Posted on 06/22/2014 9:35:13 PM PDT by sukhoi-30mki
Yeah, I thought their next one might be big
I bet it’s big enough to have its own Walmart! /s;)
No ski jump?
Doesn’t look very intimidating.
No more ski jump... it’s a big boy carrier!!
We are currently buying (from) China 440 billion dollars / year of goods.
We are currently selling China 122 billion dollars of goods.
That is a whole heck of a lot of financing, for China’s military.
Just saying.
Its one thing to build them. Its an entirely different and probably more critical need to train a competent crew. Without the tradition of naval aviation , combat experience and the hard won lessons learned over eighty years on carriers, that ship may be outdated before it is fully functional and effective.
China is spending years and years training those crews
Ohheck! Ididn’t notice this: four electric catapults for quickly launching... Not steam catapults; they must really have good spys.
Time to bring back America jobs, wouldn’t you say?
Still in the planning stages, and since that ship is supposed to be a nuke, and a CATOBAR launcher, it will be unlike their other two hulls. Gonna be a loooooooooooooong time before that thing sees water, much less active service, even if they have a crew that can run it. It’s taking the US 7 years from laying the keel to commissioning a Ford Carrier, and that’s largely because we’ve been building nukes for forty years already. In all likelihood, by the time the Chinese “Nimitz” takes its place in the Line, the US Nimitz hulls will all be considered obsolete and will already have their decommission dates set (even if they’re still in service). There will be at least 4 Ford carriers in service by then, maybe more; Enterprise is scheduled for commissioning in 2025, and I don’t expect a Chinese nuclear carrier much before 2030.
I completely agree with that.
Which party, is going to stand up for America workers, doing American jobs?
GOP stand up. Bring back American jobs.
Also, is it just me, or are their trap wires set rather forward? Their model shows the wires right in front of the “Island”.
Never mind, I missed the reflection; their “Island” is set more aft, like the Ford carriers, but even then, the wires do still look a bit too far forward.
Is it going to fall apart like all the crap that I have that is stamped MADE IN CHINA?
I should like to ask the larger question, why do we build and maintain aircraft carriers at such an enormous cost? How do they further the nation's national security?
If we are building them to refight the battle of Midway, I think we are well advanced along the wrong track. I do not think were going to be fighting a war with China with conventional forces on a world scale, although there certainly might be many flareups, hopefully geographically isolated, which have the potential to get out of control.
The Chinese right now and for the foreseeable future take few pains to hide their ambitions in their near Asia. They are intimidating Taiwan, Japan, Vietnam, and the Philippines. But they're not overtly threatening these nations with nuclear war, that would be fought with missiles probably and not with planes.
They are attempting to change the balance of power in the region. In other words, they want to end the role of the United States as the cop on the beat in their neighborhood and they want to substitute themselves in that role. Their idea of a cop on the beat, however, is one who takes payoffs and the Chinese plan to strip their neighbors of commodities much like the Japanese conception for the greater Southeast Asia coprosperity sphere of the late 1930s.
Even if Chinese ambitions are less rapacious, they still see themselves in need of enormous quantities of commodities from around the world, especially Africa and South America to feed their teeming millions and to advance a 21st-century technical society. In order to get into those continents and get the stuff back to China, they want to be assured that they can control the sea lanes. Certainly, carriers fit that purpose as well as the purpose of intimidating their immediate neighbors.
So we as the dominant naval power the world ultimately projecting sea power by the use of very expensive carriers, should consider what the world will look like in a couple of decades when the Chinese have even a few carriers of concededly more limited capabilities. Think as the Soviets thought when Reagan was introducing Star Wars, they thought it probably would not work-but they could not be sure and that lack of certainty changed everything.
The whole balance of power will change. The whole system of alliances will be threatened and probably change. A socialist nation in South America which sells copper to China might consider itself closer to China than to the United States, not geographically but strategically and economically. If once the United States, as hateful a Yankee nation as that might be, provided a system of security, now that system is not perfect and the Chinese are providing a different system with economic benefits.
I recall being abused on these threads about 10 years ago for endorsing the projections of an article to the effect the Chinese economy would exceed ours within a reasonable number of years. We are now on the threshold of that calamity and with it, after a time lag, inevitably comes the threshold of military power.
Worse, in many ways the Chinese are building an industrial capacity that will exceed ours in important ways. For example, I have read that the Chinese will have a shipbuilding capacity approaching 50 times ours. If true, the timeline changes drastically. They do not need a learning curve times 20 but only a learning curve to the point where they get a serviceable carrier which could compete and change perceptions and therefore the balance of power and, in the time to build one carrier, build 20. Of course I know is not as simple as that, but nobody told Henry Kaiser of those difficulties during World War II. He built one liberty ship every day fooling the gainsayers and the Japanese.
I believe that we should lift our sights from aircraft carriers to the next dominating weapon system. Perhaps the submarines, perhaps that is weapons launched from satellites, perhaps that is cyber warfare, or perhaps it is a combination of all of these. But that still does not change our problem of a shifting balance of power. We will see a shifting balance of power with immediate ramifications in the Persian Gulf when Iran gets the bomb. Everything in that region will change. We should expect everything to change in the Far East for much the same reasons.
Still require command, control and logistics.
They are behind us.
Carriers aren’t about being the centerpiece of a flotilla anymore. Once upon a time, they were intended to fight as the core element in a naval armada, acting as flag ship and a way to increase the amount of firepower available to target the enemy.
However, nowadays, that’s changed. Certainly there’s still a significant Naval role for the carrier, but today the carrier is akin to a mobile airbase, capable of projecting power in regions where the US does not have assets already stationed, or at least stationed in such numbers as to be capable of projecting force. And more to the point, doing it quickly.
It’s arguable as to whether an airplane can take territory, and more arguable as to whether it can hold it, but air power certainly does a fantastic job of denying territory to an enemy, and of “killing them and breaking their stuff” as the saying goes, and doing it in large volume at high speed.
China is probably the biggest reason to keep carriers around. The US simply doesn’t have enough land facilities close to China to be of any use if China decides they want full control of the Western Pacific. A carrier can be a credible replacement.
Whether or not it serves the US’s national security to be capable of projecting force globally is probably a separate matter. However, assuming for the sake of argument that it is, the carrier is probably the best way to do it for now and for at least the next couple of decades.
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