China has been buying and adapting Russian naval technologies as it introduces new ships to the fleet in fits and starts. Instead of standardizing ship designs and deploying large numbers of similar ships to its emerging blue water fleet, the People’s Liberation Army Navy keeps introducing new types of guided missile destroyers largely in pairs. [...]

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The Russian Navy’s shipbuilding plans are still mostly plans. For the last seventeen years, most of their construction effort went into finishing a few subs, and building for export. Currently building are three SSBNs (the new Borei class, for which the missile is not quite ready yet), one new SSN (attack sub, that has been [...]

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The U.S. Navy has positioned its advanced communications flagship off the coast of Lebanon ahead of a larger mission, an intelligence report says.
U.S. Navy spokesman Lt. Patrick Foughty said the the USS Mount Whitney, a 620-foot command and control flagship for the U.S. Navy’s 6th Fleet, is in the region “to support additional communications requirements [...]

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The battle for “ownership” of the polar oil reserves has accelerated with the disclosure that Russia has sent a fleet of nuclear-powered ice breakers into the Arctic.
It has reinforced fears that Moscow intends to annex “unlawfully” a vast portion of the ice-covered Arctic, beneath which scientists believe up to 10 billion tons of gas and [...]

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Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced Monday a 30-billion-dollar plan to re-equip Canada’s military, to boost its recruiting and to bolster Canada’s defense industry over the next 20 years. The initiative will include major combat fleet replacements of surface combat ships, maritime patrol craft, fixed-wing search and rescue aircraft, fighter aircraft, and land combat vehicles [...]

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The Pentagon is going to resuscitate its Fourth Fleet, with the mission of patrolling Latin American and Caribbean waters.
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The plan to install a military base in Paraguay, close to Bolivian gas fields, was denounced by Brazil and Argentina. Ecuador has made it known that the American military base installed in Manta until 2009 will not [...]

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NEW DELHI: The absence of nuclear-powered submarines armed with nuclear-tipped missiles has come back to haunt the Indian defence establishment, even though plans are afoot to test the China-specific Agni-III missile within this week.
Though tabs were being kept on China’s underground nuclear submarine base on the southern tip of the Hainan Island in South China [...]

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Experts attempting to understand the strategic aims behind China’s aggressive military expansion have generally focused on Taiwan. But a new naval base points at Beijing’s significant and growing interest in projecting power into waters far from the Taiwan Strait. China, in fact, is equipping itself to assert its longstanding and expansive territorial claims in the [...]

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The maritime arms race in Asia has crossed another threshold with the publication of satellite pictures of a massive Chinese underground submarine and warship base giving it a significant tactical advantage in the strategically important South China Sea.
The naval base has been constructed by tunnelling into the mountainous shoreline of China’s southern Hainan Island near [...]

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