The future fleet of conventional Chinese submarines is a deadly quiet force that could perform defensive and offensive operations. The future fleet will compose of the Kilo, Song and Yuan types, as the Romeos and Mings are phased out of service. China is reported to have the option of purchasing the more advanced Russian Amur class SSK. With the success of indigenous programmes, however, future purchases of foreign submarines look relatively unlikely.
Like the ones the Koreans and Japanese are building. Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.
Take a capital ship that you don't like.
Then take a moderately modern spy satellite.
Then take four dozen submarines.
Launch five hundred cruise missiles over the horizon.
Watch as ten million man hours, five thousand sailors and pilots and a hundred thousand tons of high-grade steel sinks helplessly to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.
Dive, scatter and lose the counter-sub task force dispatched to hunt you down.
Repeat as necessary. They can get twenty of your subs for each capital ship you take out and you still come out ahead in terms of steel, man-hours and trained sailors.
Watch your capital be reduced to radioactive glass about forty-five minutes after the first capital ship gets an impromptu U-boat makeover.
- Jake If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
Second, even if the subs win, you still don't control the SLOC's. You just deny them to the enemy.
If you don't believe me, send in your merchantmen and watch as land-based (and carrier-based) fighters, long-range bombers, missile armed fast attack crafts and enemy submarines close on them. Not pretty. You need your own ASW and AA (and ASh) bubble around your convoys of merchantmen. You only get that from capital ships, or a plentiful base network. Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.
The Moscow Times: Tangled Triangle of Russia, China and the U.S.
... Reveling in its victory in the Cold War and its clear military, political and economic superiority, the United States set its sights on global hegemony. This antagonized and alienated both Moscow and Beijing and created an opportunity for them to join forces once again to oppose U.S. hegemony.
The Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks marked the beginning of the end of U.S. global domination. The U.S. fall from the stars was accelerated by its unsuccessful, taxing military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq and the deep economic crisis.
By 2009, it became obvious that the "Pax Americana" global empire was a pipe dream, and the United States -- now under the leadership of a more pragmatic and realistic President Barack Obama -- began looking for new alliances. One of the Obama administration's ideas was sharing the burden of responsibility for global security with China...
In February 2009, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton proposed creating a U.S.-Chinese superpower alliance... But the Chinese leadership flatly rejected Clinton's proposal. ...China has always insisted that it has no ambitions to become a hegemony and is opposed to any global domination by any superpower. ...This is why many U.S. policymakers view China as the country's largest threat.
How can the United States counter this threat? ... once again, Washington has courted Moscow to help the United States counterbalance China's growing global influence. But the United States doesn't realize that Russia has no interest in alienating China.
Eighteenth-century French philosopher Charles de Montesquieu said, "Small counties perish from external enemies, and large countries perish from internal ones." Russia has more than enough internal problems that it needs to solve without having to worry about conflicts with China. This is why ... the Russian-Chinese-U.S. triangle will remain as three separate centers for a long time to come.
