It was made as a counter to a specific claim that the Chinese would perform worse than the Iraqis. That is hardly a read herring to respond to a specific claim. To change the analogy, confirming whether or not your playing against a middle school team, doesn't clarify whether its a high school, college, or pro team. But, if the argument is your taking a pro team (which the US undoubtedly is) against a middle school team, the sensible thing to argue is that its at least not a middle school team.
The bigger difference is that whoever it will be against, it will be a game of full contact kickboxing, not soccer where you can't even intentionally kick the enemy when the referee is looking.
Losing ships to someone without a navy isn't really that much of a shocking achievement. The US has done that too. Specifically against the Koreans and Chinese actually.
Tug and minsweepers. Nothing even close to losing a friggin flagship of the Pacific Fleet.
Which is why mine warfare seems to have been one of the lead strategies of the Chinese navy, at least up to about 2010.
I'm not sure Korea is particularly categorizable as a guerilla war. Vietnam beat us through conventional operations, not the guerilla part of the war. And I'm not sure Yugoslavia can be categorized as a guerilla war, at least by any definition that the WWII U-boat campaign would also not be a guerilla war. Or Rome's strategy against Hannibal post after several disasterous battles showed decisive battle against Hannibal's army in Italy was not the winning move.
Korea was highly limited by politics around the UN, rather than USA actually going to fuck up the other side with all means available. MacArthur wanted that and he got told off.
No, Vietnam's conventional operations won only against South Vietnam, and only after US withdrew even material support, learn history, Vietnam beat US public's morale with US media working on the communist side, on the battlefield Vietnam got generally beaten by US forces.
Poorly qualified nation buildings goals also don't match most of those listed wars, and wouldn't matter there for how effective America's opponents there fought. ROE I've become more certain is a bit of a cope. Your also likely not to have unlimited ROE in a China war either, for very sensible reasons.
Vietnam had quite a bit. Serbia in the end was a victory, but like Korea, it was highly bound by the UN politics around them, with destroying the enemy not even being the main objective.
Yeah, with a sufficiently retarded ROE, with special mention to the classic, arbitrary lines on the enemy state's map where the enemy gets told that none of their assets will be hit, US government can fail at any war it wants.
But that's a political problem, not one related to military strategy, force or technology.
I guess it depends on what exactly we mean by guerilla war, but naval war that doesn't revolve around head on confrontation with the US Navy is perfectly possible, and has been China's longstanding Naval and land doctrine.
But is the US Naval doctrine going to play along? Ships, unlike "little green men" are something, especially in the age of modern technology, that has clear identities, and effective attacks on them are a pretty clear matter with clear escalation steps to take.
Again, sufficient levels of retardation can waste that, but assuming US government at the time won't be exceptionally retarded, confrontation with US Navy is going to automatically turn into a head on confrontation within *minutes* of certain lines being crossed. Coded messages will be sent, and missiles and torpedoes will be going out fast.
General military and societal performance actually probably is a useful measure of how they are likely to perform in the Naval setting.
No, its not written in stone anywhere. Countries can have pretty dramatically different organizational state of different branches of their military. British Army vs Navy in WW2, or even more so, Israel's Army/Air Force/Navy histories.
Especially when your talking about a society with extensive naval experience, like the Chinese. One for example might argue landlocked Moscow doesn't have any good pool of people and expertise to draw from on how sailing works. One can't suggest that about the Chinese, with the 1-2nd largest merchant fleet, and literally millions of sailors and fishermen.
What's their extensive naval experience, and i mean in modern warfare?
A history of sailing has little to do with running a navy nowdays, if it did, Spain and Britain would still be naval superpowers USA would be learning from but it's the other way around if anything, we're talking missiles, air defense systems, radars, this sort of shit war on sea is fought with (and Moskva sank because most of theirs worked only on paper, it's not like they crashed the ship out of stress).
So, is Chinese military very meritocratic and immune to such silly things as
nepotism and subordinates lying to higher ups massively as nothing works?
China's manpower pool of people who are familiar with boats and sailing is if anything likely deeper than the US's. So there's not even much basis to argue China would particularly underperform at sea compared to anything else they did.
Definitely will help them handle their lifeboats under stress.
But what's their experience with launching and intercepting missiles? How battle tested their equipment is? How good are their radars (they only made their first 70's AEGIS ripoff a decade ago)? What's their electronic industry like? Can they even
make a decent jet fighter engine?
Point in case, in 2003 they had a
submarine disaster on probably an extra-basic level of training failure worthy of a third world country, suggesting competence no better than Russian, if not worse.
There are
rumors another one happened recently.
Guess submarines aren't something age of sail experience translates well to, yet submarines and carriers are the true killer weapons of modern naval warfare.
en.wikipedia.org
They are still getting funny notes like this for their shiniest swords of the sea:
Type 093
Initial design.
[3] In the early 2000s, Chinese sources reported that the Type 093's noise level was on par with the
improved Los Angeles-class submarines, and with
Project 971 (
NATO reporting name Akula) at 110
decibels.
[12] In 2009, USN ONI listed the Type 093 as being noisier than
Project 671RTM (NATO reporting name Victor III) which entered service in 1979.
[13] Two built. NATO reporting name
Shang I.
[14]