Exactly the kind of analysis I expected from you.
What I find really telling is that, for a post that supposedly took you two hours, you only were able to provide one link and said link was not related to anything I had said in my previous post. You recognize, on some level, how little evidence there is for your position because you immediately have to personalize it as "my argument" because to actually address it
would force you to consider why the American defense establishment is saying the complete opposite of your position. It also explains why you've already carved yourself a fall back position of an internal "Stab in the Back"; if you genuinely believe what you're saying about Taiwan alone, there is no need to create such a fallback option unless you are not, actually, sincere in your beliefs. At some level, you know I'm right and your behavior overall is very telling in this regard.
Now, it's time to start demolishing your points, such as they exist, and it's clear your analysis requires a wide variety of double standards to even be made. Let's start with the most obvious one of your insistence on geography, which is odd because you continue to duck my questions and your own statements reveal how rudimentary your understanding of the forces at play truly are.
The reason why I don't see your focus on their carriers as answering anything I said is because of the exact same reason the CRS dismisses it:
Although aircraft carriers might have some value for China in Taiwan-related conflict scenarios, they are not considered critical for Chinese operations in such scenarios, because Taiwan is within range of land-based Chinese aircraft. Consequently, most observers believe that China is acquiring carriers primarily for their value in other kinds of operations, and to demonstrate China’s status as a leading regional power and major world power. Chinese aircraft carriers could be used for power-projection operations, particularly in scenarios that do not involve opposing U.S. forces, and to impress or intimidate foreign observers.69
Chinese aircraft carriers could also be used for humanitarian assistance and disaster relief (HA/DR) operations, maritime security operations (such as antipiracy operations), and noncombatant evacuation operations (NEOs). Politically, aircraft carriers could be particularly valuable to China for projecting an image of China as a major world power, because aircraft carriers are viewed by many as symbols of major world power status. In a combat situation involving opposing U.S. naval and air forces, Chinese aircraft carriers would be highly vulnerable to attack by U.S. ships and aircraft, but conducting such attacks could divert U.S. ships and aircraft from performing other missions in a conflict situation with China.
For someone who asserts the primacy of terrain, it's odd how ignorant you are of the consideration that Fujian Province as a whole is a giant unsinkable aircraft carrier to which the U.S. has no answer. Guam is thousands of miles away, Japan is hundreds; Fujian is just 100. You don't need aircraft carriers at those distances as the CRS notes above and that should be obvious from someone citing WWII in a military context. This realization of the superiority of land based airpower is the entire conclusion which drove the Pacific War strategy of the United States. That you suddenly forget it is telling here, but you continue on in this pattern of either being ignorant or conveniently forgetting things that undermine your argument.
It has never actually fought a war. Their troops are completely green.
Which is equally true of the U.S. Navy today; none of our sailors have experience in Naval warfare and haven't since the 1940s. The last time we conducted a contested landing was Inchon in 1950, the PLAAN did the same on Hainan Island in 1949. In that regard, we're even, in that both sides only have history and repeated training to go off. I know you're a believer of "institutional experience" as a factor, however, and we will get to that on the whole momentarily.
The big scary sea-skimming Supersonic carrier-sinking missiles are completely untested in battle. Whether they're capable of performing the intended role is speculation, and the USN has been building counters to this sort of thing for as long as they've been a threat on the horizon. Granted, those counters are also untested in battle, but the way Chinaboos keep treating these weapons like their effectiveness is a foregone conclusion is farcical. The historical comparative performance of communist-built and operated hardware relative to NATO built and operated hardware is predictive of how an actual confrontation is likely to go. Not certainly go, but much more likely.
