EagleAye
DP Veteran
- Joined
- Sep 21, 2011
- Messages
- 5,697
- Reaction score
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- Location
- Austin, TX
- Gender
- Male
- Political Leaning
- Centrist
How do you know its just one ? ...Ill tell you this, its hard for me to believe that we know what china spends on defense. I find it hard to believe what your saying...when the country has had nuclear capability for decades...and we dont know how many warheads they have...I do know they have missles that can hit the US...
Don't get too worked up over this. We know it's only one because carriers are hard to hide. You can only work on them at very large, developed ports. Work on a carrier at one is extremely obvious. So yeah, it's only one, and a Russian cast-off to boot.
Carrier ops are very difficult and very dangerous. It takes decades to get it right. The US has a long history of carrier ops so our teething pains are past us. China's headaches are about to begin. Check out this article:
WHAT SOVIET NAVAL HISTORY CAN TELL US ABOUT CHINA’S NEW CARRIER | PROSPECT
Here's a couple quotes from it:
“The basic issue here is that the learning curve at the initial stages of carrier operation is extremely steep. Not only is it difficult and expensive to build a working aircraft carrier, but if you don’t already have a fleet of working aircraft carriers, you don’t have pilots and flight crews who can reliably operate it. And if you don’t have pilots and flight crews, you don’t have experienced people who can train new pilots and flight crews. What’s more, the United States got to go through this bootstrapping phase decades ago when ships and planes were simpler. Then we had a solid foundation of human capital to go through the process of building more advanced hardware. But if you want militarily useful equipment for the 21st century, your human capital gap is much bigger than any that we ever faced.”
The Admiral Kuznetsov had the misfortune to be launched in 1985 and commissioned in 1991, just as the Soviet Union was collapsing. While the Admiral Kuznetzov entered service in the Russian Navy, the only other Admiral Kuznetsov-class ship built, the Varyag, was not completed and sat unfinished in Ukraine for a decade before being sold to the Chinese. While the ex-Varyag has been extensively refitted by the PLAN, it still inherits the deficiencies of the Admiral Kuznetsov-class, and entirely lacks the power projection capabilities of modern US carriers Given these deficiencies and the PLAN’s lack of experience operating aircraft carriers, it is unlikely that the ex-Varyag will ever be used operationally. It’s much more likely that it will be used exclusively as for training purposes, which despite its limitations is an achievement sure to be heavily leveraged for domestic consumption within China.
Rest easy. China's carrier is more trouble for them than it is for us. Honestly, if this carrier is such a huge threat, why did Russia sell it to them?
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