PLA Navy news, pics and videos

longmarch · Jun 19, 2022

US debt level has to be considered too.

weig2000 · Jun 19, 2022

ZeEa5KPul said:
I always have a chuckle at the SDF jargon. As if understatement lends more credibility.

I would usually ignore such comments, but today is Father's Day and I'm in a more joyful mood...

I have to say I'm quite impressed by your, as well as a few other members', tireless efforts in policing various threads on SDF for posts expressing negative sentiment on China, often doling out your emphatic and sometimes dreadful "No" verdict. Apparently you have expanded your scope of policing to include those posts that you now deem understatedly or insufficiently positive on China.

I'm still undecided though whether I should file you under the category of Angry Youth or that of New Age Red Guards. LOL.

Blitzo · Jun 19, 2022

From the moderator view, I want to convey that snide "CHYNA STRONGK!!!11!" sentiments are not necessarily anymore welcome here than snide "CHYNA BADDD1!!11!!" sentiments, and can be actively non constructive as well, and is also subject to moderation depending on how much it occurs and actively inhibits constructive discussion on this forum.

This isn't Reddit, there's no one here to impress or one-up.

I hope the relevant members can choose which hills to contest.

ZeEa5KPul · Jun 19, 2022

weig2000 said:
I would usually ignore such comments, but today is Father's Day and I'm in a more joyful mood...

Happy to hear it, and happy Father's Day to you.

weig2000 said:
I have to say I'm quite impressed by your, as well as a few other members', tireless efforts in policing various threads on SDF for posts expressing negative sentiment on China, often doling out your emphatic and sometimes dreadful "No" verdict. Apparently you have expanded your scope of policing to include those posts that you now deem understatedly or insufficiently positive on China.

I'm also happy to see that my "no" has become something of a signature. I don't see what I do as policing in the slightest, I'm usually just browsing threads looking for interesting developments when I'm confronted by the sort of passive-aggressive trolling all too common on SDF. I'd rather it not be present at all but, alas, it is, so I've found that the best response is a simple one-word dismissal - no.

But this isn't what's happening here at all. I consider you one of this forum's noteworthy contributors and I found your weak language disappointing. Reading my response again, it comes across as unnecessarily confrontational and personal and I apologize for that. My bad, I should have addressed my disagreement with your position in a constructive way so let me do that now:

If China dedicated the bulk of its shipbuilding capacity to naval construction, it could build more warships - both in number and tonnage - in a year than the US could in a decade. That's not a boast or an exaggeration, it's just a fact. I find this overmatch sufficient to not use circumlocutions like "it's not immediately clear that the US has a clear edge should it plunge into an arm race against China."

I find it immediately clear that the US has no edge whatsoever in any arms race with China, not today and most certainly not tomorrow.

weig2000 said:
I'm still undecided though whether I should file you under the category of Angry Youth or that of New Age Red Guards. LOL.

I'd rather be filed under "Realist", if you would. Realism is not systematically understating China's capacities as far as credulity can stretch, realism is trying to be as objective and evidence-based as possible when assessing those capacities.

I'd rather not clutter this thread any further with OT, so I'd be happy to continue this in DMs if you like. Or not, up to you.

Lethe · Jun 20, 2022

weig2000 said:
I would agree that US defense spending still has room to increase, particularly when measured in terms of percentage of GDP, compared with those in the Cold War era.

But I also want to caution against going too far using this yardstick, because it can be misleading and confusing. Defense industry is mostly manufacturing and industrial scale and capabilities. In that sense, the US manufacturing and industrial capacity and capability have declined significantly in relative terms compared with those in the '50s, '60s, '70s and even '80s. Looking from a different angle, during the Cold War, the US's chief geopolitical rival, the USSR's industrial output and capacity were far below those of the US (<50%). Today, as the US's primary geopolitical competitor, China's industrial value-add is equal to the combined industrial value-add of the next three largest industrial nations: the US, Japan and Germany.

Put it simply, all GDP are not created equal, at least when it comes to defense spending. GDP of today's US is more service-driven, much de-industrialized and substantially inflated by dollar's reserve status. It's not immediately clear that the US has a clear edge should it plunge into an arm race against China.

I agree that GDP, particularly nominal GDP, is an imperfect measure, however in decades of reading I have yet to see a credible alternative measure proposed, even by those with clear incentives to do so.

This discussion has begun to wander significantly off topic. The question is if US Congress' proposal to order (and, by extension, produce and deliver) three Burkes per year for five years is achievable. I contend that it is achievable because it is more or less what was occurring before Zumwalt and LCS entered the picture. Indeed, that is the problem that this proposal from Congress anticipates, i.e. the need to replace ships (including early Burkes) that were constructed at a high cadence decades ago, and will therefore reach retirement age at a similarly cadence, requiring replacement at a similar cadence.

Michaelsinodef then raised the question, looking beyond industrial capacity at HII, BIW and the broader Burke supply chain, if cost and budgets might be a limiting factor. My answer to this was no, because I anticipate that US military spending will continue to increase going forward. That is not to say I anticipate a drastic increase (though I would certainly not rule it out, one never knows when Reagan 2.0 is going to appear on the American political scene), but at the end of the day we are talking about an additional USD $2.2bn (i.e. one additional Burke per year) in an annual Navy budget of some USD $230bn, including $53bn for procurement (FY2023 DoD request) Moreover, these mooted additional Burkes are explicitly conceived as an alternative to additional FFG-62 frigates, hence the actual annual increase in expenditure from a 3 Burke/1 Constellation structure compared to a 2 Burke/2 Constellation structure would be around $1.1-1.2bn/yr (unit costs from USN's April 2022 Long-Range Shipbuilding Plan). Ultimately it is Congress that determines both the overall budget and which ships are and are not funded, and the Navy is left to work within those parameters. Often this means that Congress continues to order stuff that USN has sought to wind down, such as more LCS and Super Hornets. If Congress wants three Burkes per year, they will get three Burkes per year, even if that means USN has to make cuts in areas not under Congressional control, e.g. maintenance, training, deployment schedules.