Equally untested in combat are Carrier Battle Groups as a whole. They have not once, in their entire existence, engaged in naval warfare, much less a peer opponent. So why exactly are we supposed to discount the Chinese area denial systems as a whole given that fact but somehow assume the CBGs are this great weapon? This is what I meant earlier about double standards and again we see you personalizing the argument because you recognize, again, you're wrong on this. Case in point is the U.S. Navy isn't doubting their validity because, just like we train and work out errors in our systems, they do the same too. Once again, CRS is worth reading:
Until recently, reported test flights of DF-21s and SDF-26s have not involved attempts to hit moving ships at sea. A November 14, 2020, press report, however, stated that an August 2020 test firing of DF-21 and DF-26 ASBMs into the South China resulted in the missiles successfully hitting a moving target ship south of the Paracel Islands.35 A December 3, 2020, press report stated that Admiral Philip Davidson, the commander of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, “confirmed, for the first time from the U.S. government side, that China’s People’s Liberation Army has successfully tested an anti-ship ballistic missile against a moving ship.” 36 China reportedly is also developing hypersonic glide vehicles that, if incorporated into Chinese ASBMs, could make Chinese ASBMs more difficult to intercept.37
Observers have expressed strong concerns about China’s ASBMs, because such missiles, in combination with broad-area maritime surveillance and targeting systems, would permit China to attack aircraft carriers, other U.S. Navy ships, or ships of allied or partner navies operating in the Western Pacific. The U.S. Navy has not previously faced a threat from highly accurate ballistic missiles capable of hitting moving ships at sea. For this reason, some observers have referred to ASBMs as a “game-changing” weapon.
Does this mean the DF-21s are a super weapon? No, but it does present China with a low cost alternative and which greatly complicates U.S. capabilities; it's far cheaper to missile spam a CBG than it is to build and deploy a CBG. To blithely dismiss this, especially in the context of confirmed proof of concept capabilities, is monumentally naïve at best and foolish at worse.
Yes, the PLAN has many more recently-built ships than the USN. Ships built by a navy that has never actually seen combat. The USN is built on decades of institutional knowledge, starting from WWII and the lessons about dealing with damage, damage control, maneuvering, and the million little particulars about 'what systems should and should not go where and why?' The PLAN has none of that institutional knowledge backing up the ships they've built.
When was the last time the U.S. Navy fought a conventional conflict? When did the last sailor, from said conflict, retire? There is no institutional knowledge of the sort ingrained in the service, that solely comes from the veterans of such imparting their direct wisdom into their replacements and said veterans have long since been withdrawn. What knowledge the U.S. Navy has today in things like damage control and "maneuvering" comes from training, same as China, and book knowledge. Are we really going to assume the Chinese have never read a history book or technical paper on the subject lol? I'm already really glad you brought up "maneuvering" because I think that is further evidence of just how ignorant you are on the state of the U.S. Navy in particular.
94% of Sailors Say ‘Damaging Operational Failures’ Related to Navy Culture, Leadership Problems
The study, titled “A Report on the Fighting Culture of the United States Navy Surface Fleet,” surveyed 77 current and recently retired surface sailors “about their insights into the culture of the United States” and how it related to incidents that included the 2017 fatal collisions in the Western Pacific that killed 17 sailors, the 2016 incident in which the crews of two Navy patrol boats were captured by Iranian forces in the Persian Gulf and the pier-side fire that resulted in the total loss of the former amphibious warship USS Bonhomme Richard (LHD-6).
“When asked whether incidents such as the two destroyer collisions in the Pacific, the surrender of a small craft to the IRGC in the [Persian] Gulf, the burning of the Bonhomme Richard and other incidents were part of a broader cultural or leadership problem in the Navy, 94 percent of interviewees responded ‘yes’,” reads the report. Fifty-five percent said there was a direct connection between leadership, culture and the incidents.
The study – sponsored by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), Rep. Jim Banks (R-Ind.), Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas) and Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.) – was conducted by retired Marine Lt. Gen. Robert Schmidle and retired Rear Adm. Mark Montgomery, without the direct participation of the Navy and was released a day ahead of the Senate Armed Services Committee’s confirmation hearing for Navy Secretary nominee Carlos Del Toro and a year after the Bonhomme Richard fire.
Years of Warning, Then Death and Disaster
The fleet was short of sailors, and those it had were often poorly trained and worked to exhaustion. Its warships were falling apart, and a bruising, ceaseless pace of operations meant there was little chance to get necessary repairs done. The very top of the Navy was consumed with buying new, more sophisticated ships, even as its sailors struggled to master and hold together those they had. The Pentagon, half a world away, was signing off on requests for ships to carry out more and more missions.
The risks were obvious, and Aucoin repeatedly warned his superiors about them. During video conferences, he detailed his fleet’s pressing needs and the hazards of not addressing them. He compiled data showing that the unrelenting demands on his ships and sailors were unsustainable. He pleaded with his bosses to acknowledge the vulnerability of the 7th Fleet. Aucoin recalled the response: “Crickets.” If he wasn’t ignored, he was put off — told to calm down and get the job done.
