Future PLAN orbat discussion

AndrewS

Brigadier
Registered Member
Why should even have to resort to that? Did you not read the paragraph that I wrote in response to AndrewS just above my response to you, that you quoted in your response? This is what I mean when I compare an NFL QB to a high school QB. The former is larger and has significantly more weapons than the latter. This is not a fair comparison just because they are both called QBs/destroyers.

Let's make it more obvious then.

A Type-55 cruiser costs $850M
An Arleigh Burke destroyer costs $1700M

So you can buy 2 Type-55 Cruisers for the price of a single Burke Destroyer.

And note that a Type-55 Cruiser is significantly bigger and better armed than a Burke.

This still implies that the PPP exchange rate underestimates how Chinese industry can produce warships at low cost.
 

Tam

Brigadier
Registered Member
Let's make it more obvious then.

A Type-55 cruiser costs $850M
An Arleigh Burke destroyer costs $1700M

So you can buy 2 Type-55 Cruisers for the price of a single Burke Destroyer.

And note that a Type-55 Cruiser is significantly bigger and better armed than a Burke.

This still implies that the PPP exchange rate underestimates how Chinese industry can produce warships at low cost.

Going to put in my two cents here.

That kind of price difference is more than just PPP. There are other deep underlying structural factors in play here, factors that don't favor the US either.

The first is that the US shipbuilding industry has shrunk massively from its World War 2 years. You can write an entire book on this, cite pages of links but for the sake of brevity I'm not going to do that. Let's just say that when it comes to the shipbuilding industry, the US has been reduced to a dwarf. The remaining US large shipbuilders rely two things, Jones Act ships and ships for the US Navy. Shipbuilders like Austal USA, Fincantieri Marinette Marine, Bath Iron Works and Huntington Ingalls require US Navy contracts to survive. This means the cost of the shipyard's survival is tacked to the cost of each ship. This isn't the case with China when mega SOE shipyards have a huge civilian production. These shipyards do not need to tact the entire cost of survival to each warship they make, they make plenty enough ships to distribute their direct operating costs. Note that two of these shipyards are already foreign owned --- Austal USA is a subsidiary of Austal from Australia, and Marinette Marine is owned by Italian shipbuilder Fincantieri. These are the two shipyards that make the two LCS classes.

The second is that when you have a shrinking shipbuilding industry, so are the technical schools that are needed to train the welders and technicians needed. The US shipbuilding industry faces this ever shrinking pool of shipbuilding workers, and wages are going to get higher. The reason why US unemployment is low is actually due to a shrinking labor base. HII recently is looking for at least 3,400 workers to hire. If this keeps on, there will be manpower shortages with the US shipbuilding industry.

Lets add in contrast to the shrinking US shipbuilding industry, the Chinese shipbuilding industry is the world's number one in volume, is oversized and for years, is facing a glut. Your skilled labor base is much larger, your transportation infrastructure means you can bullet train lower wage workers in from surrounding areas outside of the city, increasing the size of the labor poll available for the shipyard. Not only wages are low, you can have construction being done 24/7. You also don't have unions.

The third is that as US companies have their usual high corporate margins and stockholders to satisfy. In China, the military industrial complex are SOEs. In China, the state owns the MIC, and not the other way around as Eisenhower once warned. That's another incentive for the SOE to keep their prices low and with lower profit margins. I heard before that Chinese shipyards prefer doing foreign contracts because they can tact a larger profit margin on those ships.

With the Chinese MIC being SOEs, every point of purchase of components from engines to weapons systems are also from SOEs.

The fourth is politics. In the US even these ship contracts have to be passed by Congress. Every politician wants the best for their states and constituents over the other. One result is that contracts are handed out in a year to year basis. This puts long term uncertainty for the shipyards which results to #1, where they have to tack their survival costs for every contract. If you are ordering one or two ships in a two or three year contract, the cost per ship will be much higher than say ordering a batch of 10 ships for 10 years production run. The Zumwalts costs like that because only three ships are made. If they decided to make 20, the costs will drop to the floor for each ship. The LCS classes are also into these single to two year contracts, with approvals done on a ship to ship basis, though the main point of doing this is keeping the shipyards contracted till hopefully, you get multi year, multi block contracts for the FFG(X). In China, you can see ships running in large production blocks, corvettes at over 60, a single frigate class up to 30 ships. If you consider the 052C/D a single class with two variants, the total class may well exceed 30 ships.

