From the article:
> “As these facilities could be rendered useless by precision strikes in the opening hours of a conflict, the PLA missile threat challenges America’s ability to freely operate its forces from forward locations throughout the region,”
Nuclear weapons probably don't fall under precision strikes.
Then the article is likely talking about anti-ship missiles (AShMs). Every "real" country can overwhelm a naval battle group of any other "real" country with guided missiles. A lot of these missiles can be fired from the shore.
AShMs defenses are very questionable when it comes to supersonic/hypersonic AShMs.
It holds and China only has 300 nukes, which isn't even close to the US and Russian numbers, which both have more experience handling them. Bait-y headline.
I once did the exercise of finding a list of US cities ranked by size. By the time I got down to number 300, it was some small, insignificant place that only had a population of about three thousand.
That 'military objectives only" thing was tried in WW2, but found wanting. In bombing against both Germany and Japan, it was found that destroying civilians' homes was far more effective.
Read up on Curtis Le May's methods in Germany, Japan, and then later in North Korea. He was a great proponent of fire-bombing large areas in the centre of cities.
You and I both know the goal of that was to get Hirohito to surrender and that Japan lost most of it strike capability. If strike capability is present, it's a priority.
Exactly. Nobody knows what the threshold for opening a can of nuclear whopass is. Who's willing to bet a billion lives on it being in a particular spot?
The US and China have far too much common economic interest to go to war short of China doing something so absurdly aggressive that you can't not go to war (e.g. invading Japan) I don't see that happening.
Or maybe miscalculating (I mean here thinking the U.S. isn't willing to go to war but turns out they are) and invading Taiwan. I'm honestly not sure how the U.S. and allies would respond. In my opinion, with the current Chinese administration there's no reason to think they won't continue to act in ways that the West views as aggressive, the question is whether or not we can avoid a war of a misstep. Certainly any military action against Japan (or the Republic of Korea) would guarantee a U.S. military response, but what about other countries? If you're China, it seems like the goal here would be to have Chinese citizens immigrate to countries like Australia and subvert their resolve through their own democracy. We see some of those actions taking place on college campuses in Canada, for example. It's certainly interesting to chat about.
The US is legally obligated to protect Taiwan. Also the US would have to fight even without that because not doing so would be the end of US power in the world. We could NOT afford NOT to fight.
Legal obligations are worth the paper they're written on, when it comes to war between two major world powers. Any decision to retaliate would end up being based on what's best geopolitically for the USA.
Giving up Taiwan, of course, would announce to the world that allies of the US should look for other world power sponsors, because our support is paper thin.
That kind of choice is very costly, and it would take a very unique type of President willing to piss away a century of alliance building.
>The US and China have far too much common economic interest to go to war short of China doing something so absurdly aggressive that you can't not go to war (e.g. invading Japan) I don't see that happening.
Have you forgotten about the incompetent fool that the US elected to be in control of the nuclear arsenal?
No probably about it. Pre-WW1 was the first era of globalisation, of the oil barons, including the USA and pre-revolutionary China. Quite a few famous names believed there too much economic and trade interdependence to permit another war. Yet once one country started mobilisation war tipped from impossible to inevitable as the web of treaties kicked in.
Both points of view existed back in 1910, that war was unthinkable and that war was quite likely. A reflection of today's acceptance of both viewpoints.
Yeah, as soon as shit hits the fan you can be sure there will be nuclear warheads aimed at any major known military bases, ports and electricity plants of the country.
There would be no winner in a total war between nuclear super powers.
Sure China could probably destroy US bases in Asia easily, but what then ?
Mutually assured destruction only prevents war if both parties think the other will take the “tie” of “we both lose, and terribly so” in favor of “I’ll rattle my sabres a bit to show that I mean it, but grudgingly accept a status quo, certainly if you give back a bit of what you took to let me save some face”.
The big question is whether that is still the case if the area fought over isn’t US soil.
Russia in the Ukraine already might be an indication that the answer isn’t an unqualified “yes” anymore. The USA leaving the INF treaty, thus allowing Russia to develop mid-range nuclear missiles, and even threatening to leave NATO are much stronger signals.
