Posted on 04/17/2024 9:52:45 PM PDT by Zhang Fei
The job of commanding a nuclear submarine should go to smart and well-qualified officers. Or at least that's the case in Western navies.
Not so in the Chinese navy. Except for engineers, Chinese submarine officers tend to come from military academies with the lowest college-entrance-exam scores, a US military analyst said. This suggests that People's Liberation Army Navy sub commanders are not the "best and the brightest" officers who may be most equipped to cope with the stresses and challenges endemic to submarine warfare.
Based on China's college-entrance exam — called the gaokoa — the People's Liberation Army Navy engineering university ranks No. 2 in test scores among the military academies, while the submarine academy consistently ranks in the bottom three, according to a paper written by Roderick Lee, an expert on the Chinese military at the US Naval War College.
"Assuming a student's Gaokao score is generally indicative of overall performance potential, this suggests that PLAN submarine officer cadets tracking towards non-engineering department positions are inferior to their engineering brethren," Lee said.
Rivalry between the engineers on the lower decks who keep the ship's engines running and the bridge officers such as captains, navigators, and weapons officers isn't unusual in any navy. In the US, all submarine officers and commanders are trained in nuclear engineering. By the time a Chinese officer reaches submarine command, they've had more than a decade of training and fleet experience since taking their college-entry tests.
Still, the disparity inside the Chinese navy is remarkable, given that submarines would be one of China's most important weapons in a conflict with the US, Japan, or Taiwan. The PLAN operates around 60 submarines, including six armed with nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles, plus six nuclear and 46 diesel-powered attack subs armed with a variety of anti-ship missiles and torpedoes.
(Excerpt) Read more at businessinsider.com ...
https://digital-commons.usnwc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1026&context=cmsi-maritime-reports
The Naval War College is a ticket punch where naval officers acquire the table manners necessary (but not sufficient) to become flag officers, i.e admirals.
Their equivalents of John McCain. Weird.
There used to be a commonly used, though unkind metaphor related to that philosophy; “Like a Chinese Firedrill!”
Why would you consign your best people to shoddy death traps? You put low grade expendables into them.
Because this kind of logic is how China operates.
So much more efficient to do it the Western way. Only one idiot required.
More likely to follow orders blindly without thinking about them too much, I guess.
It’s because life on a submarine is difficult, and people use their connections to get out of it if they can. So the only people who know this is the best gig they can get go there.
If their nuke boats are still based on Soviet designs we can hear them coming a week away.
CC
US picks lowest IQ former Senators/VPs to be POTUS.
I wonder where they fit into the von Hammerstein quad?
This is the only explanation that makes any sense. And from what I've been told by a colleague who was TDY in China for five years in the middle '00s it makes a lot of sense.
Well, I for one, and I know of others, have not had much success with tools made in China, or power equipment either, unless it’s from an American or European company and assembled there. Even then the quality is not the same, I’ve noticed my Stihl chain saw didn’t last as long as the prior one and didn’t rev as fast either, and that’s just one example. So, I wouldn’t want to go in a Chinese sub for all of their tea. Put the idiots on it.
I’m not so sure I agree with the conclusion. This is an apples and oranges comparison. It’s comparing command officers with engineers.
If this War College thesis compared US Naval Academy SATs with MIT SATs it might reach the same conclusion about our naval officers.
EC
Every school is going to have its lowest scorers but with affirmative action we have students who don’t score well enough to be in the school at all, so they amount to much less than the lowest of all who are qualified.
“Their equivalents of John McCain. Weird.”
Have you ever read the book Level 7 by Mordecai Roshwald? Here is the synopsis of the book. “Level 7 is the diary of Officer X-127, who is assigned to stand guard at the “Push Buttons,” a machine devised to activate the atomic destruction of the enemy, in the country’s deepest bomb shelter. Four thousand feet underground, Level 7 has been built to withstand the most devastating attack and to be self-sufficient for five hundred years. Selected according to a psychological profile that assures their willingness to destroy all life on Earth, those who are sent down may never return.”
For a Chinese skipper, you don’t have to be smart. The skipper has been indoctrinated over many years to support the party and would do anything asked without understanding the consequences. He just has to do his job and in a Chinese nuclear submarine it means taking a key, turning it and pushing a button. Doesn’t take a genius, because the genius will question his own morality of what is about to take place.
In the US Navy, those same captains understand the morality and ethical challenges of unleashing nuclear hell on the enemy and have accepted it.
USN is now DEI based so it’s worse than the lowest score it’s the ones that least capable and don’t know what sex they are.
Being in the military is not considered a “good” job in China. The best of them is average.
“Does that mean that these officers are expendable?”
Most likely the low score people are CCP princelings.
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