China Takes Aim at U.S. Naval Might
The USS Gerald R. Ford was supposed to help secure another half century of American naval supremacy. The hulking aircraft carrier taking shape in a dry dock in Newport News, Va., is designed to carry a crew of 4,660 and a formidable arsenal of aircraft and weapons.
But an unforeseen problem cropped up between blueprint and expected delivery in 2015: China is building a new class of ballistic missiles designed to arc through the stratosphere and explode onto the deck of a U.S. carrier, killing sailors and crippling its flight deck.
Since 1945, the U.S. has ruled the waters of the western Pacific, thanks in large part to a fleet of 97,000-ton carrierseach one "4.5 acres of mobile, sovereign U.S. territory," as the Navy puts it. For nearly all of those years, China had little choice but to watch American vessels ply the waters off its coast with impunity.
Now China is engaged in a major military buildup. Part of its plan is to force U.S. carriers to stay farther away from its shores, Chinese military analysts say. So the U.S. is adjusting its own game plan. Without either nation saying so, both are quietly engaged in a tit-for-tat military-technology race. At stake is the balance of power in a corner of the seas that its growing rapidly in importance.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204397704577074631582060996.html?mod=WSJ_World_LeadStoryEurope
sharp_stick
(14,400 posts)Mutually Assured Destruction and all that jazz here we go again.
MADem
(135,425 posts)notwithstanding.
This isn't total news, though--we've been on this for eons. It's a logical outgrowth of their industrialization.
http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?Location=U2&doc=GetTRDoc.pdf&AD=ADA486582
(this is a MASSIVE report from CRS to Congress from several years ago, fair warning):
DOD states that:
China is developing an anti-ship ballistic missile (ASBM) based on a variant of
the CSS-5 medium-range ballistic missile (MRBM) as a component of its
anti-access strategy. The missile has a range in excess of 1,500 km [810 nautical
miles] and, when incorporated into a sophisticated command and control system,
is a key component of Chinas anti-access strategy to provide the PLA the
capability to attack ships at sea, including aircraft carriers, from great distances.
6
I have to wonder why Rupert is reporting this like it's BIG NEWS, when the CRS report has been out since back when Bush was finishing up his 2nd term of ruining the country?
Gotta ask the old "Cui bono" question~!!
Rex
(65,616 posts)be enough distraction to keep him out of prison?