Out to Launch

In 1988, in the Mykolaiv Shipyard in southern Ukraine (then part of the Soviet Union), a keel was laid for a 1,000 foot medium aircraft carrier, the Varyag. It was to be an Admiral Kuznetsov-class boat with a 65,000 ton displacement, an upward sloping deck for short-takeoffs, and would have carried fewer than a dozen helicopters and/or a small contingent of vertical take-off jets. $100 million later, the USSR fell apart, and in 1991, the new nation of Ukraine inherited a very incomplete boat, lacking an engine, electronics, etc. They had little need for a ship of this kind. In the military community, it was widely known that the naval skeleton was for sale.

I remember joking to the wildly successful King Brothers, television syndicators who are famous for programs like Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune and were equally well know for throwing lavish parties at the annual National Association of Television Programming Executives conference (often held in port cities), that they should buy and complete the carrier. I argued that while many production companies and studios could invite the jet set to their big event, if they owned that boat, they could one-up them all by having those rich players “land on your boat”!

While the Varyag was a nice add to any navy, it was hardly representative of the much larger, American Nimitz class (and so many preceding generations of American carriers), which displace around 100,000 tons and with a long flight deck can launch around 70 longer range aircraft. And Ukraine decided to put the carrier up for bids rather than scrap the effort entirely. One Macau-based Chinese entrepreneur offered to buy the ship, tow it out of the Black Sea, through the Mediterranean and all the way around to China, where he would retrofit the boat into a magnificent Vegas-style casino. Hey, King Brothers!

The entrepreneur, who suspiciously had spent ten years as an officer of the Peoples Liberation Army (China’s army), “insisted he had only tourism in mind. According to the South China Morning Post, he denied that he was planning to hand the ship over to China’s military. He told the Post in November 1998 that his company would spend $200 million to remake the Varyag into a water-borne resort “with 600 hotel rooms, a conference center and various attractions, including a nightclub and ‘children’s military playground.’” Through his travel agency, he bought the boat. BusinessWeek.com, January 25^th. The U.S. tried to get Turkey to block passage through the Bosporus but Turkey relented, and in 2001, the Varyag sailed into the Mediterranean, where a storm almost capsized the vessel. In 2002, the Varyag arrived… not in Macau as expected… but in the northern ship-building PRC city of in Dalian.

With a rather large but mostly older navy of about 500 vessels, the Peoples Republic of China had always suffered from “carrier envy.” The Varyag was a natural, and the PRC couldn’t resist. The cost and technology inherent in carriers, and the exceptionally long time-line to develop and build them, had always pushed China to buy older boats that no one seemed to want anymore, hoping to refurbish them into functioning carriers, a symbol of national military prestige to the PRC: “The ex-Soviet ship was not the first used carrier China had purchased. In 1982 Beijing bought the smallish (15,000-ton) Majestic-class carrier Melbourne from Australia; it was dismantled for study and then scrapped. In 1998, the Russians sold China the much larger carrier Minsk, and, two years later, one called the Kiev. After undergoing similar scrutiny by Chinese ship designers, the Minsk and Kiev were turned into floating amusement parks…

“In April 2011, Xinhua [News Agency] heralded the slope-decked vessel’s imminent debut, posting photographs on an official website. ‘Huge warship on the verge of setting out,’ the state news agency declared, ‘fulfilling China’s 70-year aircraft carrier dreams.’ Beijing rechristened the ship the Shi Lang, after a 17th century Chinese admiral who served the Ming and Qing dynasties. The symbolism could not have been lost on historically minded government officials in Taipei. In 1683, Admiral Shi led a force of 300 ships in the amphibious conquest of Taiwan.” BusinessWeek. She’s ready now (see above).

With PRC claims over Taiwan and the Spratly Islands, and as China launched this almost symbolic carrier, the U.S. announced its own containment efforts for Southeast Asia: “Despite impending budget cuts, the U.S. has signaled its intent to reinforce its presence in the Asia-Pacific, where there is some trepidation over China’s rising military capabilities. In recent months it has announced plans to station troops in Australia and dock Navy ships in Singapore. That has fueled speculation the U.S. could seek to re-establish the permanent military presence it had in the Philippines until the early 1990s…

“State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said the U.S. is interested in increasing training and cooperation in areas including search and rescue, freedom of navigation, countering terror and countering piracy… ‘The idea that we are looking to establish U.S. bases or permanently station U.S. forces in the Philippines, or anywhere else in Southeast Asia, as part of a China containment strategy is patently false,’ said Cmdr. Leslie Hull-Ryde, a Defense Department spokeswoman… The Philippines has turned to Washington for military hardware after accusing Chinese ships last year of repeatedly intruding into areas it claims in the South China Sea’s disputed Spratly Islands and disrupting oil exploration in its territorial waters.” ABCnew.go.com, January 27^th. Hmmm…. No base… yet.

I’m Peter Dekom, and this historical moment appears to be “déjà vu” all over again.