Long ago, passenger ships were considered dual use military assets, good for service as troop carriers, attack transports, auxiliary cruisers and even commerce raiders. As specialized amphibious attack ships entered service during the 1950s and 1960s, passenger ship military utility evaporated. Long forgotten as military assets, cruise ships have quietly evolved to the point where they can be useful in certain amphibious assault scenarios.
China is just beginning to mass-produce cruise ships. With a military that embraces civil-military fusion, blending civilian and military capabilities, the country will be sorely tempted to transform these enormous civilian vessels into super-sized security problems.
Since the mid-nineties, a global renaissance in passenger cruising has given passenger liners a new—albeit unrecognized—military relevance. Over the past few decades, the race to cost-effectively meet booming customer demand has pushed the industry towards massive, complex ships. As fast, robust vessels, capable of generating large amounts of electricity, the technology aboard gives these ships far wider military relevance than most modern observers realize.
For years, cruise liners were consigned to serve as reserve troop transports, good for little more than point-to-point troop transport during a Falkland Islands-like crisis.
Today, technology gives these ships the potential to serve as amphibious assault platforms right out of the box. Cruise ship technology has evolved to point where the no longer need much modification to be militarily relevant. The ships can get an enormous number of troops onto a sea-side target. If left unwatched, China’s future cruise ship fleet will have the potential to carry out strategic “coup de mains” anywhere across the Indo-Pacific.
The West has brought this on to itself. Technological advances, regulatory inertia and a failure of imagination have limited the West’s interest in understanding the accretion of military potential in these rapidly-evolving, dual-use platforms. Policymaker refusal to appreciate China’s willingness to defy long-standing Western operational norms, coupled with the cruise industry’s insatiable appetite for the lowest-cost shipbuilder, risks creating a new and poorly understood amphibious challenge throughout the Indo-Pacific.
Cruise Liners Are Now Amphibious Assault Vessels:
A modern cruise ship’s military relevance rests in the fact that each cruise ship can use their embarked lifeboats to get more people ashore faster than ever before.
Present-day cruise ships can use capable, modern lifeboats to land up to 8000 people in a single wave. Even without ready logistical and support backup, a surprise landing of thousands of modestly-equipped troops would simply overwhelm defenses on many of the Pacific’s remote and strategically-useful islands. With these ships, China could change the “facts on the ground” in an instant.
Even modern ports on Taiwan or elsewhere would struggle to rebuff such an attack. The moment Chinese forces have a foothold in a developed port, China will be ready to use their militarized civilian ferry fleet to pour supplies and heavier resources into their initial lodgment.
Aside from their ability to land lots of people, modern cruise ships are also huge, fast and tough to sink. In the cruise industry’s push to maximize per-ship efficiencies, cruise ship displacement has more than doubled since 2009. Cruise ship displacement growth shows no sign of leveling off anytime soon. In 2024, the Royal Caribbean International’s Icon of the Seas, is set to leave a Finland shipyard. At almost 1,200 feet long and over 250,000 tons, the ship—the first of three—is larger than the USS Gerald R. Ford, America’s newest aircraft carrier.
The cruise ship industry was a backwater for decades. Dismissed as irrelevant after World War II, the cruise ship industry suffered fifty years of relative stasis. But, over the past few decades, the explosive growth in cruise ship displacement has outpaced everything from port infrastructure to maritime regulation. The rate of cruise ship growth has been exponential. Between 1939 and 1972, the 87,673 ton RMS Queen Elizabeth was the largest passenger ship in the world. Only surpassed by the 101,353 ton Carnival Destiny in 1996, both ships are less than half the size of the enormous Icon of the Seas.
As cruise ship displacement grew, lifesaving technology—the tools that make the ships useful in amphibious assault—have advanced as well. When RMS Queen Elizabeth’s operational peer, the RMS Queen Mary, left service in the early 1970’s, the ship relied on 22 open lifeboats that could fit 145 passengers and propel survivors through the water at about six knots. Today, the Icon of the Seas is set to carry seventeen mega-sized enclosed lifeboats, each with a capacity to move up to 450 people to shore at somewhere around nine or ten knots. They’re fast-loading, too. Though each of the big lifeboats carry more people than a 747 jumbo jet, passengers, in tests, can get aboard in just five minutes and 21 seconds.
