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China's People's Liberation Army - Navy ship "Longushan" is reportedly ablaze just off the coast of China tonight. The vessel is reported to be "China's most advanced warship." No OFFICIAL word on what caused the fire. I am not sure if China has acknowledged the fire yet ... All mention of this is being rapidly scrubbed from China social media networks, and no official information is coming out of Beijing. The vessel bears Hull Number 980 and is described as a Type 071 landing ship. China's fifth Type 071 amphibious transport dock (LPD) Longhushan; with hull number 980) was commissioned...

Israeli troops on Saturday were hunting a Hamas commander described as Palestine's Osama bin Laden, vowing to find him wherever he was hiding and insisting his days were numbered. Yahya Sinwar, 60, is the current head of Hamas in the Gaza Strip. He has been arrested by Israel multiple times and spent 24 years in Israeli prisons: he was freed in 2011, as part of a prisoner swap in exchange for Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit. Sinwar is being held responsible for the murder of 1,300 Israelis in the October 7 attack. The U.S. death toll rose to 29 on Saturday,...

A Cold War British nuclear sub sneaked into a Soviet naval exercise and took closeup underwater pictures of Russia’s new aircraft carrier. n 1977, with the Cold War in full swing, the U.K. Royal Navy’s nuclear-powered attack submarine HMS Swiftsure (S-126) slipped right into the heart of a large-scale Soviet Northern Fleet exercise in the Barents Sea. The British submarine penetrated undetected through the layered escort screens of destroyers and frigates and meticulously approached the Russian aircraft carrier Kiev. The submarine recorded extremely valuable acoustic signatures and took incredible underwater periscope pictures of the Soviet carrier’s hull and propellers. As...

Update(1718ET): The United States says it's watching ongoing Chinese military drills around Taiwan very closely, while condemning the latest series of ballistic missiles fired over the island as a severe provocation and escalation. The White House has ordered the Ronald Reagan carrier strike group to stay in the area.US National Security Council (NSC) spokesman John Kirby said in statements to MSNBC Thursday: "We’ve been watching this very, very closely. It’s concerning. It’s not just concerning to us, but it’s concerning, of course, to the people of Taiwan. It’s concerning to to our allies in the region, especially Japan.""The provocateur here...

n a ribbon-cutting ceremony held at the Jiangnan Shipyard in Shanghai, officials unveiled the Type 003 warship. The Fujian — which, according to officials cited in state media, would not be battle-ready for five years — is an important milestone in Beijing’s ambitions to develop a “blue water” navy, capable of projecting power far beyond its shores. The carrier has been the focus of intense interest among military observers and rival nations tracking the development of China’s navy. China’s first two carriers include a retrofit of an old Soviet model, the Liaoning, bought from Ukraine in 1998, and the Shandong,...

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is using an advanced intelligence-gathering satellite for hunting US aircraft carriers and other military assets worldwide, according to South China Morning Post. Space researcher Yang Fang and her team at DFH Satellite Co., Ltd in Hong Kong published a report in the domestic peer-reviewed journal Spacecraft Engineering that reveals China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) used an AI-powered satellite to detect and “live stream” the USS Harry S. Truman. A remote sensing satellite, powered by artificial intelligence technology, lurked in low Earth orbit above North America on June 17 of last year and automatically detected the...

Eleanor Watson Tue, May 3, 2022, 12:21 PM·3 min read The nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS George Washington leaves the US naval base in Yokosuka, 60 kms south of Tokyo, for the last time for refueling and complex overhaul on May 18, 2015. / Credit: TORU YAMANAKA/AFP via Getty Images (TORU YAMANAKA/AFP via Getty Images) More than 200 sailors on the USS George Washington took the opportunity Monday to move off the ship to accommodations at a local installation. The move is part of the Navy's response to support the crew who lost three shipmates to suicide within one week in...

Within hours prior to the Xi-Biden call which is now in progress, China sent an aircraft carrier through the Taiwan Strait on Friday in what’s being seen as a message to the West. “The timing of the Shandong’s movements, being so close to the US-China President’s call, was described as provocative by the source,” Reuters described. “Around 10:30 a.m. the CV-17 appeared around 30 nautical miles to the southwest of Kinmen, and was photographed by a passenger on a civilian flight,” the source told Reuters of the pass-through which was also confirmed by Taiwan’s Ministry of Defense. Via The National...

Gere's What You Need to Remember: Ideological and financial concerns mean there are a lot of things India won’t buy from the United States or Europe, leaving Russia as their sole source of weapons. Like a lot of countries, India wants the best weapons it can afford. But ideological and financial concerns mean there are a lot of things it won’t buy from the United States or Europe. That pretty much leaves, well, Russia. India has been a big buyer of Russian weapons for 50 years. Those haven’t been easy years for New Delhi. India’s defense contracts with Russia have...

A second suspected missile target in the shape of a U.S. aircraft carrier has been spotted in a rural Chinese desert, according to satellite photos obtained by USNI News.The site consists of a single aircraft carrier target, miles from the nearest town in the Xinjiang region, according to photos provided to USNI News by satellite imagery company Maxar. The carrier target is about 300 miles away from a larger suspected missile range in the Taklamakan Desert, first reported by USNI News on Sunday. The two sites share similar characteristics and are aligned on a map with the carriers facing the...

