China Bets Refitted Destroyers Can Hold Line In US Numbers Race

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.