Obviously because in separate statements it is not definitively clear whether 3 "large" destroyers/year was an afterthought or part of the original thinking. We are obviously now splitting hairs here and are not going to agree, once again.
PLAN Catapult Development Thread, News, etc.
- Thread starter antiterror13
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Yeah, and I think it doesn't matter whether or not his post at the time was an afterthought to his post #1665 or not. You challenged him about whether he had predicted 3-4 055s would be under simultaneous construction.
Whether he definitively expressed his prediction in a single post or not, or in two posts a few hours apart, or even if it was spread over multiple posts over the course of a few months, shouldn't matter given what you wrote as your challenge. Technically speaking, so long as he or anyone else had made a prediction of 3-4 055s clear before we first had evidence of 3-4 055s under construction (which was in late 2016), that would fulfill the terms of what you wrote.
And yes, we're splitting hairs but given how detailed the preceding few replies have been, it is worth settling just what the nature of this quibble is meant to be.
Looking back at it, I think AndrewS was a one of a few between here and CDF who dared to suggest that anything like 3 055s could be under construction at a single time, and this was well before we had photo evidence of the first 055's module at JNCX which only emerged in about April/May 2016, yet by late 2016 we had photo evidence of 4 under construction at the same time. Now, obviously AndrewS was also suggesting a sustained construction rate of 3 055s at anyone time over a number of years on top of merely seeing 3 055s produced at a time (which has now been fulfilled), but credit is due where it's due, and to make what seemed like such a grand prediction at the time and having the first half of the prediction fulfilled by the end of the year is quite a turn.
90+ large destroyers by 2037 sounds wildly unrealistic to me, though a total of 150+ surface combatants may be achievable in this timeframe.
Jura The idiot
General
Note that the posts were right after each other on the same train of thought.
You can see the first one is a very short remark, which is then followed by a second much longer post which has a comprehensive rationale.
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It's pretty simple.
90+ large destroyers = The existing fleet of Type-52C/D + 20 years x (3.5 per year)
But if the Chinese economy becomes twice the size of the USA economy (circa 2035?) then the end-strength estimate above would need to be doubled from 90 to 180 AEGIS destroyers by 2060-odd.
But that is much more speculative.
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It's not such a stretch.
Remember that Niall Ferguson was invited to address the graduating class of midshipmen at the US Naval Academy at Annapolis a few years back.
He told them that by the time they were admirals, the US Navy would almost certainly no longer be the world's largest and rule the waves.
That would simply come about from:
1. China already being the world's largest trading nation, which drives the requirement for the world's largest navy to protect that trade.
2. And China being the world's largest economy, which means they have the resources to build such a navy.
Of course, it is very difficult to find members of the US establishment who are willing to go on record or believe that the USA (and its Navy) won't be number 1 anymore.
Then also on the same day, there are a lot more posts where I argue that the Type-52D should cease all production, and be replaced by the Type-55
Lethe
Captain
Even in PPP dollars, China is not projected to become twice the size of the United States before mid-century (PWC 2017 projects 2050 PPPs in 2016 USD for USA and China at 34 and 58 trillion dollars respectively). And while there are certainly elements of the military apparatus that are sensitive to local price conditions (in the way that PPP tries to capture), most significantly personnel costs, I believe that market exchange rates provide a superior basis for comparison, for two main reasons: fuel costs (a major input into operational costs) are more or less the same between nations, and the further one ascends up the technological chain, the greater the degree of convergence in both wages and material costs.
A strict PPP comparison will overestimate China's military-economic resources for the reasons noted above, while a strict MER comparison will underestimate those resources by failing to account for lower personnel costs. A hybrid or approximation of the two measures, therefore, is likely to be more accurate than either alone, although that still leaves open the question of the appropriate ratio.
Applying a crude 50/50 approximation of MER and PPP measures, using PWC 2017 projections for future economic growth, and assuming that defence allocations as proportion of GDP remain equivalent to the 5yr average of 2011-2016 (as estimated by SIPRI 2017) , generates the following "comparable" figures of defence expenditure in 2030:
USA (3.8%): $892bn
China (1.9%): $613bn
India (2.5%): $342bn
Russia (4.4%): $151bn
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Jura The idiot
General
I now entertained myself with numbers:
based on what I saw Jul 20, 2017
(predictions for 2030 and 2050), I now "interpolated" the US 2035 GPD to be 26t; solving for zero of
11.2*x^19-52.0
gives (of course rounded) x=1.084 (11.2t is the Chinese 2016 GDP according to google);
meaning: Chinese economy would have to grow by 8.4% in each of the years since now until 2035 to reach 52t