One might conclude that the USA isn’t as willing to go to nuclear war for invasions of its partners as it used to be.
No, China has a no first use policy on nuclear weapons and their relatively modest nuclear arsenal matches their rhetoric. China might be willing to risk war over Taiwan or something similar but that isn't the sort of existential stakes you start a nuclear exchange over.
A decade of “delayed and unpredictable funding” for the U.S. military’s budget has seen America lose its primacy in the Western Pacific, giving the edge to an increasingly sophisticated China, a Sydney-based think tank warned.
So you're saying there's a 'Gap' in missile technology between the US and China? A 'Missile Gap', perhaps?
Perhaps we should have a good old-fashioned arms-race to sort it all out?
How? Wall Street has control of the US defense Industry and Chinese investors are a big part of that. The last time we had a healthy defense industry was the mid nineties before the last supper destroyed all the small to medium size defense contractors by forcing them to merge in mega corporations like Raytheon and L3.
> The last time we had a healthy defense industry was the mid nineties before the last supper destroyed all the small to medium size defense contractors
The much feared cold-war era 'Missile Gap' turned out to be mostly a myth[1], based off of extrapolation form incomplete data and considering worst case over best.
That's not to disrespect the opponent; both historical USSR and present day China pack quite a punch. It warrants careful approach rather than outright panic.
This is a pointless exercise in creating the think tank equivalent of click bait. So China could wipe out America’s military presence in Asia. What then? Do we assume that somehow the rest of America’s military back home and abroad doesn’t respond? That this inevitable retaliation does not weigh into a decision to “wipe out” Asian-deployed forces? American forces deployed overseas are nothing more than “ambassadors” for its military, mere pawns on the chessboard. Imagine a newspaper headline “black queen could wipe out white pawns” and realize how ridiculous this is.
On the other hand Vietnam could be summarised as black spends 5 pawns a rook and a knight to take out 1 pawn.
It isn't necessarily a question of who would win a fight to the death, and more a question of how big a bloody nose the US would accept. My guess is China would be willing to accept a much bigger bloody nose, who reaches their limit first?
Of course theres a fine balance here. Vietnam was never an existential threat to the US, could China be/ portrayed to be? That obviously changes the calculation.
By the time reserve US forces arrive in theatre, China has troops on Taiwan. How well situated is the US to do a cross-Pacific amphibious invasion of Taiwan? How likely is the US political system to be willing to take on that project?
This is a completely different scenario from the op, but I don't think anyone projects Taiwan lasting more than a couple of hours if China decides to invade.
Their only hope is that there would be a multinational response. The US certainly wouldn't go it alone against China on their own doorstep.
Your point about the political system is valid, but if the USA was behind the invasion of Iraq, I imagine watching another great power chew up an ally would unite the country as well. Times do change, though, and I could be wrong.
>How well situated is the US to do a cross-Pacific amphibious invasion of Taiwan?
Parking an invasion+battle fleet off of Taiwan's coast would probably lead to huge US ship losses to Chinese missiles.
However, island hopping campaign is a thing. Islands make for good unsinkable carriers.
Assuming war isn't concluded permanently in a couple months[1], the real advantage is self-sufficiency in regards to raw materials (especially oil[2]) and ability to ramp up and then build out military production. High tech is secondary issue, and would be only slightly on the US' side. Probably the most important advantage would be in submarines and to extent in carriers, again as it was historically. Lastly, the presumable advantage in comms crypto protection, and codebreaking/backdooring could make or break any long term war, by repeatedly giving better starting positions before each battle or campaign; again to historical precedent.
All in all, US would do just fine, however the local allies would suffer a lot.
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[1] i.e. excluding an overwhelmingly effective ABC attack on mainland China or US
[2] both previous and current administration helped ramp it up
Snark first: weapons[1] to defeat rockets and free-falling bombs have been operational for quite a while now. Next gen (laser) is being made operational; both shipboard versions and air versions for the CAP. Next next gen (railgun) is on the horizon, but still uncertain.
