HMS Prince of Wales breaks down….

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Thumpalumpacus said:
Nor is it any occasion for any worry.
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Agreed, it would be a light show of capability, but it would still be historically interesting as the very first occasion of an Asian CV sailing from the Indo-Pacific into the Atlantic. Less a sixty year postwar gap, Japan has operated over thirty CVs from Hōshō in 1922 to today's Kaga (just finishing F-35 conversion), and they've never left the Indo-Pacific - as much as I'd like the idea; Japanese aircraft carrier Kaga at 1937 Spithead Review. India has operated three carriers (2x INS Vikrant, INS Viraat) and none have ever left their eponymous ocean since their acquisition from the UK and Russia, and I doubt the new domestically-built INS Vishal will either.

I know this is all mostly meaningless trivia that will needlessly provoke our resident hair splitters, but China being the first Asian naval power to send a CV into the Atlantic would be noteworthy.
 
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China sees the need for a blue-water navy, and I'm sure they're making good headway to that end. But given that they have something like 13 nations, not all friendly, sharing land borders, I imagine that their Army and Air Force have a larger charge on funding, with the sea-control mission being shared with missile forces.

China needs a Russian victory in Ukraine in part because a Russian defeat may well introduce a huge swath of instability on their northern borders. They already have tensions with India. That calculation implies a navy that can hold the East and South China seas, along with missile and air assets, while they must maintain large army formations to guard long land frontiers of dubious security.

If Russia loses and Putin falls as a result, China's navy stands to be the big loser.
 
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The rub is China doesn't need much of a navy whatsoever. None of their neighbours present maritime threats threats and the rest of us just want China to make our cheap electronics and buy our coal, pork and soybeans. Maybe India, but their starting a war with China is a remote, and the PLAN of the 2013 would smoke the Indian navy of 2023. As for the rest of China's neighbours, none are a naval threat, and any that are expanding their navies are doing so only because China is. If a PLAN CSG sailed for SPB the locals in the Pacific would wish it a temporary good riddance and carry on. As for the British QEs, I hope the Russia and PLAN threat see Britain pursue a Japanese level of interest in their navy.
 
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The rub is their own; China has had expansionist aims in the South China Sea for at least a decade, and so recently as last week attacked a Filipino resupply vessel (with water streams and not shells) there. Building artificial islands and then declaring a 200-mile national zone around it. That's the sort of thing that they want a bigger navy for, too.

They don't need a bigger navy for security, but they do need one for national aims. We should not sleep on it. This is why our sailing through the Taiwan Strait is useful, while their sailing to St Petersburg isn't.
 
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