Category: Magazine

German Mission Network Seegehend

If you want to survive in battle today, you have to be able to exchange information in real time - even with units from other nations. A disruptive approach is now being developed for a continuously updated command and control capability for the navy. With the German Mission Network (GMN) programme, the existing command information systems of the armed forces are being harmonised, service-oriented and transferred to a common platform. This enables the capability for national and multinational mission and operational command. With GMN Seegehend, the implementation for the maritime dimension and the development of the Bundeswehr's joint, cross-command level, nationally and multinationally interoperable information and communication network on the Navy's ships and boats is taking place. This means that information from the German,...

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China: First voyages of the third aircraft carrier

At the end of June, the South China Morning Post reported that China claimed to have the world's largest conventional aircraft carrier, the "Fujian". The privately owned (Alibaba), but in China recognised for its narrow degree of freedom to publish factually, referred in particular to the electromagnetic catapult: something had been achieved with this technology on a conventionally powered ship that was not considered feasible. The US Navy can also demonstrably achieve this with the Ford class, but its energy systems are known to be nuclear-powered and can therefore generate sufficient electricity. The "Fujian" is China's third aircraft carrier and the first to be built after...

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China's strategic submarines in the Taiwan Strait

An event with rarity value: It is now five years since a strategic submarine of the Chinese People's Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) was last sighted in the open sea. Shortly before a Taiwanese military manoeuvre towards the end of June, one of the Type 094 submarines appeared travelling northwards on the Chinese side of the international fairway between the island and the mainland (median line). The nuclear submarines of the Jin class (137 metres, 10,000 tonnes submerged, 12 launch containers for JL-2s, each with around 1 MT of nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs)) are still a big unknown - their number is now said to have grown to five. The boat was presumably on the...

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Scholasticism and the dark sea

The German Navy is still essentially a peacetime navy and the officer corps is hardly tactically orientated. How can this be changed at the doctrinal level? Scholasticism was an important tradition of thought in the Middle Ages, dominated by a rigid insistence on the truth of old texts that propagated a closed world without innovation. It collapsed when the turn of the modern era exposed the scholastics' world view as false. Our country is also experiencing a moment in which a turning point is shaking the world view of political Germany. Our old scholasticism no longer offers us any answers. Germany must think war in all areas in order to become fit for war -...

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Chile: A small flotilla for the Antarctic

At the beginning of July, the handover and commissioning ceremony for the first icebreaker designed and built in South America, the "Almirante Viel" (111 metres, 13,000 tonnes), took place in Talcahuano/Concepcion, halfway along Chile's almost 6,500-kilometre coastline. Together with the patrol vessel "Fuentealba" (OPV80 - Fassmer design) and the tugboat "Lientur", which arrived in the last decade, the newbuild forms the Chilean triumvirate for the nation's stronger commitment to the opposite coast of the 7th continent, the...

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