Modern “lifeboats” for civilian service usually meet the bare minimum requirement for current lifesaving regulations. But there’s enough flexibility in modern lifeboat design to make the boats faster and more suitable for dual-use activities.
Even without military influence, lifeboats are evolving. As cruise ships get bigger, port infrastructure is struggling to keep up. Big cruise ships are often unable to moor directly to a pier, and must sit at anchor. To overcome this lack of ready infrastructure, cruise ships are transforming their lifeboats into “tender boats” to get passengers ashore without the need of super-sized dock space. These “dual-use” tender boats are, in general, up-engined and faster than the average lifeboat. A big Fassmer SEL-T 15.5 lifeboat/tender hybrid can shuttle 230 people to and from the ship at 11 knots. Palfinger Marine’s CTL 57 catamaran can get 220 people ashore in relatively speedy comfort.
That is just the tip of the iceberg. It is easy to harden—or even militarize—these utilitarian and hard-to-sink lifeboats. Improving their speed, survivability or landing features are well within China’s capabilities.
In fact, we’ve reached the point where modern lifeboats can meet—and even beat—the performance of dedicated modern-day military landing craft. America’s Wasp-class big-deck amphibious ships might have entered service in the 1990’s, but their landing craft are relics from the early sixties.
Each of America’s Wasp-class assault vessels carry up to twelve medium landing craft (LCM-8) or two larger LCU 1600 utility landing craft. With an open deck, LCU 1600s can only carry up to 400 troops for brief and uncomfortable periods, pushing them to shore at about 11 knots. The smaller open-deck LCM-8s, when loaded with about 150 troops, can only manage a maximum speed of nine knots.
These old-school landing craft might be able to land large equipment, but, if all China needs is to get a single, big assault wave ashore and into a moderately-developed harbor, modern cruise ship tenders and lifeboats can get more troops to their seaside targets more quickly than ever. Only helicopters and air-cushion LCAC landing craft can move troops ashore faster.
China Is Aiming To Mass-Produce Modern Passenger Ships:
There’s not much time to plan for a future full of militarized cruise ships.
China’s first home-built cruise ship, the 135,500 gross ton Adora Magic City, is currently in sea trials. China isn’t waiting. It is already building a second 142,000-ton cruise ship and observers expect it to enter service in 2025.
Everybody from the West will line up to have China build their cruise ships. Given all the state subsidies showered on China’s shipbuilding sector, China was reportedly able to undertake their first two cruise ship building projects for one-fifth the price of a similarly-sized European-built passenger vessel.
The Adora Magic City, or “Ada Modu”, carries 20 314-person lifeboats. If China decides to press this civilian ship into military service—like it has with every single type of civilian vessel that operates under the Chinese flag—the new cruise ship could effectively land more than 6000 troops in a single wave. China will certainly give this tactic a try; cruise ships offer some of the final operational pieces China needs to fully integrate a diverse grab-bag of organic civil-military amphibious capabilities.
With Chinese-operated cruise ships set to enter service and likely to fan out into the Pacific, it is high-time to recognize the military utility of these new entrants into the Chinese fleet and act to limit the militarization of these vessels. Going forward, any Chinese civilian vessel employed for amphibious assault exercises must be identified as a formal military vessel and permanently excluded from international civilian commerce.
Modern cruise ships are not to be dismissed. These modern-day attack transports pose a serious and underestimated security challenge. China can easily “militarize” these civilian vessels, either by adding military features, making unexplained “improvements” to the embarked lifeboats or by secretive attempts to leverage their massive electrical generation capabilities. If China starts bending these civilian assets towards offensive military capabilities, those efforts must be publicly rebuffed the moment they are detected.
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