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Gabriel Dominguez

Having marked its 99th anniversary on August 1, the People’s Liberation Army is now just a year away from its centenary goals, with its evolution highlighting the past, present and future of China’s military strategy. In the sixth part of a series, Gabriel Dominguez looks at Beijing’s evolving aircraft carrier doctrine.
Debate over China’s aircraft carrier ambitions has long centred on how many carriers it will build, with the Pentagon last year estimating that Beijing planned to expand its fleet to nine by 2035.
Yet behind the high-profile ship launches, experts say quieter changes in pilot recruitment, command structures and fleet integration point to a carrier doctrine distinct from the American model.
“The biggest misconception among Western analysts is the tendency to evaluate the [Chinese navy] through the doctrinal mirror of the US Navy,” said Brendan Mulvaney, director of the China Aerospace Studies Institute.
“Just because they have the same kinds of equipment doesn’t mean they will use it in the same way as the US. Their goals, missions and challenges are different than ours; they will come up with Chinese solutions to Chinese problems.”
China’s carrier force is evolving under strategic conditions unlike those that shaped the American naval doctrine of using carriers to project power thousands of kilometres from home.
Instead, China’s carriers appear intended to complement its land-based air power, long-range anti-ship missiles, integrated air-defence systems and rocket forces along its coastline, and to extend the People’s Liberation Army’s reach farther into the western Pacific and beyond.
The strike capacity of China’s aircraft carrier groups also seems to be more evenly distributed across the fleet than that of the US, which could help the PLA’s resilience in war.
From command to force distribution
A recent report by the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) argues that rather than judging Chinese carriers against American standards, analysts should focus on how they fit into the PLA’s broader operational architecture.
One of the clearest indicators is command.
The IISS report notes that all known Chinese navy carrier commanders have come from the surface warfare branch, unlike the US Navy, where carriers are traditionally led by naval aviators. Although China established a “pilot-captain class” programme to qualify naval aviators for carrier command, none of its nine known graduates have gone on to command a carrier, underscoring the continued dominance of the surface warfare career track.
The [Chinese navy] views its shipborne fighters as coequal assets that coordinate with the heavy missile arsenals of its surface escorts, rather than serving as the singular offensive arm of the fleet
Brendan Mulvaney, China Aerospace Studies Institute
Mulvaney said Beijing’s continued experimentation with pilot-commanders suggested this remained an unresolved organisational question rather than a settled doctrinal choice. But he cautioned there was also the opposite risk: commanders shaped primarily by ship-handling may underestimate the specialised demands of flight-deck operations.
“A carrier cannot be fought simply as a very large guided-missile warship,” he said.
Mulvaney pointed to another often-overlooked difference: how much authority a Chinese navy commander actually exercises.
American naval operations generally assume commanders have broad latitude once assigned a mission. In the PLA, by contrast, a ship’s commanding officer shares authority with a political commissar, whose role is to ensure the division toes the Communist Party’s ideological line. That arrangement does not eliminate battlefield initiative, but it is likely to shape how commanders weigh risk, signal intent and manage escalation, according to Mulvaney.
But command is only one aspect of the Chinese navy’s evolving approach.
Mulvaney said the navy increasingly treated carrier fighters, Type 055 and Type 052D destroyers, submarines, airborne early warning aircraft and long-range missile forces as complementary rather than hierarchical.
“The [Chinese navy] views its shipborne fighters as coequal assets that coordinate with the heavy missile arsenals of its surface escorts, rather than serving as the singular offensive arm of the fleet,” Mulvaney said.
This division of strike responsibilities between the air wing and surface combatants probably originated as much from necessity as doctrine. Early Chinese carrier air wings were constrained by shorter aircraft range, limited aerial refuelling and immature command-and-control networks, forcing accompanying warships to shoulder a larger share of the offensive burden.
That contrasts with the traditional American model, in which the carrier air wing has long served as the strike group’s principal offensive arm while escorts primarily defend the carrier and contribute secondary missile firepower.
Experts point to another aspect that could be a key difference from the US. Unlike an American carrier operating far from home, a Chinese carrier group would probably fight alongside land-based fighters, bombers and long-range missile forces contributing to the same campaign. Judging the carrier group in isolation therefore understates the combined combat power Beijing can bring to bear from the mainland.
Different tactics, new vulnerabilities
The US Navy has spent the past decade developing Distributed Maritime Operations (DMO), integrating aircraft, ships, submarines and space-based assets into a more networked force.
According to IISS analysts, while the Chinese navy is testing the GJ-21 carrier-capable drone, the US Navy has been developing the MQ-25 Stingray as part of this broader transition. Over time, such systems could reduce the carrier air wing’s role as a strike group’s principal offensive element.
Whereas the US Navy has traditionally concentrated most of its striking power in the carrier’s air wing, China appears to spread combat power more evenly across the fleet.
But spreading combat power also creates new vulnerabilities.
Asked whether such an approach made carrier strike groups more survivable, Mulvaney said it “mitigates vulnerability, but it does not abolish it”.
He said the danger was that even a more distributed force could still depend on a small number of highly visible ships and support vessels that remained attractive targets.
“The correct comparison is therefore not ‘a vulnerable carrier versus an invulnerable distributed force’,” he said.
“It is between a force whose combat power collapses when the carrier is neutralised and a force that can absorb the carrier’s loss but may still be degraded through attacks on its wider reconnaissance, command and logistics architecture.”

