Recently, the Asia-Pacific region has been a place for the United States to be anxious about. The Philippines frantically provoked incidents in the South China Sea, and after being resolutely defended and counterattacked by us, the Philippines turned its attention to the US military, hoping that the US military could provide them with support, but it seems that the United States has not been able to take any practical action at all except a few words of verbal comfort. Such behavior by the United States has also greatly undermined its prestige in the Asia-Pacific region. In addition to the Philippines, the People's Liberation Army (PLA) has carried out intensive exercises and training activities in the waters around the Taiwan Strait, and the Taiwan authorities have cried and demanded that the US military rescue them, but the US side has said that they have no rescue capability.
Over the past few years, the PLA's military strength has grown by leaps and bounds. During the 2016 confrontation in the South China Sea, the U.S. military dispatched a number of aircraft carrier battle groups and massed a large number of troops in the South China Sea in an attempt to force us to accept the so-called "international arbitration" through military deterrence. In May 2020, the United States was able to send an aircraft carrier battle group to conduct military exercises in the waters around the Asia-Pacific region, and also dispatched a large number of air force aviation units. However, now, the situation has heated up in both the South China Sea and the Taiwan Strait, but the US military no longer has an aircraft carrier to adjust, and the last usable aircraft carrier has been transferred to the Middle East.
Compared with the rapid decline of the US Navy, the PLA naval forces already have a more powerful combat capability. According to state media reports, three Type 055 guided missile destroyers belonging to the Southern Theater Navy formed a ship formation and conducted actual combat training in the South China Sea. At the same time, the Philippine media also carried a large-scale report on the formation of destroyers led by another Type 055 guided missile destroyer of the Navy in the southern theater of the mainland passing through the Philippine island of Palawan at close range. After passing through Palawan, the naval destroyer group headed for a goodwill visit to Malaysia.
In addition to the four Type 055 guided missile destroyers of the Southern Theater Navy, the Shandong warship stationed in Hainan also went out of port for training and conducted training in the waters around the South China Sea. In addition to the Southern Theater Navy, the Type 055 guided missile destroyer No. 2 "Lhasa" of the PLA Northern Theater Navy is also carrying a supply ship through the Tsushima Strait and into the Sea of Japan. In addition, this year, the PLA Air Force's Y-20 transport planes have arrived in Kamchatka and Anadyr, which are common airports for Russian strategic bombers, and this move is also widely regarded by the outside world as preparations for this year's joint cruise of strategic bombers of the Chinese and Russian air forces, and this joint cruise is bound to involve the US state of Alaska.
At present, the two aircraft carriers of the mainland navy have left their home ports, and the Liaoning has also carried out its first ocean-going mission after completing maintenance and upgrades. The PLA Navy has a total of eight Type 055 missile destroyers, and five of them are currently on training missions, which can be said to be very alarming. Just these five Type 055 missile destroyers have 560 vertical launch units, even more than the total number of vertical launch units of most naval fleets in the world.
After all, the two aircraft carriers on the mainland are in a brand new and usable state, and the number of American aircraft carriers is large, but at present there is only the "Roosevelt" in the western Pacific direction, and it is necessary to rush to the Middle East. The United States naturally does not want to see this large-scale operation of the PLA, but at present, they cannot deploy enough ships to confront it. There is a paragraph on the Internet that there are now two aircraft carriers in the western Pacific, one of which is owned by the PLA, and the other is also owned by the PLA. Although this is just a paragraph, it also shows from the side that the US military has gradually fallen into a situation where it is overstretched in the use of aircraft carriers. Even if the U.S. military is eager to change this status quo, seeing its current shipbuilding industry and ship maintenance capabilities, the United States can only sigh and silently slap its swollen face and become fat.