Chinese sub pops up in middle of U.S. Navy exercise.
The U.S. military might have been caught napping for a second time. Three years to the date exactly the Chinese popped up in a naval exercise.
The Chinese do have a stealth submarine. The stealth submarine is a modified version of the Type 041 Yuan-class submarine. According to military experts, the Yuan-class’s technology borrows heavily from Russian designs. The Yuan-class is reported to use a new air-independent propulsion (AIP) system based on the concept of the Swedish Stirling engine. Chinese naval research institutes are known to have been investigating fuel cell and exhaust recycling AIP designs similar to the French MESMA (Module d’Energie Sous-Marine Autonome) (Jane’s Defense Weekly, October 7; Wen Wei Po [Hong Kong], October 12).