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[-] culpritus@hexbear.net 35 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I recently saw someone cite the 'China has the world's largest navy'. So I looked it up.

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/largest-navies-in-the-world

It's true if you just count 'naval vessels' because China and NK have a lot of small boats:

Top 10 Largest Navies in the World (by total number of warships and submarines - 2020):

China - 777
Russia - 603
North Korea - 492
United States - 490
Colombia - 453
Iran - 398
Egypt - 316
Thailand - 292
India - 285
Indonesia - 282

So maybe not the most useful metric for comparison of relative might. Maybe tonnage is a better metric of that?

Top 10 Most Powerful Navies in the World (by total tonnage - 2014):

United States - 3,415,893
Russia - 845,739
China - 708,886
Japan - 413,800
United Kingdom - 367,850
France - 319,195
India - 317,725
South Korea - 178,710
Italy - 173,549
Taiwan - 151,662

Taiwan even makes it on the the top ten list that way. And you can clearly see that the USA has the most massive navy by a wide margin. You can get into aircraft carriers and subs too if you want to see how lopsided these stats can appear.

[-] Blinky_katt@lemmygrad.ml 25 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

China has been working to increase the PLAN's power and reach this past decade. They are nearing to a blue water navy at this point, and have broken through the first island chain, within which they are no longer considered to be defeatable without extreme cost.

The US has withdrawn their concentration back to Guam (previously, they didn't bothered to arm the second island chain).

China has 20x the manufacturing power of the US and a bigger PPP (more efficient use of their military budget) , and they have known the US will one day come for them since Mao. Their recent ships are lighter in tonnage but newer than the American fleet by several decades, carries better equipment, radar, with greater fire power that makes them more equal to traditional ships one category higher in tonnage.

Finally, they aren't building a navy to project power around the globe like the US navy does. The PLAN intends to have the capability to defend their home waters and to protect their economic interests abroad, that's it, so it will never need to have as many ships as the US navy, so a tonnage or ship number comparison would not be an accurate measure of the PLAN capabilities.

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this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2023
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