In summary, a long list of 'accentuate the negative of one side, accentuate the positive of the other.' None of this counters my point that while the US Navy in particular and military in general have issues, the Chinese military has no institutional experience to build off of at all.
Mostly because you have yet to actually quantify said point; you just keep repeating it over and over again without actually showing any evidence to support it. In effect, it's an unfalsifiable argument based on copium and the fact you essentially open up this post by complaining I didn't try to glorify the U.S. just confirms this: there is no evidence for what you're claiming.
The U.S. Navy had no history of imposing a blockade until the 1860s and then proceeded to do it anyway. The U.S. had not experienced mass mechanized warfare until 1944, and was up against an opponent who had been doing such since 1939; the lack of "institutional experience" didn't prevent the weight of U.S. industry from being felt. It's the same here and it's basically your own modernized form of the Japanese "Bushido" or whatever, and we saw how that worked out in the Pacific War, didn't we? There's no historical or rational basis for any of your points.
You can say that the US Navy hasn't actually fought major fleet engagements since WWII; and that's true, but you conveniently didn't mention the
reason for that, IE that the US Navy has been so utterly dominant that the only challenges it has faced haven't even amounted to speedbumps. I'll use some Wikipedia links here, because we can safely say these pages are not controlled by fanboys of the American military.
North Koreans.
North Vietnamese.
More North Vietnames
The Libyans of all people.
And the Iranians.
There's a recurring theme here, of the US military
utterly crushing the opposition (or the engagement being too small to be called meaningful for
either side). There's
also a theme of communists claiming their highly-capable forces inflicted much more damage and suffered much smaller losses than they actually did. Because Communism is built on lies, and actively promotes an institution of lies internally,
which is not conducive to having an effective military.
And, notably,
none of these featured the Naval combat upon which your argument rests and to which I pointed out. I didn't cite ground combat because it's not relevant to naval warfare and if you believe so, that just further underscores to me how delusional you are being here.
As a historical aside, it's notable that of the wars you list, the first consisted of the U.S. getting knocked back from the Yalu River by the Chinese and the re-institution of North Korea which persists to this day. North Vietnam? They not only won, they followed up by taking South Vietnam and then turning Laos and Cambodia Communist.
During each of these time periods, there were serious internal concerns and external criticisms about the readiness and capability of the US military, very publicized concerns. Why?
Because in a free country, you're allowed to criticize the military and government.
Being allowed to do that, also means that those concerns are at least sometimes actually addressed. That freedom has been eroding, but it still exists, whereas China is a police state that will happily completely disappear its wealthiest and most powerful people if other party apparatchiks decide it's necessary.
Which is basically an emotional argument devoid of any supporting evidence or even relevance to the debate at hand. Nazi Germany was a dictatorship and they had a military they conquered Europe with, the KMT lost to those evil ChiComs in their Civil War, North Vietnam decisively defeated us in the Vietnam War, etc.
The US military has issues. Those issues are studied, explored, and efforts are made to redress them. You've pulled up some extensive articles describing such. These efforts don't always work, and as with cases like the Mark-14 Torpedo in WWII, sometimes efforts made to redress them are horrifically slow, but...
Is that why aircraft readiness has gotten worse since 2015? You really should take the time to read what's posted before trying to post yourself.
Can you pull up similar articles exploring the issues the PLA has? Comprehensive reviews of fleet readiness that are something other than party propaganda? A rundown of all the mishaps they've had with their attempts to get their domestic aviation industry off the ground, and how they solved the issues involved, that again, isn't just party propaganda?
The fact you're basically asking me to try to make your argument for you is telling here, in that it confirms there's no real objective basis to your claims. What you're trying to do here, if we take the point at face value, is create a negative argument; there's no way to prove it either way.
See, the thing is, the USN and Military may not have directly fought 'peer opponents' since WWII, but one positive effect of the 'forever wars' in the sandbox, is getting an idea of how the people and hardware do and don't actually perform.
Except there's no comparison in equipment and training between the COIN based fighting of the Middle East and the Peer to Peer conflict the Pentagon is turning towards; you don't need air superiority fighters and tank divisions in COIN. If you also believe the Forever Wars made the MIC sane about procurement policies, you're going to need to quantify that.
Do we know just how the F-22 and F-35 will compare to the J-20 and J-16?
Given
U.S. combat testing had the F-16 (Comparable to the J-16) beat the F-35 in trials and
U.S. Pacific Command has been impressed with the J-20...
No, we don't. But we
do know that all the older J designs are shitty knockoffs or inferior local alternatives to Soviet designs. We
do know how communist-built hardware has performed against American-built hardware historically, and it ain't pretty for the communists.
Meme version:
And the source for that, if you want more hard data. It has some interesting commentary towards the bottom.
