Posted on 06/15/2009 6:43:24 AM PDT by Bean Counter
It is highly likely the recent collision of a Chinese submarine and an underwater sonar array towed by a US warship in the South China Sea was due to misjudgment of distance, Chinese military experts said.
The conjecture is in line with the United States view of "inadvertent encounter".
The collision occurred last Thursday as the destroyer USS John S. McCain was sailing in the sea, CNN television reported on Friday.
Its sonar array, used to listen and locate underwater sounds, was damaged in the incident, but fortunately the sub and ship did not collide, an unnamed military official told CNN.
The official said the US Navy does not consider the incident a harassing move by Beijing, as it would have been extremely dangerous had the array got caught in the submarine's propellers.
So far, both China's Ministry of National Defense and the Pentagon have yet to comment on the incident, while most US media have downplayed it with short reports.
"The destroyer USS John S. McCain isn't a professional anti-sub ship, while such US destroyers stopped carrying sonar arrays after the collapse of the former Soviet Union," said Yin Zhuo, a senior researcher with the People's Liberation Army Navy Equipment Research Center.
"According to the CNN report, the US destroyer seems to have failed to detect the sub, while the sub set its distance from the US ship based on the assumption it wasn't carrying sonar arrays. It's highly possible that's the reason for the incident," Yin said.
The submarine is likely not damaged, as the sonar array is quite thin and soft, he added.
Philippine Navy spokesman Lt. Col. Edgard Arevalo said on Saturday that to their knowledge the US warship was in international waters at the time of the collision.
According to media reports, the US destroyer, along with three other US warships, was on an annual joint exercise in the South China Sea with navies from six Southeast Asian countries, including the Philippines and Malaysia.
One of the four US ships is the USNS Chung-Hoon, one of the world's most advanced destroyers.
According to the Kuala Lumpur Security Review, the participation of four advanced USNS ships is aimed at familiarizing the US navy with the situation in the South China Sea and shows the possibility of the US Navy's joint combat role with Southeast Asian nations.
Major General Luo Yuan, a senior researcher with the Academy of Military Sciences in Beijing, said though the collision was accidental, the existence of US ships in the South China Sea is cause for potential incidents.
"The best way to avoid such collisions is for the Pentagon to stop its unfriendly moves toward China in this region," he said.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2271901/posts
The wording of this story in the Chinese media is fascinating, and so full of obvious baloney it would be laughable if the circumstances and implications were not so serious. These people are NOT our allies, and you can read the language they chose to use that proves it.
If the US were to ever give up their Anti-submarine gear, we would simply stop building ships like the USS McCain. (named for the Senator's Father, the Admiral).
Accident my *ss, they knew exactly where that thing was and wanted to disable it.
“The destroyer USS John S. McCain”
Yea, right. McCain is a bad movie not a destroyer.
Cute.
Note that the Chinese are “promoting” the collision (to THEIR population at least), while the Soviets either ignored this type of collision, or worked (with us) to merely ignore inconvenient underwater collisions.
This way, the Chinese get to enhance their Navy’s credibility with the Chinese population?
I cringed when I read that, too.
We have been known to go fishing with our towed arrays...
The unanswered question here is were we aware of the sub before the collision? The answer is of course classified, and of considerable interest to the Navy.
We should develop some ‘cold war’ type sub warfare devices...perhaps a torpedo variant that’d just attach a ‘pinger’ to the sub instead of blowing it up...strictly for safety purposes of course! ;-)
That’s an expensive lure...
You're a better man than me if you are willing to serve on an ASW platform that fires a high speed torpedo of any kind at a sub.
As soon as any flag sub hears high speed screws hit the water coming at them all hell is gonna break loose....
The USS John S. McCain (DDG-56) is named after John S. McCain, Jr. and John S. McCain, Sr., both Admirals in the United States Navy. John S. McCain Jr. commanded the submarines USS Gunnel and Dentuda during World War II. Subsequently he held a number of posts, rising to Commander-in-Chief of the United States Pacific Command before retiring in 1972. John S. McCain Sr. commanded the aircraft carrier Ranger (CV-4), and acted as commander of the Fast Carrier Task Force during the latter stages of World War II. They were respectively the father and grandfather of John S. McCain III, former naval aviator captain, U.S. Senator representing Arizona, and Republican nominee for president in the 2008 election.
The intelligence gathered is a worthy catch.
It might be a very bad idea for a submarine to ram a towed sonar array, because it might have equipment padding inside the array, consisting of loose cable and things like that, that were the array to be damaged, could come loose and severely foul the submarines propeller.
Which would be a bad thing. The submarine would be disabled, and have no other option but to surface, so that one of its fleets surface ships could toe it in for extensive repairs.
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