US and China seek to project power with huge and expensive aircraft carriers | China
It would be impossible to miss the 80,000-ton aircraft carrier Fujian in the harbour. More than 300 meters long and capable of carrying around 60 aircraft, the £5.4bn supercarrier puts China second among the world’s navies, with three aircraft carriers, but still well behind global leader the US, which has 11 aircraft carriers.
But for all the new battleship’s massive power projection, another conflict some 5,000 miles from its homeport seems to suggest that size may not matter. Ukraine achieved a remarkable military success in the Black Sea, inflicting a “functional defeat” on Russia’s naval fleet using swarms of expertly targeted maritime drones.
However, it is possible that the contradiction is apparent rather than real. In a new era of state rivalry, and particularly the growing rivalry between China and the United States, aircraft carriers, for all their size and expense, remain an attractive source for projecting power and conducting tougher diplomacy.
This is why US president Donald Trump ordered the USS Gerald R Ford, the world’s largest and most expensive warship worth $12.8 billion, to Venezuela to intimidate the country’s regime. Capable of carrying 70 aircraft, making 125 sorties at its peak, and supported by four destroyers, the maneuver was so unusual that it raised the question of whether the force on display could be used against President Nicolas Maduro.
That’s why there’s so much interest in the construction and testing of Fujan, whose official launch was attended by Chinese President Xi Jinping earlier this week. It’s a sign of Beijing’s rapidly growing military power: its first aircraft carrier, Liaoning, Completed in 2012, the ship was built from a ship frame originally built in the Soviet Union in the late 1980s and sold by Ukraine following its destruction.
Ironically, as Nick Childs of the International Institute for Strategic Studies notes, China has also invested heavily in anti-ship missiles to protect its coasts from the United States. But he says Beijing clearly “views aircraft carriers as an indispensable element in building a navy that can independently generate power and penetrate globally” because they remain “unrivalled in terms of flexibility” and are “incredibly useful across a range of potential conflict scenarios”; one of which may one day be an attempt to force reunification with Taiwan.
The UK, which completed the construction and deployment of two aircraft carriers for £6.2bn four years ago, has far less global power, making its military needs less obvious. Neither ship was deployed during the Middle East conflict over the last two years, but their construction provided jobs in Scottish shipyards in the 2010s. So far their use has been as a form of volatile diplomacy, as evidenced by the visit of HMS Prince of Wales to Tokyo in August, which was intended to impress allies rather than intimidate.
For now, aircraft carriers are not expected to face a military threat with Ukraine’s tactical sophistication, let alone an opponent of equivalent level. Houthi rebels in Yemen attacked the USS Harry S Truman aircraft carrier and its supporting destroyers in the Red Sea at the beginning of this year with unmanned aerial vehicles. However, the most serious damage sustained during the attack was not to the warship, but to the $70 million F/A-18E Super Hornet fighter jet, which crashed into the sea as the aircraft carrier turned to avoid incoming fire.
Destroyers such as the Royal Navy’s HMS Diamond, which specialize in shooting down incoming drones, form the heart of carrier strike groups protecting the mothership. In theory, carriers are designed to be difficult to sink even if hit. Soviet rule in the Cold War was: 12 conventional missiles shooting down a supercarrier; While it took the United States four weeks to sink the USS America in 2005, it was a test in which the American ship was shot down to determine how durable it was in practice.
As for the Black Sea, Ukraine’s success came against a small and poorly organized navy that was certainly much weaker than that of the United States and China. Russia does not have a functioning aircraft carrier and has not had one since 2017, when 40-year-old Admiral Kuznetsov sent it for repairs. The country’s shipbuilding chief said it would likely be scrapped or sold. The failure to modernize or replace is indicative of Russia’s broader geopolitical, military and economic weakness.
