Posted on 11/14/2006 7:18:14 PM PST by traumer
The US navy has confirmed reports of a close encounter between one of its battle groups and a Chinese submarine in the Pacific late last month.
US Pacific Commander Admiral William Fallon said the incident had had the potential to escalate.
He called for better communications between the two sides.
He dismissed as rather sensational a report that a Chinese submarine had stalked the aircraft carrier USS Kitty Hawk and its accompanying warships.
But he did concede that the Chinese vessel had been close, which left both sides open to the potential for miscalculation.
Admiral Fallon said that US forces had not been looking for submarines at the time.
But if they had, and the Chinese had stumbled into the middle of such an exercise, the encounter "could well have escalated into something that was very unforeseen", he said.
According to the Washington Times, the Chinese had surfaced in ocean waters near the Japanese island of Okinawa, a mere 8km (five miles) from the carrier group.
The paper said that the submarine had only been detected by a routine surveillance flight by one of the carrier group's planes.
Admiral Fallon said the incident illustrated why his colleagues want better relationships with their Chinese counterparts.
Exchange visits between the two sides were scaled down after a collision between a Chinese fighter jet and a US spy plane off the Chinese coast in 2001.
Where is Bush on this?
Why hasnt T.Snow-job come out to whitewash it?
Why arent the democrats saying "SEE SEE Bush is totally incompetent(they would be right to)!"
All the weenies running our country care about is themselves.
While Reagan did have his faults(pulling out of Beirut), he did send a message to Khadaffi(although Pan AM 103 may have been the payback) and Iran when the navy sanka bunch of their boats and shot down the Iran Air 660. If you read the history, that really got to them and was one of the reasons Khomeini drank the poison chalice
Admiral Fallon is a chinese appeaser...pure and simple..
If the carrier collides with the Chinese sub, the Chinese get to keep the entire crew hostage for a month.
Someone has egg on their face.
Perhaps if we knew it was there, we do not want them to know we knew it was there.
Let them carry on in the ignorant bliss of their unknown unkowns...
"Admiral Fallon said that US forces had not been looking for submarines at the time."
And on Dec 7 1941 we had not been looking for fighter bombers over Pearl Harbor.
"Admiral Fallon said that US forces had not been looking for submarines at the time "
Niether was the skipper of the USS Indianapolis during the closing days of WW2. She now sits on the bottom of the pacific.
lol...I knew someone would point that out.
in other words.... one of their subs is gonna turn up, missing. too bad, so sad.
With our boomers and other devices that are classified I'm sure that the Chinese could just "sneak up" and stalk a carrier.
So in about a month or so when we read about this "tragic" Chinese sub accident, we can just shrug our shoulders and say, "don't know what happened. We weren't anywhere near it when it disappeared.... or were we?"
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