Old Blogger

Good Bye

14 December 2014

Same Location, Different Time

The Orchard Road Presbyterian Church

The same church view from another direction

I have stopped going to Orchard road since when the building featured
on the right was still leased to the Singapore Institute of Architects !

Same location but different time !
Gosh, just realized the Specialist Shopping Centre has been demolished ! (notice the Pavilion cinema on the right in the top photo? The Pavilion gave way to the specialist shopping centre and the latter gave way to a spanking brand new building in its place [Link]  )
I still have vivid memories of exiting from Somerset MRT station,
crossing the traffic junction just diagonally in front of it to get to centrepoint.
It seems like only yesterday ...

Have not been getting around for more than a decade ! Partly due to family and also things and places and people just don't feel familiar anymore ...

[Link] here

01 December 2014

Hobby : Navy 2040 (Air - Sea Defence)

Air - Sea Defence ( Light Aircraft Carriers - Mobile Airbase) Version 3.0

Air - Sea Defence : A Sustainable Force

Relinquishment of the Paya Lebar Airbase by 2030 reduces our fighter airbases to only two and having no strategic depth, given the reality of land mass constraint. An alternative is to envision our seas (EEZ and SLOC) as forward defensive extension inhabiting our maneuver elements from the armed forces. Bringing our defenses forward by equipping a force structure that enables a tactical maneuver doctrine from our combined arms of Air, Sea and Land services. By way of strategic defences utilizing the sea as forward extension of land. 

Unmanned / Autonomous Systems augment the reduced quantity of manned assets by way of sensor fusion and big data real time monitoring 24/7.

With the closing of the PLAB, the overall manpower head count is transferred in stages to the future mobile airbases in the form of two Light Aircraft Carrier. With a ramping up in recruitment of Navy personnel and re-training of Air Force personnel to orientate them towards naval aviation, the increase in recruitment of naval personnel with a corresponding decrease in NS full-time and reserves man power, decommissioning of units such as the soldier intensive airfield defence squadron and airfield maintenance squadron, etc. from the Air Force, net manpower numbers remain constant and sustainable.

During normal peace time, only one light aircraft carrier is operating with the Sea-Air Defence Task Force (ASDTF)

ASDTF Combat assets on rotation

The other light aircraft carrier is either in maintenance dock or operating/training in near seas well within our land base air cover. Only when there is imminent flash point will the two light aircraft carriers embark on mission(s).

The Air Sea Defence picture is not complete without including the air assets from the Air Force.

Total Air Defensive Shield

Version 3.0 [Link]
Version 2.0 [Link]
Version 1.0 [Link]

07 October 2014    

The Hong Kong we love Is Lost ( 完 了 )

HK : When to run and save your lives [Link]

It is sad, but i agree with this blogger ...

Caught between a rock and a hard place {my caption}

I saw this off my phone yesterday but it wasn't the first of many reminders that Beijing will be absolutely uncompromising. Beijing will pay any price for Hong Kong to behave because if HK doesn't China's leaders fear the whole nation would become unstable. Never mind that this will set back to square one all effort invested in wooing Taiwan to return. To Beijing that is only a question of when, the how isn't important. Beijing assumes in good time China will be irresistible. They seems intoxicated by this fallacy.

So what's the point for pointing out the obvious. The reason is the safety of the students.

Beijing will not hesitate to repeat the 1989 incident if it proves necessary. The question is how and when it might happen. I think the moment they sack CY Leung {or he resign}, those who cherish their lives should quickly run home. You have made your point, there is no point getting shot by the para military police. HK police will not fire on Hong Kong students {香港人不杀香港人} but the Chinese troops will not hesitate. {emphasis mine}

Beijing doesn't even bother to try very hard to resolve the stand off. It's laziness is appalling. Therefore you can conclude that Xi Jinping may even be able to make political capital out of his opponents in a crack down on Hong Kong.

At the very least, CY Leung should have enough tactical sense to start writing letters to the parents of these students to persuade them to bring their kids home.

The trouble with Hong Kong leaders is they are not leaders but mere managers. To Hongkongers they could never step up to the plate and lead, neither could they impress Beijing.

As for the tycoons they will not try to do their part to save the place. They are only interested in safeguarding their wealth. Some of this wealth would be lost to the mainlanders. KS Li was a canary in the coal mine for those who were watching and understanding the oracles.

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I will miss the Hong Kong that we are so familiar with ... 

But the spirit of Hong Kongers must live on !

Good Bye HK.

Hong Kong You Are Not Alone

 

01 Red October 2014 !

Poland - The poison shrimp !

Poland needs nuclear arms to ward off Russia : Walesa [Link]

Polish anti-communist icon Lech Walesa said Poland should procure nuclear weapons as a safeguard against Russia, which it blames for stoking the crisis in neighboring Ukraine.

“Poland needs to stand up to Russia,” the Nobel Peace laureate, who spearheaded Poland’s democracy movement and became its first post-communist president, said in an interview published Wednesday.

EU and NATO member Poland has been rattled by Russia’s actions in Ukraine, including its March annexation of the Crimean peninsula and suspected backing of rebels in the east.

