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Comment by duxup | Hacker News Reader

Interesting story although:

> Pepsi a fleet of 17 obsolete Soviet Navy diesel attack submarines along with a decommissioned cruiser, destroyer and frigate, as well as a number of new civilian oil tankers. At a stroke, PepsiCo had become the sixth most powerful navy in the world.

Not sure a bunch of questionable quality / condition ships and some oil tankers would really be the "sixth most powerful."

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There aren’t that many powerful navies these days. It’s not like the age of dreadnoughts when countries like Japan and Argentina were getting into naval arms races.

Japan is a strange example? They're a big island; you'd kind of expect them to focus on their navy.

Much like England was a naval power and not a land power.

Japan has a very decent Navy, including two aircraft carriers, Kaga and Izumo.

[1]https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/japan-doesn’t-know-wh...

What are the more powerful ones? US, UK, France, Korea?, who else? Japan's SDF was still pretty neutered at the time, China didn't have a navy to speak of, I'm not sure how many other countries would have beaten them at the time. Maybe Egypt?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_Navy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Navy#Equipment

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_active_Spanish_Navy_sh...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_active_Portuguese_Navy...

"Were" implies "back then". Marine equipment 1989 was likely more plentiful, but less capable, to offset likely losses in the always-imminent WW3.

Here's what I got searching country names searching the pennant list from "Janes Fighting Ships 1988-89". It's limited to "major surface ships", and notably doesn't include the USSR due to their policy of regularly changing pennant numbers. I think it's OK for ballpark purposes.

1. USA 425

2. UK 95

3. Japan 81

4. France 65

5. Taiwan 60

6. China 52

7. Indonesia 36

8. India 35

9. Italy 34

10. Germany, Federal 30

https://www.dropbox.com/s/a74zpbb556lv4mn/ships.pdf?dl=0

Interesting. I wonder what qualifies as a "major surface ship"? Presumably not 50 foot coast guard cutters?

My guess is that they only compare the fleets in number of attack submarines.

I mean, that's what really counts in our hearts, right? :D

That's an imperfect metric, but at the time it was a good measure of the destruction potential you had against other navies. 17 attack submarines, even "obsolete" (which probably just means that the US navy and maybe one or two others could counter them) was an impressive force at the time.

Did they change the quote? Largest makes much more sense.

>making PepsiCo temporarily the sixth-largest Navy in the world.

"powerful" is still part of the quote. It's from near the end of the text rather than from first paragraph.

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