Landlocked Navies, Part 5: Laos

Note: I’m away on vacation biking around Japan’s northernmost island of Hokkaido with family. The posts in this series are autoposted. Hope you enjoy.

In the final post of this series (which I believe now covers ever landlocked nation with a navy), I will focus on the only landlocked (although very wet) nation of Southeast Asia, Laos.

The monarchy that ruled Laos from independence from France had a small Royal Navy that patrolled the rivers and lakes of the Southeast Asian nation, which nominally aided the United States during the Vietnam War. When the Red Pathet Lao took over the country with the backing of North Vietnam in 1975, the Lao People’s Navy was established from the remnants of the Royal Lao Navy.

During royal rule, the Royal Lao Navy patrolled the rivers of the Mekong with approximately a few river patrol boats donated by the United States. After the Communist takeover, Vietnamese advisers helped reorganize the navy and trained Laotian cadre in operations and maintenance. As further evidence of Laos’s geopolitical flip-flop in the grand scheme of things, all boats received after 1975 were of Soviet manufacture, and also included not just river patrol boats but also amphibious landing craft.

The navy as of the mid-1990s had a personnel strength of around 500 and a grand total of almost fifty river patrol boats.