Bgile wrote:Third world countries are being supplied with modern submarines by european builders. They are very hard to detect, and modern torpedoes are very destructive.
The reason the Falklands campaign was so difficult for the British is they lacked an airborne early warning aircraft. The Harrier is also not an ideal interceptor. If they had still had F4s and Gannetts the Argentine butcher's bill would have been even higher and British losses would probably have been much lower.
I would not be surprised to lose CVNs to the Chinese. They are extremely useful, but they could indeed be overwhelmed and even one torpedo hit would force one to go home for lengthy repairs.
I was not aware Europe was building submarines for export; thanks for the info. Also i might add that if the British became efficient U-boat hunters in WW2, i would have thought that today it should be even "easier" to track enemy submarines.
The Falklands is far from being my "favorite" conflict to read about, but what i know about it is more than enough to make a point: nasty surprises can happen. I do not know whether the Royal Navy´s command was saying when planning the response to the Argentinian attack: "Well, we do not have airborne early warning aircraft, therefore we will surely have significant losses..."
If a 3rd world country´s air force alone managed to put critical pressure on a naval task force belonging to a 1st world country [although possibly the Royal Navy entered the fray relying more on its historic weight rather than the actual combat prowess they had in the 80s], then Russia [and also probably China and India in a second place] is perfectly and comfortably capable of delivering a blow that is perhaps impossible to describe in its whole scope, and i am not talking nuclear warheads involved, just conventional warheads...
I recall how i was shocked to see a documentary of some anniversary of the Falklands war, where the British commander of the Task Force admits to his interviewer the Royal Navy was it "its limit", and that if some Argentinian bombs that hit some critical British ships had exploded -they were duds-, and the Argentinian conscripts in the Islands had not surrendered, his task force would have abandoned operations and sail back to England with the tail between the legs.