The Mysterious, Disappearing Chinese Aircraft Carrier Resurfaces

An aircraft carrier that can disappear? Apparently, the Chinese have perfected such a craft. Back in the day, I used to riff almost monthly on the good ship Varyag, a rusting Soviet hull that the Chinese recently bought and relabeled the good ship Liaoning. The Liaoning had just about disappeared, but resurfaced recently in the Bloomberg News. The Chinese are practicing using the Liaoning as, you know, an aircraft carrier—a place where planes land and take off—and it seems they’ve been making some progress, although the ship is several years away from being fully operational, and, apparently, will always be confined to a training role.

In the meantime, the U.S. has just achieved the feat of landing a drone on an aircraft carrier, surely a bitter pill indeed for the fighter jocks who run the U.S. Navy. The notion that they can be replaced by machines is the very worst news imaginable for these bad boys, but in today’s U.S. military, if it ain’t drones, it ain’t shit, so the flyboys have to follow suit. The good news—or rather, the “not terrible news”—is that real combat drones are another decade away, which is just about the time the Chinese might be launching an actual, functioning WWII-style flat-top. At least, that’s what the admirals are hoping. It would be terrible if the Chinese turned out to be too smart to bother.

Afterwords
Unfortunately for wits like me, much of Chinese muscle-flexing is not directed at us but rather the Japanese and the Koreans, not to mention India. The fires of nationalism burn as in deep in the East as they do in the West. Asians like to think of themselves as more civilized than their boorish western cousins. It would be so nice if that would turn out to be true.