The Chinese carrier is at sea and are conducting air operations training. The Chinese have already laid the keel for a second carrier. China plans on having four carriers and maybe more.
The threat isn't today but twenty or thirty years in the future. Most in the worlds naval community believe that China will challenge the U.S. Navy in the South China Sea in twenty or so years.
This is why most in the U.S. military community and our Allies in the Pacific criticize Obama for only paying attention to the present and not looking at what threats there are over the horizon.
While the current U.S. Navy under the Obama administration struggles just keeping two carriers at sea, our Navy has become a hollow force and can't even project it's power as it was able to do five years ago. Look at what just happened in the Mediterranean during the Syrian show down some months ago. We were only able to deploy three additional destroyers to the 6th Fleet AOR. When the Chief of Naval Operations was asked "whear are our carriers" ? "Why is our surge carrier still sitting in Norfolk" ? His answerer was the carrier's crew weren't properly trained to put to sea. Instead of training to go to war they are attending mandatory classroom sensitivity training.
While our Navy is shrinking our allies took notice and our building up their navies.
Great Britian are building two large super carriers and new escorts. Japan just launched it's first aircraft carrier since WW ll. India's is buying Russia's old carriers while the Russian Bear has come out of hibernation and will be building three new fleets with all new high tech warships. And more often than not, the Russians get it right with new ship designs.
There's a world wide navy build up going on as war clouds are forming over the Western Pacific. And our current administration is to incompetent to see it.
During the Syrian show down in the Med, do you know why the Nimitz Carrier Strike Group was hold up in the Red Sea and didn't transit the Suez Canal and enter the 6th Fleet AOR ?
Because Putin moved one of his Slava class cruisers into the Mediterranean Sea. A Slava class cruiser was designed for one mission, to sink a Nimitz class carrier and it's escorts from 300 miles away with mach-5 supersonic anti ship missiles, each with a 2,000 explosive warhead. And a Slava class cruiser doesn't work alone, it has a few attack subs designed to sink NATO ships and hunt down American subs. It also has AA destroyers who main purpose is protecting the cruiser by shooting down NATO aircraft and ASW destroyers designed to destroy American subs.
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