The War Zone – The incident is the latest in which a Chinese naval vessel has been accused of firing a laser at a Western military aircraft.

The War Zone – The first full image of China’s “Bohai Sea Monster” wing-in-ground effect craft has emerged, but major questions remain.

China Maritime Studies Institute – VADM Li Hanjun was a fast-rising star, terminated before he could make his full contribution and career achievements:

Naval News – Ekranoplans, special ultra-low flying aircraft, promise to combine features from ships, airplanes, and hovercraft. There are many designs and projects out there, but they have yet to truly realise their promise. Now the discovery of the large 4-jet ‘Bohai Sea Monster’ in China harks back to the mysterious Soviet projects of the Cold War.

CIMSEC – Writing in the November 2023 issue of Military Art (军事学术), a prestigious journal published by the Chinese Academy of Military Science, three PLAN officers revealed that the peacetime operations of Chinese submarines are highly vulnerable to the U.S. Navy’s undersea surveillance system, raising serious questions about their strategic and operational utility.

US Naval War College Review – The PLA Navy will play a key role in any flash points and conflicts in the western Pacific. This study of professional military education for senior PLA Navy officers supplements analyses of platforms and capabilities with a look at how senior navy commanders are prepared to lead in combat.

US Naval War College Review – China’s rise as a major maritime and naval power in recent decades resulted from a deliberate policy choice, but that choice was not an uncontroversial one. Internal Chinese Communist Party debate about naval power was resolved by balancing entrenched continental interests, resulting in an integrated but possibly compromised policy approach.

China Maritime Studies Institute – Since mid-November 2023 to the present Houthi armed forces in Yemen have continued to hijack and attack vessels in the Red Sea that “use Israeli ports” or “engage in trade with Israel” to oppose Israel’s military operations in Gaza and disrupt military assistance to Israel from the United States, the United Kingdom, and other countries. As of April 1, 2024, over 86 vessels related to the United States, the United Kingdom, Israel, and other countries have been attacked. The Houthis continue to maintain control over the Red Sea, forcing vessels from these countries to risk damage and loss of life while navigating through the area. The crisis in the Red Sea is worsening.

RUSI – The China-Cook Island’s Comprehensive Strategic Partnership draws the island nation into a rising competition in the pacific between great powers.

The War Zone – The presence of Chinese carrier strike groups farther east than ever before is a taste of what’s to come as the PLAN’s reach expands.

National Interest – James Holmes says that leaving the port of Darwin in Chinese hands would bestow on Beijing a golden opportunity to make mischief for Australia and its allies.

China Maritime Studies Institute – Xi Jinping has played a direct and active role in China’s naval buildup. He is China’s first great navalist statesman, the world’s greatest navalist leader today, and among the world’s greatest navalist statesmen in modern history.

Notwithstanding major advances in ships, submarines, aircraft, and other hardware, Chinese military leaders believe that the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) continues to lag behind in human factors.

Since Xi Jinping came to power in 2012, the PLAN has dismissed (or is rumored to have dismissed) eleven flag officers. Beyond combating outright dysfunction, these removals are intended to prevent potential disloyalty and factionalism, centralize power, and further modernization and warfighting goals.

These high-profile dismissals have had no apparent impact on PLAN operational capabilities, which continue to improve at a remarkable rate. From the Taiwan Strait to the “distant oceans” (远洋), the service is present daily and visible internationally, particularly its surface fleet, indicating reliability, trust, and growing responsibilities and capabilities.

Since 2008, the PLAN’s surface fleet has almost doubled. Despite being projected to exceed 400 ships by the end of 2025, China’s Navy continues to successfully crew, operate, and train with them.

China’s Navy draws on a massive, sufficiently-capable talent pool and education system. Provincial-level compulsory conscription quotas avoid individual compellence thanks to high levels of volunteerism.

Given the demands of increasingly frequent and intense training and missions—often with the austere privations of submarines or remote installations—mental health support is increasingly prioritized. Nevertheless, it remains a weakness for China’s Navy, which views U.S. care as the gold standard yet has treated counseling as a “political” issue.

China’s Naval Command College in Nanjing—the Naval War College’s closest equivalent—educates its students differently from its counterpart in Newport by focusing on naval operations and warfighting for top-priority scenarios.

The PLAN enjoys unique human capital advantages: educational partnerships as early as elementary school; personal data compiled centrally, available and utilizable without privacy restriction; eldercare benefits; and warfighting-focused naval education.

