Future War with (Red) China Hypotheticals/Theorycrafting

[JagerIV]

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.

Maybe, but this doesn't really have anything to do with the issue you seem to be trying to refute.

Tug and minsweepers. Nothing even close to losing a friggin flagship of the Pacific Fleet.

Is the black sea fleet equivalent to the Pacific Fleet though?

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.

Not really relevant unless you believe the US is going to escalate to a nuclear war. In which case you probably have better than even odds that China would win that conflict, but like I said, not relevant to this discussion. I'm not sure this is a fight US can genocide its way out of. If you want to escalate to a genocidal war, there's more Chinese, and they have nukes.

How un-American are you expecting the Americans to fight this war?

The tet offenive was in large part carried out with conventional troops, and the attacks that continued pressure post Tet which made continued operation non-viable was carried out with conventional troops. Light infantry is part of a conventional army. US lost the Vietnam war in 1967-1969, when the US decided 10,000 casualties a year was not a price the US was willing to pay. And were back to this graph:

While US casualties were "relatively" low, the RVNAF was never taking less than 20,000 casualties in any particular year. While nominally this is about 2% of the RVNAF per year, that still suggests some 14% casualties over the course of heavy fighting, and if those are concentrated in the combat arms, well, regular troops were only about 400,000, and if tooth to tail ratios were even WWI good of roughly 3-1, that means you only have roughly 150,000 frontline troops, in which case 20,000 casualties would be 13% of frontline troops lost per year.

This was obviously not sustainable for South Vietnam.

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.

Yes, Vietnam had some of that, most of the rest didn't. As I said earlier, I'm much less convinced of the argument failure is simply an issue of rule of engagement. Or at least, civilian imposed ones, and if often a way to shift blame.

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.

Well, war is an extension of politics, and Nations at war are generally extensions of the nation at peace. Suggesting the US might win the war, assuming the Americans don't act like America, is about as meaningful as suggesting Iraq would have won the gulf war if it was not faught by Iraqis.

That isn't even really the basis of my argument of course.

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.

I mean, your the one assuming that the Chinese will fight a naval war in a way to maximize American Strengths and minimize Chinese ones, so I should ask why do you expect Chinese doctrine to play along?

Ships are not nearly as trivial to find and target as your suggesting. And missiles and torpedoes don't teleport.

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.

Eh, those all seem to perform within roughly the same order of magnitude of each other. The British Navy getting more money than the British army is different from the suggestion say Naval Captains are brilliant while Army captains are idiots. I don't really see that. Britians did pretty well on land and Sea, Israel Army/Air/Navy all seem to perform to roughly the same level generally. Israel Tanks, Aircraft, and boats all generally seem to be supplied enough to function and manned by people with decent levels of compentence.

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?

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.

Type 093 submarine - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

They are still getting funny notes like this for their shiniest swords of the sea:

Sure, and I remembers there being some good stories of rank incompetence from my Dad's days in the Navy. They had to cancel a landing excersize because the bay doors fell open because people lied on maintenance reports. And some people around him were caught up in a sting because they were signing procurement contracts in exchange for favors. And of course nepotism is an old navy tradition. I wouldn't be suprised if the Navy got worse as it became less Nepotistic.

Now, I don't doubt some of our stuff is still better than theirs, even though much of their stuff is actually newer than ours at this point, and the average US soldier may still be better than theirs.

I'm just not sure how much it actually matters. That might be the big disagreement here: Does quality or quantity matter?

You seem to be putting extreme weight on quality, to overcome poor terrain, numbers, and victory conditions. That quality can overcome a lot.

I more see it that once you've reached some bare minimum of quality, quantity is the main determinant. Basically I guess that were still in fundamentally Lancastrian set up. Where if your outnumbered 2-1, you lose taking roughly 3-1 casualties, and winning while outnumbered 2-1 requires you be about 5x better.

I could see the US troop being 5x better than an Iraqi. Which we then brought roughly the same number of troops to the fight with 10x as much equipment per soldier. I don't see the US troop being 5x better than a Chinese soldier, and the material advantage is maybe 2-1, in specific fields. And the Chinese can win from a basically defensive posture in the local area, with all the advantages such a position allows.

I am much less confident in American quality superiority being nearly that high. Plus obviously America just doesn't have deep reserves for any of the things it would need. If the US doesn't win in the first 2 weeks, its going to be in a very bad spot.

 

[Marduk]

Is the black sea fleet equivalent to the Pacific Fleet though?

On Russia's scale, it's not far off. After all, the ship in question was Russia's equivalent to a Ticonderoga class cruiser, and Russia had even fewer of such. Comparing it to loss of few minesweepers (inherently endangered ships in particular due to what their job is) is unreasonable to the point of being humorous.

