Beijing’s submarine fleet is not as big or powerful as US
military planners once feared. Have its blue-water ambitions
been overstated? It was the US Navy’s biggest jolt in years. On
October 26, 2006, a Chinese Song-class attack submarine quietly
surfaced within nine miles of the aircraft carrier USS Kitty
Hawk as the 80,000-ton-diplacement vessel sailed on a training
exercise in the East China Sea between Japan and Taiwan. The
Song-class vessel, displacing 2,200 tons, was close enough to
hit the Kitty Hawk with one of its 18 homing torpedoes. None of
the carrier’s roughly dozen escorting warships detected the Song
until it breached the surface. The Song’s provocative appearance
was, for the Americans, ‘as big a shock as the Russians
launching Sputnik,’ one NATO official told Britain’s Daily Mail
newspaper, referring to the Soviet Union’s launch of the first-
ever space satellite in 1957. ‘This could well have escalated
into something that was very unforeseen,’ said Adm. Bill Fallon,
then commander of US Pacif