Serious reply: a carrier is a highly mobile, flexible airport. Like any other major fleet element, it's a threat in being, and best used that way. Might even be best used by always being held beyond radar horizon, to keep the opposing forces spread thin and deployed overtime, preventing any transports from resupplying the enemy troops deployed to Taiwan.
A carrier is also by its nature an anchor point for a whole battle group, with flexible capabilities of long range detection, jamming, attack, and defense, including major ASW threat. It can also make a 300 mile dash at 30kn to deliver several dozen F35 to an island. An overnight miracle.
There is no known defense yet fielded against this missile.
Lasers might do it, but those aren't going to be ready for deployment for a few years yet .. none of your "rocket/free-falling bomb" defenses are relevant against this thing.
I'm definitely not a military analyst, but I haven't seen anything indicating that the Chinese are capable of employing the DF-26 as you describe. If anything, it is a deterrent against nuclear first strike which is how it's currently deployed.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/10/asia/china-missiles-south-chi...
'According to a report from the Missile Defense Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, China may have an anti-ship version of the DF-26 under development -- and may have even tested it in 2017.
However military analyst Carl Schuster, a former director of operations at the US Pacific Command's Joint Intelligence Center, cast doubt on whether the DF-26 was workable as an anti-ship weapon. Using one effectively would require practicing procedures and tactics that China had not yet shown, he said.
"Remember, the Soviet Union never successfully developed an ASBM (anti-ship ballistic missile) and no country in the West has one," Schuster said.'
First, this is false: "Remember, the Soviet Union never successfully developed an ASBM (anti-ship ballistic missile) and no country in the West has one" and is clearly fog of war propaganda.
Second, DF26 is all over the South China Sea. You think they'd be deploying them if they didn't have confidence in their efficacy?
ROC has 300K active and 3.9M reserve forces according to Wikipedia. Moreover, the Taiwanese people like the US much more than the Chinese. China putting troops in Taiwan would be very hard to accomplish before the US could retaliate. Even if they succeeded, hold the island would be difficult when faced with internal sabotage and a US threat to reclaim the island.
One of the first political acts of the US would undoubtedly be to officially recognize the state of Taiwan. Given how much of the world relies on Taiwan's manufacturing output, other countries would be close behind and China would be looking at a joint liberation force rather than China vs the US.
> So China could wipe out America’s military presence in Asia. What then? Do we assume that somehow the rest of America’s military back home and abroad doesn’t respond?
Yes, consider the following scenario, Using some political pretence, China invade Taiwan in a blitzkrieg which is over in a few days. All US communications and GPS are wiped out before the attack begins. Total chaos. Allies are blind. Any US forces in the vicinity trying to prevent the attack are obliterated. Next days China issue the following decree, Taiwan has joined the motherland and all regrettable attacks on US forces have stopped and a ceasefire is in effect. Any attack on China and Taiwan will be meet with nuclear forces. What will US and Nato do? What did they do when Russia elbowed itself into the Syrian conflict? That's right, nothing.
The point is, any serious attack done by China will be over before US an allies can stop it or reply properly, unless there is a believable rapid response force on location.
So, in your hypothetical, China is making a _massive_ bluff because they know the US would wipe them out as well as soon as the first nuke launched, not to mention the loss of nearly all their largest trading partners. Seems unlikely.
This is no less naive than the Japanese plan to make America concede the Pacific by killing two and and a half thousand Americans. The Chinese are not stupid enough to think that would work, rather than having the opposite effect of enraging Americans.
Huge difference is this implies a Chinese attack on US forces, you think they could allow that to go unchallenged?
Russia didn't attack US forces in Syria or the rest of the middle east, so the US could ignore it. It might work if there was no attack on US military, but any attack, significant enough to disable the US military for a few days, would almost certainly be responded to with force.
A bunch of jerks flew planes in a building at killed ~3k people and look how we reacted? The blood of Americans as you described would result in the same reaction as WW2, full stop. It is the way we wired.
As an aside, the PLA trying to capture Taiwan will be a huge bloody mess. Any attack plan would be known as the build up would be seen by everyone. The Taiwan military is not a push over and has dug hole in every mountain. This is a pretty realistic view here - https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/09/25/taiwan-can-win-a-war-wi...