Russian President Vladimir “Putin has been trying to intimidate us with his nuclear weapons, so why shouldn’t we have our own arsenal?” Walesa told the Rzeczpospolita daily.

“We should borrow, lease nuclear weapons and show Putin that if a Russian soldier poses one foot on our land uninvited, we will attack. Just to be clear,” the 70-year-old said.

Several countries including Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Turkey currently host shared nuclear weapons on their territory under NATO.

But there is no tradition at the moment of borrowing or leasing the weapons.

Poland should speak up and say: “Mister Putin, we won’t let you make one step forward. Try it and you’ll perish, and so will we,” added Walesa, who as leader of the Solidarity trade union negotiated a peaceful end to Communism at home in 1989.

It is under his presidency in 1993 that the last Soviet troops left Poland. Six years later the country joined the NATO defence alliance.

On Wednesday, Poland began major military exercises involving 12,500 troops, including 750 from other NATO countries, which will continue through October 3.

Poland stages the Anakonda manoeuvres every two years but this time they “take on a special significance given the events in Ukraine,” Defence Minister Tomasz Siemoniak said at the opening ceremony.

“It is important for NATO to show that we stick together,” added Torben Moller, a brigadier general from the alliance’s command centre at Brunssum in the Netherlands.

01 Red October 2014 !

Taiwan can be defended

Taiwan, Asia's Secret Air Power [Link]

When current and former world leaders, including Bill Clinton, visit Taiwan, they often stay at the Grand Hotel Taipei, an opulent Chinese architectural landmark perched atop Yuan Mountain. With spectacular views of the downtown riverfront and a palm-lined swimming pool surrounded by lush green jungle, guests at the Grand Hotel could be forgiven for thinking they had arrived at one of the most peaceful spots in East Asia.

Grand Hotel, Taipei*

In fact, just under their feet lies a vast underground command center from which Taiwan’s top leadership would direct their nation’s armed forces in the event of a war with China. This facility, like many around the high-tech island, shows that when it comes to the defense of Taiwan, there is much more than meets the eye.

Known officially as the Tri-Service Hengshan Military Command Center, the sprawling tunnel facility stretches through the mountain in a line that starts near the Grand Hotel and goes down to the giant Ferris wheel in Dazhi. Built to defend against China’s growing fleet of ballistic missiles, this hardened nerve center is designed to allow Taiwan’s government (and thousands of military personnel) to live and work for months, riding out air raids above while organizing the defense of Taiwan from below.

Linked to a large network of subterranean command posts and military bases around Taiwan and its outer islands – as well as the U.S. Pacific Command in Hawaii – the Hengshan Military Command Center is the ultimate redoubt for Taiwan’s president. It is so important, in fact, that China’s strategic rocket force, the Second Artillery, has actually simulated missile attacks on the bridges that connect it to the Presidential Office.

Assuming the PLA are civilized combatants :
They will "take out" the bridge during wee hours
to reduce collateral civilian casualties ?*

On the other side of the city, buried inside a wet rocky outcropping near the campus of National Taiwan University, lies another tunnel complex, the Air Operations Center. Known affectionately as “Toad Mountain” by Taiwanese air force officers, this facility oversees one of the most robust air and missile defense networks on the planet. Fed vast quantities of information by airborne early-warning aircraft, long-range radars, listening posts, unmanned aerial vehicles and satellites, Toad Mountain stands constant watch over all of Taiwan’s airspace, ready to scramble fighters or assign surface-to-air missiles to intercept intruders. And, like every other Taiwanese military facility, it has multiple back-ups. Just in case.

One of those back-ups is located on Taiwan’s east coast inside Chiashan or “Optimal Mountain,” not far from the mouth of a gorge cut through pure white marble. Unlike the gorge, however, no tourists are allowed inside this billion dollar bunker complex. According to first-person accounts, the base is an entire military city built inside a hollowed-out mountain. Not only does it have space inside for parking, arming, and repairing over two hundred fighter aircraft, it also has its own hospital and multiple gas stations serving jet fuel. With ten blast doors that exit out to multiple runways via a long taxiway that can itself be used as an emergency runway, it may be toughest airbase ever built.

Ninety miles down the coastline, Taiwan’s air force is further bolstered by the Shihzishan or “Stone Mountain” complex at Chihhang Air Base. Though somewhat smaller than Chiashan, its labyrinthine tunnels can still shelter some eighty aircraft. Both of these facilities benefit from their strategic locations on the far side of the highest mountain range in East Asia. Missiles fired from the Chinese mainland can’t reach them – they would smash into the side of mountains before they got there.

Underground Air Base to surface runway

For this reason Taiwan regularly practices dispersing its fighter jets from vulnerable west coast bases to airfields on the east coast. Units are also moved between bases to make it difficult to predict where they might be at any given time, and dummy aircraft are parked on tarmacs and inside shelters to confuse enemy intelligence.

