So anyone know why four straight out this time unlike two of each 051C, 054, 052B, and 052C?

And Kanwa just came out with this:

PLA NAVY EXPANDING EXPERIMENTAL FLEET

After No.970, China has accelerated building of more experimental ships. The second 970 Class experimental ship is currently under construction at Shanghai Hudong – Zhonghua Shipyard. The construction of more experimental ships indicates that China is making active preparation for the next-phase building of large surface battleships. The weapon configuration and layout of the radar systems on these experimental ships give some clues of the characteristics of China’s next generation surface combatants.

(For full story, please refer to July 2006 issue of Kanwa Defense Review.)

Does anyone know more detail and what ships? 052D? 071? etc…

I wouldnt be surprised one day China being pulled into “War on [American-Spread] Terrorism” Its not China asking for a fight, its the Americans looking for reasons.

In some circles, it has been from the very beginning.

I remember reading a couple years ago about a group of US congressmen who took their very first trip to China. They had pretty much of the skeptical backward view of China before going. When they came back, they sounded the alarm bells in Congress that China was a threat. Why? Was is because they were treated unfairly and the Chinese people spat on them with all their hate? No. Was it because they saw a military police state and the leaders only made threats to them and the US? No. It was because they saw this hi-tech metropolis being built in China where the major cities were at least on par with any modern city of the West.

And these are the elected leaders of the most powerful country in the world? I know the American public choses to be blind about the world but those in Congress? You’d figure they would know what’s going on and not be relegated to knowing the world through American television and movies. I wonder if those congressmen were alarmed and angry by the Chinese people not living in straw huts by dirt roads.

Yeah, that’s no fake! Certainly not from the pic posted.

Strategy page has moderators? Strategy page is the yahoo message board cesspool of military forums. The Strategy page forums follow the example of the people who run the website itself.

Here’s some pics I just found on the net. Could be fake but if true looks like the missile hit the hangar bay.

The fact that there was corruption involved with the C-17 has NOTHING to do with whether it is effective and needed or is “pork-barrel” (an unnecessary project that exists solely to benefit the politicians whose constituents benefit from the project).

That he was citing bribery as one of the reasons he felt it should not have been purchased shows that he was discounting the need for the aircraft as being less important than an opposition to corruption.

Standing for a principle is fine, just as long as your stance does not become so extreme that you “cut off your nose to spite your face”!

As for “he didn’t seem like a Lib”… isolationism and non-interference with other nations has long been a hall-mark of extreme conservatism.. an example of this is during and after WW 1.

Democrat (and very liberal for his time) President Wilson ordered troops into Haiti to overthrow the recently-elected president there with the statement “We must teach the Central American Republics to elect good men”, while the Republican party opposed the League of Nations on the grounds that it would force the US into international affairs that it should stay out of.

Likewise, before WW 2 it was the Republicans who were isolationist.

Even today, if you look at the numbers, Bill Clinton involved the US in more different international military ventures than GW Bush has… mostly as part of UN actions, where Bush’s are for US reasons.

Just before the 2000 election a liberal magazine sounded a warning that if Al Gore were to become president that he would be even more interventionist than Clinton had been, and more than GW was likely to be!

This is common with the form of Liberalism that wants to “do good” by stepping in any time a nation, people, tribe, town, or individual makes a decision or takes an action they don’t like. They rush in to “protect you from yourself” and teach you to “make the right choices” because “we are a global society”.

One can be patriotic and still wish for less military expenditure and less military usage.

Nice digression but still doesn’t say anything about this guy’s (who you or I don’t even know) motivation which you seem to think was political. He was an engineer on the C-17 project not a politician. If he saw waste, why do you have a problem with him testifying to it? Like there weren’t all those stories in the news about problems with the C-17? This isn’t new.

Well he didn’t seem like a “lib” to me. Why would a liberal be an engineer for the defense industry and work to cut his own job? Maybe he’s the one that sees the fat and waste as a threat to national security. Never heard of bribes being a postive and patriotic.

If this were to happen in a third world country, it would be called corruption. Maybe it’s just some people don’t like corruption and it has nothing to do with what party one belongs to or what beliefs one holds.