Extending the PLA’s reach
Experts also expect that China’s carrier groups are designed to fight alongside shore-based air and missile forces, instead of replicating US-style independent power projection.
The IISS experts noted that reforms encompassed cross-academy training, joint exercises and increasingly sophisticated air wings incorporating airborne early warning, electronic warfare and, eventually, unmanned aircraft. They said the emphasis was on building the institutional foundations needed to sustain multiple carrier strike groups over the long term, not simply producing more pilots.
Taken together, those reforms suggest Beijing is investing not just in warships, but in the personnel, doctrine, logistics and organisational structures needed to sustain a credible blue-water force. It is building the habits, command culture and institutional experience needed to fight with carriers – and that process is still under way.
Although China’s carrier force would matter in a regional conflict, Mulvaney argues its greatest value lies farther from the mainland, supporting sustained operations across the western Pacific, the Indian Ocean and other regions tied to China’s expanding interests.
“The PLA has a clear goal to have a world-class navy by mid-century,” he said. “Carriers are very much a functional capability but also a prestige capability.”
Recent deployments reinforce that trajectory. In mid-2025 the Liaoning and Shandong conducted coordinated dual-carrier operations beyond the second island chain, underscoring China’s growing ability to sustain increasingly complex far-seas deployments.


Christopher Sharman, director of the China Maritime Studies Institute (CMSI) at the US Naval War College, said those deployments were about more than showing naval power. They provided opportunities for the Chinese navy to test and refine the concepts that will shape its future carrier force.
“The [navy] will soon enter what Chinese media often refers to as the ‘three-carrier era’ – the point at which three operational aircraft carriers will be capable of sustained power projection,” Sharman said.
“As this capability matures, the [Chinese navy] will likely deploy carrier battle groups more frequently into the western Pacific and, over time, the Indian Ocean.”
He said those deployments would also serve as operational experiments, allowing the Chinese navy to refine tactics, logistics, command and control, and long-range power projection through experience rather than theory.
Unlike the US Navy, whose doctrine has been refined through decades of global operations and combat, China’s modern carrier force remains comparatively young, and many of its emerging concepts are still being tested and adapted.
Role in a Taiwan conflict
That raises a question closer to home: what role, if any, would these carriers play in a Taiwan contingency?
Neither Mulvaney nor Sharman saw them as central to such an operation.
“I do not regard carriers as the PLAN’s primary Taiwan weapons,” Mulvaney said, referring to the PLA Navy. He noted that Beijing already had ample land-based aircraft, missiles, surface ships and submarines for operations close to the mainland. Sending a carrier near Taiwan itself “could duplicate capabilities already available from shore while exposing a politically and militarily valuable platform”, he said.
Instead, he said he expected carriers to operate on the theatre’s outer flanks, supporting reinforcement-denial, air defence and counter-intervention missions deeper into the western Pacific rather than spearheading an assault close to Taiwan.
Sharman’s assessment, offered in a personal capacity, points in the same direction. Mainland Chinese military publications describe a layered defensive architecture around the carrier, with submarines and aircraft screening ahead of the formation, missile-armed destroyers forming the next ring, and point-defence systems providing the final layer of protection.
“This layered defensive architecture described in Chinese media suggests that, in wartime, the PLAN would seek to preserve the combat effectiveness of its carriers rather than expose them unnecessarily in the most heavily contested portions of the battlespace,” Sharman said.
Both assessments suggest Beijing sees its carriers less as the spearhead of a Taiwan assault than as high-value assets better employed on the conflict’s periphery while supporting broader campaigns against outside intervention.


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Defence experts say PLA carrier fleet is expected to complement land-based forces and extend reach into the western Pacific and beyond


Defence experts say PLA carrier fleet is expected to complement land-based forces and extend reach into the western Pacific and beyond.


.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Defence experts say PLA carrier fleet is expected to complement land-based forces and extend reach into the western Pacific and beyond

Defence experts say PLA carrier fleet is expected to complement land-based forces and extend reach into the western Pacific and beyond