Mini submarine captured on satellite photo of Chinese dockyard

A MYSTERIOUS midget submarine has been spotted in commercial satellite photos, drawing fresh attention to the nation’s expanding underwater might.

A SECRET Chinese midget submarine has been spotted in a review of commercial satellite photos, drawing new attention to that nation’s rapidly expanding underwater might.

Defence analyst organisation Janes and the Bellingcat open intelligence website have highlighted a 2014 photograph of the Wuchang shipyard in Wuhan, central China.

It is where most of China’s diesel-electric submarines are constructed, including the world’s largest non-nuclear boat — the Type 032 Qing-class ballistic missile testbed.

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Moored alongside a military pontoon used for preparing newly constructed submarines to go to sea is an unusually small vessel which analysts believe may be only 35m long and four metres wide.

It’s not been seen nor heard of since.

Such a submarine is ideally suited to operating in the shallow waters of the East China and South China Seas, hiding among the ‘clutter’ of the seabed and noisy tidal currents.

Covert weapons

Military midget submarines have a history of covert operations, particularly stealth attacks.

A force of five small submarines were deployed by Japan to strike Pearl Harbor at the same time as its torpedo-carrying aircraft. Similar vessels later raided Sydney Harbour.

Great Britain used midget submarines to deploy explosives under the German battleship Tirpitz, as well as to survey the beaches of the D-Day landings.

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Few modern militaries employ such vessels beyond deep-sea research and rescue.

North Korea and Iran have a force of small attack vessels believed capable of travelling some 2500km to their targets. One is believed to have been behind the sinking of a South Korean corvette in 2010.

Sweden also builds and operates midget submarines in the narrow waters of the Baltic Sea.

While able to carry torpedoes, military analysts believe the primary purpose of these ‘commando’ submarines is to secretly deploy spies and special forces.

Power shift

While the Cold War cat-and-mouse games between nuclear missile and hunter-killer submarines as shown in the movie The Hunt For Red October may be over for now, Asia’s navies are boosting their submarine forces to counter China’s expansion.

The US has also responded by moving extra submarines out of the Atlantic and into the Pacific, as well as sending its newest anti-submarine aircraft — the P-8 Poseidon — to Okinawa.

India, which operates one ex-Russian nuclear attack submarine and 13 diesel-electric boats, is understood to be in negotiations with Japan to build a new class on home soil.

Australia, still caught up in a controversial ‘competitive evaluation process’ in which the Abbott Government has clearly telegraphed its preference for Japanese built vessels, has reduced its plans to build 12 new submarines to buying eight.

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Last year China made great fanfare about sending a nuclear-powered Shang-class attack submarine through the Strait of Malacca between Malaysia and Indonesia. It is believed to have been the first voyage of such a Chinese vessel into the Indian Ocean.

It was a move designed to demonstrate that nation’s growing subsurface strength.

It’s doing little to hide the fact.

Chinese nuclear-powered and armed missile submarines are berthed near tourist beaches in China’s southern Hainan province. They carry missiles capable of reaching Hawaii and Alaska if launched from the South and East China Seas.

“This is a trump card that makes our motherland proud and our adversaries terrified,” the chief of China’s navy, Admiral Wu Shengli, wrote early last year. “It is a strategic force symbolising great-power status and supporting national security.”

Island enclosure

While geography poses a challenge for submarine forces in Asia, China may be seeking to turn that to its advantage.

Ships of all kinds must pass through narrow straits to enter Chinese waters from both the Pacific and Indian Oceans. The Indonesian Malacca, Sunda and Lombok Straits are natural ‘choke-points’ to the Indian Ocean. Then there’s the Luzon Strait between the Philippines and Taiwan, and the island chain including Okinawa between Taiwan and Japan.

China established its naval strategy in the 1980s when Admiral Liu Huaquing defined a “First Island Chain” (line stretching from southern Japan to the southern Philippines) as well as a “Second Island Chain” (From northern Japan, Guam and down to Indonesia) as being ‘constraints’ on Chinese power.

His stated objective was for the People’s Liberation Army Navy to have established dominance over the “First Island Chain” by 2010, and the “Second Island Chain” by 2020. Many see China’s land reclamation projects in the South China sea to establish a string of military bases in disputed territory as the embodiment of this strategy.

One advantage of this approach is to create an enclosed ‘sanctuary’ to protect its nuclear missile submarines.

It’s also why the US fears China will declare a new “air defence identification zone” over the South China Sea — enforced by combat jets operating from the new island bases — in the same way one was imposed over the East China Sea in 2013.