The combat statistics for all the aircraft currently in use | MiGFlug.com Blog
Once again, we're seeing your argument is based on memes and being completely ignorant of what you're talking about. For someone who has conceded the U.S. has never fought a peer since WWII and harps on institutional experience, one would think comparing the results of Iraq against the U.S. should be an obvious non-starter. Since it isn't, but luckily we have historical data,
perhaps we should take a look at that, no?
The MiG Alley battles produced many fighter
aces.
The top aces were Russian. Nikolay Sutyagin claimed 21 kills, including nine F-86s, one F-84 and one Gloster Meteor in less than seven months. His first kill was the F-86A of Robert H. Laier on 19 June 1951 (listed by the Americans as missing in action), and his last was on 11 January 1952, when he shot down and killed Thiel M. Reeves, who was flying an F-86E (Reeves is also listed as MIA). Other famous Soviet aces include Yevgeni G. Pepelyayev, who was credited with 19 kills, and Lev Kirilovich Shchukin, who was credited with 17 kills, despite being shot down twice himself.
The top UN ace of the war, Capt.
Joseph C. McConnell, claimed 16 MiGs, including three on one day. His story featured in a film called
The McConnell Story, starring
Alan Ladd and
June Allyson.
[43] The second-highest-scoring UN ace, Maj.
James Jabara, was the first UN jet-vs.-jet ace. Another ace,
Frederick C. "Boots" Blesse, claimed nine
MiG-15s in his
F-86 Sabre[44] and later wrote
No Guts, No Glory, a manual of air fighter combat that is still studied today.
[42] James P. Hagerstrom claimed 8.5 kills.
George Andrew Davis, Jr. became one of the first members of the new U.S. Air Force to receive the
Medal of Honor after being killed while leading his section of two F-86s against 12 MiG-15s when he was trying to shoot them all down.
Do we know how the USN or PLA will perform in direct naval battle?
Yes, and the U.S. lost every single time according to defense connected officials when they run the war games.
The U.S. Military 'Failed Miserably' in a Fake Battle Over Taiwan
The U.S. military reportedly "failed miserably" in a series of wargame scenarios designed to test the Pentagon's might. The flunked exercises, which took place last October, are a red flag that the way the military has operated for years isn't going to fly against today's enemies.
Specifically, a simulated adversary that has studied the American way of war for decades managed to run rings around U.S. forces, defeating them decisively. "They knew exactly what we're going to do before we did it," Gen. John Hyten, Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
revealed at an industry event.
While Hyten did not disclose the name of the wargame (it's classifed), he did say that one of the exercises focused exclusively on a brawl between U.S. and Chinese forces fighting over Taiwan—a scenario that seems
increasingly likely.
Meanwhile, a leading Chinese think tank recently described tensions in U.S.-China relations as the worst since the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, and it advised Communist Party leaders to prepare for war with the United States.
What many Americans don’t realize is that years of classified Pentagon war games strongly suggest that the U.S. military would lose that war.
“More than a decade ago, our war games indicated that the Chinese were doing a good job of investing in military capabilities that would make our preferred model of expeditionary warfare, where we push forces forward and operate out of relatively safe bases and sanctuaries, increasingly difficult,” Air Force Lt. Gen. S. Clinton Hinote, deputy chief of staff for strategy, integration and requirements, told Yahoo News in an exclusive interview. By 2018, the People’s Liberation Army had fielded many of those forces in large numbers, to include massive arsenals of precision-guided surface-to-air and surface-to-surface missiles, a space-based constellation of navigation and targeting satellites and the largest navy in the world.
“At that point the trend in our war games was not just that we were losing, but we were losing faster,” Hinote said. “After the 2018 war game I distinctly remember one of our gurus of war gaming standing in front of the Air Force secretary and chief of staff, and telling them that we should never play this war game scenario [of a Chinese attack on Taiwan] again, because we know what is going to happen. The definitive answer if the U.S. military doesn’t change course is that we’re going to lose fast. In that case, an American president would likely be presented with almost a fait accompli.”
No, but we do know that the USN has spent the last three decades providing short-notice high-tempo support to ground operations. Performance at getting aircraft off the deck and missiles and shells into the air to support ground forces is a pretty decent indicator of how quickly it can be done for a naval action. Conversely, militaries that concern themselves primarily with political indoctrination of their officers and are vehemently against low-level initiative doctrines tend not to have good response times.
Except, if you had bothered to actually research this topic, you would also know that Naval readiness has collapsed in the past decade and that high tempo of operations is no longer sustainable. It's the main cause behind the increasing number of accidents and failures in the Navy, which I had previously cited.
Navy Approaching ‘Weak’ Rating in New U.S. Military Strength Survey
The Navy’s ability to defend the nation’s vital security interests is “marginal,” – with the caveat that its score is trending to “weak” in capability and readiness – while the Marine Corps’ ability is graded as “strong,” according to a think tank’s latest survey of United States military power.
