New Photos, Information re China’s Increasingly “Blue Water” Navy

On April 29, we ran a piece about the expansion of the activities of the Chinese navy.

On April 29, we ran a piece about the expansion of the activities of the Chinese navy.

On April 29, we ran a piece about the expansion of the activities of the Chinese navy.

In the last few weeks, more information, including several pictures, have emerged of the components of some of the potentially significant elements of that new “blue water” Navy,

a term that refers to any naval force’s ability to project itself beyond its coastal waters and into the “blue water” that constitutes the world’s oceans. [br]

The International Institute of Strategic Studies [IISS] in London has a new brief providing useful detail on a number of recent Chinese sorties into the South China Sea, according to this recent piece in the website site defensetech.org.

Two exercises in March and April were the first of any real size beyond the First Island Chain, and “indicated that deployments beyond the chain were now official policy,” says IISS.

The flotillas contained the PLA’s most advanced warships, of Russian manufacture (Kilo class diesel electric subs and Sovremenny class destroyers).

In March and April a flotilla of six ships from the North Sea Fleet set sail, passing near Okinawa on its way to the strategic Malacca Strait between Malaysia and Indonesia; through which flows much of China’s inbound shipping, including vital oil and minerals.

Once there, the flotilla conducted live fire and anti-submarine exercises.

IISS says these sorties demonstrate the PLA Navy is taking a much more prominent role in Chinese foreign policy.

“It shows that the navy is willing and able to break through the First Island Chain and into the Pacific – a substantial change from previous doctrine.”

For China’s neighbors, Vietnam and other Southeast Asian countries, it means they will have to contend with a more assertive China.

Japan and the U.S. will have to get used to Chinese flotillas moving about the Pacific.

“However, its primary focus will be on preserving territorial integrity rather than on aggressive expansion.” [br]

In this context, the website informationdissemination.net – which styles itself “the intersection of maritime strategy and strategic information” –

recently ran a series of “up close and personal photos” from all over the Shanghai waterfront that reveal in detail the current state of China’s naval hardware capacity,

a project, which, of course, has SIGNIFICANT implications for not just China’s economy, but also shipbuilding sectors in every other country in the world.

Let’s just hope and pray this is NOT a re-run of the disastrous “dreadnought war” between Britain and Germany that started in 1907 and concluded with what we call Europe’s SECOND Thirty Years’ War [see Lecture 12],

which began with World War I, continued through what EH Carr so cogently called the Twenty Years’ Crisis, and then the most brutal war in history to date, World War II.