> 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."
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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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."