Back to the OP, it's getting more interesting now.
http://www.cbc.ca/m/touch/world/story/1.2440703China has sortied its brand new (refurbished anyway) CV with 3 escort warships and several support vessels to the area we're talking about. I guess I was right about staging Chinese/Japanese air force fighters easily, as China has gone with the naval option as well. We'll get to see at the very least how spooled up they are with modern CV air operations. A lot of defense sites and analysts around the world will be glued to the wires waiting to see how that works out for the Chinese. I bet they actually are able to do pretty well so far as getting aircraft airborne, and not so well at keeping their CVN deck covert (very important even for USN CV battle groups). Taiwan has the closest fighter bases to the disputed region too, and they certainly aren't on China's side in this. Kadena AFB and the closest Chinese AFB look pretty close to equidistant from the islands. The Chinese CVN certainly is no match for a USN CVN group, but it does signify a first for a country like China, getting into the naval air projection game, albeit with a slow non nuclear powered CV with only about 20 or 25 aircraft max, and those aircraft will be lightly loaded in order to get airborne in the first place. If Japan was on their own in this one, the Chinese CVN would be a huge piece on the board, since Japan doesn't have one at all. The new Chinese Frigs and Destroyers are pretty impressive on paper, this will be a good time to observe them and see how good they are at the escort gig. I wouldn't bet against the USN running some pretty intense exercises versus this group with their SSN's in the area. I'm very interested to see how good the Chinese ASW capability is now.
I wonder if Japan will respond now with some naval vessels, or if the USN is going to handle this one. The B52's that flew through the area yesterday was quite a show of force to China, pretty much telling them where they can stick their new air defense zone regs. Apparently China didn't get the message, or got it and doesn't care, and is sending a CVN battle group anyway. I think the USN is going to have to do some major redeployments to counter this move. This is when having F35B capable "mini cv's" like the America and other assault ship classes will really help the USN in areas like this. When they just don't have an extra CVN deck to put into a crisis like this, having 2 assault ships with 40 F35's will be a pretty major asset to use as a substitute. Just my opinion anyway.