On June 17, 2017, shortly after 1:30 a.m., the USS Fitzgerald, a $1.8 billion destroyer belonging to the 7th Fleet,
collided with a giant cargo ship off the coast of Japan. Seven sailors drowned in their sleeping quarters. It was the deadliest naval disaster in four decades.
Barely two months later, it happened again. The USS John S. McCain, its poorly trained crew fumbling with its controls, turned directly in front of a 30,000-ton oil tanker. Ten more sailors died.
The Navy, embarrassed and scrambling to explain to Congress and America’s allies how such seemingly inexplicable disasters could have happened, moved quickly to prosecute members of ship crews it declared all but incompetent and to strip senior officers of their commands. But the swift, seemingly decisive action masked a much more damning story of failure by the Navy’s top command and the Pentagon. Aucoin had hardly been the only one detailing the once-proud 7th Fleet’s perilous condition. The alarms had been sounded up and down the chain of command, by young, overmatched sailors, by veteran captains and commanders, and by some of the most respected Navy officials in Washington.
Two three-star admirals told ProPublica they had explicitly notified superiors of the growing dangers. The two people who served successive terms as undersecretary of the Navy, the No. 2 position in the civilian command, said they had, too. They produced memos, reports and contemporaneous notes capturing their warnings and the silence or indifference with which they were met. Now, frustrated by what they regard as the Navy and Pentagon’s papering over of their culpability for the twin tragedies, these officials and others have broken with Navy custom and are speaking candidly, naming names and raising concern that the Navy could well repeat its mistakes.
I think it should speak volumes about your position that the U.S. Navy, not the PLAN, is the one having the "maneuvering" issues. Your insistence in institutional knowledge is not being reflected at all, either, as evidenced by these disasters and the large number of sailors reporting systematic issues in this vein.
Numbers. People like to quote that the PLAN is now 'the largest navy in the world' by hull count, but that really is not as impressive as it sounds. They get to that number by counting dozens of tiny little corvettes and landing craft; let's have a look at some of those numbers?
23 Type 74 and 74a Landing Craft. They mass 700 whole tons.
~5 Type 271 landing craft. They mass 800 tons.
8 Type 37 missile boats and variants. They mass 520 tons or less.
60 Type 22 missile boats. A whopping 220 tons each.
71 Type 56 and 56a corvettes. These mass a much more impressive 1500 tons. Combine all of them together, and they equal a single Nimitz!
10 Type 53 light frigate variants. 2000-2400 tons each. That's getting into something more than flyweight.
32 Type 54 and 54a Frigates. That's 3900 tons and 4200 tons respectively. Combine them together, and you have about 1.2 aircraft carriers.
That's really nice, but it is also rejected utterly by the DoD's own assessment:
These new classes of surface combatants demonstrate a significant modernization of PLA Navy surface combatant technology. DOD states that China’s navy “remains engaged in a robust shipbuilding program for surface combatants, producing new guided-missile cruisers (CGs), guided-missile destroyers (DDGs) and corvettes (FFLs). These assets will significantly upgrade the PLAN’s air defense, anti-ship, and anti-submarine capabilities and will be critical as the PLAN expands its operations beyond the range of the PLA’s shore-based air defense systems.” 70 DIA states that “the era of past designs has given way to production of modern multimission destroyer, frigate, and corvette classes as China’s technological advancement in naval design has begun to approach a level commensurate with, and in some cases exceeding, that of other modern navies.” 71 China is also upgrading its older surface combatants with new weapons and other equipment.72
So they have larger numbers and their quality, in general is a match or actually surpasses us. I think that's why you've chose to focus on tonnage, but you have done so without being able to quantify why this represents a negative. Again, certainly the U.S. Navy isn't deluding itself here given the trends in naval building.
In short, the overwhelming majority of the Chinese fleet is made up of untested ships, designed and built by companies and people who have no experience in making a military fleet work.
Except they have had 30+ years of experience now and the
DoD's own internal reports concede they have developed a better all around industrial base than us.
The buildup of China’s navy, including aircraft carriers, has been one of the most remarkable and strategically disruptive global defense spending trends in the past two decades. By commissioning fourteen warships a year, Beijing has made clear that it intends to be a world-class maritime power in addition to having the world’s largest military on land. While China’s naval buildup has been able to piggyback on its rapidly expanding commercial shipbuilding industry, U.S. shipbuilding, by contrast, has become a key vulnerability in the U.S. defense manufacturing base, as we will see.
