FOR CONTINUED ANALYSIS SUBSCRIBE TO GUNNERS SHOT WITH YOUR EMAIL
In the 11th episode of the China Challenge the ambitions snd limitations of the PLA Navy were covered in great detail by Cmde R S Vasan (Retd) , Director General, Chennai Centre For China Studies. It was a great session and elicited searching questions from the audience. This was the second foray into the maritime domain in this series. It was good.
Sir, the Chinese are churning out naval vessels like cookies but churning out the commensurate trained personnel to staff them will be highly unlikely. Given their demographic trends this is only going to worsen with time. The degree of automation/autonomy required for robotic vessels to adequately compensate for lack of skilled personnel is surely not going to be available, if ever, in this decade. And, even if such autonomous vessels become available, it’s doubtful how effective they will actually be in war, given the control & communication challenges across the vast distances of the Pacific and Indian Oceans. So, other than to bolster their military preparedness propaganda, is this another excess industrial capacity utilization scheme or perhaps in preparation for their standard dump-and-capture-market-share tactic, this time in the global armaments market ?
Gunners Shot 
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