Posted on 08/12/2011 9:54:11 AM PDT by LSUfan
As a totalitarian society, PRC is a military camp, in which everyone is a soldier. It is easier in such a society to conceal the building of new weapons or pursuing a secret military agenda. The original Hong Kong news story of 2004, which said that China was reported to be building, with the assistance from Russia, 3 aircraft carriers (called Project 9935), floated around the Chinese forums. According to Key publishing LTD.Aviation Forums of 18th Feb. 2004, all 3 ships could be operational by 2008-2010. The Chinese article said that maintenance facilities had been built in Shanghai, Dailan, and Zhejiang. The author of the article was not sure “how reliable” the source was: “so there you go… 3ACs, setting up the scene to become superpower by 2020.”
According to Polmar’s Perspective, other articles cite alleged Chinese plans to build up to 6 aircraft carriers in the near term.
(Excerpt) Read more at worldtribune.com ...
Tough to tell from the article whether any of the reports are accurate, but it has seemed for some time that the Red Chinese are hell-bent for leather to build a bluewater Navy to challenge the 7th Fleet and dominate the Asia-Pacific region at the very least.
Ahhhh, good...3 targets now...
No problem...
Help in the form of:
US becoming economically prostrate, with huge deficits and huge debt.
Forming useless commissions that will agree on nothing, forcing a large cut in Constitutionally-mandated defense spending.
Electing marxists to "lead us" to nirvana, as sinators, congresscritters, and to a lesser extent, marxist state reps/sinators.
The time to worry about the Chinese is when they start building lots of aircraft carriers. I guess we should start worrying. Maybe we can give them social security.
Aircraft Carriers are obsolete, we should scrap and reallocate the money to robot drone carriers.
We only have kept building carriers for the last 15 years due to politics.
Ping
“Aircraft Carriers are obsolete, we should scrap and reallocate the money to robot drone carriers.
We only have kept building carriers for the last 15 years due to politics.”
I hate to agree...but as impressive as they are, I see big, slow targets unless there is some truly radical development in defensive weaponry. Anything anyone has can be overwhelmed or outrun.
I say 2 Mk 48’s each, tops, and they are artificial reefs.
Even when I was in the Navy before they figured this out, we had a Battle Cruiser and two destroyers routinely take out an entire battle group.
The problem is, the formation is too large and easy to detect. It’s foot print is enormous.
It is considered a win as soon as you destroy the carrier too. So even when our ship was blown up in the war game, it was always after destroying the carrier.
The last war game that we were in, we killed them all except for one that fled. We only lost one Canadian Frigate.
It is a classic game of the guerrilla fighter vs the big slow main battle force with only one primary weapon.
I say get a bunch of these and their entire Navy fleet is a bunch of artificial reefs.
It is incredibly hard to defend these ships...it is almost beyond even our ability and that is only with extreme sacrifice.
Ok for the CV is dead/obsolete crowd, if the PLAN had 10 CVBG's and the USN had none, that situation would hunky dory with you guys? What a joke. Why don't you show your ignorance on a thread you might know something about.
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Tough to tell from the article whether any of the reports are accurate...
Well, they say all three ships will be operational in the 2008-2010 timeframe. Here it is 2011 and the first one has just set sail.
A $5,000.00 tow missile can knock out a $1M dollar M-1 Abrams tank. we should stop building tanks too. You guys are stupid. A 30 cent bullet can kill a us soldier we should just disband the entire Army. WTF?
“will this be the equivalent of the great white fleet of the early 20th c that the u.s. sent around the world?”
I suspect the day of carrier supremacy is over. Carriers never entered the Persian Gulf during Gulf War 1 because of mines. Now, super missiles can be fired from any platform, including from containers on container ships. The Chinese have long been building brilliant mines that move around under their own power and probably have the ship sound and influence profiles of every US ship in their memories. Even non-state actors like Hezbollah have deployed and used sophisticated anti-ship missiles. As asymmetric technologies, like sophisticated mines, become more common, the utility of carriers diminishes.
What scares me is that we have billions of dollars and thousands of lives on the line in ships I suspect are as obsolete as the battleship circa 1941. Our first indication that the strategic map has been changed may be a 6 ship loss on day one of a battle against an as yet unidentified non-state actor.
The time to start investing in alternative technologies is now, long before we see the actual need. George H. Bush wanted to preplace some carrier groups with robotized, submergible bombardment ships. Although an admiral pitched them to Congress, senior captains made individual pleas to Congressmen saying it was a bad idea. (You apparently can’t become and admiral without commanding a carrier first.)
At least the earlier versions of the TOW don’t take out the latest versions of the M1.
I don’t know about the later versions but they don’t cost 5k either.
M1 Tanks don’t hold thousands of personal and cost millions of dollars a year just to operate a single unit.
Do I need to go on why your comparison is just silly?
To get the equivalent force concentration in the army, you would only be able to afford to have 2-3 of these tanks in the entire country of Iraq.
I am glad FR doesn’t run the USN. Again when you can tell me how to replace tactical air cover in the middle of the ocean without an aircraft carrier, I’m all ears. PS it can’t be done.
you’re correct.
i remember attending a speech by gary hart in the ‘70s and
he made the point that in a hot war aircraft carriers would
head for the nearest river estuary.
whether that’s the truth or a democrat death wish...
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