the Southeast Asian arms race

Everyone’s buying submarines:

Malaysia is spending more than US $990 million on two high-quality diesel-powered submarines, while Vietnam—which still cannot supply electricity to all its citizens—is committing more than $2 billion on Russian-made fighter planes and six submarines. 

Meanwhile, according to Russian media reports, impoverished Burma has spent $600 million on 20 Russian MiG-29 fighter planes. Thailand is so strapped for cash that it aims to buy a cheap secondhand submarine first so that it can join the new submariners club, but ultimately Bangkok also plans to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on several subsea vessels. 

In other words, they’re all buying the capacity to interdict seaborne trade routes to China, Japan, Australia and each other, or at least signaling that they can. And that applies to everything coming the other way: Malaysian submariners are a dagger pointed at the heart of Santa as he shifts his load in containers between Dongguan and Felixstowe. I don’t know what the planes are for, though China’s efforts in this area apparently haven’t been too successful. 

 “It looks like the Burmese did their homework. They might be closer to Beijing than to Moscow, but they still want value for their money,” said a military analyst at a Western embassy in Bangkok, noting that the flying life of a Chinese plane is less than half that of a MiG. 

Assuming this is true, you can understand the reasoning. These things are basically bought to rust in a shed, so why not do them on the cheap?

Comments

[Keir]

Sadly, given it is Malaysia, the submarines will be half-inched within weeks of arrival.

(cf. RMAF engines.)