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| Chinese Navy Warships on patrol (File Photo) |
The People's Liberation Army Navy last week held large-scale military exercises in the East China and South China seas, according to Sina's military news web portal.
On July 28, the South Sea Fleet led a live-fire exercise in an area of the South China Sea measuring several tens of thousands of square kilometers, along with the other PLA Navy fleets, the Guangzhou Military Region and the Second Artillery Corps; on July 30 and 31, the PLA Navy dispatched a fleet of electronic-warfare aircraft and Xian H-6 twin-engine jet bombers on several missions flying over the Miyako Strait, the waterway between Japan's Miyako Island and Okinawa Island, into the Western Pacific.
The targets of the two military exercises were not announced in the PLA press release. Military affairs websites have suggested that the South China Sea exercise is likely aimed at territory within what China calls the "first island chain" — the term the Chinese military uses to refer to the string of archipelagos extending from the Kuril islands south through Japan and its Ryukyu islands, Taiwan and the Philippines — likely in preparation for a potential scenario in which a US aircraft carrier war fleet break through the first island chain. Although this is a reasonable assumption, in a real combat scenario, relying on anti-ship missiles, conventional submarine-launched missiles and air-launched cruise missiles with a range of just 300 kilometers to take on a carrier fleet means that all the warships, planes and submarines would have to penetrate the carrier fleet's outer defenses and approach its inner defenses to fire their payload. This kind of scenario is hard to imagine playing out in reality, given the naval power of the US.
Read the full story at Want China Times