy to relieve the ship on station, and one ship which has recently returned and is undergoing the training and maintenance to prepare for her next deployment. The four-to-one rule also applies to the escorts and the aircraft units.
A carrier that is conducting extensive air operations needs supply ships to resupply her on a frequent basis. The further away the carrier is operating from her base of supply, the more supply ships are needed. It could be that they will need five sets of replenishment ships to keep one carrier group at sea on an extended deployment, and that is with none of the supply ships out of service for maintenance and overhauls.
For a nation with one or two carriers, they are better viewed as mobile coastal airfields which probably won't be operating more than a few hundred miles, at best, from their ports. One or two Chinese carriers may unsettle the other nations of East Asia, but they will not be a significant threat to any other area.
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5 comments:
Your calculations are correct and it remains to be seen how many they will build as they learn to build them better. And they have plenty of our dollars to do it with.
True, but by the time China can build and man a carrier fleet of 8+ CVs, most of us will be long dead.
What do you mean "we"?
It's possible they could have them operational in a couple of decades, maybe less. They've been studying the technology for some time. We build carriers one at a time, mostly to keep the shipyard busy, I suppose. China might could conceivably set different industrial priorities.
Cujo, it's not just building the carriers. It's building up the entire aviation and training pipeline to supply the trained pilots. It's having enough pilots who have had a tour of duty on a carrier to act as instructors to the new pilots. It's having enough experienced mid and senior grade pilots to fill the leadership jobs in the aviation squadrons. It's having enough experienced naval officers to operate the carriers themselves.
Same thing for the escorts, the supply ships, the repair ships.
In some ways, building the ships is the easy part.
Unless China has some notion in some of its own "Neocons" to attack and conquer other nations, this ship is probably meant to be like other floating museums. (I'm kidding about that). Why would China build numbers of aircraft carriers and the infrastructure to support them? Yeah, she has the money to do it but so did we. Operative word "did."
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