PLAN sources perceive weaknesses in lack of talent for new-domain operations and advanced S&T given rising demand in these burgeoning areas; recruitment and training pipeline supply-demand imbalance and talent-skills mismatches; officers’ overly narrow early-career experience and subsequent aging out of cutting-edge relevance; and youths’ declining commitment to the Communist system.

Despite being an improvement on its Soviet progenitor, China’s Political Commissar system could represent a critical weakness, causing real-time decision-making bottlenecks or distraction, particularly in crisis or conflict.

Global Times – China’s domestically built 10,000-ton-class hospital ship, the Auspicious Ark, conducted a multi-element, full-process medical rescue drill in a certain area of the Yellow Sea recently, the official Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) media reported on Monday. An expert told the Global Times that this indicates the new ship has been commissioned into the navy of the PLA Northern Theater Command, completing the strategic deployment of hospital ships across the PLA’s Eastern, Southern and Northern theater commands.

War on the Rocks – Has Beijing found a new “assassin’s mace” to keep the U.S. military out of a fight over Taiwan?

China Maritime Studies Institute – A quick summary of this conference held earlier this month.

China Maritime Studies Institute – The sky is high, the lake is vast, and ghosts are lurking.

BBC – At just 37 hectares, the Philippines-controlled island of Pagasa – or “hope” – is barely big enough to live on. There is almost nothing there.

The 300 or so inhabitants live in a cluster of small, wooden houses. They fish in the clear, turquoise waters, and grow what vegetables they can in the sandy ground.

But they are not alone in these disputed waters: just off shore, to the west, lies an armada of ships.

These are all Chinese, from the navy, the coastguard or the so-called maritime militia – large fishing vessels repurposed to maintain Chinese dominance of this sea. As our plane approached the island we counted at least 20.

CTV News –  China has long sought to intimidate Taiwan with its massive navy, air force and the world’s largest standing army, but it’s mere dinghies that are now causing the most consternation.

War on the Rocks – Although American naval forces would likely come into play to counter a Chinese blockade of Taiwan, America’s most likely immediate response option is strategic airlift of vital supplies. The successful Berlin Airlift in the earliest phase of the Cold War offers both potential objectives and serious challenges of carrying out such a mission.

Naval News – China continues to innovate in the underwater arena. A fresh image reveals one of its latest creations, an extra-large underwater drone (XLUUV). The drone is likely armed with torpedoes, mines or missiles, setting it apart from Western types.

China Maritime Studies Institute – As China continues to rise as a global sea power, its maritime strategy continues to evolve. Among these critical evolutions is one of the People’s Liberation Army’s naval special operations forces’ most elite units: the Sea Dragons. A small yet highly specialized unit, the Sea Dragons entered the global spotlight and international consciousness with the 2018 film Operation Red Sea, raising several questions for Chinese naval experts. What does Chinese military strategy and doctrine require of special forces, and specifically naval SOF, to be able to accomplish the mission, particularly along the Taiwan Strait and in the South China Sea? What are their capabilities and limitations? What real-world experience do they have and how might they be employed in the future? This volume attempts to answer those questions and many more regarding one of China’s more enigmatic units and its role in future peacetime and low-intensity conflicts.

1945 – The People’s Republic of China (PRC) just fielded the world’s largest space support ship by far. 

The Atlantic Council – This paper examines the potential for the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to exploit its growing network of overseas ports and bases to challenge control of the seas in a conventional war with the United States. Security concerns with Chinese ownership of overseas ports fall into three main categories. First, China collects vast amounts of intelligence via its port network. Second, it could use that intelligence and its control of key ports and piers to disrupt US shipments during wartime. Finally, China could leverage these ports to pre-position weapons, ammunition, and equipment to resupply its warships and armed merchants or rapidly establish anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) nodes near major maritime choke points. In short, China could exploit this network to challenge the sea control essential to US success in an armed conflict.

Center for Maritime Security – A report published this March by the African Center for Strategic Studies revealed China’s large and growing influence in Africa’s port industry. According to the report, state-backed Chinese firms have ownership stakes in a third of African ports, with the largest portion of those ports being in West Africa. Even more alarmingly for the United States, many of these ports have already been used to house People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) ships, conduct military exercises, and, in one case, host a Chinese naval base. A large Chinese presence in West African ports poses a security threat to the United States because it increases the PLAN’s presence in the Atlantic, which is in the United States’ direct security periphery and is less defensible than the Pacific.  

BBC – The Chinese coastguard has seized a tiny sandbank in the South China Sea, state media has reported, in an escalation of a regional dispute with the Philippines.