How good is the PLAN's supply ship fleet? It doesn't seem like they have enough and most of them are smaller vessels. They've got a long coastline with plans to operate further away from shore. That means they are going to need a lot more fuel, spare parts, ammo, food, etc... moving about in multiple locations and that takes a sizable fleet of supply ships.
PLAN supply ships
- Thread starter SinoForce
- Start date
PLAN fleet support assest are in fact going to quite good direction and it's one of the fields where the PLAN is almoust ahead of the schedule to transforming from greenwater navy to blue water navy. And if you take more deeper look to chinese naval development, you'll notice that PLAN has posessed quite formidable support fleet compared to it's main fleet strenght and doctrines. Thats one reason why this important part of martime warfare is actually bit ahead of the main fleet build-up becouse there were existing base for it.
Compared to soviet naval development (which is in many ways quite similar to the chinese one) China seems to have paid much more attention to the fleet support/replacement operations way offshore than Soviets did. For example the first soviet Multi-product replacement ship, pr. 1833 Berezina was commissioned only in the late 80's, about 30 years since the soviet naval transformation from coastal force to blue water navy begun. China in otherhand has already the seccond generation of such ships in service (the Fuchi class, first gen. was the Nanchang in service since 1996)
More info of those ships in here:
Compared to soviet naval development (which is in many ways quite similar to the chinese one) China seems to have paid much more attention to the fleet support/replacement operations way offshore than Soviets did. For example the first soviet Multi-product replacement ship, pr. 1833 Berezina was commissioned only in the late 80's, about 30 years since the soviet naval transformation from coastal force to blue water navy begun. China in otherhand has already the seccond generation of such ships in service (the Fuchi class, first gen. was the Nanchang in service since 1996)
More info of those ships in here:
Thanks for the additional details. I read through that section and it just didn't seem like there were that many support ships available.
Thats mostly becouse Dongfeng haven't covered much of auxiliaries in his navy site. More info and wider image of what exactly china has can be found in various naval yearbooks....
Got it. Hopefully they'll add more coverage on that topic because a fleet low on supplies might as well stay in port.