China's New Nuclear-Powered Attack Submarine: Implications For Australia
🇦🇺 🇨🇳 🇺🇸 | Extensions
Analytical extensions-themed posts expand on material that has appeared in another newsletter/section and other parts of this website more generally.
As explained in a recent post, military media outlet Naval News claims that the nuclear-powered submarine which China recently launched at the Bohai Shipyard near Huludao along the Bohai Sea is not yet another Type 093B-class nuclear-powered attack submarine (SSN) but the first completed hull of the long-anticipated next-generation Type 095-class SSN.
As explained in the above post, much rests on the maturity and competitiveness of the Type 095-class SSN, and exceedingly little information is publicly available about the Type 095-class design at this time. In the absence of information, the above post identified several important areas of uncertainty and raised questions to be answered as new information becomes available. This post is intended to broach the potential implications of a new Chinese SSN design of currently unknown characteristics and performance for Australia, just as prior posts did with respect to Japan and Taiwan.
As things stand, Australia encounters a very limited threat from Chinese SSNs, with the still minor caveat that Australian warships operating alongside American and/or Japanese warships in the Philippine Sea may encounter a Chinese SSN. With respect to a PLAN presence around the Australian continent, China’s large fleet of diesel-electric submarines (SSKs) lacks the range-endurance to pose much of a (direct) threat to Australia, and the Chinese SSN threat is, at this time, essentially non-existent for want of numbers if nothing else. While China can, in principle, dispatch one, perhaps more, SSNs to operate around Australia, the country’s SSN fleet is simply too small to operate around Australia while also undertaking other, more important missions, a dynamic that exists whatever qualitative judgement one makes about China’s most recently deployed Type 093B-class SSNs. The major expansion of the Bohai Shipyard and the reported introduction of the first of a new generation of Type 095-class SSNs may, however, may result in a very different situation over the next decade or so, one in which a Chinese SSN presence around Australia may go from a near-impossibility on practical grounds to something that is increasingly treated as a given.
Should China build and deploy additional SSNs in large numbers—perhaps ten to twenty, if not more—over the coming decade or so, Australia will likely encounter a very different situation than what it has grown accustomed to and been able to take for granted. A situation in which even a single Chinese SSN undertakes what amounts to a standing deployment around Australia’s ~30,000 kilometer long coastline will pose a major threat to merchant ships along the approaches to major Australian ports. Large ocean-going merchant ships are, in a given part of the world, more limited in terms of throughput than in aggregate numbers, not least in a wartime situation in which a large subset of the world’s fleet of merchant ships is likely to be, in effect, stranded in Chinese ports alongside much of the world’s shipbuilding capacity.
A single Chinese SSN equipped with thirty or so heavyweight torpedoes allowed to freely operate along the approaches to Australian ports and other forms of maritime infrastructure, such as the massive floating liquefied natural gas (FLNG) platform off the coast of Western Australia, can wreak havoc on the Australian economy in the event of a major war, particularly a major protracted war.
The closest analogy to such a hypothetical Australia-China dynamic playing out in the 2030s can be found in the Second World War, when the German and Japanese navies, including a small number of German diesel submarines operating from Japanese-occupied ports in Southeast Asia, operated around the Australian continent while attacking and sinking merchant ships in the process.
The Royal Australian Navy and the Australian Defence Force more generally are far from helpless when it comes to countering a potential presence of Chinese SSNs around the Australian continent. If nothing else, the United States can be expected to help bolster Australia’s defences in this and other areas, given how critical Australia is likely to be in the event of a major and likely protracted war between China and the United States. It is nevertheless important not to think about this issue in terms of absolutes. The analytically important question is not whether a Chinese SSN presence—which may well be limited to just a single SSN—around the Australian continent can be countered, but at what cost, specifically at what opportunity cost.
Here, as elsewhere, China encounters strong structural incentives to, in effect, “go on the offensive,” an undertaking for which SSNs with functionally unlimited range—excluding provisions for the crew, torpedoes/missiles, and certain types of supplies—are exceptionally well suited. A single Chinese SSN near the Australian continent is likely to force Australia, and perhaps also the United States, to refrain from deploying some number of anti-submarine warfare (ASW) warships and/or ASW aircraft and/or Australia’s own forthcoming Virginia-class and AUKUS-class SSNs elsewhere in the Western Pacific so as to secure Australia’s maritime approaches—plural—against an undersea threat that, for all practical intents and purposes, did not previously exist. Stated differently, Australia may, in a worst-case scenario, even need to primarily employ its forthcoming SSNs as defensive ASW assets to secure Australia’s maritime approaches—as opposed to operating against the Chinese navy in the South China Sea and Philippine Sea—in the event that China builds and deploys a much larger fleet of more competitive SSNs, which may or may not come in the form of the new Type 095-class SSN design.
