I would be surprised if a small number of these transfers weren’t to unmanned underwater vehicles meant to demonstrate the capacity to run blockades with logistics using UUVs.
I would be surprised if a small number of these transfers weren’t to unmanned underwater vehicles meant to demonstrate the capacity to run blockades with logistics using UUVs.
Oh good grief. Yes, sure, they and china have done plenty to sabotage marine cables. Civilian cable, however, is not generally guarded. The solution to someone dragging an anchor between Sweden and Lithuania is international sanctions; the solution to someone doing it between Qeshm and Ash Sha’m is to blow the ship up. With missiles. Just… the idea that hundreds of large moving vessels would be harder to find than a Big Hose buried at the bottom of the sea is just. Really, really wrong.
Additionally, you would need more submarines than currently exist to make this even slightly viable just to make up the difference for the US’s import thru the straight. And not only is the US *the world’s largest producer of LNG, the amount of LNG it imports through the straight per year is approximately Three Santiago’s worth. Which is both practically nothing in scale, and would require 30,000 round trips, or 82 6-hour round trips every day.
For context, china would need… uh… Napkin math says, using the largest Narco sub ever recorded (which was only semi-submersible) it would take 22 THOUSAND 6 hour trips per day.
Seriously, this is dumb. Even Big Hose is dumb. Having a whole bunch of unmaned submersible SCVs running your vespene through a sea-mine infested strait is a ridiculously unworkable idea. Why would anyone even want to do this? If you can field that many UUVs, surely you could just build a regular pipeline instead of all this Wile E Coyote nonsense.
Why?
So, how many pipes currently run under your house/apartment/van/whatever?
I dont live in the ocean?
A shocking revelation!
To borrow your own words:
But seriously, If you’re already trying to dodge the question, seems pretty clear you can see where this is going.
Static infrastructure is far more vulnerable and easy to find than moving subsurface vessels? I don’t understand why you can’t grasp that.
If that were true, I suspect you would have answered the question instead of dodging it (and the fundamental logistical realities you ignored) in favor of going the route of asserting that you’re correct, without any explanation, while ignoring the logistical realities of the situation you have proposed when they’re in turn explained to you…
While in general your statement may indeed have merit, subsurface static infrastructure is not easy to find or access. For that matter, neither is this a situation in which subsurface vessels have a wide range of depths they can hide within. Hundreds upon hundreds of them crammed into a small area is not so much asymmetric maritime warfare as it is shooting squids in a barrel.
The statement is doing a hell of a lot of work…
You are as condescending as you are overconfident.
It’s not particularly doing any work, and a great deal less than the statement you made that I’m referencing. You just want to poke holes in an argument you refuse to engage with substantively, and now you’re just insulting me… why? If your position has merit, why avoid addressing all of the massive glaring flaws I’ve pointed out, instead of being a jerk?