China is developing systems to hunt US submarines from the air

• China is developing sensors to hunt enemy submarines from aircraft.

• Recent patents show a focus on magnetic sensing and improved sonobuoys.

• New capabilities are critical for China to protect its aircraft carriers, two experts said.

China is developing new systems to hunt US nuclear submarines that could threaten a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, according to a new report.

The Chinese navy views anti-submarine warfare, or ASW, as essential to any successful amphibious operation and intends to use its aircraft to protect a flotilla from U.S. or Japanese submarine attacks.

“The plan [People’s Liberation Army Navy] clearly sees fixed-wing and vertical lift ASW capabilities as a crucial component needed for any of its amphibious-based contingencies, whether the seizure of an island or reef, or the successful implementation of a Joint Island Landing Campaign against Taiwan,” wrote Eli Tirk and Daniel Salisbury in a to study to the China Institute of Maritime Studies at the Naval War College. “ASW capabilities would be crucial for safeguarding high-value surface assets such as aircraft carriers or an amphibious landing party, protecting them while in port boarding forces, sanitizing the operating area from enemy submarines, and escorting these assets in their path to staging areas and operational areas.”

Also significant is that Chinese aerial subhunters are tasked with protecting Chinese submarines from ballistic missiles as they navigate to their patrol and launch sites. “The PLAN clearly views fixed-wing ASW as an important enabler of its at-sea nuclear deterrent,” the report stated.

The Chinese Navy’s current fixed-wing anti-submarine aircraft is the KQ-200, a four-engine turboprop aircraft that is the Chinese equivalent of the US Navy’s P-8 Poseidon. The PLAN has about 20 KQ-200s, which have a range of about 3,000 miles.

Like the US Navy, China’s submarine force tends to be secretive. But by examining open source literature, Tirk and Salisbury were able to discern the efforts China is making in anti-submarine warfare, including patents filed by Chinese researchers.

For example, state-owned China Electronics Technology Group Corporation filed a patent in 2020 for enhanced magnetic anomaly detection (MAD), a technology first used in World War II to detect submarines by the effect of these large metallic objects on the Earth’s magnetic field. . It is a useful but limited system that generally requires the aircraft to fly within less than a mile of the target and can only detect the presence of a submarine and not its course – meaning that a positive hit must be followed by the deployment of a network of other sensors to be able to target the lurking submarine.

Chinese scientists want to use highly sensitive data atomic magnetometers, which use lasers to detect changes in energy levels between atoms caused by fluctuations in a magnetic field. CETCs patent is a technology that “would allow an atomic magnetometer to detect the direction of a target, rather than just its existence,” Tirk and Salisbury noted. “According to the paper, previous research on highly sensitive atomic magnetometers focused on scalar results (i.e., just the magnitude of a target’s magnetic field) but could not provide vectors (i.e., magnitude and direction). It is already a shorter-range magnetic field capability typically used for more precise positioning after other sensors have provided an approximate search area, but any additional information could potentially give operators an advantage during search operations.”

A 2022 patent from the Aviation Industry Corporation of China calls for a new system to operate sonobuoys, which are floating containers, launched by planes and ships, that detect submarines by emitting active sonar signals or by passive sensors that detect the noise of a submarine. Current Chinese sonobuoys require “a complicated and labor-intensive series of manual button presses to configure sonobuoy parameters such as radio working frequency, working depth, working time and pulse shape to suit marine conditions before deployment “.

These parameters are not displayed in the sonobuoy control system. “This means that the display and control system does not know whether a sonobuoy is on the rack or has been launched, what type of sonobuoys were launched, or the parameters of any launched sonobuoys,” Tirk and Salisbury wrote. “Instead, operators must manually enter this data into the display and control system.”

Other patents are for lighter sonobuoysand improvements in communications between sonobuoys and aircraft. In 2022, China overcome America in number of patents filed.

China has also improved the quality of anti-submarine training. “PLAN recognized its limitations and began taking steps to improve the quality of its ASW training, both in simulators and in physical training environments,” the report states. “PLAN ASW units are training under more realistic conditions and breaking down administrative barriers that prevented them from generating more training opportunities in different operational environments.”

For example, since 2015, training materials have highlighted the need for ASW aircraft and ships to work closely together, which is standard practice in US and Western navies. The PLAN also uses simulators to train sensor and weapons operators.

One exercise involved a patrol aircraft transmitting target data to a command ship, “which then integrated it with information from other sources and checked the information against a target information database to confirm whether or not the target was a submarine.” enemy,” the CMSI report noted. . “This indicated a potential command relationship of command ships to ASW aircraft and confirmed that the PLAN trains to compare potential targets against a database, despite its small (but expanding) ocean surveillance and intelligence collection fleet and a emerging underwater surveillance capability.”

Michael Peck is a defense writer whose work has appeared in Forbes, Defense News, Foreign Policy magazine and other publications. He holds a master’s degree in political science from Rutgers Univ. Follow him Twitter It is LinkedIn.

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