🔶 The mystery of China’s enormous military installations in the heart of the desert

🔶 The mystery of China’s enormous military installations in the heart of the desert

China, with around two million soldiers, has the largest army in the world by number of troops. By comparison, the United States has only about 1.3 million active military personnel.

However, although China is also one of the five official nuclear powers in the world, until now it has not had the most modern army in the world.

According to Germany’s first television channel (ARD), Stefan Niemann, host of the podcast “Armed Forces and Strategies” on Germany’s public broadcaster NDR (NDR), lists various reasons for China’s weaker army.

In his view, this country has long focused on its own size and cultural superiority, and therefore has underestimated progress in other parts of the world.

As ARD, quoting Sara Kirschberger, the scientific director of strategy development for the Asia-Pacific region at Kiel University in Germany, writes, however, Chinese people since the 1990s have been rapidly making up their shortfall in the field of armaments—at an unusually fast pace for a country that, during this period, has not been engaged in any major war.

According to the expert, creating a modern air force or navy is usually a multi-generational project—unless a country is involved in war. Kirschberger says, however, that such prioritization during peacetime is very unusual.

She emphasizes: “When a country like Ukraine is fighting now for its survival, naturally the different forces and capacities that do not exist in peacetime in this way are freed up. In such conditions, a very large amount of money is also spent. But what China has achieved in peacetime—and in fact only over the past two and a half decades—is highly unusual.”

Kirschberger adds that China has not only made up for its backlog in this process, but in some areas has even developed innovations that other countries do not have.

According to the same report, one of the most interesting developments has taken place in China’s aircraft carriers. These ships are among the most complex and expensive military equipment and can play a decisive role in war.

For about a century, the United States has been building aircraft carriers for its armed forces and currently has 11 of them. Russia has only one aircraft carrier, which also lacks operational power.

China, in contrast, has only been starting to equip its army with aircraft carriers for about 15 years. The country has completed three carriers so far and, according to reports, another one is also under construction.

According to ARD, one of the main components of aircraft carriers is the takeoff and landing runway on the ship’s deck. Some of these carriers are now equipped with steam catapults, which enable faster takeoffs for aircraft. But the newest technology uses electromagnetic catapults.

This technology requires enormous amounts of electricity. Sara Kirschberger says the best way to supply such a large amount of power is to use a ship with a nuclear propulsion system. China has now succeeded—at the same time as the United States—in developing such an electromagnetic catapult system.

Hashtags: ["DW Farsi"]