Thousands of well-wishers waved off the Royal Navy's flagship HMS Queen Elizabeth as it set sail for exercises and its first operational deployment to the Far East. The £3billion aircraft carrier - nicknamed 'Big Lizzie' - sailed out of Portsmouth Harbour in Hampshire to cheers from the crowds who filled the walls and the beaches. There were few signs of social distancing among those who brandished Union Flags and held banners saying farewell to their loved ones who will be at sea for about seven months.

The Naval Sea Systems Command announced on Wednesday that the amphibious assault ship USS Tripoli concluded its Fitting Out Availability. Photo by MCS1 Woody Paschall/U.S. Navy March 31 (UPI) -- The large-deck amphibious assault ship USS Tripoli completed its Fitting Out Availability and awaits sea trials, the U.S. Navy announced on Wednesday. The FOA on the ship, the Navy's second in the America class, concluded last week in San Diego, Naval Sea Systems Command said in a press release on Wednesday. The sea trials will involve performance validation, including "navigation, damage control, mechanical and electrical systems, combat systems, communications and...

There are stronger signs that China’s next aircraft carrier will be fitted with an advanced type of aircraft launch system, with official confirmation of a test flight of a carrier-based early warning plane. State broadcaster CCTV confirmed in a report on the weekend that the KJ-600, the country’s first domestically developed fixed-wing early warning aircraft, had a test flight in Xian, Shaanxi province, in late January. The KJ-600 is designed to operate from an aircraft carrier but its weight and turboprop engines make it less powerful than a jet, requiring help from a catapult for take-off. China has two aircraft...

A number of Proceedings articles and commentaries in the past several years have advanced the idea of saving money and fulfilling the vision of “distributed maritime operations” by building a fleet of more, smaller, lighter ships. For aircraft carriers, that argument tends to take the shape of more “Lightning carriers”—based on the hull form of amphibious assault ships such as the USS America (LHA-6) class—and fewer nuclear-powered carriers of the Nimitz (CVN-68) and Gerald R. Ford (CVN-78) classes. While LHAs are cheaper to build than CVNs ($3 billion vs. $10 or more billion), the argument misses several key principles that...

Seoul, South Korea (CNN)South Korea plans to start building its first aircraft carrier next year, and acquire fighter jets to operate on it, the country's Defense Ministry has announced. Last year, South Korea hinted at its interest in an aircraft carrier, saying it would build a "multi-purpose large transport vessel." But in its national plan for 2021-2025, published this week, the government for the first time explicitly committed to building the billion-dollar equipment. "The 30,000-ton level aircraft carrier can transport military forces, equipment and materials and can operate fighter jets that are capable of vertical take-off and landing," said...

Iran appears to be getting ready to send a warning to the U.S. as it has moved a mock aircraft carrier out to sea presumably to destroy it in a live-fire exercise. The 650-foot long vessel with 16 fake fighter jets on deck – which bears resemblance to the Nimitz-class carriers that the U.S. Navy routinely sails into the Persian Gulf -- was pulled by a tugboat into the Strait of Hormuz on Sunday, according to satellite images released Monday. “We cannot speak to what Iran hopes to gain by building this mockup, or what tactical value they would hope...

On Martin Luther King Jr. Day at Pearl Harbor Monday, the U.S. Navy is expected to announce that a new aircraft carrier will be named after Mess Attendant 2nd Class Doris Miller, the first African American to receive the Navy Cross for valor for his actions on Dec. 7, 1941, when he manned a machine gun on the USS West Virginia to fire back at attacking Japanese planes. “I think that Doris Miller is an American hero simply because of what he represents as a young man going beyond the call of what’s expected,” said Doreen Ravenscroft, president of Cultural...

Italian Navy aircraft carrier ITS Cavour on July 20 entered a dry dock at the Taranto navy yard to receive upgrades that will allow it to operate F-35B jets. The 244-meter Cavour is currently undergoing an extensive overhaul after ten years of service. All works on the ship are expected to be completed by the spring of 2020, when the ship’s crew is set to start training for a summer deployment to the US East Coast and shipboard trials with the short take-off and vertical landing (STOVL) variant of the Joint Strike Fighter. In addition to the F-35A version, Italy...

The US entered World War II with 7 Aircraft Carriers and by the end of the war would have several times that. It's one thing to build ships, it's another thing to train the men that would eventually fly off those ships. So the US built some ships which would serve that purpose and that's where we come in. In March of 1942, the Navy purchased the steamer and started to convert her into an aircraft carrier. She was designated as IX-64. IX is the designation used by the Navy for ships that aren't otherwise classified. She was named the...

USS Harry S. Truman has been pursued around the Med by a group of Russian frigates led by warship Yaroslav Mudry. Video of the incident shows a Russian vessel in the distance shadowing the carrier and its destroyer escort. Footage was shared by ITV as a team of news reporters visited the US warship. The vessel is the US’s main weapon against ISIS as it launches strikes on their positions in Syria. War tensions have flared however after the US, France and Britain launched airstrikes against Vladimir Putin’s pal Bashar al-Assad. USS Harry S. Truman – the 116,000-ton vessel –...