All of that being said, we should all work to find a solution that does not involved killing lots of people. China is still trying to find its place in the world and has a bit of a chip on its shoulder about how it was treated in the past. I have to believe there is a path in which we are all better off.
looks like the principal US export (military-industrial complex + all that entails - in this case, think tanks justifying insane defense projects/spending) is getting some play down under
Then what? The US builds a coalition of regional and international powers, boxes China in and destroys them economically. China needs the world to trade with, otherwise the CCP house of cards collapses.
It's complicated. Any war between the US and China will likely be over disputed territories in the South China Sea, the reunification of Taiwan, maybe taking South Korea. The US can't invade the Chinese mainland, and China can't project power to the US mainland. The only way such a way ends is when both sides come to the negotiating table, where victory or defeat will be determined by political factors. The US wins by blocking shipping. China wins by destroying ships and bases. The political fallout from losing a carrier would probably be enough to bring the US to the table.
The official death toll of Pearl Harbor was 2,403. A Nimitz class US Navy Aircraft carrier houses ~6,000 sailors and airmen. If a carrier was sunk in a first strike, I'd expect a similar response to what the US responded to Pearl Harbor with. The US still has a first strike nuclear weapons doctrine. China does not. This would be bad for everyone so I do NOT want this, but am just pointing out the reality of how it would escalate.
Disclaimer: I'm spit balling as a US Army Veteran here.
That seems a sort of absurd scenario / click bait type story where any given conflict would be far more complex / nuanced.
Was there an assumption that US forces stationed there right now alone could somehow fight a battle and win vs the volume of China's forces in Asia? Seems unlikely.
I recall a US general testifying and noting that if N. Korea chose to cross the DMZ, just based on their sheer volume of men and material would take a great deal of territory in a short period of time. It was not a surprise, it's a known thing.
Even during the cold war I belive most plans expected that if the soviet union chose to move into the rest of Europe, they could do so to some extent.
What happens after that is what would really matter.
The report they are citing (https://www.ussc.edu.au/analysis/averting-crisis-american-st... if you didn't see the link) is much more interesting. Though it doesn't seem to cite a source or give evidence for the claim that the missiles could overwhelm US forces within hours, and there doesn't seem to be any elaboration about that figure. Honestly I don't think they are taking into account ballistic missile defense systems in place, the rate of fire the PLA can sustain, the risk of escalation (depending on the scenario, some of the countries these bases reside in could be neutral in the conflict), and the fact that the PLA will likely want to hold on to their longer-range DF-26 missiles until they get the opportunity to take down a carrier.
If I'm China, wouldn't I be concerned if the opposite were true? That my military capabilities didn't allow me the ability to at least defend my continent/sphere of influence from my greatest enemy?
It's one thing to go on the offensive to attack another country like the US at their home, but it's another to have the capabilities to defend areas of interest that are relatively close to home.
I've served over there and of the bases I've seen I doubt a single one would be "destroyed" in the total sense. There are just so many, most of them are large and spread out, and the structures are usually reinforced concrete. At the start of this soft targets would be moved anyway. Meh.
After skimming I'm not too impressed with this. It makes a lot of sweeping assumptions, some totally inaccurate, about our readiness in the area and seems to disapprove of them not being at peak war-time levels. More alarmist than anything.
I might be biased since I served in Okinawa for a few years.
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[ 0.24 ms ] story [ 137 ms ] threadFrom the article: > “As these facilities could be rendered useless by precision strikes in the opening hours of a conflict, the PLA missile threat challenges America’s ability to freely operate its forces from forward locations throughout the region,”
Nuclear weapons probably don't fall under precision strikes.
AShMs defenses are very questionable when it comes to supersonic/hypersonic AShMs.
There is the obvious problem of detecting hypersonic projectiles, but assuming that is "done", then lasers and a lot of them, will be quite effective.
300 nukes is well and truly enough.
Sure, in all out war, you will hit a few major cities, but only a small percentage of the nukes will go there.
Fair point nonetheless.
