一艘试航邮轮引发霉国佬的歇斯底里
2023-07-22 06:58阅读：
7月17日起，我国首艘国产大型邮轮“爱达·魔都号”开启为期9天的首次试航，这意味着我国在大型邮轮建造领域实现突破，是中国船舶工业的里程碑事件。离谱的是，外媒却借此炒作起其所谓“潜在两栖作战用途”，称这对西方构成“严重安全挑战”。
China's New Cruise Ships Are An Overlooked Amphibious
Assault Challenge
Craig Hooper
Long ago, passenger ships were considered dual use military assets,
good for service as troop carriers, attack transports, auxiliary
cruisers and even commerce raiders. As specialized amphibious
attack ships entered service during the 1950s and 1960s, passenger
ship military utility evaporated. Long forgotten as military
assets, cruise ships have quietly evolved to the point where they
can be useful in certain amphibious assault scenarios.
China is just beginning to mass-produce cruise ships. With a
military that
embraces civil-military fusion, blending civilian and military
capabilities, the country will be sorely tempted to transform these
enormous civilian vessels into super-sized security problems.
Since the mid-nineties, a global renaissance in passenger cruising
has given passenger liners a new—albeit unrecognized—military
relevance. Over the past few decades, the race to cost-effectively
meet booming customer demand has pushed the industry towards
massive, complex ships. As fast, robust vessels, capable of
generating large amounts of electricity, the technology aboard
gives these ships far wider military relevance than most modern
observers realize.
For years, cruise liners were consigned to serve as reserve troop
transports, good for little more than point-to-point troop
transport during a Falkland Islands-like crisis.
Today, technology gives these ships the potential to serve as
amphibious assault platforms right out of the box. Cruise ship
technology has evolved to point where the no longer need much
modification to be militarily relevant. The ships can get an
enormous number of troops onto a sea-side target. If left
unwatched, China’s future cruise ship fleet will have the potential
to carry out strategic “coup de mains” anywhere across the
Indo-Pacific.
The West has brought this on to itself. Technological advances,
regulatory inertia and a failure of imagination have limited the
West’s interest in understanding the accretion of military
potential in these rapidly-evolving, dual-use platforms.
Policymaker refusal to appreciate China’s willingness to defy
long-standing Western operational norms, coupled with the cruise
industry’s insatiable appetite for the lowest-cost shipbuilder,
risks creating a new and poorly understood amphibious challenge
throughout the Indo-Pacific.
Cruise Liners Are Now Amphibious Assault Vessels:
A modern cruise ship’s military relevance rests in the fact that
each cruise ship can use their embarked lifeboats to get more
people ashore faster than ever before.
Present-day cruise ships can use capable, modern lifeboats to land
up to 8000 people in a single wave. Even without ready logistical
and support backup, a surprise landing of thousands of
modestly-equipped troops would simply overwhelm defenses on many of
the Pacific’s remote and strategically-useful islands. With these
ships, China could change the “facts on the ground” in an
instant.
Even modern ports on Taiwan or elsewhere would struggle to rebuff
such an attack. The moment Chinese forces have a foothold in a
developed port, China will be ready to use their militarized
civilian ferry fleet to pour supplies and heavier resources into
their initial lodgment.
Aside from their ability to land lots of people, modern cruise
ships are also huge, fast and tough to sink. In the cruise
industry’s push to maximize per-ship efficiencies, cruise ship
displacement has more than doubled since 2009. Cruise ship
displacement growth shows no sign of leveling off anytime soon. In
2024, the Royal Caribbean International’s Icon of the Seas, is set
to leave a Finland shipyard. At almost 1,200 feet long and over
250,000 tons, the ship—the first of three—is larger than the USS
Gerald R. Ford, America’s newest aircraft carrier.
The cruise ship industry was a backwater for decades. Dismissed as
irrelevant after World War II, the cruise ship industry suffered
fifty years of relative stasis. But, over the past few decades, the
explosive growth in cruise ship displacement has outpaced
everything from port infrastructure to maritime regulation. The
rate of cruise ship growth has been exponential. Between 1939 and
1972, the 87,673 ton RMS Queen Elizabeth was the largest passenger
ship in the world. Only surpassed by the 101,353 ton Carnival
Destiny in 1996, both ships are less than half the size of the
enormous Icon of the Seas.
As cruise ship displacement grew, lifesaving technology—the tools
that make the ships useful in amphibious assault—have advanced as
well. When RMS Queen Elizabeth’s operational peer, the RMS Queen
Mary, left service in the early 1970’s, the ship relied on 22 open
lifeboats that could fit 145 passengers and propel survivors
through the water at about six knots. Today, the Icon of the Seas
is set to carry seventeen mega-sized enclosed lifeboats, each with
a capacity to move up to 450 people to shore at somewhere around
nine or ten knots. They’re fast-loading, too. Though each of the
big lifeboats carry more people than a 747 jumbo jet, passengers,
in tests, can get aboard in just five minutes and 21 seconds.
Modern “lifeboats” for civilian service usually meet the bare
minimum requirement for current lifesaving regulations. But there’s
enough flexibility in modern lifeboat design to make the boats
faster and more suitable for dual-use activities.
Even without military influence, lifeboats are evolving. As cruise
ships get bigger, port infrastructure is struggling to keep up. Big
cruise ships are often unable to moor directly to a pier, and must
sit at anchor. To overcome this lack of ready infrastructure,
cruise ships are transforming their lifeboats into “tender boats”
to get passengers ashore without the need of super-sized dock
space. These “dual-use” tender boats are, in general, up-engined
and faster than the average lifeboat. A big Fassmer SEL-T 15.5
lifeboat/tender hybrid can shuttle 230 people to and from the ship
at 11 knots. Palfinger Marine’s CTL 57 catamaran can get 220 people
ashore in relatively speedy comfort.
That is just the tip of the iceberg. It is easy to harden—or even
militarize—these utilitarian and hard-to-sink lifeboats. Improving
their speed, survivability or landing features are well within
China’s capabilities.
In fact, we’ve reached the point where modern lifeboats can
meet—and even beat—the performance of dedicated modern-day military
landing craft. America’s Wasp-class big-deck amphibious ships might
have entered service in the 1990’s, but their landing craft are
relics from the early sixties.
Each of America’s Wasp-class assault vessels carry up to twelve
medium landing craft (LCM-8) or two larger LCU 1600 utility landing
craft. With an open deck, LCU 1600s can only carry up to 400 troops
for brief and uncomfortable periods, pushing them to shore at about
11 knots. The smaller open-deck LCM-8s, when loaded with about 150
troops, can only manage a maximum speed of nine knots.
These old-school landing craft might be able to land large
equipment, but, if all China needs is to get a single, big assault
wave ashore and into a moderately-developed harbor, modern cruise
ship tenders and lifeboats can get more troops to their seaside
targets more quickly than ever. Only helicopters and air-cushion
LCAC landing craft can move troops ashore faster.
China Is Aiming To Mass-Produce Modern Passenger Ships:
There’s not much time to plan for a future full of militarized
cruise ships.
China’s first home-built cruise ship, the 135,500 gross ton Adora
Magic City, is currently in sea trials. China isn’t waiting. It is
already building a second 142,000-ton cruise ship and observers
expect it to enter service in 2025.
Everybody from the West will line up to have China build their
cruise ships. Given all the state subsidies showered on China’s
shipbuilding sector, China was reportedly able to undertake their
first two cruise ship building projects for one-fifth the price of
a similarly-sized European-built passenger vessel.
The Adora Magic City, or “Ada Modu”, carries 20 314-person
lifeboats. If China decides to press this civilian ship into
military service—like it has with every single type of civilian
vessel that operates under the Chinese flag—the new cruise ship
could effectively land more than 6000 troops in a single wave.
China will certainly give this tactic a try; cruise ships offer
some of the final operational pieces China needs to fully integrate
a diverse grab-bag of organic civil-military amphibious
capabilities.
With Chinese-operated cruise ships set to enter service and likely
to fan out into the Pacific, it is high-time to recognize the
military utility of these new entrants into the Chinese fleet and
act to limit the militarization of these vessels. Going forward,
any Chinese civilian vessel employed for amphibious assault
exercises must be identified as a formal military vessel and
permanently excluded from international civilian commerce.
Modern cruise ships are not to be dismissed. These modern-day
attack transports pose a serious and underestimated security
challenge. China can easily “militarize” these civilian vessels,
either by adding military features, making unexplained
“improvements” to the embarked lifeboats or by secretive attempts
to leverage their massive electrical generation capabilities. If
China starts bending these civilian assets towards offensive
military capabilities, those efforts must be publicly rebuffed the
moment they are detected.
