The Chinese military uses models and reproductions of US aircraft carriers as targets in exercises carried out in a remote area of the northwestern desert, in Xinjiang.
The discovery was made thanks to satellite images captured by Maxar Technologies based in Colorado and dating back to Sunday, which show the contours of a US aircraft carrier and at least one destroyer in a desert location positioned on a railway track.
The locality was identified by Maxas as Ruoqiang, a county in the Taklamakan Desert, in the northwestern region of Xinjiang. The US Naval Institute reports that the reproductions would be part of a new firing range developed by the Chinese army. What emerges is that the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is reportedly focusing on attacking and neutralizing one of the key US military assets attached to the US Seventh Fleet in the Western Pacific, including the waters around Taiwan.
In a report by the US Naval Institute (Usni News), we read that the construction of the facility appears to have started between March and April 2019 and “substantially completed by the beginning of October” of this year. The targets, not only for their 1: 1 scale, are sophisticated and indicate Beijing’s interest in developing the technology needed to counter the power of the US Navy’s strike groups.