The United States on September 13 said the Russian news outlet RT is taking orders directly from the Kremlin and working with Russian military intelligence to spread disinformation around the world to undermine democracies.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the United States has gathered new evidence that exposes cooperation between RT and four other subsidiaries of the Rossia Segodnya media group, and it intends to warn other countries of the threat of the disinformation.
In addition to RT, Rossia Segodnya operates RIA Novosti, TV-Novosti, Ruptly, and Sputnik, but the announcement on September 13 focused largely on RT. The outlet, formerly known as Russia Today, has previously been sanctioned for its work to allegedly spread Kremlin propaganda and disinformation.
This is just off of wikipedia, so I’m not sure how up-to-date it is:
3 aircraft carriers 4 landing helicopter docks 12 amphibious transport docks 32 landing ship tanks 33 landing ship mediums 58 destroyers 54 frigates 75 corvettes 150 missile boats 26 submarine chasers 17+ gunboats 36 mine countermeasure vessels 79 submarines 19 replenishment ships 232 auxiliaries
Those corvettes, missile and gun boats could all be considered “small”. The frigates and up are all capable of deep water work further out, independently if necessary. Interestingly, it’s almost a revival of the 19th century French naval doctrine Jeune École, which was typified by a heavy reliance on torpedo boats, with the idea that that would be a cheaper way to operate a navy while still posing a threat to the larger battleships that dominated naval strategy during that period.
It’s certainly more than just a big business. Which is also smart, a large country would want a significant blue water navy if it hopes for influence on the global stage. Even the UK and France have them, and they are much smaller countries. It would just be very illogical for China to ignore blue water capabilities.
True, while a lot of it is clearly for business purposes. I may have been flippant stating their blue water navy stuff, that absolutely won’t sell, is just marketing material. In truth, their blue water Navy moves which only began like 10 years ago or so is in fairness quite impressive. They’ve created large destroyers that the US is saying is on par with Ageis and aircraft carriers that have shown similar sortie rates to UK’s carriers. If it really was just for show as I’m trying to say, it would have probably been more like Russian equipment. What with their sole aircraft carrier constantly catching fire and their stealth fighter jet that they’re scared to put into the front line. The fact that China can demonstrate the equipment working on a fairly consistent basis in different weather conditions should tell me they’re much more serious about all this than I give them credit for.
That said, this shift is too new to know what they’re really thinking. Plus, they absolutely have been parading around the Type 55 to future prospective buyers of their equipment. Yet there’s also clearly some movement towards actually being able to use this stuff. For example about 4 years ago, India showed off to the world that they could operate both of their aircraft carriers simultaneously. Something that at the time at least China was unable to do. However, last month they sailed all three of their carriers out simultaneously. Clearly this is an attempted signal that we do have enough trained officers and we’re not just building equipment without training soldiers.
China’s just done the this stuff is for sales for so long it’s honestly hard for me to see it any other way. On top of them actually doing the training starting so recently that it’s hard for me to say this is a permanent shift and not just a way to throw off the comments from India mocking their training.
All in all, this IMO is why China was befriending Russia to begin with. China has powerful technology, but ironically they don’t have the bodies to put behind them. The one child policy has basically made every parent in China refuse to let their kids become soldiers. Russia on the other hand seemed to have a limitless supply of bodies to throw at a problem as they’re doing in Ukraine. With China’s best friends constantly facing off with terrorists, Pakistan, Myanmar, Saudi Arabi, UAE, Egypt and many more I think it made perfect sense China wanted access to Wagner to deal with this. Then, uh… Well Russia PROVED they have the bodies to throw in the grinder because they threw the bodies into the grinder.
China does have a very large number of active duty servicemembers, though I don’t think that’s all that surprising when they’re one of the planet’s largest countries, and have been steadily modernizing over the last few decades. I also imagine their unusually high youth unemployment numbers contribute to the ease of recruitment. When you have over a billion population, keeping 1% of them active duty is probably not particularly difficult.
Russia has the advantage of global recruitment, and are offering frankly huge financial incentives to anyone willing to fight. It’s got to be rapidly draining their coffers. I suspect Xi is mainly just war profiteering off of them. In light of western sanctions, this has probably been the best period to be a Chinese exporter in many years. lol Russia is likely willing to pay top dollar for whatever they require to fuel their war machine. And there’s always their raw material exports as well.