China’s navy is now growing at terrifying speed

Four days ago, Exercise Joint Sword finished, an annual exercise by the Chinese armed forces that sees increasing numbers of Chinese ships and aircraft encircle Taiwan. This year China described it as “strong punishment” in response to the inauguration of Taiwan’s newly elected President Lai – the candidate Beijing did not want to win. Forty-six People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) ships encircled the island and 82 of the 111 aircraft detected violated the Taiwanese Air Defence Identification Zone (ADIZ), the highest count on record.

Meanwhile the PLAN has just produced the first of a new class of corvette, taking less than a year to build it.

Whether improved global influence, economic growth, countering US hegemony or increasing national security and sovereignty is President Xi Jinping’s priority, the protection and expansion of trade is a golden thread that runs through all these themes. Recent events, in different ways, all support this objective.

Putin’s war in Ukraine, although existential to Ukrainians, will be seen through Xi’s lens as a useful drain on Western resources. The encircling of Taiwan shows ever-improving military cohesion which in turn increases the demand signal to the US and others to consider ‘what if?’

On the back of this, China’s military build-up continues at a remarkable pace. China is currently building the equivalent of the entire Royal Navy every two years. It was recently reported in these pages that they have built the first of a new class of stealth corvette in under a year. The US Navy’s equivalent, the Littoral Combat Ship, took four years (and is so useless that some are being paid off after only five years at sea). America’s new frigate, although bigger and more complex (assumption), will take seven years from laying down to sea trials. The Royal Navy’s equivalent, the Type 26 Frigate, about five (that is from keel being laid to trials. The timeline from ‘concept’ to ‘operational’ is much longer). Our industrial capacity to build ships is being outstripped by a factor of five.

Corvettes are interesting in their own right. They generally sit somewhere between offshore patrol vessels (OPVs) and frigates in terms of size and armament (although the Thaon di Revel class Italian ‘OPV’, which is as big as a British frigate and more heavily armed, proves that there is no universal convention when it comes to classifying warships). Normal, small corvettes are not limited by their ability to carry weapons, it’s more that they can’t fight as well in bad weather (though they can usually cross oceans), they don’t have the crew numbers to be able to multi-task and they lack the power generation, connectivity and bandwidth to contribute to the wider picture in the way destroyers and above can. Because they are small, they are also less flexible and adaptable over their lifespan.

Start putting expensive weapons and sensors in corvettes and you quickly have a ship inherently limited by these factors but that costs nearly as much as a frigate or destroyer. This is why the Royal Navy has never considered them. In fact, for the duration of my service, the word was forbidden for fear that it could be seized upon by the Treasury as a cheap alternative to ‘proper’ warfighting ships. The French have come to the same conclusion.

But the Chinese got into the corvette game in 2012, building 79 of their Type 056 of which 50 went to the PLAN, 22 to their coastguard and seven were exported. Then in 2021 they stopped. Maybe they thought that these ships were too small to project power globally but not survivable in a conflict closer to home – the classic ‘corvette trap’.

That they have started building ships in this space again suggests they’ve realised two things. First, there is a huge swathe of global maritime activity between coastal peacetime operations and high-intensity warfighting in which a corvette has utility. This is the zone in which 99 per cent of naval operations take place. Posturing around Taiwan, operations in the South China Sea and further afield off, say, Africa are all viable in a smaller hull leaving your larger ships to prepare for the 1 per cent. You wouldn’t want corvettes near the Taiwan Strait if the missiles are flying but then when that happens, you wouldn’t want any kind of surface ship there either.

Second, China is building corvettes because it can. If you want your fleet to have balance and mass, as any ambitious navy does, eventually you are going to cross a threshold where quantity starts to deliver a quality all of its own. You can add these hulls to the coastguard fleet and China’s thousands of non-fishing fishing vessels around the world and you have a considerable global maritime network to help assure your global trade network – some of which now has teeth.

It will be interesting to see how the new corvettes are armed. One thing is certain: being in the ship-borne missile game is eye-wateringly expensive. Tyler Rogoway of the War Zone did some analysis on this recently showing that even a smaller missile in the US inventory, the RIM-116 Rolling Airframe Missile, costs $950,000 a round. Tomahawk land attack missiles are $1,890,000 per shot whilst the highest end SM-3 Block IIA used to engage ballistic missile warheads in space is $28,700,000 each. It costs no less than $420m to fully load up an Arleigh Burke class destroyer’s vertical launch cells with a sensible mix of the above and others I haven’t listed. That’s more than it cost to build a British Type 23 Frigate.

It’s clear why so much money is being diverted into developing cheaper methods of knocking out multiple drones and slower missiles but these cheaper methods will forever remain close-in systems. If you want range, missiles (and a large ammo bill) are still the answer.

My bet is that this emerging class of Chinese warship will be fast, have a mix of highly capable missiles, guns and emerging technology. The corvettes will be perfect for trialling new equipment and as an added bonus will provide operational experience to the big ship commanding officers of the future, something that current Chinese destroyer and frigate captains reportedly lack.

Back to the top. Chinese engagements of the last few days are a continuum of the norm: meetings with Putin to see how their invasion of Ukraine can be sustained; Exercise Joint Sword to impose themselves locally and regionally; a tri-lateral diplomacy meeting with Japan and South Korea to discuss trade options. Whether it’s draining western resources, bullying at sea and maritime trade assurance (or denial), then corvettes can contribute very handily – and long before the shooting starts.

If I was head of the PLAN I’d be lobbying hard for 50 of the new stealth corvettes. I’d be delighted that I could get them five times faster than anyone in Nato, and I wouldn’t be worrying too much about the bill either.