A deeper look at Yulin-East, China’s burgeoning submarine bastion in the South China Sea.
Our previous article about Yulin-East , China’s up-and-coming submarine base in the South China Sea, provided a brief look at the base’s infrastructure and its strategic implications. Below, for those interested, we have included more information about Yulin’s features and their implications, as well as a brief technical analysis of Yulin’s strategic vulnerability.
The People’s Republic has methodically assembled the necessary force structure to make Yulin a major command and control center — and a vitally important, well-defended one in the case of a conflict. The number and size of administrative buildings suggest more officer involvement than other common Chinese naval bases. The sizeable, dense mountain makes for effective, bunkered defense in case of a major bombing raid. Yulin and Yulin-East together can house two full carrier strike groups, plus a generous handful of additional nuclear submarines. The base is designed to accommodate a wide variety of conventional and nuclear forces, some fortifying China’s strategic deterrent and others enhancing China’s coercive power in the South China Sea. Additionally, though China has been building artificial island bases at an impressive clip, the effort necessary to construct an equally-fortified base of this magnitude on a small island deep in the South China Sea would redefine herculean. (Recall that construction is still ongoing at Yulin-East after 17 full years.) Simply put, if China does want to use a base on Hainan’s southern coast as a potential command and control center for its South Sea Fleet, they have gone out of their way to make Yulin-East a qualified candidate.
The infrastructure at Yulin-East often raises more questions than answers. Do all of the tunnel entrances bored into the southeastern mountain connect to the larger internal structure? If so, identifying such entrances could provide critical information as to the size and shape of the underground facility. But some of these tunnel entrances may lead to standalone munitions or supply depots, potentially designed specifically to misdirect or confuse an adversary’s security analysts. In addition, the three radio towers could indicate an intended major Command and Control role for Yulin-East. But they could also merely serve as redundancies in case nearby radio or harbor control towers fail or are destroyed. Until we know the answers, it is difficult to determine whether some of these structures deviate from standard PLAN doctrine. We at Strategic Sentinel have flagged structures like this to watch going forward, when trends (or deviations thereof) may arise.
When discussing strike options against a military base, one must consider more than the base’s theater and point defense systems. Yulin will presumably be boasting some advanced SAM technology, if it isn’t already, and as we’ve noted, anti-ship cruise missile launchers are already deployed. But with a target like Yulin, firmly in the heart of valued Chinese territory like Hainan Island, theater and point defenses constitute merely a fraction of the threat calculus.