Not really relevant unless you believe the US is going to escalate to a nuclear war. In which case you probably have better than even odds that China would win that conflict, but like I said, not relevant to this discussion. I'm not sure this is a fight US can genocide its way out of. If you want to escalate to a genocidal war, there's more Chinese, and they have nukes.

How un-American are you expecting the Americans to fight this war?

WW2 level of un-American preferably.

The tet offenive was in large part carried out with conventional troops, and the attacks that continued pressure post Tet which made continued operation non-viable was carried out with conventional troops. Light infantry is part of a conventional army. US lost the Vietnam war in 1967-1969, when the US decided 10,000 casualties a year was not a price the US was willing to pay. And were back to this graph:

While US casualties were "relatively" low, the RVNAF was never taking less than 20,000 casualties in any particular year. While nominally this is about 2% of the RVNAF per year, that still suggests some 14% casualties over the course of heavy fighting, and if those are concentrated in the combat arms, well, regular troops were only about 400,000, and if tooth to tail ratios were even WWI good of roughly 3-1, that means you only have roughly 150,000 frontline troops, in which case 20,000 casualties would be 13% of frontline troops lost per year.

This was obviously not sustainable for South Vietnam.

This is a completely arbitrary way to define "not sustainable casualties" with a clear intent to support any point you try to make. Compare them to the casualties the other side was suffering, to their demographics (very similar between North and South), and you will see this is completely arbitrary, or at least 100% based on non-military factors.

Highlighting History: How "Tet" Began the End of Vietnam

The Tet Offensive was a big deal because it marked the peak of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War.

www.defense.gov

Militarily, a U.S. Win; Publicly, an Ugly Turning Point The Tet Offensive ended in early April 1968 as a military defeat for the communists. The enemy failed to keep any captured territory, the Viet Cong's southern infrastructure was decimated, the South Vietnamese refused to embrace the north's ideals, and thousands of enemy fighters died. At the same time, though, it was a huge loss for the U.S. cause. The shocking images coming out of Vietnam vividly showed the horrors of the war, and many were shocked by the enemy's resilience. Tet made it clear that a U.S. victory in Vietnam was not imminent, and the American public's support began to wane.
Is China's propaganda apparatus as well connected and able to get sympathy now as Soviet one was in the 70's?

Yes, Vietnam had some of that, most of the rest didn't. As I said earlier, I'm much less convinced of the argument failure is simply an issue of rule of engagement. Or at least, civilian imposed ones, and if often a way to shift blame.

No, post-WW2 all were limited with many international, national and media politics defined arbitrary rules which in summary had massive strategic implications.

Well, war is an extension of politics, and Nations at war are generally extensions of the nation at peace. Suggesting the US might win the war, assuming the Americans don't act like America, is about as meaningful as suggesting Iraq would have won the gulf war if it was not faught by Iraqis.

That isn't even really the basis of my argument of course.

But which America?
The America in WW2 was fighting differently than America in Vietnam for example, separated by mere 20 years (which with the chaos of modern media and cultural volatility it enables is equivalent to something like 5-10 now). What America will fight China, who knows?

I mean, your the one assuming that the Chinese will fight a naval war in a way to maximize American Strengths and minimize Chinese ones, so I should ask why do you expect Chinese doctrine to play along?

Ships are not nearly as trivial to find and target as your suggesting. And missiles and torpedoes don't teleport.

Electronic emissions, sound signatures, massive radar signatures, warships do have certain special characteristics that are commonly targeted.

Eh, those all seem to perform within roughly the same order of magnitude of each other. The British Navy getting more money than the British army is different from the suggestion say Naval Captains are brilliant while Army captains are idiots. I don't really see that. Britians did pretty well on land and Sea, Israel Army/Air/Navy all seem to perform to roughly the same level generally. Israel Tanks, Aircraft, and boats all generally seem to be supplied enough to function and manned by people with decent levels of compentence.

Read up on Israeli Navy in Israel's nation state wars...
Yes, nations can decide that their most talented officers will be encouraged to go to Air Force as opposed to Army for example.

Sure, and I remembers there being some good stories of rank incompetence from my Dad's days in the Navy. They had to cancel a landing excersize because the bay doors fell open because people lied on maintenance reports. And some people around him were caught up in a sting because they were signing procurement contracts in exchange for favors. And of course nepotism is an old navy tradition. I wouldn't be suprised if the Navy got worse as it became less Nepotistic.

Now, I don't doubt some of our stuff is still better than theirs, even though much of their stuff is actually newer than ours at this point, and the average US soldier may still be better than theirs.

A lot of their "new" stuff is barely catching up to US tech from decades ago. North Korea also has a lot of "new" equipment but that doesn't mean their new tanks are better than a 20 year old Leopard 2.

I'm just not sure how much it actually matters. That might be the big disagreement here: Does quality or quantity matter?

