www.China-Defense.com

There are clear indications of its future intentions regarding military hardware. Many of them may now be described as over ambitious given the relative backwardness of the Chinese industry and the PLA. But if one looks at China's economic growth, its successful leveraging of its huge market potential to acquire technology from the West and Russia's willingness to sell high tech weapons, there is no reason to believe that many of these goals will be reached. The economic and financial situation in Russia means that Russian arms makers are only too willing to sell anything China wants. With the West, China uses trade as a means to acquire high technology through tech transfers including sensitive missile and radar tech from the US, industrial espionage and other means.

According to open source writings by senior Chinese military officers, some of these future naval technologies include: High performance microwave weapons to "destroy the opponent's electronic equipment." Robotics and unmanned vehicles, Arsenal ships and undersea mine-laying robots; Tactical laser weapons for anti-ship defence; Submarine-launched air defence weapons; Lasers, particle beams and microwave beams for precision strikes; plasma weaponry, electromagnetic pulse systems, and last but not the least, IW capabilities.

Optimistically speaking, it is not at all unreasonable to expect that by 2050, the PLA Navy would have reached a capability level quite comparable to Western Navies of the time - perhaps not on par, but enough to be a match for the western navies. A more pragmatic assessment might be that the technology gap might have narrowed down to about a decade or so.

So then, we might see a more professional though numerically smaller force operating vastly more capable platforms flying the Chinese ensign to the seven seas. There will have been fleetwide qualitative improvements in weapons systems, platforms, command and control facilities, along with doctrinal changes to allow for integrated joint force warfighting capabilities. Stealth ships perhaps along the lines of the US Navy's DD-21, armed with various types of sophisticated missiles and weapons, and using electric propulsion may well be in service. Stealth aircraft operating from aircraft carriers and offensive unmanned air and sea vehicles may also be in use. The submarine force would be qualitatively far more capable and the numbers of quiet, stealthy nuclear powered ballistic and attack submarines would increase significantly. Other naval air assets would be much more capable and long-range aircraft deployments would become routine. Sustained bluewater deployments, joint force operations, the use of NCW and utilization of the complete battlespace would be commonplace. In the Asia pacific region, this force will probably be second only to the JMSDF.