I'm pretty sure at some point, early in the production, a 052C would have cost like hell for the Chinese when they only built two. AESA radars are particularly costly, but once more of 052C are made, and transitions to the 052D which even more is made, the AESA radar costs would drop thanks to mass production of its component elements. The price of a 055 would hit the ceiling if only one, two or three are made, but for its prices to be low, it would have to be guaranteed a large batch in multiyear contracts. Regardless whether there are two shipyards making it, the component sources are the same for both. The AESA radars might potentially be the largest cost component of these ships, but having them produced in an unprecedented scale should take their prices from the ceiling to the floor.

Compare that to the Zumwalts where its largest AESA had to be expunged from the ship, because of cost. The SPY-4 AESA is the role equivalent to the Type 346A, intended to be the main S-band search radar of the ship. This leaves the Ford class to be the only users of this radar, which raises its cost higher. The only way I can see out of this, is when they mass produce the SPY-6 for the AB Flight III and its small sibling EASR for the FFG(X), the Ford class needs to be revised to use SPY-6 in future ships, and the unmade third Zumwalt also has to change to radar. The Zumwalt currently only has the SPY-3 as its sole and main radar, but its an X-band, its main role was to be an FCR but now has to do search radar functions as well, and its not optimized for that. Ford class also uses SPY-3, X-band radars on a carrier is not only for defensive purposes but for tracking and landing planes. But the SPY-3 is not being adopted on the AB Flight III nor the FFG(X), and with such low numbers, this radar set is going to be sky high (both ships decided to use SPQ-9B, a dual backed PESA by the way that's already in service and proven). The higher the price for an item, the more Congress gets sticker shock, the more contracts are cut, the more production is lessened, and the prices go even higher. Its an upward spiral.

Consider let's say, the new X-band radar on top of the 055. That's going to be expensive on top of the 346B radars. But if you have 055s being built like 20, the prices would drop. If these radars are also used on other ships, from the carrier 003 and onwards, to the 054B or the 052E, the prices would drop even further. You don't need the equivalent of full sized radars on the smaller ships. AESAs can scale down to smaller sizes, even down to rotary single or double faced ones. But its their building blocks, namely the elements and T/R modules that are being mass produced, and the more is made, the more the prices go lower, making them cheaper to apply on lower ships, which further lowers the prices of these components in a downward price spiral. There also other indirect factors along the production chain, and things like China having cornered the world's production of Gallium and rare earths also helps.
 

Lethe

Captain
Any future parity (broadly construed) between PLA and US military forces is far enough in the future (and difficult enough for most to contemplate) that I think looking even further ahead or to more maximalist scenarios is unproductive. That's a discussion that can wait another ten years.
 

Iron Man

Major
Registered Member
Let's make it more obvious then.

A Type-55 cruiser costs $850M
An Arleigh Burke destroyer costs $1700M

So you can buy 2 Type-55 Cruisers for the price of a single Burke Destroyer.

And note that a Type-55 Cruiser is significantly bigger and better armed than a Burke.

This still implies that the PPP exchange rate underestimates how Chinese industry can produce warships at low cost.
Not much more obvious for you, I'm afraid. As I said before, the internals are a complete unknown for you. To what mil-spec standards are the ships constructed? Don't tell me you can assume they are similar, just say you have no idea at all. All USN warships have a built-in degaussing setup. Do PLAN ships? The answer is no, BTW. How about damage control standards, maintenance standards, ship systems redundancy? Level of NBC protection? Level of EMP hardening? Robustness to hydrodynamic shocks? I could go on and on. There are all sorts of ways to cut corners that could go into a ship's cost that you have absolutely no way to even begin speculating about. Now, I'm not saying Chinese ships aren't easier to build. And an Arleigh Burke built in a Chinese shipyard would absolutely be significantly cheaper. How much? You literally have absolutely no idea. Literally. So you can go on making these nonsensical comparisons if you want, but they go on continuing to mean nothing except to fanbois. It's like looking at a funhouse mirror to try and get the body figure that you want.
 
