Type-054A class frigate of the PLAN
Type-054A class frigate of the PLAN
The much ballyhooed LCS is NOT and never can be an FFG-7 replacement, while the DDG-51 Burke-class is just to damn big and way too expensive to build in numbers.
Commence the trade war.
Wake up, people.
Build ships is the easy part. Finding the men with the ability to fight those ships is a lot harder. That comes from experience and experience takes years to develop.
this is the chinese. they do nothing in small numbers. it’s not how they think
when they start their push for a navy, it won’t be like we do it. they won’t have a handful of ships produced while wringing their hands over whether or not its right. they will look at their adversary (the US) and move to overwhelm it. think what we did for WW2... and multiply times 10, at least
i would be shocked if they aren’t pushing to have at least 100 carrier groups (i believe we have 7... though i’m sure 0bama and progressives would like that to be 2).
sit and ponder that for a minute. what would it require and how would you defend?
require? it’d require vast resources... like they have been stockpiling/using for years. and don’t think they would use just conventional building techniques/materials.
how would you defend? they would have 10 carrier groups, 10 jets, for every 1 of ours. short of going nuclear... you wouldn’t.
and what are we doing? we’ve got progressives dismantling our nuclear arsenal daily (we under 2500 warheads yet? it was 3100 last i heard). we’ve also shutdown F22 production for the F35, yet i have heard no rave reviews of the F35. 1000 F22 like planes from the chinese, as disclosed last week, would be enough to dominate the skies (i believe we only have 180 F22s). main ships? last i heard, it’s under 150.
and if we actually wanted to keep up? how long would it take for us to produce 100 carrier groups? decades, as we wouldn’t be producing them in parallel, but serially.
in the 80s, my godfather was with the thunderbirds when they went to china. of all the stories, the one that stuck with me was his observations of their factories. they gave him a tour (he was a general) of one such location... and he said they were making jets in the same factory they were making bikes. he said the conditions were nothing like what we had. he asked me, why do you think all their bikes are black? i had no clue. he said, because that’s the color of the paint used on the jets.
he wouldn’t have thought it to be a major issue... in 1987. we didn’t push all our factories in china until 1994.
my point being, all those factories we shipped to china.. which they promptly made duplicates of... each could be re-tooled for military production. it’s how they think.
as an example, my brother-in-law was attempting to get a toilet manufactured here in the US. he had very few options and all were exceedingly expensive. then he looked to china. in one ‘village’ alone, there are 1200 toilet manufacturers. 1200! just in one ‘village’.
our scale of thinking does not come close to how the chinese operate
The U.S. should embrace assymetrical warfare, just like the Chinese. For the price of a Chinese aircraft carrier, we could build a LOT of long-range anti-ship missles.