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: it was reported that the...
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 armed forces manoeuvre towards the end of June, one of the Type 094 submarines appeared travelling northwards on the Chinese side of the international shipping lane between the island...
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. They...
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), which arrived in the last decade, and the...
Interview with the former Deputy Minister of Defence of Ukraine, Igor Kabanenko, by Hans Uwe Mergener and Holger Schlüter. Can you give us an insight into the current state of the Ukrainian navy? How do you see its future? Ukraine's naval forces entered the war when the strategy adopted in 2018 for...
How can public clients set the right incentives in order to obtain optimal offers for the maintenance of naval units? Because not (everything) is a question of price. There is public consensus on the subject of Bundeswehr procurement: It needs to be accelerated and improved. There is less unanimous agreement on the question of how...
Still smart from the front, but like a cockchafer from the side! The first mine defence platform of the Belgian-Dutch joint project rMCM, the Belgian "Oostende", was sighted in open sea for the first time in mid-July. The sea trials off Concarneau in southern Brittany initially focussed on the propulsion and navigation systems. The bilateral rMCM programme as a cooperation between Belgium Naval &...
On 3 September, the first of the four Norwegian Orion P-3C maritime patrol aircraft finally arrived in South America after being refurbished in the USA. Two weeks later, on 19 September, the maritime patrol aircraft with the new registration 6-P-57 was handed over to the Argentine Navy in Buenos Aires. As there is currently no long-distance reconnaissance...
The US Navy's ship procurement programme is several years behind schedule. At the same time, costs are exploding. The government announces targeted measures. It has long been known that most US naval shipbuilding projects are behind schedule. The Navy's ocean-going fleet currently has fewer than 300 units, including fleet supply ships. The...
The Class 404 tenders were designed for use in the Baltic Sea and were operated almost worldwide. Due to the constantly increasing requirements, it is time to develop a successor. It is not only since the current conflicts and the dramatic changes that have come with them that the utilisation management at the Federal Office of Defence...
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