Bloomberg Business:
A Chinese nuclear submarine designed to carry missiles that can hit the U.S. is likely to deploy before year’s end, the Pentagon said, adding to Obama administration concerns over China’s muscle-flexing in Asia.
China’s navy is expected this year to conduct the first patrol of its Jin-class nuclear-powered submarine armed with JL-2 submarine-launched ballistic missiles, the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency said in a statement. It declined to give its level of confidence on when the new boat will be deployed, or the status of the missile.
“The capability to maintain continuous deterrent patrols is a big milestone for a nuclear power,” Larry Wortzel, a member of the congressionally created U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, said in an e-mail. “I think the Chinese would announce this capability as a show of strength and for prestige.”
The submarines are part of an effort to modernize China’s military under President Xi Jinping, who will be in Washington Thursday and Friday for a state visit with U.S. President Barack Obama. U.S.-China defense cooperation and competition will be among the topics discussed by the two leaders. The Pentagon and DIA had previously predicted the patrols would start in 2014.
‘Threat Inflation’
“Don’t discount the likelihood of threat inflation by the Pentagon because of the shift toward the Asia-Pacific in the revised maritime strategy,” said Collin Koh Swee Lean, an associate research fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore.
China set out its ambitions for a bigger naval presence far from its coasts in its 2015 defense white paper, released in May, saying it would add “open seas protection” to “offshore waters defense” to a list of core naval missions.
Wortzel said his commission’s 2015 report probably will include a comment from PLA Navy Commander Admiral Wu Shengli, who said the submarine-missile combination is “a trump card that makes our motherland proud and our adversaries terrified.”
China’s increased naval strength, coupled with its claims to territory in the contested South China Sea and East China Sea, has helped spur the region’s largest military buildup in decades and caused disquiet in the U.S. about its role as the region’s peace keeper.
China’s deployment “will further shift the Sino-American military balance and impose more demands on our own submarine force,” Representative Randy Forbes, a Virginia Republican and chairman of the House Armed Services Committee’s sea power panel, said in an e-mail. “This milestone in Chinese naval
development should remind U.S. policy makers of the need to strengthen American sea power, particularly in the Asia-Pacific,” Forbes said…
