Chinese Naval Expansion Hits High Gear: China’s Navy Acquires 15 Warships in 7 Months

Ticonderoga Class cruiser USS Lake Champlain CG-57. Decommissioning of these vessels will begin in 2019, with no viable replacement. The U.S. Navy command has proposed keeping half of the 22 vessels in service. Despite the largest defense budget of any nation in the world, and larger than that of Russia and China combined, the U.S. Navy cited budget constraints as a key factor in being unable of replacing the vessels.

 

While there was much fanfare and attention given to the July 3^rd launch of two Type 055 guided missile destroyers at the Dalian Shipbuilding Industry Co. (DISC) shipyard in Dalian, very little mention has been made of the many other warships that the PLAN has launched or commissioned since the beginning of the year. Although the Type 055 DDG is the PLAN’s most powerful surface combatant, and the largest such vessel constructed by an Asian nation since World War II, they are one component in a steadily growing naval force structure. While the addition of three Type 055 DDGs this year, added to the first vessel in class which rolled into the water from Dalian just over a year ago in June of 2017, showcase China’s growing capabilities not only in producing powerful and modern warships, they also illustrate the maturity and  stunning capacity of the Chinese ship building industry. This industry has launched and/or commissioned 15 modern warships in just the first seven months of 2018.

China in world-first deployment of experimental electromagnetic rail ‘supergun’ aboard a warship

Don't need to worry about the power supply, note the three containers on deck, which could be the power station. pic.twitter.com/gTk4AgdvXT

— dafeng cao (@xinfengcao) January 31, 2018

 

CHINA has just changed the game. It has released photos of a new “supergun” capable of making many of the West’s defences obsolete.

WANT to win a war? Build a better gun. Now China appears to have taken a huge stride ahead of the United States with the first experimental deployment of a new ‘supergun’ aboard a warship.

The first images began circulating on the internet last week.

They showed a Chinese amphibious assault ship — usually used to deploy troops and tanks on a beach — fitted with an enormous cannon on its bows.

Overnight, Beijing’s official mouthpiece The People’s Daily Online published an article reporting speculation the unusually large single-barrelled weapon was an electromagnetic rail gun.

Russia Moves Ahead With Building New Aircraft Carriers

 

After decades of effort to reconstitute its shipbuilding industry following the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia looks set to regain a key ability: Moscow will be able to build aircraft carriers and amphibious assault ships domestically as soon as 2019.

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“We’ll be ready to begin construction of helicopter carriers as well as aircraft carriers,” Alexey Rakhmanov, president of Russia’s United Shipbuilding Corporation (USC), recently told Rossiya’24. “If you take up the technological capability for building aircraft carriers, we hope to acquire it by the beginning of 2019 as long as modernization works are completed.”