Christopher A. Lawrence is a professional historian and military analyst. He is the Executive Director and President of The Dupuy Institute, an organization dedicated to scholarly research and objective analysis of historical data related to armed conflict and the resolution of armed conflict. The Dupuy Institute provides independent, historically-based analyses of lessons learned from modern military experience.
Mr. Lawrence was the program manager for the Ardennes Campaign Simulation Data Base, the Kursk Data Base, the Modern Insurgency Spread Sheets and for a number of other smaller combat data bases. He has participated in casualty estimation studies (including estimates for Bosnia and Iraq) and studies of air campaign modeling, enemy prisoner of war capture rates, medium weight armor, urban warfare, situational awareness, counterinsurgency and other subjects for the U.S. Army, the Defense Department, the Joint Staff and the U.S. Air Force. He has also directed a number of studies related to the military impact of banning antipersonnel mines for the Joint Staff, Los Alamos National Laboratories and the Vietnam Veterans of American Foundation.
His published works include papers and monographs for the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment and the Vietnam Veterans of American Foundation, in addition to over 40 articles written for limited-distribution newsletters and over 60 analytical reports prepared for the Defense Department. He is the author of Kursk: The Battle of Prokhorovka (Aberdeen Books, Sheridan, CO., 2015), America’s Modern Wars: Understanding Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam (Casemate Publishers, Philadelphia & Oxford, 2015), War by Numbers: Understanding Conventional Combat (Potomac Books, Lincoln, NE., 2017) and The Battle of Prokhorovka (Stackpole Books, Guilford, CT., 2019)
Mr. Lawrence lives in northern Virginia, near Washington, D.C., with his wife and son.
What is the contemporary combat value of a carrier? Is the correlation between Submarine and Carrier comparable to the Cold War or WW2 era?
Revisiting this several years later with the benefit of hindsight: the Chinese commissioned the carrier Shandong in December 2019, just ahead of the earliest possible estimate given here.
Third carrier Fujian was launched in June last year and is due for trials and commissioning in the next few months.
It is unclear if a sister ship of the same design may be built in the interim while the design for an even larger nuclear-powered successor is finalized. If so, a fourth carrier may be in commission sometime around 2027. My thinking is that this would be a sensible plan: China would be able to form two ship divisions of similar capabilities: one with the ski-jump equipped Liaoning and Shandong, the other with the catapult equipped Fujian and its sister. In the future, a third and perhaps a fourth division could be built around the nuclear-powered Type 004 design. One ship could be at sea while the other is undergoing maintenance, one division could be assigned to each of China’s three fleet commands, with that potential fourth division available for overseas basing.
The years ahead will be interesting. China’s naval expansion has been rapid and energetic, and has certainly exceeded the more conservative estimates from the last decade.