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In two years time, the Chinese might have a conventional carrier nearly as good as the ones the Indians are building. That would be a fantastic effort. If the Chinese were going to build a carrier to be completed in two years time then there should be alot more than a filing cabinet full of plans. The actual hull should be somewhere now.

If the ship was to be completed in two years time, even if the Chinese are going to works some miracles, the ship probably has to have been launched already. If there is a 48,000 ton flat top floating around then the Americans have some terrific photos already and it is still a secret? That is an even bigger miracle.

I could believe that China could launch a conventional carrier in two years time but it would take years after that to complete the ship and probably years after that to commission the ship. If they get it done faster, even if they have some great plans and great planning, it is going to be a pretty primitive ship.

Using this prototype, they then intend to refine the plans for a 90,000 ton nuclear powered ship to be built by 2020. That would be miraculous. They are going to have to learn to use a carrier from scratch using planes that have never operated from a carrier and probably have not been built yet and that experience is going to inform them in the designing and building of this super carrier.

This 90,000 ton carrier is unlikely to be close to as good as the USS Nimitz. They will not have the experience to do it and it will require a very large cheque book because it is going to be a one off rush job.

Even if they have been able to beg buy or steal the plans for these carriers and they throw the resources at these two jobs, the completion of either in the time frame would be a huge achievement for Chinese industry. Nothing like that will have been achieved like that since WWII and never on this scale or complexity. It will be the achievement of a superpower.

And no group will be more pleased than the United States Navy. the highly developed paranoia of the US defence industries will go into overdrive. Talk of decommissioning carriers will be replaced with talk of new building programs. The industry will try to convince the Congress and the public that ten or a dozen super carriers is nowhere near enough to guarantee the security of the USA.

I suppose that is one attraction of the plan. Even if the Chinese carriers are hugely expensive, primitive imitations of the USN carriers and even if there are only one or two, it will provoke the USA to spend even vaster sums trying to increase an advantage over the PRC that is already unbridgeable for a generation at least.

China is a global power now but it is not a superpower. For me the test of a superpower is their ability to wage a war at great distance from the homeland for example in Africa or Iraq.

One day soon I might get surprised, but the growth in the Chinese surface fleet is relatively modest. Similarly their submarines keep on improving but the numbers of high quality, conventional submarines is still small and their nuclear powered submarines seem relatively impotent compared to the other nuclear powered submarines in the world and again their numbers are small. People keep talking the growth and expenditure up but it really is not that much compared with the nations around her.

The Japanese have built the best that money can buy in destroyers and conventional submarines. The South Koreans are building some really powerful, high tech destroyers. India is getting into the carrier game. It is unsure exactly how good the domestically produced destroyers are but the same could be said of the Chinese product. It looks good on paper, but does it work?

There is one other neighbour who, although she has fallen on hard times lately cannot be ignored and that is Russia. The Russians are building new ships and refurbishing old ones. The numbers of ships fit to take to sea may still be small but the original idea of the Russian fleet was to challenge the USN. The Russians have a well deserved reputation for making ordinary machinery achieve great things.

I could well understand if the People's Republic of China felt hemmed in by [or potential ] enemies on all sides.

China is dependent on imports of raw materials from all over the world. China needs to export to pay for these imports. She is going to depend on sea lanes staying open or she will suffer economic disaster. In this she is in the same situation as Japan and South Korea.

I could understand how some small conventional carriers would suit the Chinese Navy but to go to a super carrier so soon seems aggressive and a waste of resources when they are still trying to fix deficiencies in other areas.

In some respects I would like a carrier or two for the Royal Australian Navy but what we would be looking at for China is the first nuclear carrier in twelve years and the next ten over the succeeding twenty years and they will still not have parity with what the Americans have right now.

The thing that makes me think that it is only talk possibly aimed at getting the US to spend some more treasure on a non-existent arms race is that when they build this super carrier, it will invite comparison with the other super carriers in the world all of which are American. Looking forward to thirty or fifty years of being visibly second best to the USA does not sound like the PRC.

Freeloader, I think that the economy of China is at high risk of serious disaster. I am talking the type of disaster that causes governments to fall and bread lines to form even in a totalitarian state. But the Chinese economy has enormous strengths and is planning for the long term albeit differently to how others might plan. The Chinee are planning to be the greatest nation, sorry, they already count themselves as the greatest nation in history; they wish to be recognised as the greatest nation in the world in the future.

As I just said to Pukalshik, the USA has an unbridgeable gap in aircraft carriers and other ships for at least the next forty years and probably further out than that. The US aircraft presently flying are easily the best and will be for a couple of decades even if the PRC manage to find a spare copy of the plans for the F22 lying unwanted in a dustbin somewhere. The US missiles of all shapes and sizes are not only better than anything that the Chinese have, but will remain so for a decade or more.

And there is the crux of the matter. Missiles and tactics are changing. There is every possibility that technology will make the investments of the USA in aircraft carriers obsolete long before the ships wear out. The USN has been developing the concept of aircraft carriers both before and after WWII. They are still developing that concept.

In 1980, there was a movie called "The Final Countdown" where the USS Nimitz, without her battle group but with her air wing more or less intact and her other weapons fully operational, is thrown back in time to just before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour. Eventually after lots of boring soul searching, the Admiral decides that it is their duty to intervene and save Hawaii from the Japanese. They are entirely confident that the USS Nimitz is equal to the task. A bit after they launch their full air wing to intervene the movie ends, just when it was going to get interesting.

The point is, that the USS Kitty Hawk, as she is today, is in important ways a more advanced ship than the USS Nimitz of 1980. The USS Ronald Reagan is bigger and more clever than both of these great ships. But none of this means that some sort of missile firing drone will not be manufactured for a few thousand dollars a unit that can overwhelm the defences of any of these immense and clever ships.

I think that China is counting on this. The Chinese are now investing as much as any nation in the world in research and development. They have been growing that budget at a phenomenal rate for a couple of decades. The Chinese are growing their expenditure on education faster than their economy and have been for a couple of decades. To me that speaks of an investment in the future that must yield impressive results for the life of the people.

They may keep stealing other people's secrets for a while yet but soon some of the best technology will be found in the PRC. That is how they intend to beat the US if the US doesn't beat herself.