In the past few years, the development and construction of China's navy has become the focus of global attention. There is such a saying in the military field, "10 years of the army, 50 years of the air force, 100 years of the navy", that is to say, to build an army that can fight, maybe 10 years is enough, but to build a navy with super combat effectiveness, it will take 100 years. This time is not necessarily accurate, but through this sentence, it can also be seen that compared with the army and the air force, the construction period of the navy is indeed longer. A very important reason why the construction of the Chinese Navy has attracted the attention of the world is that the Chinese Navy has created a miracle, and it took only 15 years to initially complete the transformation from a "yellow water navy" to a "deep blue navy".
The so-called "Yellow Water Navy" is a coastal defensive navy, whose areas of activity in peacetime are mainly concentrated in the coastal seas, and it is difficult to reach the far seas in wartime, and there is almost no active offensive capability. The "Deep Blue Navy" is a navy that has both offense and defense and is capable of carrying out operations in the open sea. During the period from the founding of the Chinese Navy to the 60 th anniversary of its founding, the Chinese Navy was the "Yellow Water Navy," and there were no world-class ships in its ranks. After 2009, affected by the changes in the situation in the Taiwan Strait and China's strategic needs, the Chinese Navy realized that the "Yellow Water Navy" would not work, and if it did not transform, it would face the risk of being passively attacked in the future, and it would not be able to safeguard the integrity and security of national territory and sovereignty.
So the Chinese Navy made up its mind and started the road of transformation. At that time, the rapid development of China's economy, as well as years of technological innovation and accumulation, provided financial and technical support for the transformation of the Chinese Navy, and relatively speaking, the transformation of the Chinese Navy was relatively easy. From 2009 to the present, in the past 15 years, the Chinese Navy's ships have ushered in both quantitative and qualitative improvements. One of the most significant changes is that the breakthrough of the aircraft carrier zero has been achieved, from scratch to many. Together with the "Fujian", which has not yet entered service, the Chinese Navy has three aircraft carriers, second only to the US Navy. In addition to the three aircraft carriers, the Chinese Navy currently has eight 10,000-ton Type 055 missile destroyers and dozens of 052C/D/DL missile destroyers.
The expansion of the number and quality of warships has made the combat effectiveness of the Chinese Navy unprecedentedly enhanced. However, while making great achievements, we must also clearly understand the gap with the US Navy, which still has two major shortcomings compared with the US Navy. The first shortcoming is the lack of quantity and quality of aircraft carriers, the US Navy has 11 aircraft carriers in active service, and all of them are nuclear-powered, and we have only three, all of which are conventional power. We all know that the comprehensive performance of conventionally powered aircraft carriers cannot be compared with nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, not to mention that the US Navy is constantly building new nuclear-powered aircraft carriers. In addition, the US Navy has more experience in the use of aircraft carriers than the Chinese Navy. In the field of aircraft carriers, China still has a lot of lessons to make up.
The second shortcoming is anti-submarine capability. In the view of some military experts, once the Chinese and US navies go to war in the future, the main battlefield of the two sides will not be at sea, but underwater, and the two sides will use submarines as much as possible to hunt and kill each other's surface ships. In this case, how to defend against the opponent's submarine is a big problem. Foreign media believe that at present, the Chinese Navy, whether it is a conventionally powered submarine or a nuclear submarine, has insufficient deep-water anti-submarine warfare capabilities, and the threat to US Navy submarines is not enough, which the Chinese Navy needs to make up for as soon as possible.