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US military bases around China
(lemmygrad.ml)
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this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2023
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GenZedong
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I recently saw someone cite the 'China has the world's largest navy'. So I looked it up.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/largest-navies-in-the-world
It's true if you just count 'naval vessels' because China and NK have a lot of small boats:
Top 10 Largest Navies in the World (by total number of warships and submarines - 2020):
So maybe not the most useful metric for comparison of relative might. Maybe tonnage is a better metric of that?
Top 10 Most Powerful Navies in the World (by total tonnage - 2014):
Taiwan even makes it on the the top ten list that way. And you can clearly see that the USA has the most massive navy by a wide margin. You can get into aircraft carriers and subs too if you want to see how lopsided these stats can appear.
So China has about 500 grams of navy per capita, vs 10.2kg per capita for USA and 6.3kg per capita for Taiwan.
How can we not be scared of the yellow peril?
I really like this metric of tonnage per capita.
China has been working to increase the PLAN's power and reach this past decade. They are nearing to a blue water navy at this point, and have broken through the first island chain, within which they are no longer considered to be defeatable without extreme cost.
The US has withdrawn their concentration back to Guam (previously, they didn't bothered to arm the second island chain).
China has 20x the manufacturing power of the US and a bigger PPP (more efficient use of their military budget) , and they have known the US will one day come for them since Mao. Their recent ships are lighter in tonnage but newer than the American fleet by several decades, carries better equipment, radar, with greater fire power that makes them more equal to traditional ships one category higher in tonnage.
Finally, they aren't building a navy to project power around the globe like the US navy does. The PLAN intends to have the capability to defend their home waters and to protect their economic interests abroad, that's it, so it will never need to have as many ships as the US navy, so a tonnage or ship number comparison would not be an accurate measure of the PLAN capabilities.
Did...did whoever made this consider a frigging river patrol boat equal to a guided missile frigate?
Yes
Note that this list include auxiliary ships. China have a lot smaller ships because PLAN is a defensive navy so they build a lot of mine trawlers and short range missile corvettes, patrol boats and conventional submarines. While USN is build specifically for acting as a long arm of imperialism, therefore they have less small ships but they need a lot of huge ones. Their carriers make up for a lot of that tonnage, and their auxiliary ships also needs to be huge for the reason they need to operate on a long ranges to perform their gunboat diplomacy. Even their frigates are 4000 tons and underarmed because they need that operational range.
So yeah, USN have huge margin of tonnage advantage, but the questions is, will it be able to use this advantage vs PLAN in west Pacific, and here the answer is way less conclusive, especially that latest Chinese hypersonic missile drill point out that carriers can be as well useless.
You haven't seen the newest frigate they're building, I take it.
Yeah i meant the Perry and Knox classes, around twice as big than most other contemporary projects (except British ones). Even the LCS which should be light ships are over 3000 tons.