You think the U.S. has problems with trapped miners, collapsing bridges and extreme weather? Well, check out this round-up of headlines from China this weekend:
“Typhoon Sepat hits China after mass evacuation”
“Hopes dim for over 180 trapped miners in China”
“Death toll in China bridge collapse climbs to 64″
Wait a minute! you’re thinking. This is a military blog! Why do we even care about China’s safety and quality-control crisis? Because Pentagon brass tout China as the next Soviet Union in a future Cold War. But China’s fast-expanding military has many of the same problems as its quality-impaired civil sector. Take submarines, for example. Four years ago, mechanical failures aboard an outdated Chinese submarine resulted in the deaths of 70 sailors. This was no isolated incident, as U.S. Navy Captain Brad Kaplan, the U.S. Naval Attaché to China, explained in a recent issue of Sea Power:
Although it deploys a force of more than 60 submarines, [People's Liberation Army Navy] units lag behind Western standards, and most weapons and sensor systems are based on older Russian technology. … The PLAN’s four Kilo units remain the submarine force’s most capable boats, although the capability of their crews to operate them effectively in a tactical environment is suspect. … Progress in replacing aging Han-class nuclear-powered attack submarines (SSNs) with the new generation Type 093 SSN has been slow. The Type 093 SSNs have been compared in capability to the Russian Victor III SSN class [from the 1970s].
Liselotte Odgaard from the MIT Center for International Studies, drew the bottom line in a piece for AlterNet:
Chinese dependency on Russian arms deliveries and its arduous efforts to catch up with the Revolution in Military Affairs imply that China is far from the U.S. level of military prowess, especially in naval and aerial capabilities. A well-equipped and well-trained navy and air force is a necessary condition for exercising strategic influence in large parts of China’s Asian home region, such as the Indian Ocean, Southeast Asia, the Taiwan Strait and the Japanese isles. This goal remains out of China’s reach for several decades.
In related news, Beijing is finally opening up its once entirely state-owned defense industry to private investment, only a couple centuries behind the U.S.
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[...] Not so fast, writes William Lind for UPI: When Kaplan says, “Hulls in the water could soon displace boots on the ground as the most important military catchphrase of our time,” he engages in navalist hyperbole, unless he is anticipating the general resurrection when the sea will give up her dead. We face no credible blue-water naval challenger. The Pentagon’s threat inflators keep trying to puff the magic dragon, but the Chinese navy remains merely a collection of ships. We do not need naval supremacy because, as Kaplan writes, “‘Regular wars’ between major states could be as frequent in the 21st century as they were in the 20th.” If states are so foolish as to fight “regular wars,” they will find most are won by non-state, Fourth Generation elements as defeated — and sometimes victorious — states disintegrate. Rather, we need naval supremacy because in a world where the state is weakening, water, and transport by water, grow in importance. People today think of land uniting and water dividing, but that became true only recently, with the rise of the state and the development of railways — which can only function in the safety and order created by states. [...]
As a former ASW platform sailor (sprucan and C.F. Adams)I can tell that a well driven Victor III is a threat to almost any surface platform, within its considerable range. While not particularly quiet they are tough (at least the Russian boats). Witness the fact that there are still more than a few of them around even for am 80′s design (kind of the like the F-15/16/18/f-117/B-1b/B-2).