Read up on Curtis Le May's methods in Germany, Japan, and then later in North Korea. He was a great proponent of fire-bombing large areas in the centre of cities.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Tokyo
One fire-bombing raid killed as many people in Tokyo as were killed a few months later in Hiroshima's atom-bombing.
The US and China have far too much common economic interest to go to war short of China doing something so absurdly aggressive that you can't not go to war (e.g. invading Japan) I don't see that happening.
Giving up Taiwan, of course, would announce to the world that allies of the US should look for other world power sponsors, because our support is paper thin.
That kind of choice is very costly, and it would take a very unique type of President willing to piss away a century of alliance building.
Have you forgotten about the incompetent fool that the US elected to be in control of the nuclear arsenal?
That's probably what people said in, oh, 1910 about Germany, Britain, and France.
Book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Illusion
Sure China could probably destroy US bases in Asia easily, but what then ?
The big question is whether that is still the case if the area fought over isn’t US soil.
Russia in the Ukraine already might be an indication that the answer isn’t an unqualified “yes” anymore. The USA leaving the INF treaty, thus allowing Russia to develop mid-range nuclear missiles, and even threatening to leave NATO are much stronger signals.
One might conclude that the USA isn’t as willing to go to nuclear war for invasions of its partners as it used to be.
So you're saying there's a 'Gap' in missile technology between the US and China? A 'Missile Gap', perhaps? Perhaps we should have a good old-fashioned arms-race to sort it all out?
What was "the last supper"?
That's not to disrespect the opponent; both historical USSR and present day China pack quite a punch. It warrants careful approach rather than outright panic.
[1] e.g., https://www.armscontrol.org/act/2011-05/missile-gap-myth-its...
It isn't necessarily a question of who would win a fight to the death, and more a question of how big a bloody nose the US would accept. My guess is China would be willing to accept a much bigger bloody nose, who reaches their limit first?
Of course theres a fine balance here. Vietnam was never an existential threat to the US, could China be/ portrayed to be? That obviously changes the calculation.
Their only hope is that there would be a multinational response. The US certainly wouldn't go it alone against China on their own doorstep.
Your point about the political system is valid, but if the USA was behind the invasion of Iraq, I imagine watching another great power chew up an ally would unite the country as well. Times do change, though, and I could be wrong.
Parking an invasion+battle fleet off of Taiwan's coast would probably lead to huge US ship losses to Chinese missiles.
However, island hopping campaign is a thing. Islands make for good unsinkable carriers.
Assuming war isn't concluded permanently in a couple months[1], the real advantage is self-sufficiency in regards to raw materials (especially oil[2]) and ability to ramp up and then build out military production. High tech is secondary issue, and would be only slightly on the US' side. Probably the most important advantage would be in submarines and to extent in carriers, again as it was historically. Lastly, the presumable advantage in comms crypto protection, and codebreaking/backdooring could make or break any long term war, by repeatedly giving better starting positions before each battle or campaign; again to historical precedent.
All in all, US would do just fine, however the local allies would suffer a lot.
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[1] i.e. excluding an overwhelmingly effective ABC attack on mainland China or US
[2] both previous and current administration helped ramp it up
The US' carriers would be sunk in the first few minutes of open warfare.
They are useless in case of open war - and only of use as a threat of war/policing device. All-out war means the carriers get sunk, first.
Snark first: weapons[1] to defeat rockets and free-falling bombs have been operational for quite a while now. Next gen (laser) is being made operational; both shipboard versions and air versions for the CAP. Next next gen (railgun) is on the horizon, but still uncertain.
Serious reply: a carrier is a highly mobile, flexible airport. Like any other major fleet element, it's a threat in being, and best used that way. Might even be best used by always being held beyond radar horizon, to keep the opposing forces spread thin and deployed overtime, preventing any transports from resupplying the enemy troops deployed to Taiwan.
A carrier is also by its nature an anchor point for a whole battle group, with flexible capabilities of long range detection, jamming, attack, and defense, including major ASW threat. It can also make a 300 mile dash at 30kn to deliver several dozen F35 to an island. An overnight miracle.
[1] anti-rockets and CIWS
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DF-26
There is no known defense yet fielded against this missile.
