WORLD FIRST - RUSSIA TO BUY AIRCRAFT CARRIERS FROM CHINA?

 Well there is no other good news coming out of Malaysia. Just more of the usual chicken shit crap.  The Ringgit has fallen further to RM4.78 versus the US Dollar. I think the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington is not happy anymore with our local dunggu.

There are interesting developments between Russia and China.  There were two main ways to gauge the size or strength of a country's navy ie the number of ships they have and the total tonnage of all the ships in the navy. So if a navy has 500 ships but they are all coastal patrol boats armed with machine guns only that does not mean much. 

But if a navy has both ie a large number of ships as well as large sizes of the ships then that should be a very powerful navy. Well yes and no. 

The Top 10 navies in the world by number of ships (2019) are :

    China - 777
    Russia - 603
    North Korea - 492
    United States - 490
    Colombia - 453
    Iran - 398
    Egypt - 316
    Thailand - 292
    India - 285
    Indonesia - 282

But you can rest assured that North Korea, Colombia and Iran have a very large number of gunboats and motorboats.

By tonnage the 10 Most Powerful Navies in the World (2014) were :

• United States - 3,415,893 tons
• China 2,400,000 tons (2022)    
• Russia - 845,739
• Japan - 413,800
• United Kingdom - 367,850
• France - 319,195
• India - 317,725
• South Korea - 178,710
• Italy - 173,54
• Taiwan - 151,662

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 / 1990 Russia has downsized the average tonnage of its naval vessels.  The Russians used to build (and still maintain)  monstrous ships known as the "battle cruisers". They built seven of the nuclear powered Kirov class battle cruisers  which had a displacement of 28,000 tons (picture below). Soviet era. They were just huge platforms for carrying a full load of the most powerful missiles in the Soviet Navy, including nuclear tipped missiles. 

 

But there is a third factor that changes this "size" equation - technology. 

The Iranian Navy is largely a gunboat navy (motor boats and high speed craft) but they are equipped with increasingly powerful missiles. The Iranian Navy is not a blue water navy. They mostly operate in and defend their coastal waters. But their coastal waters include the Straits of Hormuz which suffers the "Curse of Oil". Wherever there is oil there is trouble.  The Iranian Navy maintains large numbers of high speed motorboats armed with missiles that operate in swarms. They believe that their motorboats can swarm large ships like American aircraft carriers and take them out.

The other very small navy that relies heavily on gunboats and motorboats is Israel. Israel has used their missile armed gunboats (like the Saar Class below) very effectively in the past. They are armed with world class, high technology missiles like the Gabriel missile that can take out any surface ship. The latest variant of the Gabriel is called Blue Spear and it is developed jointly by Israel and (jeng jeng jeng) Singapore.  

 

Now with the chaos and collapse of the west versus the organised and super disciplined rise of China and the re-emergence of Russia both China and Russia are re-examining their roles as world powers to keep the world functioning in good order.

In order to do that they see the need for large and powerful navies again. But with a twist. China has outpaced Russia in high technology naval vessels. Plus the Chinese build them cheap. So now Russia will most likely buy "large naval vessels" from China.

The largest non-aircraft carrier ships built by China are the LHDs (landing helicopter dock) like the Type 075 below. This is a helicopter carrier with "docks" for amphibious vehicles.  Size 35,000 tons. Then they have the cruisers / destroyers like the Type 055D weighing 13,000 tons. The aircraft carriers go out from 65,000 tons to more than 100,000 tons.

 

 

Russia and China have now become the closest of friends. They share a long and extremely "profitable" 4,200 km land border with 160 official border crossings. Extremely profitable because Russia-China trade is going to hit US$200 Billion by 2024 (almost RM1.0 trillion). That is a lot of friendship over the neighborhood fence. Neither China or Russia are going to do anything silly to jeopardise that amount of trade. They are going the other way. Russia and China are getting ever closer to ensure that their wealth and happiness increases in abundance.

 

 Artikel ini adalah pandangan penulis dan tidak semestinya mewakili MMKtT.