SEA STORY: China’s Expanding Navy.

In 2018, the PLA-N is at the point of commissioning a 10,000-ton air defence cruiser every year. It already commissions four guided missile destroyers, two guided missile frigates, and nine guided missile corvettes annually. These ships are fitted with advanced computers, data links, and long-range weaponry, as well as sensors with capabilities inconceivable to earlier generations.

But each advance in capability means additional complexity. Solid state equipment may be much more reliable than the valves of the past, but setting up complicated software-controlled systems and managing networks are highly demanding activities. Over-the-horizon tactics require greater precision and awareness of orders of magnitude than the old systems.

The PLA-N is clearly doing its best to advance its star performers. The commanding officers of the early anti-piracy deployments to the Indian Ocean are now admirals. But the great majority of the senior leadership and middle management of the PLA-N can have only a theoretical understanding of the capabilities of the force that is now being deployed.

Furthermore, the expansion has been so rapid that there must be very little chance to winnow out the inferior and mediocre – any personnel with operational experience with the new technology will have to be promoted and assigned to new construction. In the First World War, Britain’s Royal Navy struggled with the consequences of large-scale promotion past competence in a massively expanded fleet. Its operational performance reflected this, a lesson the PLA-N cannot ignore.

Naval traditions are expensive to come by — in treasure and blood. But once earned, those traditions can last centuries.