Lasers might do it, but those aren't going to be ready for deployment for a few years yet .. none of your "rocket/free-falling bomb" defenses are relevant against this thing.
And, then there's this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3M22_Zircon
https://www.newsweek.com/russia-tests-missiles-us-no-defense...
This is why the US desperately needs to complete its laser program ... until then, the Carriers are a complete and utter liability in all-out-war ..
Carriers in today's world are as obsolete as the battleships that the carriers displaced 80 years ago.
Mind you, the fact that battleships were obsolete did not stop the US from building quite a few more in the 1940s before the penny finally dropped.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/10/asia/china-missiles-south-chi... 'According to a report from the Missile Defense Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, China may have an anti-ship version of the DF-26 under development -- and may have even tested it in 2017. However military analyst Carl Schuster, a former director of operations at the US Pacific Command's Joint Intelligence Center, cast doubt on whether the DF-26 was workable as an anti-ship weapon. Using one effectively would require practicing procedures and tactics that China had not yet shown, he said. "Remember, the Soviet Union never successfully developed an ASBM (anti-ship ballistic missile) and no country in the West has one," Schuster said.'
Do you have some information to the contrary?
Second, DF26 is all over the South China Sea. You think they'd be deploying them if they didn't have confidence in their efficacy?
One of the first political acts of the US would undoubtedly be to officially recognize the state of Taiwan. Given how much of the world relies on Taiwan's manufacturing output, other countries would be close behind and China would be looking at a joint liberation force rather than China vs the US.
Yes, consider the following scenario, Using some political pretence, China invade Taiwan in a blitzkrieg which is over in a few days. All US communications and GPS are wiped out before the attack begins. Total chaos. Allies are blind. Any US forces in the vicinity trying to prevent the attack are obliterated. Next days China issue the following decree, Taiwan has joined the motherland and all regrettable attacks on US forces have stopped and a ceasefire is in effect. Any attack on China and Taiwan will be meet with nuclear forces. What will US and Nato do? What did they do when Russia elbowed itself into the Syrian conflict? That's right, nothing.
The point is, any serious attack done by China will be over before US an allies can stop it or reply properly, unless there is a believable rapid response force on location.
Russia didn't attack US forces in Syria or the rest of the middle east, so the US could ignore it. It might work if there was no attack on US military, but any attack, significant enough to disable the US military for a few days, would almost certainly be responded to with force.
As an aside, the PLA trying to capture Taiwan will be a huge bloody mess. Any attack plan would be known as the build up would be seen by everyone. The Taiwan military is not a push over and has dug hole in every mountain. This is a pretty realistic view here - https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/09/25/taiwan-can-win-a-war-wi...
All of that being said, we should all work to find a solution that does not involved killing lots of people. China is still trying to find its place in the world and has a bit of a chip on its shoulder about how it was treated in the past. I have to believe there is a path in which we are all better off.
Disclaimer: I'm spit balling as a US Army Veteran here.
Was there an assumption that US forces stationed there right now alone could somehow fight a battle and win vs the volume of China's forces in Asia? Seems unlikely.
I recall a US general testifying and noting that if N. Korea chose to cross the DMZ, just based on their sheer volume of men and material would take a great deal of territory in a short period of time. It was not a surprise, it's a known thing.
Even during the cold war I belive most plans expected that if the soviet union chose to move into the rest of Europe, they could do so to some extent.
What happens after that is what would really matter.
It's one thing to go on the offensive to attack another country like the US at their home, but it's another to have the capabilities to defend areas of interest that are relatively close to home.
The US loses some military bases. China loses their economic infrastructure and their own internal military bases.
The US would have tens of thousands of casualties. China would have a couple orders of magnitude more casualties.
The US would lose one trading partner. China would lose almost all of their trading partners.
The article seems like a sensationalist attempt to justify increasing the US military budget.
After skimming I'm not too impressed with this. It makes a lot of sweeping assumptions, some totally inaccurate, about our readiness in the area and seems to disapprove of them not being at peak war-time levels. More alarmist than anything.
I might be biased since I served in Okinawa for a few years.