Beijing will publicly display extra‑large uncrewed underwater vehicles on 3 September, underscoring progress in a programme that analysts warn could one day target allied seabed sensors and undersea communications — though operationalising such attacks would be complex and risky.
China will put its undersea ambitions on public display on 3 September 2025, when a Beijing military parade marking the 80th anniversary of the end of the Second Sino‑Japanese War is expected to include extra‑large uncrewed underwater vehicles (XLUUVs) that analysts say could one day be used to threaten the United States’ seabed surveillance architecture.
According to Naval News and imagery from rehearsal parades, one hull marked AJX002 stretches roughly 18–20 metres and appears fitted with pump‑jet propulsion, lifting lugs and modular transport features that would ease over‑the‑beach movements or embarkation on auxiliary ships. A second, larger design remained covered in rehearsals but showed distinctive dual stern masts and X‑form rudders, signalling a design divergence within the programme. People’s Daily, relaying an official Xinhua dispatch, says the parade will showcase “improved weapons, equipment,” framed as active‑service, domestically produced platforms reflecting the PLA’s modernisation drive; the report quoted a senior officer, Wu Zeke, stressing joint and informationised combat capabilities.
The public unveiling will do more than celebrate hardware. For Beijing, the spectacle is also a strategic message: XLUUVs promise to expand the People’s Liberation Army Navy’s toolbox in an undersea competition that has long been dominated by the United States and its allies. Defence analysts have argued that large, long‑endurance unmanned submarines could be tasked to map, harass or physically disable fixed seabed sensors and communications infrastructure — operations that, if performed at scale and in concert with other measures, would complicate allied anti‑submarine warfare (ASW) and maritime domain awareness.
That vulnerability is well understood in Beijing. As Ryan Martinson reported in June 2025 for the Center for International Maritime Security, PLA Navy officers writing in the service journal Military Art warned of a “fairly high probability” of detection for Chinese submarines even inside the First Island Chain because of an integrated surveillance system that couples seabed arrays, satellites, aircraft, surface ships and unmanned platforms. The network these systems create — often described in western analyses as the Fish Hook undersea defence line — links nodes from southern Japan through Okinawa, past Taiwan to the Philippines and down into the wider Indonesian archipelago. The result is persistent exposure for conventional PLAN submarines that modernisation alone has yet to eliminate.
Commentators such as David Axe have outlined how XLUUVs and related systems could be used against that network. In The Strategist he described techniques Beijing might pursue: remotely operated vehicles to sever cables, autonomous drones to emplace charges, and long‑range systems left in place to be triggered remotely by acoustic or other signals. Such a campaign, he warned, would be methodical rather than theatrical — intended to blind fixed arrays, lengthen repair cycles by forcing reliance on a limited pool of specialist vessels, and push the US and its partners back toward more expensive and predictable patrol regimes.
Those scenarios feed directly into Beijing’s wider operational calculations. A CSIS analysis in August 2024 led by Bonny Lin underlined the role submarines would play in a high‑intensity effort to blockade or coerce Taiwan, including covert mine‑laying and interdiction of commercial sea lanes. Likewise, impairing seabed surveillance would loosen constraints on China’s emerging undersea nuclear deterrent: SSBNs operating free of constant acoustic tracking would be better able to undertake patrols beyond “bastion” areas such as the South China Sea, and the arrival of longer‑range JL‑3 missiles will increase the strategic value of such freedom of manoeuvre.
But the parade reveal — and the hardware it displays — should not be read as an instant game‑changer. Observers caution that XLUUVs are tools, not magic bullets. The US Department of Defense’s China Military Power Report (2024) documents both the numerical growth of China’s submarine fleet and the scale of allied investment in undersea sensing and ASW techniques. The International Institute for Strategic Studies’ 2024 Asia‑Pacific assessment also stresses that, despite capability gaps across the region, the US and its partners have decades of experience in ASW and continue to expand patrols, sensor networks and cooperative training with partners such as Australia, India and Japan.
Operationalising a campaign to neutralise seabed networks would be difficult and risky. It requires sustained intelligence to locate nodes and repair patterns, specialised logistics to sustain dispersed unmanned systems, cyber‑acoustic tools for clandestine activation, and a force posture that can protect deployers and deny repair ships access. David Axe and other analysts note the paucity of dedicated cable‑repair and seabed maintenance vessels globally; that scarcity would both aid an attacker in the near term and, paradoxically, create incentives for defenders to harden redundancy and rapid‑reaction repair capabilities.
There are also countervailing political and escalation risks. An organised effort to sever undersea cables or emplace explosives would be overtly hostile, with obvious implications for peacetime commerce and military‑to‑military signalling. The practical gains for Beijing would need to be balanced against the strategic costs of forcing the United States and its partners into a sustained wartime posture that would galvanise allied mobilisation and perhaps accelerate counter‑measures such as dispersal of sensors, deployment of more mobile acoustic baselines and stepped‑up ASW patrols.
China’s parade will therefore offer a public snapshot of what has been a quietly fast‑moving technical programme: trials at naval bases such as Sanya and Yulin have already suggested design maturity, and the appearance of multiple XLUUVs in rehearsals points to production at scale. Yet whether those platforms can be translated into a durable operational advantage depends on logistics, doctrine, allied resilience and the tempo of counter‑measures. As analysts have pointed out, the strategic picture is not static: the United States and its partners retain deep expertise in seabed warfare and are unlikely to cede the undersea domain without a protracted contest.
When the XLUUVs pass Tiananmen, the display will be as much about signalling a future capability as about demonstrating a present one. The parade will confirm design milestones and Beijing’s intent to broaden the character of undersea competition. But the real test — whether unmanned submarine fleets can systematically “punch holes” in a decades‑refined surveillance network and so reshape the balance beneath the Pacific waves — will be settled at sea over years, not in a single parade.
Source: Noah Wire Services
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