The National Interest:
While Russia is the most technologically sophisticated undersea warfare threat faced by the United States Navy, there is one area where the threat from Beijing exceeds the one posed by Moscow.
China has successfully developed and fielded diesel-electric submarines with Air Independent Propulsion (AIP) technology, unlike Russia, which has thus far failed to develop a comparable analogue for its future Project 677 Lada-class vessels. Indeed, Beijing’s conventional AIP submarine units have been breaking their own records in recent months.
“China’s first submarine unit using air-independent propulsion (AIP) technology recently broke a number of records set by the Chinese navy,” reported the People’s Liberation Army and Central Military Commission’s China Mil site, citing a report from the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology’s Science and Technology Daily in a recent posting.