Congressional Research Service epub China Naval Modernization: Implications for U.S. Navy Capabilities- Background and Issues for Congress

Updated 10/28/2020: In an era of renewed great power competition, China’s militarymodernization effort, including its naval modernization effort, has become the top focus of U.S.defense planning and budgeting. China’s navy, which China has been steadily modernizing formore than 25 years, since the early to mid-1990s, has become a formidable military force withinChina’s near-seas region, and it is conducting a growing number of operations in more-distantwaters, including the broader waters of the Western Pacific, the Indian Ocean, and watersaround Europe.China’s navy is viewed as posing a major challenge to the U.S. Navy’s ability to achieveand maintain wartime control of blue-water ocean areas in the Western Pacific—the first suchchallenge the U.S. Navy has faced since the end of the Cold War—and forms a key element ofa Chinese challenge to the long-standing status of the United States as the leading militarypower in the Western Pacific. Some U.S. observers are expressing concern or alarm regardingthe pace of China’s naval shipbuilding effort, particularly for building larger surface ships, andresulting trend lines regarding the relative sizes China’s navy and the U.S. Navy.China’s naval modernization effort encompasses a wide array of ship, aircraft, andweapon acquisition programs, as well as improvements in maintenance and logistics, doctrine,personnel quality, education and training, and exercises. China’s navy has currently has certainlimitations and weaknesses, and is working to overcome them. China’s military modernizationeffort, including its naval modernization effort, is assessed as being aimed at developingcapabilities for addressing the situation with Taiwan militarily, if need be; for achieving agreater degree of control or domination over China’s near-seas region, particularly the SouthChina Sea; for enforcing China’s view that it has the right to regulate foreign military activitiesin its 200-mile maritime exclusive economic zone (EEZ); for defending China’s commercialsea lines of communication (SLOCs), particularly those linking China to the Persian Gulf; fordisplacing U.S. influence in the Western Pacific; and for asserting China’s status as the leadingregional power and a major world power.The U.S. Navy in recent years has taken a number of actions to counter China’s navalmodernization effort. Among other things, the U.S. Navy has shifted a greater percentage of itsfleet to the Pacific; assigned its most-capable new ships and aircraft and its best personnel tothe Pacific; maintained or increased general presence operations, training and developmentalexercises, and engagement and cooperation with allied and other navies in the Indo-Pacific;increased the planned future size of the Navy; initiated, increased, or accelerated numerousprograms for developing new military technologies and acquiring new ships, aircraft, unmannedvehicles, and weapons; begun development of new operational concepts (i.e., new ways toemploy Navy and Marine Corps forces) for countering Chinese maritime A2/AD forces; andsignaled that the Navy in coming years will shift to a more-distributed fleet architecturethat will feature a smaller portion of larger ships, a larger portion of smaller ships, and asubstantially greater use of unmanned vehicles. The issue for Congress is whether the U.S. Navyis responding appropriately to China’s naval modernization effort.