To further mitigate the threat of a knock-out Chinese missile strike on its airfields, Taiwan’s air force maintains five emergency highway strips where it can land, refuel, rearm, and launch fighters in the event that nearby runways are cratered. In addition, each Taiwanese airbase has large engineering units attached to it with ample stocks of equipment for rapidly repairing runways. Clocking in at four hours, Israel’s Self Defense Force used to have the world speed record in the runway repair game. No longer. Earlier this year a team of Taiwanese sappers beat that record by an hour.

Facing an existential threat from China and its much larger military, these are just a few of many examples of how Taiwan’s military is using quality to offset its quantitative shortcomings. Whether or not Taiwan can pull it off could hardly be more important for the United States and the future of the Asia-Pacific region.

Indeed, if the contest of the century is to be waged between the U.S. and China for primacy in the Pacific, Taiwan will be the center of the action. Look at any map and it should quickly become apparent why. Taiwan sits at the crossroads between the East and South China Seas, within torpedo range of the world’s most heavily trafficked sea lanes. Not only critical for bottling the Chinese navy up inside the first island chain–and thereby protecting Japan and the Philippines from the threat of naval blockade–Taiwan also plays a leading role in the air.

Fun Taiwan - 50 times bigger than the pi sai country !*

With China fielding ballistic missiles for targeting U.S. aircraft carrier groups in the Western Pacific and Andersen Air Force Base on Guam, Taiwan’s defenses matter more now than ever. Chinese missiles would have to go through Taiwan’s airspace on the way to their targets. With the right combination of high-powered ballistic missile defense radars and interceptors, Taiwan can serve as a shield to protect deployed American forces during a contingency.

This potential was inadvertently revealed in late 2012 when North Korea launched a long-range rocket into the Philippine Sea. At the time, Taiwan’s new ultra high frequency (UHF) radar system was able to track the missile and provide the U.S. and Japanese warships with 120 seconds of extra warning time, an eternity in the short life of a hypersonic missile flight.

TW Phased Array radar installation on Mount LeShan.
NB: Need to build ever more complex UHF wave-forms  in fast variable random switching mode
in order to overcome PLA EW measures ... This will be enough to buy you precious 2 to 3 minutes before this $800 million dollar installation is taken out by ballistic missile swam attack.
Suggest real-time integration with allies radar network to pick up the trail by extrapolating echo for defense and counter-strike.*

For this reason and many others, China’s Communist Party leadership in Beijing continues to see Taiwan as its most worrisome external political and diplomatic problem. Viewed by Beijing as the Chinese world’s first liberal democracy, Taiwan’s remarkable political success story casts China’s oppressive system in an unfavorable comparative light.

To combat what it thinks is a grave political threat, Beijing’s strategy has been to employ a combination of coercive and cooperative measures to isolate (and eventually subjugate) Taiwan. The most prominent aspect of China’s strategy is its missile build-up, which aims to intimidate the voters in Taiwan and policymakers in the United States.

Yet without the ability to dominate the air domain, any Chinese attempt to blockade or invade Taiwan would be disastrous. This may explain why China’s amphibious fleet has not grown by a single ship since 2007. It makes little sense for any navy to spend limited resources on ships that could be sunk at the outset of war.

However, the air and missile threat to Taiwan, and by extension the United States, is very real and growing fast. China’s Second Artillery Force has developed and tested a ballistic missile warhead for targeting airfield runways with penetrating cluster munitions. At the same time, China has been able to convince two successive U.S. administrations (and three French Presidents) to freeze the sale of new fighter jets to Taiwan, leading to a widening “fighter gap” in the Taiwan Strait.

Without new F-16 or Mirage-2000 fighters, Taiwan knows that it may soon find itself overwhelmed in the air even though its pilots are far better trained than their mainland adversaries. In an air war quality may be the most important factor, but quantity matters a lot too. Fortunately, Taiwan’s government appears to be making serious progress on developing its own indigenous means of undercutting China’s growing missile and air forces. While Taiwan will be hard pressed to ensure that it always has cross-strait air superiority, it can easily deny the same to China. By developing and fielding a number of world-class capabilities to survive missile strikes and keep enemy aircraft from freely operating in its airspace, Taiwan may have broken the code on deterring Chinese aggression.

by Ian Easton

*  not by the author
and heading down south into the South China Sea ...

Defending the Natuna - Indonesia's "Guard Post" in the South China Sea !

The tiny Riau Islands - 10 times the size of the little red dot [Link]

28 September 2014

Twenty-First Century Sportsmanship

Asian Games [Link]

Yahoo News : China Swim King Sun bashes Japan's "ugly' anthem

Chinese Swimmer Sun

Japanese rival Kosuke Hagino, who ruffled Sun’s feathers with a shock 200m victory last weekend, gave a measured response when asked for his thoughts.

“I didn’t hear what he said so it’s hard to comment,” he said. “But first and foremost we’re all athletes and we have to respect each other. We also have to show human values so hopefully we can continue to compete in that atmosphere.”

Sun is no stranger to controversy, getting himself suspended from swimming for six months after police detained him last year for colliding with a bus while driving his Porsche without a license.

China’s swimming bad boy previously had a public bust-up with his coach after he voiced disapproval of the swimmer’s dalliance with an air hostess.

Troubles brewing ahead ... somebody gonna kiss the donkey ...

26 September 2014