China Builds New Aircraft Carrier to Expand Military Muscle.
 

Found this mildly amusing:

'China is building its first aircraft carrier and it may have been built using stolen US technology. What will this mean for the balance of power in Southeast Asia and the South China Sea?'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ugcRo6PCtg0

Stolen US technology? Maybe, but doctored in critical areas so the end result is a less than efficient bit of military hardware?

Interesting but I'm a little skeptical of the short / mid term efficiency of the whole thing. Their first refurbished Ukrainian carier is still not operational (although currently at port in Syria but without any on-board airplanes) so they certainly seem quite a bit away from having an operational naval airforce

Atakacs wrote

No it isn't. The story of the Chinese carrier in port in Syria comes from Debka. It is a fabricated story. Think about it? A Chinese carrier through the Suez is not going to go unnoticed. Also think about all the commercial satellite imagery available to the media and still no images of this carrier in Syria. The story has taken on a life of its own! It is ridiculous!

The Liaoning was always going to be a training carrier. It doesn't have the systems to be operational. I admire the pilot who first landed a J15 on it; no experience, no training, bang it on according to a book.

during the coldwar American flattoppers used to say they could have given one of their boats AND the aircraft to the Russians, but it would still have taken them over ten years to learn how to fight the system at their level.


one wonders how long the Chinese will take to become proficient in blue water carrier ops.


FISH.

let's hope we never find out...............

It is not what you see on the surface that matters.

So, the nation with the big 'missile that makes carriers irrelevant' super weapon is building a carrier. Interesting.

It is not what you see on the surface that matters. - PN

Most submariners would agree with that....:)

Jack

Just back from China. I can assure you that in many matters we are now the in the relative stone age. And they are not hanging about in (ever fewer) areas where they are still in arrears.

If you want to see just what an insignificant little player our nation now is, hop on a flight to HK and cross over to Shenzen. You''ll be blown away.

All of which is a pretty emphatic reason to keep the IND - whether or not it really matters is irrelevant. It's all we have now that gives us any sort of voice.

Bleak I know, but I've seen the future and it ain't ours.

Shenzhen City from the west. All this built in the last twenty years.
I know, because I have watched it go up.

http://i229.photobucket.com/albums/e...psde245f39.jpg

New Territories in the background.

I wonder if those senior types who spent the best part of the past 15 years mortgaging Defence in order to fight low level policing actions will now admit they were wrong. And that when combined with Russian actions in Syria, there is more than enough evidence pointing to a credible threat still existing at the state on state level and for which Defence must be appropriately resourced and configured?

And I wonder if all those theorists who built a career on the back of Defence's lack of understanding of international relations will be busy revisiting their theories in order to get revised versions of their books out. Nice work if you can get it; build a career on writing theories, get it wrong - no problems, just rewrite the last chapter and reissue and wait for the sales to roll in.

You will have to forgive the sceptical tone, but I'm rapidly coming to realise that the academics and staff types that Defence relies on as the 'specialists' to guide and advise appear to have little more expertise than your average soothsayer. It's probably as much of do with the politicisation of policy making - decisions based evidence making - as it is our corporate ignorance.

So just where do we go from here if the UK armed forces are to become little more than a gendarmerie? Because frankly I now cringe whenever I sit through a briefing or read a note talking of UK generating influence and all we've done is deploy a company of troops here, a couple of aircraft on exercise there or sailed one of our increasingly few in number destroyers through a particular grid square on a map. I wonder what our allies around the world really think of our claims :hmm:

Melchett, I see that the UK Defence Force, including the RN, is set to tackle illegal immigration in UK Territorial Waters.

Will they use war canoes or just inshore rescue boats aka rigid raiders?

.. and that there is no such thing as surface vessels - only targets :E

Submarines certainly had a major impact on the outcome of the last major war in the Pacific. I wonder if they've forgotten that? And now you can launch quite a large number of Tomohawks from them too, especially the converted SSBNs.

First hint of trouble and there'll be quite a large quanitity of very well aimed munitions inbound all of a sudden, launched from who knows where.

The Old Fat one,

"Insignificant little player? I really REALLY don't think so! London is still as important as ever in the finance, trading and minerals world among a fair few others.

Melchett01,

Maybe, just maybe, that's why we have one of the largest defence budgets on the planet?

Your rebuttal is a little superficial old chap. I don't think China will be the world's dominant superpower next week and I don't think we will be a third world country anytime soon either.

But compared to China we are a minnow on the world stage, whose grip on a nuclear deterrent and whose ability to be the financial world's go-between allows us to box above our weight - albeit it more and in perception rather than reality.

My point is more about the future though...and the trend is pretty clear.

Here's a free tip...try and give your posts a little more substance...it makes for a more enlightened debate.

TOFO

A little more substance would be nice, yes.:hmm:

The idea that the UK is a minnow compared to any nation and in any metric is frankly weak minded tosh.

We are a tiny nation that manages to hold our own successfully against the worlds monster nations in any metric you can imagine.

People, like yourself, who like to talk the country down are our greatest threat, and frankly, disloyal.




Worlds largest financial centre.
2nd largest Aerospace industry in the world.
World capital for currencies trading.
3rd largest reserve currency.
5th largest GDP
3rd and seventh largest pharma companies.
Sixth in global education rankings.
5th or 6th in terms of military spend.
UK is sixth largest tourist destination with London most visited city.
Still 11th largest exporter in the world.
6th largest manufacturer by value of output.
Three of the top 10 universities in the world.
Big and growing cut of the world space/satellite market.

How many of those are "minnow" like compared to China?

Perhaps most importantly for the future, this makes very interesting reading. Note where China ranks....

Softly does it | The Economist

China's biggest problem is a billion Chinese staring at the bright new China on their TV screens and asking; Where is my share?

pr00ne

And maybe it’s insufficient to meet our national aspirations?

You can’t compare budgets on an absolute basis when all other areas of comparison are relative. It’s all well and good having the fifth largest budget, but when your national aspirations are up there with those of the largest budget holder, but your resource base is a fraction of the size, then you are going to end up where we are now: constant cuts, struggling to keep up and able only to commit to an extended albeit arguably unsuccessful policing action. And as if any more evidence was needed, what are the definitions these days of a large, medium and small scale deployment? I don't have the numbers off the top of my head, but I'm pretty sure they have all shifted along so what was once a small scale deployment is now medium scale etc

Incidentally, did anybody else notice when it was that the Govt quietly stopped trumpeting our defence budget being the fourth largest in the world as it slipped a place in the tables?