we don't need no stinkin' maps

 one of the absurdities in the Clinton administration was when the US bombed the Chinese embassy in Serbia because their map was out of date.

Nowadays we read a lot of stuff about people getting lost because their google maps are inaccurate, and the availability of up to date maps was one reason I used to belong to AAA in the good old days.

But now StrategyPage has a nice article about China mapping the West Philippine sea. 

Well, they have been out there for awhile mainly looking for where they can dig up the seabed for their artificial islands and trying to find the huge natural gas deposits there. (as long as the 1970s, I was assured that the VietNam war was about these natural gas deposits, and our lovely president awhile back essentially tried to cooperate with China to find them, i.e. giving them rights to the natural gas etc until our intrepid press caught her at it).

So now SP discusses how China is mapping those areas, presumably in preparation for getting the fossil fuel deposits, or maybe just mapping the area so they can figure out where it is safe to sail and if they could blockade the sea routes.

But then I ran across this: about when a US submarine hit a sea mount in that area in 2006. A lot of sailors were hurt from the bump, but luckily nothing imploded so only one died.

Several sailors were punished for not watching out where they were going and not checking the depth of the sea nearby.

Why do I bring this up, and what does this have to do with Serbia? This part:

the sea mount the sub hit had been spotted by survey satellites in 1999 and 2004, but the intelligence agency responsible, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, said it didn't have the money to update naval charts. Neither did the navy, or anyone else. Because of this American submarines were allowed to continue moving around amidst all manner of uncharted hazards.

so the article goes into what they are doing to update the problem including mapping that updates itself all the time.

But then:

The second American SSN underwater seamount collision occurred in October 2021 to the very advanced and expensive Seawolf class SSN Connecticut. The damage was so severe that the sub had to surface immediately, and some ballast tanks were damaged so the sub could not remain underwater.

 there are a lot of rumors out there about training problems in the USNavy, and I'd love to ask my grandson about it but he is no longer at sea (he served on an aircraft carrier but now is doing paperwork).

But when little things go wrong, it suggests a bigger problem needs to be done.

Sigh.

and to make things worse: If two US Submarines hit these shoals, one wonders how many maritime accidents have occurred in the Chinese submarines or ships in the area.