China Will Hunt U.S. Navy Nuclear Submarines From the Sky

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Should China invade Taiwan, Taiwan’s best defense may be the U.S. Navy’s nuclear submarines.

Quiet, hard to detect, and armed with cruise missiles, anti-ship missiles and torpedoes, U.S. attack submarines could wreak havoc with a Chinese amphibious fleet.

“The greatest threat to the PLA Navy is not US aircraft carriers, but U.S. nuclear submarines,” warned China’s iFeng news site. “These submarines are difficult to detect, and their advanced performance presents a significant challenge to the PLA in the South China Sea.”

Until recently, neither China’s submarines – nor its anti-submarine warfare (ASW) systems – appeared especially capable. But mindful of the threat posed by American submarines, the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) is beefing up its sub-killing systems.

Aircraft have long been important – perhaps the most important – anti-submarine platforms in Western navies. Now, China is beginning to emphasize ASW aircraft and helicopters for sub-hunting. For example, China’s new Type 075 amphibious assault ship is equipped with 30 helicopters: while most are for transporting troops, the Z-8 and Z-9 models are multirole platforms that can serve as gunships and armed sub-hunters. 

In September 2024, the Hainan — launched in 2019 as the first of the Type 075 class – was part of a battlegroup formed around the aircraft carrier Shandong. The Chinese navy envisions amphibious assault ships as a sort of auxiliary carriers, whose helicopters can assume some missions – such as ASW – and thus free the regular flattops to concentrate on other missions.

Adding an amphibious assault ship will allow a carrier battlegroup will allow a carrier  battlegroup to “play a crucial role not only in landing operations but also in anti-submarine warfare,” said Chinese state-controlled media. “The Hainan can establish an anti-submarine network around the fleet, making it nearly impossible for even US submarines, despite their world-class technology, to evade detection. This capability will significantly reduce the likelihood of U.S. submarines launching surprise attacks on the PLA fleet.”

The Chinese navy sees neutralizing enemy submarines as a prerequisite for any amphibious operations, not just against Taiwan. “The PLAN [People’s Liberation Army Navy] clearly views fixed-wing and vertical lift ASW capabilities as a crucial component necessary for any of its amphibious based contingencies, be that a seizure of an island or reef, or the successful implementation of a Joint Island Landing Campaign against Taiwan,” according to a study for the China Maritime Studies Institute at the Naval War College.  “ASW capabilities would be crucial for safeguarding high value surface assets such as carriers or an amphibious landing group, protecting them as they are in port embarking forces, sanitizing the operational area of enemy submarines, and escorting these assets on their way to staging areas and operational areas.”

By using open-source literature, the CMSI researchers identified several patents that illustrate China’s interest in airborne ASW technology. For example, the state-owned China Electronics Technology Group Corporation filed a patent in 2020 for improved magnetic anomaly detection (MAD), which spots submarines by their effect on the Earth’s magnetic field. Though its range is short — the aircraft to be within less than a mile of the target – it can be highly effective.

An artist’s concept of the nuclear-powered submarine SEAWOLF (SSN-21).

China is also developing atomic magnetometers, which use lasers to detect changes in the energy levels between atoms caused by fluctuations in a magnetic field. CETC’s patent is for technology that would “enable an atomic magnetometer to sense the direction of a target rather than just its existence,” Tirk and Salisbury noted. “According to the filing, previous research on highly-sensitive atomic magnetometers had focused on scalar results (i.e. only the magnitude of a target’s magnetic field), but could not provide vectors (i.e. magnitude and direction). MAD is already a shorter-range capability usually used for more precise positioning after other sensors have provided a rough search area, but any additional information could potentially give operators an edge during search operations.”

Other patents are for lighter sonobuoys and improved communications between sonobuoys and aircraft. The PLAN is also revamping anti-submarine training. “The PLAN has acknowledged its limitations and has begun taking steps to improve the quality of its ASW training, both in simulators and in physical training environments,” CMSI said. “PLAN ASW units are training under more realistic conditions, and breaking down administrative barriers which prevented them from generating more training opportunities in different operational environments.”

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 an enemy submarine,” the CMSI report noted. “This indicated both a potential command relationship from command vessels to ASW aircraft and confirmed that the PLAN trains to compare potential targets to a database, despite its small (but expanding) ocean surveillance and intelligence collection fleet and a nascent underwater surveillance capability.”

Image of Block III US Navy Virginia-class Submarine.

How effective these new Chinese anti-submarine efforts will be remains to be seen. Chinese command and control tends to be rigid, but aircraft and ships will need to cooperate tightly and flexibly to hunt stealthy U.S. subs. China will also need sufficient control of the skies to enable aerial ASW platforms to operate. But either way, American submarines will need to beware the skies above.

About the Author: Michael Peck 

Michael Peck is a defense writer whose work has appeared in Business Insider, Forbes, Defense News, Foreign Policy magazine, and other publications. He holds an MA in political science from Rutgers Univ. Follow him on Twitter and LinkedIn