(Admiral Giuseppe De Giorgi) Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the US Navy has had no more rivals able to fight it on the Oceans, at least until today. The numerical overtaking, however, occurred: 317 naval units against 283, and so at the end of 2017 the Navy of the People's Liberation Army became, surpassing that of the United States of America, the largest military fleet in the world. A large military fleet capable of controlling the sea and projecting its force onto the mainland through the oceans is considered one of the main attributes of a great power; the primary strategic goal for China, however, is currently to protect the Chinese Sea, with its many islands, and to prevent the access of the opposing ships to the stretches of sea.
Over the years, China has shown an increasingly aggressive attitude regarding the question of the sovereignty of the numerous islands of the Chinese Sea: from the Senkaku islands disputed with Japan, to the Spratly archipelago, which has become a military base with airports, military ports and antinave missile stations. Airplanes and Chinese ships now patrol those waters in an increasingly aggressive manner and the US Navy, although still much higher in terms of quality and technology, has lost the absolute numerical superiority it enjoyed in the years' 90. In fact, the times when the Chinese army launched some missiles against the territorial waters of Taiwan to intimidate the local government, which at the time was about to hold the first free elections in its history, are far away.
At that time, American President Clinton immediately sent the fleet into the waters of Taiwan, forcing China to immediately cease its bellicose attitude. But perhaps from that moment, it is said lived with particular humiliation by the Chinese government, began the program of armament and modernization that today, under the leadership of current President Xi Jinping, begins to show its results to the world.
"The need to build a powerful Navy has never been as urgent as today," President Xi himself said, emphasizing the priorities on the agenda for his government. With 228 billions of dollars allocated, China is second only to the States (610 billion), although the percentage allocated to Defense compared to total public spending has gradually decreased. And so, only in the last ten years, the Navy of the People's Liberation Army has built more submarines and warships than 100, more than the fleets of most of the world's countries possess.
It is true that the US has 20 very powerful aircraft carriers and the ability to quickly deploy them to any part of the world, at the same time, however, China today would have the ability to counteract access by any enemy forces to its territorial waters. The Chinese forces base their strength above all on "A2 / AA" capabilities, an acronym that stands for "Anti-Access / Area Denial" carried out with, above all, anti-ship ballistic missiles, commonly called "carrier killer" or "aircraft carrier killer" . Difficult-to-stop missiles, which when launched rise almost vertically, out of the earth's atmosphere, then re-enter, guided by radar and satellites, and plummet towards their target at a speed several times the speed of sound. The DF-21D and DF-26 missiles can reach up to 4 thousand kilometers, that is, in the event of a conflict with the USA, they can hit the US bases on the island of Guam. We are talking about a very significant threat to which the US Navy responds, however, with the Arleigh Burke class destroyer family, cleared to protect the aircraft carriers, capable of destroying ballistic missiles in the reentry phase. In addition, an embarked direct energy weapon is also at an advanced stage of development, a powerful laser that has already demonstrated the ability to shoot down air targets in the operational experimentation phase from aboard naval units. To complete the fleet there are also about 80 submarines, embarked aircraft, strategic bombers and cruise missiles. A respectable arsenal in anticipation of what according to experts could be the return of comparisons in the open sea between large fleets, a hypothesis that seemed to have faded at the end of the twentieth century and that reappears in the twenty-first, not surprisingly called the " maritime century ".
In recent years, the need to defend its growing economic and geopolitical interests in the world, in addition to its own sovereignty, has pushed the Asian giant to recalibrate its military power in favor of the navy. The Chinese horizons are increasingly vast, embracing the entire east coast of Africa to the Mediterranean. China needs a great Navy to give strength and credibility to its foreign policy and confidence in the growing number of friendly nations looking for alternative allies to the US to Russia or France. In addition to ships an oceanic Navy needs naval bases located at strategic points, possibly near the obligatory passages. Hence the construction of a base in Djibouti, to which others will follow along the renewed Silk Road to the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf. The rise of Chinese naval power is evident in numbers. Only China has built more naval vessels in this decade than all the world powers put together. Clearly this does not mean that the Navy of the People's Liberation Army is superior to that of Washington, suffice it to say that China has only one aircraft carrier while the US maintains all nuclear-powered 20 services. The goal of Xi Jinping's new China is clear: to make China not just a giant on earth, but also on the sea. In short, a great world power.
The lines of maritime communications are the enabling element of global globalization along with the Internet, and China no longer wants to depend on the great maritime powers that have dominated the world from the sea since the 15 century. The control of the sea passes through a series of levels that also concern other areas of the world, where commercial, energy and military interests are intertwined in an indissoluble manner. Like a giant that is opening up to the world, the defense of domestic interests is expanding worldwide and, while it is true that the Chinese naval potential is not yet at the level of the US, in the coming years the equation could suffer a radical change.