The
Heritage Foundation’s 2022 Index of Military Strength rated the Pentagon overall as “only marginally able” to operate in key regions – such as Europe, the Middle East and Asia – based on existing alliances like NATO, political stability, the forward presence of American forces and the state of key infrastructure, like ports and highways in foreign nations and domestic shipbuilding and repair.
“Marginal” in the index’s ranking is the middle grade on its five-step scale, according to Dakota Wood, Heritage’s editor for the project and a retired Marine. Explaining “marginal” as a grade, he said in terms of capacity it comes down to being “not big enough or equipment [being] too old.”
As the authors noted since 2015, using open sources, “the index should be seen as a report card for how well or poorly conditions, countries, and the U.S. military have evolved during the assessed year” in having a military force capable of fighting two major regional wars almost simultaneously. The 2022 report added the recently established U.S. Space Force.
Do we know who has the more reliable missiles, radar, and ability to coordinate combined-arms operations?
Again, yes we do, and this should be obvious if you had, again, researched this topic.
RAND keeps a scorecard and places China ahead of us in most of those categories; the last one is actually a detriment in modern warfare.
The PLA has placed as much emphasis on putting U.S. aircraft carrier strike groups (CSGs) at risk as it has into efforts to neutralize U.S. ground-based airpower. China has developed a credible and increasingly robust over-the-horizon (OTH) intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) capability. It launched its first operational military imaging satellites in 2000 and deployed its first OTH skywave radar system in 2007. The skywave system can detect targets and provide a general, though not precise, location out to 2,000 km beyond China's coastline. The development of China's space and electronics sectors has enabled it to increase the pace of satellite launches and deploy a wider range of sophisticated ISR satellites.
China's development of anti-ship ballistic missiles—the first of their kind anywhere in the world—presents a new threat dimension for U.S. naval commanders. That said, the kill chain for these missiles will pose great difficulties for the PLA, and the United States will make every effort to develop countermeasures. Anti-ship ballistic missiles therefore may not pose the kind of one-shot, one-kill threat sometimes supposed in the popular media. At the same time, however, the ongoing modernization of Chinese air and, especially, submarine capabilities represents a more certain and challenging threat to CSGs. Between 1996 and 2015, the number of modern diesel submarines in China's inventory rose from two to 41, and all but four of theses boats are armed with cruise missiles (as well as torpedoes). RAND modeling suggests that the effectiveness of the Chinese submarine fleet (as measured by the number of attack opportunities it might achieve against carriers) rose by roughly an order of magnitude between 1996 and 2010, and that it will continue to improve its relative capabilities through 2017. Chinese submarines would present a credible threat to U.S. surface ships in a conflict over Taiwan or the South China Sea.
RAND's rating for a Taiwan scenario? Chinese Advantage.
Given that again, the PLA has not fought in a war for 40 years, there's no definitive way to compare, but there are indicators. For the US military, combined arms is bread-and-butter. Artillery and air support for infantry and armor formations in Iraq and Afghanistan wasn't just a thing, it was aggressively made use of, and the current officer and NCO corps of the US military are heavily populated by people who either have experienced/practiced this, or learned directly from those who have.
And yet they are either at parity or advantage, as shown above by RAND, and U.S. wargames have consistently found they decisively defeat us.
Conversely, the Ukraine war has shown that the closest relative to the Chinese military,the Russians, have missiles that don't perform as well as expected, their radar likewise, and their ability to coordinate combined arms forces is absolute shit. This is at best a general comparison, but it's the closest comparison that we have, and historically speaking, militaries with some actual damn experience (like the Russians had with their adventurism in Donbass and Georgia) do better than militaries with jack all experience, like the PLA.
Except none of this is true and it's exactly why the last time we engaged you stopped responding.
Unless and until the PLA actually gets into a serious shooting war, we won't know how it will or won't perform for sure. But for those of us who learn from history, the indicators are not looking good for them.
The history that solely exists in delusions within your head, sure. In reality as far back as the Korean War, American military leadership was noting the quality of the PLAAF and nowadays they are finding in their war games the Chinese crush us every time; RAND, as noted above, shows the Chinese have parity or advantage in every single category in a Taiwan focused fight.
To repeat what I said before: When your claims are actually subjected to an objective analysis, they fall apart because there is no evidence for them at all.
Also, you have a fair point about the Ming Treasure Fleets; I wasn't aware of that part of Chinese Naval history. Can you point to any Chinese Naval accomplishments or tradition that are less than six hundred years in the past? Preferably post age-of-sail?
I think my interaction with you has shown you're unaware of a lot in general, but the capabilities of the Chinese in general seems to be a pretty big one and the fact you're asking this is further proof: the capture of Hainan Island in 1949 and the deployment of over 30 combat groupings on Anti Piracy duty off the Horn of Africa.
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