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If you berth a few AAW containerships like this one at each of every major sea ports, navy bases and shipyards like JNCX, you can set up an impressive mobile sea based air defense. And this would be very cheap in relative to regular AAW destroyer, and also can quickly be built and replace those destroyed.

Also being mobile eliminate presenting a fixed location target for enemy's land attack cruise missiles or ballistic missiles, in contrast to shore based AA defense.

Temstar said:

It certainly gives a vibe of "winning at any cost".
You would expect merchant traffic to dramatically decrease in the event of Reunification so many cargo ships would be available for requisition. The existence of this thing does feel like there is a time table already for Reunification.

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AR seems overkill for this project, between AESA, CIWS and 9m VLS tubes, you're talking about the ability to turn any and every container ship in the Pacific into an hypersonic ASM launcher or AD node, it means US navy's threat envelope just expanded by 2 order of magnitude, they'll now have to worry about being one-shoted by every container ship within 1000 km and their freedom of movement just shunk to only areas they can prevent all cargo ships from sailing.

This IMO is squarely targeted toward global naval dominance.

Maikeru said:

Replace 'PLA' with 'USN' or 'JMSDF' and you see that this particular boot fits on both feet.

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That's true, which is why it's very good then that China operates a far larger fleet of container ships than the other two, and more importantly, Chinese trade mostly consist of containers going out and bulk coming in, i.e. it's China that loads the containers.

from Ayi:

Interestingly, neither TWZ nor the comment section below saw much discussion on the ethical implications of converting cargo ships into warships.
This is actually a good thing, as it shows they are not hypocritical—the war they are preparing for holds no moral high ground to begin with. We are simply finding ways to survive in this lawless, jungle-like world devoid of moral constraints.

After all, the established U.S. national strategy and trump card is to disrupt global shipping west of the Malacca Strait and wage unrestricted submarine warfare east of Malacca. The Americans have never shied away from discussing this. If evidence is needed, I can provide at least 1,000 pages of think tank reports and Pentagon testimonies. But that is not the point—the point is that we are preparing for the most all-out world war imaginable.

Given that the ship’s militarized modifications are indeed real, we can interpret the two statements above as follows:
Without the maritime revival of the Chinese nation, the rest of humanity on Earth should not enjoy the convenience of maritime shipping.

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Yeah, FAFO.

When X's fools spend all day memeing the Three Gorges Dam, they'll face nuclear arms expansion. When the U.S. military spends all day discussing blockades and unrestricted submarine warfare, they'll face armed merchant ships. PLA isn't some passive entity you can keep waving your fists at without consequence.

bsdnf said:

from Ayi:

Yeah, FAFO.

When X's fools spend all day memeing the Three Gorges Dam, they'll face nuclear arms expansion. When the U.S. military spends all day discussing blockades and unrestricted submarine warfare, they'll face armed merchant ships. PLA isn't some passive entity you can keep waving your fists at without consequence.
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I like Ayi's other line when the morality of armed merchant ship comes up:

"Why should anyone enjoy the usage of the ocean for trade if China cannot?"

People here often complain CPC is too soft and naive about geopolitics and don't realize this is a civilisational conflict where there are no rules, well CPC clearly got the message so you can all rest easy now.

Temstar said:

I like Ayi's other line when the morality of armed merchant ship comes up:

"Why should anyone enjoy the usage of the ocean for trade if China cannot?"

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Sounds similar (to a certain degree) to Russia's "If the world doesn't have Russia anymore, then why does the world needs to keep existing?" quote.

This is in addition to the fact where China of today is both the world's largest economy AND the world's largest trading country. If anything - China is the one who needs and deserves to operate the world's largest and most powerful navy, not the literal banana republic on the other side of the Pacific.

With mass production of UUV equipped with sonars, sea mines, and torpedo. that will negate last US advantage which is underwater warfare.

each ships should accompany a few UUV just to make sure there is no sneak attack by submarine.

bsdnf said:

from Ayi:

Yeah, FAFO.

When X's fools spend all day memeing the Three Gorges Dam, they'll face nuclear arms expansion. When the U.S. military spends all day discussing blockades and unrestricted submarine warfare, they'll face armed merchant ships. PLA isn't some passive entity you can keep waving your fists at without consequence.
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Its good that this confirms China is prepared to mobilize the entirety of Chinese industrial power in a war with America.
Unfortunately for America I don't think they're mentally prepared for what that means, because if they did, the last thing they should worry about is Asia.

iewgnem said:

AR seems overkill for this project, between AESA, CIWS and 9m VLS tubes, you're talking about the ability to turn any and every container ship in the Pacific into an hypersonic ASM launcher or AD node, it means US navy's threat envelope just expanded by 2 order of magnitude, they'll now have to worry about being one-shoted by every container ship within 1000 km and their freedom of movement just shunk to only areas they can prevent all cargo ships from sailing.

This IMO is squarely targeted toward global naval dominance.

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What does global naval dominance in a total war look like?

My guess is the simultaneous construction of 15 aircraft carriers, followed immediately by another set of 15 to be assembled.

This also implies 120+ destroyers.

Such a fleet will take years to build.

So in the meantime, containership conversions as an emergency wartime measure will be very useful.

Throwing my hat in the ring, my prediction is that not only is this a preparation of future all out naval warfare but also something China already needs to experiment with now simply due to its munition production capacity advantage.

Many people often think Chinese production of large destroyers and multirole frigates as quite fast, but their induction probably significantly lags behind the production of shipborne missiles. Referring to vertical launch missile cells in general, each contains one to four missiles depending on their role and each new large destroyer only adds just over a hundred cells.

There was a documentary from some years back showing how just one single automated factory produces a hundred missiles a day, which means it can produce nearly forty thousand missiles every year if ran at capacity. Containerized vertical launch missile cells will take advantage of land based industrial scales that led China to dominate production of industrial goods like passenger vehicles and solar panels. We are not going to be a position in the future where the military will need to wait for the construction of warships even if we are now reaching half the American military total vertical launch missile cells.