China has an advantage over the US Navy that could mean a 'decisive' defeat for US warships in a fig

[Eugene]

Source: Business Insider

China has an advantage over the US Navy that could mean a 'decisive' defeat for US warships in a fight at sea

Ryan Pickrell 9h

Chinese warships can shoot farther than the US Navy, an ability that could prove "decisive" in a naval conflict, experts argue.

China is arming its surface warships with supersonic anti-ship cruise missiles with far greater range than the Cold War-era subsonic missiles the US Navy has in its arsenal.

The Chinese People's Liberation Army Navy's advanced Type 052 and Type 055 destroyers carry YJ-18 cruise missiles with an operational range that extends out to 540 kilometers.

US Navy Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyers and Ticonderoga-class cruisers are armed with shorter-range missiles, such as the Harpoon anti-ship missiles and SM-6s with surface-to-surface capabilities that have ranges up to only about 240 kilometers.

-snip-

Read more: https://www.businessinsider.com/chinese-warship-range-could-be-decisive-in-battle-against-us-navy-2019-4

[MaryMagdaline]

1. Will anyone ask Twitler about this?

[Hoyt]

2. I'm not sure naval superiority is as big a deal nowadays, but I am sure the military will

whine for more money and bombs.

[soryang]

3. Gunboat diplomacy does matter

That's the message the US and its allies send in the far east every day. Just as Japan saw that it had to mimic western navies that imposed their will on the far east in the 19th Century, China is doing the same now in the 21st Century. Japan (Abe's LDP) still wants to break out of the post WWII constitutional restrictions from building offensive naval forces for power projection purposes. It is evident that the US and UK are okay with this.

The Chinese got the message and are now building the armed forces to break out, if the need arises, from the island cordon keeping them from the open Pacific and from access to the Indian ocean to protect their sea lines of communication.

[soryang]

4. The National Interest- another discussion on this topic today

The U.S. Navy Is Unbalanced. It's Time to Fix It.

by John S. Van Oudenaren

In the decades after the Cold War, the U.S. Navy absorbed sustained budget cuts resulting in large force reductions. The total size of the fleet dwindled from nearly 600 active ships in 1987 to around 285 today. During this period, naval planners focused their substantial, yet shrinking, budgetary resources on large, costly, high-end platforms such as aircraft carriers at the expense of smaller surface warfare combatants such as frigates. This approach perhaps suited the range of global expeditionary missions that the navy was called upon to support in the 1990s (e.g. Bosnia, Iraq, Kosovo), a time when the United States faced no proximate military competitors.

https://nationalinterest.org/feature/us-navy-unbalanced-its-time-fix-it-55447