Two other critical components in China’s growing military power have been a huge expansion in its ballistic and anti-ship missile inventory and its nuclear weapons arsenal. Its missile arsenal contains advanced capabilities such as maneuverable anti-ship ballistic missiles, MIRVs, and experimental hypersonic glide vehicles, all designed to target American aircraft carriers and forward air bases – the mainstays of U.S. military power projection in the Indo-Pacific region. In addition to the obvious cost in lives, replacing carriers or other ships, or repairing damaged vessels, would severely challenge the most robust shipbuilding base. Attempting to repair or replace forward bases in mid-conflict would be an even more complex challenge.
You are either ignorant, or wilfully ignoring one of the most important factors in warfare, terrain. First off, crossing the straits of Taiwan with a military force is massively more complicated than crossing a line on the ground. Second off, Taiwan is a mountainous island with few beaches suitable for a military landing, meaning that you don't just have to move your army across the water, you have to land it in a handful of very specific places. Even if you do take those beaches, you have to fight inland through urban terrain, some of the roughest terrain you can fight in, and the Taiwanese have the defensive advantage both in the city itself, and in being able to have artillery support.
Once again, the DoD pointing out you honestly are ignorant of a lot:
The U.S. Navy has substantial worldwide responsibilities, and a substantial fraction of the U.S. fleet is homeported in the Atlantic. As a consequence, only a certain portion of the U.S. Navy might be available for a crisis or conflict scenario in China’s near-seas region, or could reach that area within a certain amount of time. In contrast, China’s navy has more-limited responsibilities outside China’s near-seas region, and its ships are all homeported along China’s coast at locations that face directly onto China’s near-seas region. In a U.S.-China conflict inside the first island chain, U.S. naval and other forces would be operating at the end of generally long supply lines, while Chinese naval and other forces would be operating at the end of generally short supply lines.
As for the landing aspect, it's quite ironic given you're previous focus on solely the Air-Naval component that you now turn to talking about the ground combat issues...thanks for basically admitting I was correct to point out the depletion of our relevant stocks, particularly of artillery systems and munitions, represents a serious window for China to exploit against Taiwan. What happens when Taiwan is getting bombarded from the start, its industrial base destroyed and its imports cut off by the PLAN?
And then there's the matter of what the Chinese airforce and navy fly.
Ironically, everything you said here equally applies to the U.S. Navy; we've yet to deploy the F-35 in large numbers, meaning the mainstay of the fleet is a collection of F-18s, of both the Gen 4 and 4.5 type. Again, we also find double standards afoot because somehow the F-35 is a superweapon-despite never seeing combat-yet we have to make assumptions the Chinese aircraft are fish in a barrel.
There's also the serious question of the F-35 at all:
For years, Air Force officials have portrayed the F-35 as the aircraft that it would use to infiltrate into enemy airspace to knock out surface-to-air missiles and other threats without being seen. However, in the war game, that role was played by the more survivable NGAD, in part due to the F-35′s inability to traverse the long ranges of the Pacific without a tanker nearby, Hinote said.
Instead, the F-35 attacked Chinese surface ships and ground targets, protected American and Taiwanese assets from Chinese aircraft, and provided cruise missile defense during the exercise. But “it’s not the one that’s pushing all the way in [Chinese airspace], or even over China’s territory,” Hinote said.
Notably, the F-35s used during the war game were the more advanced
F-35 Block 4 aircraft under development, which will feature a suite of new computing equipment known as
“Tech Refresh 3,” enhancements to its radar and electronic warfare systems, and new weapons. “We wouldn’t even play the current version of the F-35,” Hinote said. “It wouldn’t be worth it. … Every fighter that rolls off the line today is a fighter that we wouldn’t even bother putting into these scenarios.”
On the wider aspects of the air war, we again see you do not know much about that which you are trying to make pronouncements on.
We don't have 500 F-18s to use, for one, and this isn't restricted to the Navy either.
For years, the military’s critics have raised alarms about its
aircraft readiness, and whether concerning numbers of airplanes and helicopters have not been
ready to fly. A new report from the Government Accountability Office released Thursday shows just how bad the problem has gotten — not just in the Air Force, but also in the Navy, Marine Corps and Army.
In the report, which was requested by Congress, GAO said that it studied readiness rates for 46 aircraft across those four services between fiscal 2011 and fiscal 2019. Of those, only three met their annual
mission-capable goals for a majority of those years: The Navy’s EP-3E Aries II and E-6B Mercury and the Air Force’s UH-1N Huey helicopter. The EP-3 hit seven of its annual goals, the E-6B hit it during five years, and the UH-1N met its goal during all nine years.
