In light of the 70th anniversary of their triumph over U.S-backed anti-communist wars this week and year, the Vietnamese have seemingly taken the time to reward themselves with some new procurements involving their submarine fleet.

Vietnam buys submarine-launched land attack missiles to deter China

An in-depth article by a state-run newspaper detailing the training of the Vietnamese crews by the Russian Navy:

Life at Kilo-class submarine brigade in Vietnam

Vietnam’s steps are apparently only part of an overall movement in the Far East for numerous countries to invest more in their submarine warfare capabilities as China muscles its naval power throughout the region.

Thai government petitions government to buy submarines

Asia has an Arms Race in Submarines

Funny, Russia just signed a huge arms deal with China. And Putin laughs all the way to the bank...

The USS John C Stennis Is A Fortress At Sea: By The Numbers.

THAT'S a big ship and tons of shit to use!

Terrified sailors try to escape mechanical whale

While the article is the stock "Chinese equipment isn't as good", that one paragraph speaks volumes.

It's one thing to study party doctrine and wargame, another to lead troops in actual combat. The Yanks With Tanks have NCO's and officers who've been on many deployments. A lot of our doctrine has been changed to reflect the Gulf War and The War On Terror.

Does the PLA have a plan to counter that? We don't know. The Cold War era US miltiary had a generation of troops to who the Vietnam War was in history books. But there were enough Vietnam/Grenda/Panama vets to spread that "tribal knowledge". The PLA? Last war the Army fought was with Vietnam and in the words of the article, the PLA got a "Bloody Nose". Their Navy has yet to be tested in Cold War-style antics or in combat.

The PLAN did chase the Vietnamese off the Paracel Islands in 1974. It's not much, but it did happen.

@AFP, yeah, that piccy is quality, man. Nice one.

Amusing but those are marines. Notice the unsightly green pt shorts. The Navy has some odd blue affair.

North Korea is claiming to have test-fired an SLBM. No independent comment yet to my knowledge.

They got some cruise missiles, but an SLBM is a huge technical feat that "best Korea" isn't up to yet.

Purely in theory, you can horizontally capsule-launch an SLBM. You could even rig an ancient diesel sub with a Scud equivalent, the way the Soviets did way back when with the Zulu class.

Whether or not you'd want to is a different story.

^^ Are we sure? Best Korea is enough of a hermit kingdom that nobody truly has a full scope of what goes on in there or what they actually have and can do.

Maybe they probably managed to get a working Soviet-era SLBM up and running rather than did domestic. Or maybe they're bluffing hard.

Given Best Korea, I doubt bluffing is in order.

Why is it called "Best Korea" anyway? :S

It's a joke about how they always portray their country as some kind of paradise and everywhere else as some dystopian hellhole.

^^ Because North Korea is Best Korea.

No it's not. It has fake grocery stores and fake fat kids.

North Korean military capabilities are consistently under-estimated. Remember the drones that crashed a while back? When the South Koreans examined them, they found that they'd taken pretty decent imagery of the Blue House in Seoul. They were also not alone.

A true SLBM is unlikely, but I don't think submarine-launched missiles are completely beyond them. Something like the Regulus or even the Nazi V-2 launching gear for subs shouldn't be that hard to replicate, even for NK.

An SLBM is far less technically complicated than an SLCM like a Tomahawk.

Only if you want to fire it out of the torpedo tubes. Some kind of deck-mounted installation, like the Regulus I mentioned, would be considerably easier.

The old vertical silo stuff like Polaris is also quite simple technically speaking.

The only platform they're known to have that could do it appears to be based on the Golf-class.

South Korea has officially responded, incidentally, and their statement appears to be "No you didn't" with a notation that their only missile submarine platform hasn't yet left the shipyard.

^ It would seem that perhaps we actually don't know squat about Best Korea.

Those pics don't look airbrushed. And it is mentioned being a vertical silo type.

Can you make a makeshift gunboat by slapping a tank on a landing craft and having the tank do all the firing?

I guess? It'd be pretty shit though.

That really doesn't prove they aren't forgeries, even in Best Korea, or that they're an actual, working SLBM. It could still be an ejection test or performed from a static test rig rather than an actual submarine if it's real.