@Temstar more news from 52051 (Pakistan defense forum)
Source from Weibo claim the submarines were forced by 054 to surface when they are trying to stalk Liaoning CV group.
That’s one sub, where is the other?
Would be unusual to have two subs trailing the Liaoning, especially so for one of them to be a boomer, as their only (both in the SSBN and SSGN roles) job should literally be to just go and hide as far away from anything remotely hostile as possible.
If the USN is sending their boomers on such tailing missions, it would signal a dangerous degree of overconfidence in the untouchability of their subs. It would not surprise me at all if that was the case given the ridiculous amount of smoke the US submarine community have been blowing up their own arses for decades from living off their glory days making fools out of the Soviets.
But the PLAN is an entirely different class of opponent altogether, and if legit, this would positively be a textbook example of a major flex as a means to send a strong and unambiguous signal - your subs are nowhere like as untouchable as you seem to think.
This would be a significant capacity reveal, as the USN clearly would have had no idea their subs were basically sitting ducks in plain sight as far as the PLAN was concerned when the USN thought they were doing sneaky-sneaks beyond the sight and reach of the PLAN.
If real, this makes me even more worried something is about to go down with Taiwan, as you do not freely give up such a massive advantage.
Now the USN squids are going to be scared and scrambling to try to figure out just how vulnerable they really are and basically having to completely re-do all their risk assessments and operating procedures and would have no idea of their viability and survivability in a shooting war against the PLAN. Whereas before they would have had been the most (over) confident and gung-ho of any US military brand at the prospect of going hot against Chinese forces.
I cannot help but feel this was done to warn off the US from directly intervening in any Taiwan conflict by using their subs as first responders to try to score cheap kills.
It would obviously be far more impactful for the PLAN to continue keeping this secret till then, and absolutely annihilated the USN submarine fleet, but I think two main factors meant they preferred to scare them off instead.
Firstly, killing the entire USN pacific sub fleet would be a major scalp, but it would also mean China and America are in a direct shooting war with no clear or easy de-escalation path. And after such a humiliating and devastating opening blow, risks are high that the US would do something stupid to try to even the score that could cause things to go well and truly down the MAD path, which no one wants.
The second factor would be environmental. All USN subs are nuclear, and operating in a Taiwan scenario, they would all be killed close off the Chinese coast. Can you imagine the long lasting environmental catastrophe all those blown open reactors would cause just by themselves?
