Funny old world...you get one China post...and then another comes along
There I was speculating on why the Chinese may not want to get involved in a bit of argy bargy around the Middle East and a certain Matthew Palmer1 reminds me that the Chinese have a shiny naval base in Djibouti. Totes forgot that. So really when they are so involved, it’s their merch after all, but they aren’t turning up to the ball game, maybe more questions should be asked.
Then you get this gem from Asian Sentinel:2
“We are not only talking about embezzling funds or getting kickbacks from military-linked SOEs (state-owned enterprises), but also lowered quality-control standards, resulting in subpar quality weapons and military equipment being purchased and possibly used by the PLA – which includes the Rocket Force,”
It’s like the world doesn’t want me to go to bed, it wants me to write more and question more…with more cognac.
And maybe not many read the august journal of Janes Defence and Intelligence Review and you get a whole article called False Economy3 and you get gems of paragraphs like this:
“This decline is aligned with increasing risks and challenges of China in global markets. Chief among these is the growing number of reports of faulty Chinese defence exports…”
Now of course it is way too soon to get carried away with the old trope that Communist weapons are junk <insert Soviet / Russian disaster>, so lets look at it from a different angle.
Lets not care about the USN being in the conflict zone and doing stuff, lets just focus on they are doing stuff.
Why does the USN in every guise it has, DDG, Carrier Strike Force, USMC in amphibs sitting off some where, just do it? What is it that they have that others don’t? Now for me I’d start with they’ve done this before. They’ve been in harms way in every way for 30+ years. They have kit, and processes, that mostly (Cain, Fitzgerald, Bonhomme Richard not withstanding) stands up to the test of having live ordinance lobbed at them. But it’s also because they have tested the shit out of what they have on those ships (and yes there are problems…at sea reload of VLS cells as an example) but it damn well works.
Then I read on Sky the Brits have started to get in there…once again…test of time, time tested kit. You don’t put your people in harms way unless you think they are good to go.
Now lets get back to the worlds largest navy. Where are they? Like I said, it’s their merch…why are they not defending it? Is it oops, we pretzelled our thinking? Or we are going to get there but our ability to sortie at distance and coherently is bad (own story told.) We are afraid it won’t work? Who cares about this? (Belies the thousand year thinking…as there are always second and third order effects that will bite you.)
Or something else…I don’t proclaim to be anything other than someone who has spent way too much time reading and writing stuff that has never seen the light of day, to know every answer, but something seems, well off for the time being.
Funny thing is this is not the first time, and I’m sure the last that I’ve written about the Chinese Navy. The first got me an MA4 for my troubles, and having just read the conclusion of what I wrote then, I was very wrong. Lessons of the past were not learnt. But maybe it is time for me to re-read that dissertation and see if I can glean a new future based on the intervening decade or so.
Time to sleep. Time to think. And then write more.
PS.
I do wonder what I’ll make of this dissertation in a decade…
https://1drv.ms/b/s!Ag1yJEt9g0WSiOFNPphbj1pALVyCYw?e=IJIWAQ
JDIR October 2023
https://1drv.ms/b/s!Ag1yJEt9g0WSiOFLVOahUtWZlQBNbw?e=A677Cs