Dwayne A. Day
During the Cold War, American reconnaissance satellites monitored Soviet aircraft carrier construction at the Mykolaiv shipyard in the Black Sea. By the 1980s, intelligence analysts looking at the photographs back in Washington noted that the Soviet Union was struggling to build large ships, with the fourth vessel of the Kiev-class taking almost twice as long to build as the first. By the 1990s, new Russian ship construction was almost nonexistent. It recovered slowly, but remains problem-plagued.
Whereas Russian shipbuilding languished for decades, by the 2000s and later, US intelligence analysts became increasingly aware of a dramatic increase in Chinese ship production, including aircraft carriers. The first Chinese aircraft carrier, Liaoning, was a heavily modified Soviet-era ship that was never completed and headed for the scrapyards when the Chinese acquired it via subterfuge. The Chinese rebuilt it and the ship entered service in 2012. The second Chinese carrier, Shandong, was a modified copy of Liaoning, and entered service in 2017. (See “Flattops from space: the once (and future?) meme of photographing aircraft carriers from orbit,” The Space Review, July 19, 2021.)
The third Chinese aircraft carrier was the first of China’s own design, and significantly bigger and more capable than the first two. China’s first two carriers can only deploy a small number of planes that have limited range and payload capability. The new ship will obviously significantly expand its embarked aircraft and have a greater ability to project power than Liaoning or Shandong. That new ship’s construction and early operations have been tracked by Westerners using commercial satellite imagery that has proliferated in the past decade.
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