It's like looking at a funhouse mirror to try and get the body figure that you want.
that's hilarious sentence, LOL!

anyway, Andy I think up this page made a point which I had expected to be posted earlier, that is if Chinese surface combatants cost a half of a cost of equivalent US surface combatants, the PLAN could double the number

what's your take?


(I'm aware of your Yesterday at 9:36 AM
That's like saying a high school quarterback being compared to a NFL quarterback is a "fair" comparison just because they're both quarterbacks. Yeah, that sounds fair.
comparison, but interested still)
 

Iron Man

Major
Registered Member
that's hilarious sentence, LOL!

anyway, Andy I think up this page made a point which I had expected to be posted earlier, that is if Chinese surface combatants cost a half of a cost of equivalent US surface combatants, the PLAN could double the number

what's your take?


(I'm aware of your Yesterday at 9:36 AM

comparison, but interested still)
My take is that I don't have enough information to have a take. All that I'm willing to agree with is a general statement that all things being equal a random ship constructed in a Chinese shipyard will be cheaper than in (all?) other countries' shipyards. How much more cheaper is anyone's guess. My hunch is that there are very few people in the world who could give you an educated guess on this topic. Certainly nobody on SDF, despite all the verbiage so far.
 
My take is that I don't have enough information to have a take. All that I'm willing to agree with is a general statement that all things being equal a random ship constructed in a Chinese shipyard will be cheaper than in (all?) other countries' shipyards. How much more cheaper is anyone's guess. My hunch is that there are very few people in the world who could give you an educated guess on this topic. Certainly nobody on SDF, despite all the verbiage so far.
well what I meant (but didn't say) 21 minutes ago was this:

if you were funded X dollars to build a fleet of large surface combatants,

and you could build N more expensive seaframes or M cheaper seaframes: N = 2*M,

which way would you go?
 
Even if Chinese ships cost 70% as much as US ships, it would be evidence that PPP figures would give an more accurate assessment than nominal figures when it comes to trying to comparing military spending between the two countries. In 10 yrs, China and the US will have roughly equivalent nominal GDP. Assuming Chinese military spending of around 2% GDP and US at approximately 3.5%, and further assuming naval surface forces are given roughly equal budgetary priority between the two militaries, PLAN should be able to comfortably maintain about 80% of the USNs total surface fleet capability. Of course, this is a very very rough approximation. The two navies do not operate the exactly comparable ship classes, or maintain the same ratios of comparable ship classes, so it'd be even more difficult to draw conclusions on actual ship counts.
 

AndrewS

Brigadier
Registered Member
My take is that I don't have enough information to have a take. All that I'm willing to agree with is a general statement that all things being equal a random ship constructed in a Chinese shipyard will be cheaper than in (all?) other countries' shipyards. How much more cheaper is anyone's guess. My hunch is that there are very few people in the world who could give you an educated guess on this topic. Certainly nobody on SDF, despite all the verbiage so far.

The whole purpose of this thread requires 3 elements:

1. A view on the size of the Chinese economy now and in the future.
2. A view of the desired Chinese Navy end-size . For simplicity, let's call it scenarios where the Chinese Navy is 50%,100%,150%,200% of a US Navy. Of course, even the Chinese Navy don't know what this will be in 30 years time.
3. A view on the cost of equivalent Chinese naval warships, to ascertain affordability. Eg. Whether PPP is the correct measure to use.

@Iron Man
If you don't believe that we can even try to estimate the 3rd factor, then you actually don't have anything to contribute.
 
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