Nations design hardware to provide an advantage in combat, battles seldom take place out of range of shore support and geography shapes the space where fleets battle for mastery. Such comparisons are abstract and otherworldly. A side-by-side comparison of force totals would only be useful if each antagonist built precisely the same aircraft, ships and weaponry for the same missions, if they committed their entire fleets to battle and if this hypothetical battle took place in open seas equidistant from their bases. Numbers and statistics are far from meaningless, but the size of a navy on paper disguises as much as it conveys. Basing strategy on partial truths begets poor strategy. None offers mathematical precision, if indeed such precision is possible. The metrics offered by IISS, Gates and Dodd reveal part of the picture. The US and its Asian allies can rest easy, confident in their nautical supremacy.īalderdash. Chinese naval mastery, it follows, remains a remote prospect since the PLAN has never operated flat-tops. From this the Australian reporter inferred that carrier operations represent the sine qua non for naval power. During a speech in Canberra, the US Navy chief rightly observed that it will take PLAN mariners and aviators years to master tactics and procedures for handling aircraft-carrier task forces at sea, even after a Chinese carrier takes to the sea. Dodd attributed the view expressed in his story's headline to Admiral Gary Roughead, America's top uniformed naval officer. 1 titled, "Don't Fear Chinese Fleet: US Admiral," further reducing the problem of comparing navies to just carrier aviation. Mark Dodd, a reporter for The Australian, chimed in with a story on Oct. He created a furor among naval enthusiasts, implying that a fleet this overbearing could be trimmed without placing US maritime interests in jeopardy. "In terms of size and striking power, no other country has even one comparable ship," he said, adding that it "has 57 nuclear-powered attack and cruise missile submarines - again, more than the rest of the world combined." And "the displacement of the US battle fleet - a proxy for overall fleet capabilities - exceeds, by one recent estimate, at least the next 13 navies combined." Like the IISS analysts, Gates spotlighted major platforms while also insisting that the tonnage of individual platforms matters. Speaking before the Navy League this past May, Gates observed that the US Navy operates 11 large carriers. The US Navy has fallen behind by that standard.īy contrast, US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, an insider presumably in the know, depicts the US Navy as incomparably larger and stronger than any other.
For instance, the well-respected Economist of London published a story in August 2010 titled "China Now Has More Warships than America, According to the IISS." And sure enough, accompanying the story was a graphic from the London-based International Institute of Strategic Studies purporting to show that the PLAN has overtaken the US Navy in terms of "major combatants." Rather than graph raw numbers, lumping smaller and lightly armed vessels in with heavily armed cruisers or destroyers, the IISS team measured the respective fleets in terms of submarines and large surface ships - the missile-, torpedo-, and gun-armed "shooters" best equipped to decide fleet encounters.
Absurd, yet that's the story that raw statistics tell.Ībsent an algorithm for calculating naval power, people steeped in naval affairs choose their own metrics - and come up with strikingly different results. Going by the numbers, the PLAN would prevail even over the combined fleets of the US-Japan alliance. This is an absurd result, implying that American leaders must avoid a maritime conflict with China at all costs. A quick example: on paper, China's People's Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) is double the size of the US Navy. But this simple process of bean-counting soon collides with reality. THE IDEA of comparing navies sounds straightforward, doesn't it? To figure out which nation sports the largest navy, just break out the nearest copy of Jane's Fighting Ships, tally up the number of keels supplied in the handy chart for each nation, and compare figures.