It is productive to paraphrase a section of text included in the prior post on the implications of China’s new Type 095-class SSN for Japan:
A significantly expanded Chinese SSN force will constitute a qualitatively new and distinct threat to [Australia], even if China’s new Type 095-class SSNs remain significantly inferior to the latest American Virginia-class SSNs. Here, as elsewhere, the fact remains that China does not always need perfect or world-leading military systems to significantly alter the regional military balance in its favour. Needless to say, the more competitive the new Type 095-class SSN is relative to the latest in American submarine technology, the greater the challenge that [Australia] will face in securing its maritime approaches in times of crisis and war in the 2030s and beyond. [Australia—and the United States have], for decades, been able to use forward-sensor and anti-submarine capability barriers to greatly blunt, if not neutralize, the threat posed [to the Australian continent by Chinese] submarines. The mere prospect of a large fleet of potentially far more competitive Chinese SSNs should raise alarm bells in [Canberra] unless [Australian] officials are aware of some fundamental qualitative shortcomings of the new Chinese Type 095-class SSN design that will significantly constrain its military implications for [Australia] without being sensitive to how many China comes to build and deploy over the coming years. (emphasis added)
As mentioned with respect to Japan, the new Type 095-class and future Chinese nuclear-powered submarines that draw upon, and perhaps expand upon, whatever qualitative advances it encompasses relative to preceding Chinese nuclear-powered submarines, may have a significant land-attack capability. The latest Type 093B-class SSNs are understood to be equipped with a vertical launch system (VLS). Although Chinese SSNs and SSKs alike appear to be increasingly viewed as forward sonar nodes and forward anti-ship missile launchers—as seen in terms of the torpedo-launched YJ-18 and YJ-19 anti-ship missiles, such missiles may well have land-attack modes and, failing that, China has the option of loading the torpedo tubes of its submarines and, where applicable, the VLS cells, with land-attack munitions, whether of the subsonic cruise missile, ballistic missile, or supersonic cruise missile varieties.
While a Chinese SSN deployed near the Australian continent is first and foremost useful as a deployed “fleet in being” that can induce Australia and perhaps the United States to forgo the deployment of scarce ASW assets that will be high in demand elsewhere and, secondarily, to damage, if not sink, merchant ships of various types that the Australian economy cannot do without, there may well be a fairly short list of very high priority terrestrial targets in Australia that China may want to target early on in a war. Although China has other ways to undertake such attacks, one should not discount the possibility of a forward-deployed Chinese SSN being used to either undertake pre-planned strikes or strikes against targets of opportunity, not least as a result of how SSNs constitute an all-aspect threat to Australia in terms of air defence and ballistic missile defence unlike the People’s Liberation Army Rocket Force’s (PLARF) land-based missiles. That said, it is important to bear in mind that the virtual attrition that a Chinese SSN near Australia can impose on Australian and American ASW capabilities is likely to be far more consequential than a limited number of SSN-launched strikes against terrestrial targets in Australia.
In the absence of information, observers tend to speculate, but serious analysts endeavour to identify important areas of uncertainty and raise questions to be answered as new information is uncovered and rendered available at a later date. This SPAS Consulting analysis merely presumes that the new Type 095-class will constitute some form of qualitative improvement of some sort over the preceding Type 093B-class SSNs and that China may find the Type 095-class design to be satisfactory enough to make full use of the much-expanded facilities of the Bohai Shipyard, which is the only Chinese shipyard to build “full-size” nuclear-powered submarines. It goes without saying that there are very major analytical uncertainties at play. As with the preceding posts on the implications of the Type 095-class SSN for China, Japan, and Taiwan, this post presumes little about the performance and competitiveness of China’s latest SSN design. For Australia, the single most important unknown concerns how many SSNs China will build and deploy over the next decade or so—a much larger fleet of decidedly imperfect Chinese SSNs will still have the potential to negatively affect Australia.
While forward-deployed Type 095-class and Type 093B-class SSNs constitute some of the most potent threats to the Australian continent, it bears emphasis that China has other ways to attack terrestrial and maritime targets in and around the Australian continent, as well as militarily important adjacent areas in Papua New Guinea and the South Pacific. This dynamic has been the subject of several SPAS Consulting analyses:
