Advertisement
China’s military
ChinaMilitary

Chinese navy’s biggest destroyer leads Yellow Sea combat drills seen to target smaller rivals

  • The PLA Navy’s Lhasa is seen as the second most powerful destroyer in the world after the USS Zumwalt
  • The ‘high-low’ mix drill with much smaller corvettes may have aimed to simulate encounters with weaker rivals in the East and South China seas, analyst says

Reading Time:3 minutes
Why you can trust SCMP
48
The three-day exercise included air-defence, anti-ship and anti-submarine drills. Photo: Weibo
Minnie Chan
The Chinese navy’s largest destroyer led three corvettes in a joint services exercise in the Yellow Sea, a new “high-low mix” drill that experts say was aimed at simulating military confrontations with weaker regional counterparts.
Advertisement
The Lhasa, a Type 055 stealth-guided missile destroyer and the largest and most advanced warship of its kind in the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), conducted a series of assessment drills with three Type 056A corvettes in the Yellow Sea recently, state broadcaster CCTV reported on Sunday.

They carried out three days of air-defence, anti-ship and anti-submarine exercises, the report said. Some other types of surface warships, submarines, early-warning aircraft and helicopters also took part in the drill to simulate combat conditions.

A Z-9 ship-borne combat helicopter takes part in the recent exercise. Photo: Weibo
A Z-9 ship-borne combat helicopter takes part in the recent exercise. Photo: Weibo

The Lhasa, declared combat ready just in January, is the PLA Navy’s second Type 055 warship. With displacement of 12,000 tonnes, it is regarded as the second most powerful destroyer in the world after the USS Zumwalt (DDG-1000).

The 1,440-tonne Type 056A corvette, meanwhile, is a variant of the Type 056, capable of anti-submarine warfare.

The drills aimed to test joint operation capabilities between different types of warships under a complex electromagnetic environment, CCTV said.

Advertisement

“Joint exercises between the Type 055 and Type 056A could be very complicated and challenging because of the involvement of many new technologies and tactics in modern naval combat,” Zhou Chenming, a researcher from the Yuan Wang military science and technology think tank, explained.

China launched eight Type 055 destroyers between 2017 and 2020, and over 70 Type 056 and 056A warships in the past decade.

Advertisement