The Chinese navy is hard at work on a huge new amphibious assault ship – a combination troop transport and aircraft carrier that could carry hundreds of troops toward Taiwan, and then launch helicopters to deposit those troops behind Taiwanese defenses.
That ship, the Type 076, makes sense. Many of the world’s leading navies operate vessels of this type: the US Navy has its nine Wasp- and America-class ships, the French navy has its three Mistrals and the Australian navy has its two Canberras. The Royal Navy used to have an aviation assault ship, HMS Ocean, but sold it to Brazil as a cost-saving measure in 2018.
What doesn’t necessarily make sense is the other apparent assault ship class the Chinese are building, astonishingly quickly. In late October, Tom Shugart – a former US Navy submariner and current fellow at the Center for a New American Security think tank in Washington DC – spotted the strange vessel in recent commercial satellite imagery depicting a shipyard outside the city of Guangzhou in southern China.
The mystery ship has the flat flight deck of an assault ship as well as the twin islands – one for navigation, one for directing flight operations – that are currently in vogue with designers of aircraft-carrying vessels.
The Chinese navy is hard at work on a huge new amphibious assault ship – a combination troop transport and aircraft carrier that could carry hundreds of troops toward Taiwan, and then launch helicopters to deposit those troops behind Taiwanese defenses.
That ship, the Type 076, makes sense. Many of the world’s leading navies operate vessels of this type: the US Navy has its nine Wasp- and America-class ships, the French navy has its three Mistrals and the Australian navy has its two Canberras. The Royal Navy used to have an aviation assault ship, HMS Ocean, but sold it to Brazil as a cost-saving measure in 2018.
What doesn’t necessarily make sense is the other apparent assault ship class the Chinese are building, astonishingly quickly. In late October, Tom Shugart – a former US Navy submariner and current fellow at the Center for a New American Security think tank in Washington DC – spotted the strange vessel in recent commercial satellite imagery depicting a shipyard outside the city of Guangzhou in southern China.
The mystery ship has the flat flight deck of an assault ship as well as the twin islands – one for navigation, one for directing flight operations – that are currently in vogue with designers of aircraft-carrying vessels.