China Will Soon Have the World’s Largest Submarine Force – What is the Threat?

And this plane is a big part of that plan. 

bySebastien Roblin

Tokyo eventually intends on operating sixty to seventy P-1s to replace all its P-3Cs, and plans on routinely upgrading the P-1’s sensors every ten years. The JSDF may also procure customized P-1s to replace P-3 variants, which include five EP-3C signals intelligence planes, four OP-3C optical reconnaissance aircraft, and four UP-3C and UP-3D test and training planes.

Japan may be the only nation to have experienced having its economy truly crippled by submarine warfare. Yes, the costly campaigns waged by German U-Boats during World War I and II targeting the United Kingdom’s supply lines across the Atlantic are better known, but the U-Boats ultimately were defeated by Allied anti-submarine warfare. By contrast, Allied submarines sank 55 percent of Japan’s merchant shipping during World War II, crippling the circulatory system of a Japanese empire spread thinly across the Western Pacific.

(This first appeared last month.)

That historical experience must be high on the Japanese Self Defense Force’s mind as it considers the rapid buildup of the Chinese PLA Navy submarine force, which will soon be the largest submarine operator on the planet with over seventy submarines operational. While most of these are shorter-range diesel and AIP-powered submarine, this is little consolation for Japan, which is easily within range and economically dependent on secure shipping lanes.

Large maritime patrol planes are a key platform in Anti-Submarine Warfare (ASW), and for over a half-century Japan has operated U.S.-built four-engine P-3C Orion turboprops, which spend long hours patrolling the seas and tracking the movements of vessels around Japanese waters—including any submarines they succeed in detecting. But as the Orion airplanes neared the end of their service lives, both Japan and the U.S. separately developed jet-powered successors.

The U.S. P-8 Poseidon is derived from the twin-engine Boeing 737-800 airliner and is optimized for higher-altitude patrols. By contrast, the Kawasaki P-1, which first flew in 2007, is a clean-sheet four-engine design that can handle both low and high-altitude operations. (The P-1 was developed concurrently with anespecially portly twin-engine Kawasaki C-2 transport, and shares about 25 percent of its weight in parts.)