The PLA has a new way to break the situation in anti-submarine warfare, and the "big fish of the United States" lurking underwater will face the PLA's dimensionality reduction strike.
CCTV News reported that the Dalian Naval Academy of the People's Liberation Army Navy organized trainees to conduct practical training in anti-submarine warfare, and in addition to the traditional scene of a deep rocket hitting underwater targets, there was also a scene of the trainees using a small unmanned boat to search for submarines.
[Naval Academy Cadets Release Unmanned Anti-Submarine]
This shows that the PLA has begun to systematically train unmanned equipment for the Navy, and with the spread of these intelligent unmanned ships, the PLA's anti-submarine system will become more and more solid.
We all know that with the United States Northrop Grumman, MARTAC and other military enterprises have launched various surface or underwater unmanned ship concepts. The large-scale diffusion of small and medium-sized unmanned ship technology is not only a foregone conclusion, but related technological achievements have also begun to emerge like mushrooms after a rain with the active investment of various countries.
At the same time, judging from the current speed of technological development, small and medium-sized unmanned ships will usher in high-speed iterative upgrades in the foreseeable future, and gradually become an indispensable part of naval warfare in the new era in continuous improvement.
[Autonomous Surface Vessel (ASV) launched by MARTAC Corporation of the United States]
The emergence of this trend is somewhat unexpected, after all, from past experience, even in the Cold War era with an arms race, mankind has never experienced such a high-intensity iteration of military technology and concept renewal in such a short period of time.
So much so that to some extent, technological progress alone is no longer enough for a country to adapt to modern warfare in the new era. Whoever is able to develop supporting military theories at the same time as technological progress and so that these technologies can play their role to the maximum is expected to become the ultimate winner.
Fortunately, from the latest CCTV news report of the training footage of the Dalian Naval Academy of the PLA Navy, we can see that the PLA is maintaining the lead on this issue.
Because in this anti-submarine skills training, the Naval Academy not only arranged such traditional training subjects as "rocket depth bombing to hit underwater targets", but also added the subject of "using unmanned platforms to detect and search underwater targets".
【563肇庆舰发射火箭深弹】
This means that the PLA has begun to list the operation of small and medium-sized unmanned ships as a basic subject that needs to be systematically cultivated by the academy, and as more and more students begin to learn how to use these small and medium-sized unmanned ships, the scale of the Chinese Navy's unmanned ship talent pool will be further improved.
This will give the PLA more spare time to develop tactics that rely on unmanned ships to operate, and anti-submarine warfare is an area in which it can focus on investing.
[PLA unmanned anti-submarine under sail]
After all, compared with the vast and unobstructed sky, the existing underwater detection technology is often limited by various objective factors in the actual application process. As a result, in anti-submarine warfare, the most effective anti-submarine tactic is to use a large number of ships carrying sonar and other underwater detection equipment to build a surface anti-submarine network to curb the activities of enemy submarines.
Of course, the problem with this tactic is also obvious, that is, there is a clear need for the number of ships involved in the operation. The number must not be small, otherwise there will be vulnerabilities in the anti-submarine network.
The People's Liberation Army (PLA) will build more than 70 056/056A corvettes in total, which is to take a fancy to the advantages of low cost and short construction period of this class of ships while being able to use anti-submarine capabilities, so that the PLA can quickly pull out a considerable number of surface anti-submarine forces in a short period of time, and effectively curb the activities of US nuclear submarines in the waters around China.
[056 corvettes of the People's Liberation Army]
However, no matter how cost-effective a frigate is, it also needs a large number of well-trained crews to drive it, and it needs supporting slots for maintenance and supply. This objectively limits the scale of service of the 056A frigate, and in the face of the further increase in military resource investment in the Asia-Pacific region by the United States, the anti-submarine pressure of the PLA has also begun to show a rising trend.
In this case, it is necessary for the PLA to further expand the anti-submarine force, and moreover, it is an anti-submarine force that requires less personnel and is cheaper to produce. Small and medium-sized unmanned ships with underwater detection capabilities are related products born under the stimulus of this demand, and for China at this stage, this solution does meet the needs of the PLA.
First, because China's intelligent unmanned technology has reached the world-class level, with the ability to allow unmanned ships to sail autonomously to perform designated tasks, and automatically return to port after the mission is over. There is little need for human intervention during the entire mission, and the collected data can also be transmitted to the relevant analysis units in real time through the data link.
[Zhuhai Yun unmanned system mother ship with autonomous navigation ability]
Even with the advancement of AI analysis technology, these data can be preliminarily analyzed by AI in the future, and then manually screened for a second time, effectively improving operational efficiency.
Second, China's industrial capacity is sufficient to support the construction of dozens or even hundreds of small and medium-sized unmanned anti-submarine ships in a short period of time, and with the aforementioned autonomous mission capabilities, a large number of marginal anti-submarine patrol missions can be entrusted to these unmanned anti-submarine ships. This will not only further strengthen the integrity of the PLA's surface anti-submarine network, but also improve the efficiency of detecting US military underwater targets. It is also possible to free manned anti-submarine ships from these boring tasks and devote them to more important ones.
What's more, in addition to anti-submarine, these small and medium-sized unmanned ships can also take on the task of detecting surface ships and air targets, and even launching small-scale attacks on them by replacing equipment.
It can be said that the People's Liberation Army (PLA) is deliberately using these unmanned ships to solve those "minutiae" but indispensable service tasks and reduce the pressure on personnel. And when this manned + unmanned system can allow the PLA to concentrate its limited human resources in more important areas, the PLA's comprehensive combat effectiveness will also be significantly improved.