OP PROJECTION - Asia Pacific region monitoring

[Furniture]

2/5ths of the pacific frigates and all of our replenishment vessels. what a sad state of affairs for a once significant naval country. thanks to our sailors for doing the do, despite the country giving nearly zero fucks about our place in the world.

With Projection/Horizon it's more like 3/5 of MARPAC frigates, since there are usually two rotos over in any given year, and one of them is often a two ship TG. When I went it was WIN and OTT. Bear in mind that at any given time 1-2 of the frigates are in some state of refit, so sending almost all of the coast's ships out the door every year on deployment is a bit of a big deal. The army struggled to keep a battalion+ in Kandahar...

Remember as well, that we still have a large navy compared to most nations, and we are projecting power around the globe on a daily basis. Not many other navies do that, even if they boast larger numbers. The RCN is tiny compared to the PLAN, but we will never fight them alone.

 

[GR66]

HMCS Montreal actually just completed a Taiwan Straight transit with USS Chung-Hoon which was subjected to an unsafe close approach by a PLAN warship.

BZ to the crew of HMCS Montreal for being on the front line in defending right of navigation against China.

 

[Rifleman62]

Better video: Chinese warship comes within 150 yards of U.S. missile destroyer

 

[daftandbarmy]

A good reminder of why Taiwan is nervous....

China has chilling plans for governing Taiwan​

There may be few painless options left​

America’s humiliations would not end with the island’s submission. In recent times China’s plans for securing Taiwan have become grimmer and more explicit. Chinese leaders have drawn a bleak lesson from anti-government protests in Hong Kong in 2019, namely that to secure a territory exposed to years of Western freedoms, half-measures will not do. They stand ready to crush Taiwan’s thriving, raucous multiparty democracy and “re-educate” the island’s 23m people. In such a scenario, if Western leaders merely wring their hands, senior Asia-Pacific diplomats are clear about what would follow: countries across the region would start to accommodate China in once-unthinkable ways.

China has another goal: to ensure that America is blamed for the turmoil of a Taiwan crisis. The 170km-wide Taiwan Strait is the main route for container ships from China, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan to the world. A single Taiwanese company, tsmc, makes over 80% of the world’s most advanced semiconductors. China has been polishing anti-American talking points. A Western diplomat reports that around Asia, Chinese envoys call America a provocateur that once accepted Taiwan’s status as a part of China, but now encourages its separatist fantasies. China is succeeding, the diplomat says. In a crisis, many Asian neighbours would blame America and its ally Japan for stirring tensions.

China has chilling plans for governing Taiwan

There may be few painless options left

www.economist.com

 

[Eye In The Sky]

It is for the CAF, that's an extra 250 pers deployed to the far side of the world.

That’s funny and sad all at once…

 

[daftandbarmy]

That’s funny and sad all at once…

But it makes for witty repartee in good movies