The puzzling question is:-

Why would the PLA Navy spend such a huge sum of funds on acquring Russian kilo submarines and then not send the submarines on patrol to make its submarine force potent?

It also make nonsense of India’s constant talk of denying the PLA navy the Indian Ocean. India wants to be a world power and is using China as a boogeyman to hide her real ambitions.

Reply: Yes it begs a lot of questions. Only, keep in mind that the small number of patrols doesn’t mean that Chinese sibmarines are not doing anything at all. “Patrols” probably refer to longer voyages away from the Chinese coast. So it is possible that Chinese submarines, like that of its neighbouring countries, are busy training up and down the coast. They just don’t venture far away very often. The patrol data is a small window into their operations, but we just don’t know very much about it because the intelligence community is so tight-lipped about what’s going on, and the little it does reveal tends to be fed into threat warnings in support of defense posturing.

China probably spends large sums of money (and here we also know very little in public) on its submarine fleet because it feels it needs to have some capability to counter the submarines and aircraft carriers other countries deploy off its coast. And here a potential Taiwan scenario is probably an important driver.

It is true that it is hard to see what India has to worry about from the Chinese navy, but India is looking ahead 20-30 years and sees a growing Chinese capability. It may not mean a pending attack by any means, but India’s naval modernization is driven by a need to counter potentially hostile capabilities – plus a doze of national pride and ambitions to be a significant naval power in the Indian Ocean. MK

1. Do you think that the US Navy is that good to track every Chinese sub on patrol? Maybe the Chinese are so smart that they just haven´t been discovered. Something stinks here.

2. Well if the Chinese Navy is so inactive and lacking experience how do you explain the Song Incident?
Doing nothing over the years and then suddenly sneaking undetected close into a carrier task force and surface and say hello to Uncle Sam. That is quite good for a coastal defense force, don´t you think?

Greetings from Germany.

Reply: Those are questions I would like the answers to myself. But there is no solid information in the public domain to answer either of them with confidence. So here are my subjective replies:

1. Yes, if it tries then I think the US is capable of tracking every Chinese submarine on patrol. That’s not to say that tracking them is easy. For one thing, some of the Chinese diesel-electric submarines are quiet enough that they could be very hard to detect under the right circumstances. But a quiet submarine is not enough; it takes a skilled crew to make use of that capability for it to matter on a deployment.

Another requirement is that the US continuously monitors each Chinese naval base, and that the US Navy has enough submarines in the area to track each submarine that leaves port. Of the 20 or so US submarines that are underway at any given time, about 12 are forward deployed on a specific mission. Some of these are tied down in the Persian Gulf and North Arabian Sea, so only a few are probably available to shadow Chinese submarines. In a US-Chinese crisis or war that priority would obviously change.

2. As for the Song-Kitty Hawk incident, who knows? We don’t know very much about the circumstances. Yes it surfaced near a US carrier, but it was one of only two patrols that year. The rumor was that the Kitty Hawk was operating near Okinawa, and the US Navy said the carrier was not conducting anti-submarine operations at the time of the incident. We also don’t know if the US Navy was aware of the Song submarine’s presence in the area.

What does tell us a lot about US capabilities in tracking Chinese submarines is this: Naval Intelligence is confident enough to state that there were no patrols in four years since 1981. That’s confidence! – MK

Please provide a reference for this quote. It flies in the face of most estimates of the PLA(N) plans for their submarine construction. From here and here.

You are correct that they are replacing older obsolete diesel submarines with more modern subs, both nuclear and diesel. They are also active in buying top of the line subs from Russia, and technology from other nations.

Reply: Yes, there are many rumors out there, not all of which appear to be accurate.

The reference is Worldwide Maritime Challenges published by the Office of Naval Intelligence in 2004. To get a copy, call their public affairs office at (301) 669-5670. Another more general guide is the Submarine Force Brief on the US Commander Submarine Force web site.

The World Wide Web has many virtues, but one of its greatest dangers is that inaccurate information can proliferate and be repeated so often that it is seen as accurate. The high Chinese submarine numbers used by many private institutes and the news media might be inflated because they include submarines that float but are not actually operational. – MK

1. A Han SSN cruised to Guam then got followed back to home.

2. A Song SSK stalked Kitty Hawk.

For all the other time of the year, they had been sleeping.