ships disappear all the time. the Chinese aren’t in a position to do anything about it, so who cares?

as for them selling arms to Iran, et al, the solution is rather easy, except that Ear Leader will never go there: ID the ships via intel, then, when they are out there in the big lonely ocean, have a sub sink them. no muss, no fuss, and no acknowledgment. a Mk-48 under the keel won’t leave any evidence worth mentioning.

Except that the “leakers” would never let it stay quiet and the accusations would fly no matter who did it. Besides life is not a Tom Clancy novel.

China can project power only as far as it’s army can march and still be supplied with necessities. the PLA has no way to get anywhere other than overland.

the PLA lacks a real air force and a blue water navy worthy of the names, and neither item is going to magically appear anytime soon, no matter how much money they throw at the problem.

in the meantime, their population imbalance bomb is ticking louder and louder, as are other pressures, such as the economy, pollution, government graft & corruption, and dashed expectations amongst the masses.

as for them selling arms to Iran, et al, the solution is rather easy, except that Ear Leader will never go there: ID the ships via intel, then, when they are out there in the big lonely ocean, have a sub sink them. no muss, no fuss, and no acknowledgment. a Mk-48 under the keel won’t leave any evidence worth mentioning.

The father of a childhood friend of mine had all fingers/thumbs amputated at the first joint from frostbite resulting from throwing hand grenades down-hill all night (gloves made fingers to thick to easily “pull the pin”).

Islamofascists are willing to fight and die at impossible odds because of their fanatacism that overrides the instinct of self-preservation and the belief in the value of life. Tyrannical governments are willing to send their citizens to die because they don’t care about human life either. This causes a major problem if one counts on deterrence alone as a military strategy.

I know that our President Obama is remarkably dependent on his TelePrompter (affectionately known as TOTUS), but one would hope that anyone born in the US whose education took place mostly in the US would be able to correctly pronounce corpsman as ‘core-man’ and NOT as ‘corpse-man’ …

(Yeah, yeah, I know … it’s about Haiti where ‘corpse-man’ could well make more sense, but even then … could he not have used the Creole word for ‘zombie’, instead ?)