Even more concerning, 24 of the aircraft GAO reviewed never met their annual goals once in that nine-year span. The average annual mission-capable rates for selected Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps aircraft decreased overall since 2011, according to the GAO. The average mission-capable rate for the selected Army aircraft slightly increased. Mission-capable rates are the percentage of total time when an aircraft can fly and perform at least one mission, GAO said, and is one of the key metrics used to assess the health and readiness of an aircraft fleet.
Readiness problems are especially worrisome because the Defense Department spends tens of billions of dollars each year to sustain weapon systems such as aircraft. Of all the costs a weapon system will incur during its entire life cycle, operating and support costs — including spare parts, depot and field maintenance, personnel and engineering support — typically account for about 70 percent of those expenses.
But large swaths of the military’s aircraft fleet were not anywhere close to meeting their readiness goals, GAO found. Of the 46 aircraft reviewed, 19 were more than 15 percentage points below the readiness goals set by their services, including 11 that were 25 percentage points or more below-goal. Another 18 aircraft were anywhere from six to 15 percentage points below their goals.
It's also worth noting the U.S. Navy has noted Chinese pilot quality is every bit the match of our own.
Historically, communist militaries perform like shit. If they can field absolutely overwhelming numbers, they can still overwhelm the enemy and take ground, but even then they tend to suffer crushing losses in the process. China is especially notable for being the worst at this, taking absolutely insane losses even in battles they won during Korea, and then managing to lose a war with Vietnam, in spite of directly bordering the nation and outpopulating it by most of an order of magnitude, not long after the Vietnam war ended.
China was also a third world nation in 1950 coming out of a domestic Civil War and
still managed to knock us out of North Korea before instituting a stalemate we never could break. They achieved their goals, which is something the U.S. has only rarely been able to accomplish since then, especially in a little place called Vietnam it outnumbered by a large order of magnitude. All of this occurred in a area where the U.S. had an overwhelming industrial edge, which it no longer does; instead, China now has the larger, more efficient industrial base at large and is surpassing us in specific military fields as the Pentagon itself concedes.
This goes back to what I've been saying throughout this reply in terms of you constantly engaging in double standards and ignoring what the actual professionals are saying. They're under no allusions about China, while you seem content to wallow in horrifically outdated views that lost their relevance in the 1950s. It's ultimately fact free self imposed delusions, because it is more comfortable to believe the "Reds" are still stuck in their Maoist mire than admit they've got up and started surpassing us by objective measures.
The reason I oppose your thinking so much is because your link of thinking will, at best, get a lot of people killed because it's hopelessly naïve and detached from reality. We managed to avoid nuclear wear in the Cold War because we were honest about ourselves and our capabilities as well as those of the Soviets. You modern lot seem drunk on the Unipolar moment, despite it having crashed down firmly a decade ago. That delusion is dangerous and it needs to beaten out at every turn.
On top of this, historically China has been a functional non-factor as a naval power. Even during the many centuries of Imperial China, it never projected power navally, so it's not like there's a pre-communism tradition they can try to harken back to and rebuild. Sure, the American military is not in top fighting form. It's suffering from a variety of issues, but the key thing here is that unlike the PLA, the US armed forces actually have a fighting form, because there are living members of it who have actually fought in wars.
Once again, and in closing, this should reveal just how uninformed you are about what you're trying to present knowledge on when it's clear you don't have it:
The
Ming treasure voyages were the seven maritime expeditions undertaken by
Ming China's
treasure fleet between 1405 and 1433. The
Yongle Emperor ordered the construction of the treasure fleet in 1403. The grand project resulted in far-reaching ocean voyages to the coastal territories and islands in and around the
South China Sea, the
Indian Ocean, and beyond. Admiral
Zheng He was commissioned to command the treasure fleet for the expeditions. Six of the voyages occurred during the Yongle reign (r. 1402–24), while the seventh voyage occurred during the
Xuande reign (r. 1425–1435). The first three voyages reached up to
Calicut on India's
Malabar Coast, while the fourth voyage went as far as
Hormuz in the
Persian Gulf. In the last three voyages, the fleet traveled up to the
Arabian Peninsula and
East Africa.
In reality, Imperial China built a fleet that projected naval power all across the Indo-Pacific basin and was able to extort tribute because of how powerful it was.
