Posted on 04/29/2015 11:44:52 PM PDT by sukhoi-30mki
HONG KONG: Vietnam is arming its expanding submarine fleet with land attack missiles that could be capable of reaching Chinese coastal cities, a choice of weapon likely to be seen as provocative by China in the ongoing South China Sea dispute.
The independent Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) recently updated data on its website to show Vietnam's acquisition of the Russian-made land attack variant of the Klub missile for its state-of-the-art Kilo attack submarines.
SIPRI arms researcher Siemon Wezeman said the entry was based on an earlier but little-noticed filing Vietnam made last year to the United Nations' register of conventional arms.
Regional military attaches and analysts see the missiles as a further sign of Vietnam's determination to counter the rise of China's military and part of a broader trend of Asian countries re-arming amid rising territorial tensions.
The choice of weapon is a more assertive one than the anti-shipping missiles Vietnam was expected to obtain.
While those would potentially target Chinese ships and submarines in the South China Sea, the land attack weapons are capable of precision strikes at a range of 300 kilometres, making China's coastal cities potential targets in any conflict.
Carl Thayer, an expert on Vietnam's military at the Australian Defence Force Academy, said the move was a "massive shift" beyond more routine anti-ship tactics.
"They've given themselves a much more powerful deterrent that complicates China's strategic calculations," he said, adding he was surprised by the move.
Vietnam is the first Southeast Asian nation to arm its submarine fleet with a land attack missile.
The Vietnamese defence and foreign ministries have yet to respond to questions submitted by Reuters. Vietnamese military officials have previously described Vietnam's arms build-up, including the submarine purchases, as defensive.
(Excerpt) Read more at channelnewsasia.com ...
Its anti-ship cousin!
I have vague recollections of a Vietnam china war when i was a young boy in the 70’s was it?
I have that movie on VHS. Just saw it (in the box) yesterday.
1979...followed by a couple of minor dustups in the 80s.
What’s their beef with each other? Thought they would have been fast friends after the Vietnam war.
Hardly. Vietnam and China are historic enemies dating back to at least 40 AD.
Vietnam was founded in 2879 BC? Good Lord!!!! I had no idea. I don’t try to hide my lack of knowledge in many areas or all i would be doing is hiding my lack of knowledge :)
thanks for the lesson.
But I guess they still hated the idea of a US supported government there more than the old enemy they knew.
China decided to “teach Vietnam a lesson” in 1979 and got their ass handed to them.
China was also ticked because Vietnam got rid of their pal, Pol Pot.
“But I guess they still hated the idea of a US supported government there more than the old enemy they knew.”
Like with the French, once they drove us out they missed us and mythologized us.
You would have hoped that our experience there would have taught our foreign service types that western values can’t always be imposed on ancient cultures. But the recent adventure in Iraq proves that such lessons aren’t learned.
Japan was a fluke. They had been flirting with western style government before WWII and so they were receptive to it after their defeat.
“China decided to “teach Vietnam a lesson” in 1979 and got their ass handed to them”
Something you can bet greatly pleased the average Vietnamese. There’s no love lost between those two.
I get flack for it sometimes here but i agree. Iraq was a foil for Iran and a two bit dictatorship.
I wonder if Japan, without he nukes, would have been another Vietnam.
I know North Korea WITH the nukes would have been another Japan. hmm.
I could be wrong.
Like you said, Japan flirted with western style government. Good grief, didn’t McArthur want to drop like 17 nukes along China border?
Ever seen The Enemy Below?
Yeah, not too bad.
Some time read “The Terrible Hours”. Pretty amazing book. It’s like 1 cent now plus shipping all over. You’ll find it interesting. They did an (average) movie about the great Swede Momsen.
I don’t know the number of bombs but MacArthur wanted to drop nukes on the Chinese when they joined the fight on the side of the NORKs. The public fight over this proposal led to Truman firing MacArthur.
“I wonder if Japan, without he nukes, would have been another Vietnam.”
A conventional invasion of Japan would have been far, far worse. Vietnam was 50,000 casualties. Estimates for Operation Olympic ran from 1 to 4 million .
In that conflict in 1979, neither side went to all-out-war and the only thing that can be said is that the Chinese failed to get Vietnam to pull their troops from Cambodia. In an all-out-war, either in 1979 or now, the Chinese have to have the advantage, just by size alone. (And the Chinese have no Jane Fondas, then or now.)
But you have to hand it to the Vietnamese commies. They weathered the French, the US, and the Chinese... though with Soviet assistance in the last two and with a major failure of will here in the US, not to mention a lot of high treason on the part of many Americans. Still, the Vietnamese commies did hang tough through all of that.
The lesson from Japan and Nazi Germany is that you CAN change a culture, but first you have to thoroughly break it.
In Japan, we made their god come down from heaven and surrender to us, burned all of their cities to ashes, and made every mother worry first and foremost where the next mouth of food was coming from for her children.
Had we done the same in Iraq, we might have succeeded. But we no longer have the stomach for war.
“The lesson from Japan and Nazi Germany is that you CAN change a culture, but first you have to thoroughly break it.”
Yeah, well you’ve learned the wrong ‘lesson’ if you think that’s what happened.
Nazism was not a “culture”. It was a political movement imposed upon Germany. Germany’s culture was western and Christian and it has a very close connection to Great Britain and to America where Germans were the largest ethnic group after the British isles. It just needed to have the criminal Nazi regime removed.
Japan’s culture was already open to Western ideas. Japan had been experimenting with a parliament since 1889. Once Japan was opened in the 1860s they enthusiastically began trying to adopt western ideas to their culture. Their Meiji Constitution of 1890 was modeled on the Prussian constitution.
But the Emperor worship did have to go. It was a source of trouble because it fed into Japanese militarism mixed with ideas of racial superiority. It required the complete defeat of WWII to strip that from them.
But Emperor worship was and is vastly different from Islam. There was no outside reservoir of Hirohito worshippers outside of Japan. That “religion” was entirely limited to Japan and by making Hirohito publicly admit that was not a god we were able to bring it to an end.
Iraq is entirely different. It is an Islamic culture over a thousand years old. There is no Emperor to defeat and to have capitulate, Mohammed and Allah will always be lurking in the background. Islam has no affinity with the Christian west and in fact is its historic enemy. And unlike Japan, Iraq wasn’t flirting with western style democracy for 50 years before our invasion.
A western country can rule over an Islamic land, as the British and French had done many times before. But they didn’t make a dent in the underlying culture because it is based on Islam. And the Iraqis aren’t going to give up their Islamic culture.
This wasn’t a matter of “having no stomach for war”. Saddam’s military was utterly defeated by us. We occupied the country. We could occupy Iraq for as long as we want, but whenever we left the underlying culture would reassert itself which is what it’s doing now.
The only group over there that offers any optimism are the Kurds, who are showing signs of creating a home grown democracy. But unfortunately the Kurds don’t have their own country.
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