The prospect of a quieter Chinese SSBN is driving, in part, the AUKUS deal among Australia, Britain and the US, which will see increased deployments of British and US attack submarines to Western Australia. By the 2030s, Australia expects to launch its first nuclear-powered attack submarines with British technology.
“We are at a fascinating point here,” said Alexander Neill, a Singapore-based defence analyst. “China is on track with a new generation of submarine ahead of the first AUKUS boats – even if they are at parity in terms of capability, that is highly significant,” said Neill, an adjunct fellow at Hawaii’s Pacific Forum think-tank.
Even if China’s submarine force reaches technological parity, it will need to train aggressively and intensively over the next decade to match AUKUS capabilities, he added.
Vasily Kashin, a Moscow-based Chinese military scholar at HSE University, said it was possible Chinese engineers had made the breakthroughs described in the report.
Although China most likely obtained some key Russian technology in the 1990s after the break up of the Soviet Union, Kashin said, there was no known sharing agreement between Beijing and Moscow outside of a 2010 nuclear reactor agreement.
He said China may have made progress via adaptations of Russian designs and through other sources, including espionage, but it is unlikely they have the newest-generation Russian systems.
“China is not an adversary of Russia in the naval field,” Kashin said. “It is not creating difficulties for us, it is creating problems for the US.”
Source: CNA
