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Fonte: Aviation Week and Space Technology
What Carrier Means In China Military Plans
By Bradley Perrett - Beijing (Aug 17, 2011)
The Chinese military is either confident that it can already win a battle in the Taiwan Strait, or it is confident that it can keep winning the budget battles back in Beijing.
With the ex-Soviet carrier Varyag now mobile near the northern port of Dalian, China has joined the aircraft carrier club. And in completing the ship, with its limited use in narrow waters, the country has left behind one of the guiding principles of its defense acquisitions—that the first priority after nuclear deterrence is subjugating Taiwan.
Partly for that reason, the long-awaited appearance of the 67,500-ton vessel, symbolic of the country’s rising economic and military strength, has stoked anxieties across Asia as far as India. Beijing’s response: Other countries should just get used to the fact that China is developing carrier aviation.
As if to underline the doubtful value of an aircraft carrier in an attempt to force Taiwanese reunification with the mainland, a Hsiung Feng III missile was promoted as a “carrier killer” at the Taipei Aerospace and Defense Technology Exhibition just as the Varyag headed to sea for the first time (see p. 26).
The ship, which will soon get a Chinese name and is officially earmarked for training pilots and deck crews, left Dalian on Aug. 10 for its sea trials, in which the builder will show that the ship meets specifications.
The investment in Varyag shows that the Chinese military is moving beyond its decades-old obsession with seizing Taiwan, says security researcher Ashley Townshend of the Lowy Institute in Sydney. “An aircraft carrier does not seem to be necessary for that,” he says, noting the land-based firepower that China can bring to bear on the island. “This means there is less focus,” he says.
So the carrier program could mean that China thinks it already has the pieces in place to secure the strait and bring Taiwan to heel. The alternative, which seems more likely, is that while the armed forces reckon much more military power is needed to force Taiwanese reunification—and to persuade the U.S. to keep out of the fight—they expect that future funding will be enough to do that and more.
Completing Varyag is unlikely to be just a one-time divergence from the focus on Taiwan, since three carriers will probably be needed to ensure that one is always available, Townshend argues. Reports of China building carriers from scratch have appeared from time to time over the years. The Washington Times cited unnamed U.S. defense officials this month as saying that construction of a Varyag-like carrier had begun.
Varyag’s long-awaited appearance raises two questions that have been asked repeatedly since China towed the hull to the shipyard at Dalian in 2002 with the evident intent of using it, somehow, to introduce fixed-wing aviation at sea. When will China have an operational carrier, usable as a fighting ship, and not just as a training ship? And why does China want carrier aviation anyway?
“When the ship will be operational is anyone’s guess,” says Townshend. It depends a lot on what level of competence the Chinese will demand before regarding the ship as deployable, he points out.
Taking a stab, analyst Richard Bitzinger of Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University says: “It will probably be at least five years before there’s an operational capability.”
There is a strong clue that the Chinese navy does not expect to take too long in learning the notoriously difficult and dangerous business of efficiently operating fixed-wing aircraft at sea. For many years while Varyag was in dockyard hands, it was unclear how much effort would be spent on the ship, and how far it would be transformed from the empty hull that Chinese businessmen bought from Ukraine in 1998. It was conceivable, for example, that Varyag might have been made only structurally fit for service as a moored hull that pilots and deck crews could practice on. Or it might have been cheaply fitted with a modest powerplant and not much else, confining it to training excursions.
But as the ship runs its trials, it is evident that the navy has gone for the whole box and dice. Varyag has been fitted for combat—with self-defense surface-to-air missile launchers, a profusion of domes that must cover antennas for communications systems and sensors and, most notably, a phased-array radar. To integrate those systems, a capable command system must be installed deep in the hull. It seems unlikely that a navy that expected to take, say, 10 years to prepare the ship for combat would spend so heavily now on such costly equipment, especially since better systems would be available later.
It is also clear that China has not skimped on propulsion. Thick exhaust from the funnel during engine tests indicates that Varyag is not fitted with the gas turbines that Western and Japanese navies now routinely use for fast ships—and yet the exhaust color is too light for diesel propulsion, a heavy but inexpensive and efficient choice commonly made for ships of moderate speed. Diesels were an alternative that Chinese builders, expert in merchant ship construction, could easily have executed had the navy not wanted much speed, says U.S. Naval War College Prof. Andrew Erickson.
So the installation—reportedly built with Ukrainian help—is evidently a powerful steam-turbine plant, matched to the high-speed lines of the hull. Varyag’s sister ship, the Russian Kuznetsov, has a 147,000-kw (197,000-hp) steam-turbine plant that propels the ship at about 30 kt., compared with the 25-plus kt. officially stated for the two otherwise comparable ships that Britain is building. U.S. carriers are capable of more than 30 kt.
Erickson stresses the value of speed to a ship that, like Varyag, has a deck configuration requiring aircraft to use the mode of operation known as short takeoff but arrested recovery (Stobar). “Given the limitations of Stobar on aircraft weight, the more wind over the deck the better,” he says.
The Stobar configuration uses a ski jump instead of catapults. One of many British inventions that have made aircraft carriers workable, the ski jump effectively extends the flight deck into the air ahead of the ship. As aircraft hurtle off the ramp, they are not fast enough to fly, but their upward trajectory gives them time to accelerate before hitting the water. The energy from a catapult, however, allows greater weight—and therefore payload-radius.
The combat aircraft that will eventually appear on the Varyag will be the J-15, a Flanker version similar to, and maybe reverse engineered from, the Russian Su-33 naval fighter. Adapted for ski-jump takeoffs, it features canard wings and complex trailing-edge surfaces (AW&ST May 9, p. 35).
Like Kuznetsov, the operational Varyag may carry 40 or so aircraft, compared with more than 60 on U.S. carriers. The flight decks of the 102,000-ton U.S. Nimitz class ships measure 333 X 77 meters (1,092 X 252 ft.), compared with Kuznetsov’s 305 X 70 meters.
Limited payload-radius and other shortcomings would put Varyag at a disadvantage in action against a U.S. carrier, but such a battle must be the last thing on the mind of the Chinese navy. It seems likely that China expects to deploy its carriers in much the same way that the U.S. Navy, whatever its hot-war plans, has actually deployed its flat-tops during the past 60 years: as power-projection tools against enemies that could not hope to sink the huge ships, surrounded as they are by anti-air and anti-submarine escorts.
While Varyag and follow-on carriers would be helpful in intimidating rivals to China’s claims on the South China Sea, analysts Erickson, Bitzinger and Townshend agree that the most likely reason for China to build aircraft carriers is probably not far from the vague justification that the country is offering: Lots of other nations have them.
Aircraft carriers have proven useful to other countries. Moreover, China is a rising power, with a long view of history. It will want carrier aviation eventually, so it might as well start working on it. The reasoning is that “a rich nation should have strong armed forces,” says Bitzinger, who also thinks the ships would have some role against Taiwan.
, grazie richelieu!!! D'altronde leggevo che tra i nomi proposti per la portaerei c'è quello di un ammirgaglio che ne medioevo conquistò Taiwan, quindi l'mmagine artistica del missile è giustificata!!!
..son russi.. 
