<
article id=”post-951709″>
Recent midlife upgrades to China’s older surface combatants highlight an ongoing debate over whether preserving naval fleet mass provides an operational edge over purely qualitative technological modernization in naval warfare.
This month, the South China Morning Post (SCMP) reported that the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) has carried out an extensive midlife refit of its legacy Type 051C guided-missile destroyer, replacing aging Russian-built combat systems with modern domestic air defense systems, based on recent sea trial imagery.
Commissioned in the mid-2000s as a stopgap fleet-air-defense platform, the Luzhou-class warship originally relied on imported Russian S-300FM Rif-M vertical launch missile systems and heavy rotating tracking radars to shield coastal approaches.
The overhaul, conducted at northern naval shipyards as the vessel nears the final phase of its operational service life, stripped out the dated Russian components and replaced them with indigenous universal vertical launch cells and advanced Chinese phased-array radars.
The upgrade is designed to streamline maintenance logistics, eliminate reliance on foreign parts, and enhance the warship’s tactical interoperability within modern, digitally integrated battle groups operating alongside newer Type 052D and Type 055 destroyers.
By fielding domestic surface-to-air missiles and updated electronic warfare suites, the PLAN extends the combat relevance and coastal air-defense utility of its veteran surface combatants before their eventual planned retirement.
While a February 2026 Newsweek article notes that China initially built the modern PLAN using Soviet technology in the 2000s, Alex Luck adds that legacy Russian-built systems in PLAN service may disappear within the next decade or two.
Luck notes that China has now overtaken Russia in some areas, especially sensors and electronics, thanks to its much larger domestic electronics and semiconductor industries.
He adds that comprehensive modernization of aging destroyers such as the Type 051C reflects the PLAN’s desire not to compromise on the number of its large surface combatants, allowing China to maintain front-line combat mass without sacrificing ship numbers as it transitions entirely to advanced domestic designs.
The PLAN’s decision to modernize legacy surface combatants rather than decommission them raises the question of whether the strategic utility of fleet mass outweighs the compounding operational liabilities of sustaining older hulls in peer naval competition.
Keeping older warships in service creates multiple challenges for navies. In a March 2026 Heritage Foundation report, Brent Sadler says warships more than 20 years old pose severe operational, structural, and budgetary challenges for navies trying to sustain frontline combat readiness against modern adversaries.
Sadler notes that decades of deferred maintenance on aging hulls trigger compounding structural degradation, rendering life extensions costly and difficult while draining limited shipyard capacity from new construction.
He adds that legacy platforms increasingly suffer obsolescence, requiring extensive retrofits to accommodate modern radar, electronic warfare suites, and missile cells.
According to Sadler, keeping these older vessels also risks fleet-wide firepower losses upon retirement and strains overburdened maintenance crews already contending with persistent spare-part shortages.
But the warship-age problem might be less of a challenge for the PLAN than for the US Navy. In a June 2024 report for the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), Alexander Palmer and other authors note that about 70% of active Chinese warships were launched after 2010, compared with just 25% of the US Navy.
Palmer and others point out that the disparity is particularly pronounced among surface combatants: the PLAN deployed 23 destroyers launched in the past decade versus just 11 operational US equivalents and has launched eight cruisers since 2017 compared to none for the US, which has not launched a similarly large type (the Zumwalt-class destroyer) since 2016.
Furthermore, US Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) estimates suggest Chinese shipbuilders have roughly 232 times the shipbuilding capacity of the US, raising the question of why the PLAN bothers preserving older hulls at all.
Because Chinese state-backed yards leverage an enormous commercial shipbuilding base to absorb naval construction, this dual-use industrial capacity lets shipbuilders rapidly accelerate combat vessel output, absorb attrition and conduct high-volume battle-damage repairs during a protracted war, echoing Allied manufacturing advantages in World War II.
Yet keeping older warships in service could confer decisive quantitative advantages. In a January 2023 Proceedings article, Sam Tangredi points out that numerical superiority routinely overcomes technological advantages in peer naval conflicts because volume lets forces absorb damage, exhaust adversary munitions, and mass decisive firepower.
Tangredi says that while initial technological leads rapidly erode over time, larger fleets retain combat striking power after absorbing first salvos and can overwhelm defensive systems through multi-axis saturation attacks.
He adds that greater platform mass also enhances broad-area scouting, rapidly depletes an opponent’s finite stockpiles of expensive precision munitions, creates complex targeting dilemmas, and provides the operational resilience needed to replace catastrophic wartime losses.
Fleet numbers illustrate this dynamic. the US Department of Defense’s 2020 China Military Power Report (CMPR) formally recognized that the PLAN had become the world’s largest maritime force by hull count, deploying about 350 ships and submarines, including more than 130 major surface combatants.
In contrast, an October 2020 Congressional Research Service (CRS) report recorded an active US Navy inventory of 301 battle force ships that year, including 94 large surface combatants.
That discrepancy may widen, with an April 2025 US CRS report noting that the PLAN’s fleet of over 370 vessels is projected to grow to 395 by 2025 and 435 by 2030, led by major surface combatants.
In contrast, a January 2026 US CRS report shows that US Navy battle force inventory fell from 296 hulls in late 2024 to 293 by late 2025, with projections anticipating 294 ships by 2030 amidst acute shipyard capacity constraints and procurement delays.
However, the April 2025 CRS report cautions that comparing US and Chinese naval capabilities solely through ship counts or aggregate fleet tonnage is fundamentally misleading and analytically flawed.
The report says hull numbers are a one-dimensional metric that overlooks critical combat determiners, including weapon payloads, sensor sophistication, networking, logistics, personnel proficiency, and doctrine.
It also adds that modern naval warfighting increasingly hinges on internal electronics and software that external observation cannot judge. It cautions that crude quantitative tallies obscure wide fleet asymmetries and fail to measure how each force aligns with its respective strategic missions.
Ultimately, the PLAN’s fleet-mass doctrine will succeed only if integrated digital systems and tactical networking keep legacy hulls combat-effective, or if rising lifecycle maintenance costs eventually favor qualitative modernization.