You seem to be putting extreme weight on quality, to overcome poor terrain, numbers, and victory conditions. That quality can overcome a lot.

In naval and air warfare, the quality/quantity curve is much more biased towards the former than in land warfare. In land warfare you can use 50 year old tanks and SPGs with little modifications and they are good enough. Try that with a 50 year old submarine...

I more see it that once you've reached some bare minimum of quality, quantity is the main determinant. Basically I guess that were still in fundamentally Lancastrian set up. Where if your outnumbered 2-1, you lose taking roughly 3-1 casualties, and winning while outnumbered 2-1 requires you be about 5x better.

Lanchester laws are meant for land warfare with established frontlines and forces exchanging fire, and contain appropriate assumptions and limitations,. Modern naval warfare is way more encounter based, with mobile units not being able to spot each other and being able to hit each other over distances measured on world maps.

I could see the US troop being 5x better than an Iraqi. Which we then brought roughly the same number of troops to the fight with 10x as much equipment per soldier. I don't see the US troop being 5x better than a Chinese soldier, and the material advantage is maybe 2-1, in specific fields. And the Chinese can win from a basically defensive posture in the local area, with all the advantages such a position allows.

I am much less confident in American quality superiority being nearly that high. Plus obviously America just doesn't have deep reserves for any of the things it would need. If the US doesn't win in the first 2 weeks, its going to be in a very bad spot.

In land warfare since ages immemorial routs are the most deadly, and with modern technology there are ways to force them through swift and focused offensive. Blitzkriegs against France and Soviets are even more demonstrative of that, despite the troops not being all that different technologically, and the advantage was mostly in training and strategic organization.

Again, land warfare is not air warfare is not naval warfare. For example in land warfare fortifications and defensive positions are a thing and are a major force multiplier for the defending side, while water is water, and besides, it would be China that would start the war by going on the offensive. The Chinese aim is absolutely not to stalemate such a conflict because that stalemate could mean essentially naval blockade of China with pretty damn painful consequences.
The need for munitions to dispose of large quantities of improvised warships that China may try to use to soak the superior yet expensive US munitions with sheer willingness to lose hulls was noticed, and it's far from an unsolvable problem.

America’s New QUICKSINK Bomb Targets China’s Vast Low-Tech Navy

Here's how QUICKSINK changes things in the Pacific.

www.forbes.com

Even China cannot build ships cheaper than a JDAM, and even peacetime production of those is in 5 digits.

 

[JagerIV]

On Russia's scale, it's not far off. After all, the ship in question was Russia's equivalent to a Ticonderoga class cruiser. Comparing it to loss of few minesweepers (inherently endangered ships in particular due to what their job is) is unreasonable to the point of being humorous.

Well, one, the US has not just lost minesweepers to mines, so, what? I can also call some arbitrarily small formation from Luxemburg to the American equivalent. Doesn't really make them equivalent as were talking here.

WW2 level of un-American preferably.

So, what, cannibalism? WWII America was America too.

This is a completely arbitrary way to define "not sustainable casualties" with a clear intent to support any point you try to make. Compare them to the casualties the other side was suffering, to their demographics, and you will see this is completely arbitrary.

I mean, South Vietnam obviously was not able to sustain those casualties, and collapsed as a military force. It seems even more arbitarty to define sustainability as such where "its not what they were actually able to sustain, but what in my imaginary Utopian model they should have been able to sustain". Also, even if this was not a good model of sustainable, saying no, reality was wrong without any argument is not, well, an argument.

No, post-WW2 all were limited with many international, national and media politics defined arbitrary rules which in summary had massive strategic implications.

Yes, and a China - US war would be faught in a way limited by international, national, and media politics with arbitary (though many aren't actually particularly arbitrary) which will have massive strategic implications. Having established water is indeed wet and war occurs in political contexts, what's the argument?

But which America?
The America in WW2 was fighting differently than America in Vietnam for example, separated by mere 20 years. What America will fight China, who knows?

Well, the scenario I was giving would result in the war happing this year, so the US military as it currently exists. Which I don't believe is a military that would engage in such a riskly, escalatory strategy, but it seem here its driven by a belief that a war with China is a zero risk activity. Which strikes me as a bit crazy, but that's what were exploring. Can the US fight a war with China at zero risk.

Electronic emissions, sound signatures, massive radar signatures, warships do have certain special characteristics that are commonly targeted.

Yes, as has been a case since WWII. Somehow, that did not result in anyone's navy being killed off immediately, even in fairly tight places like the black sea or Baltics. All of those have range limits, signal to noise ratio limits, countermeasures such as jamming and camouflage, and that's before all the things done by a detected ship not to be hit, or destroyed. I'm not sure how the US is supposed to have exact info on the exact location of every chinese ship from their bases on Okinawa. You can send out scout planes, but those would obviously be the primary target, to blind the US.

Read up on Israeli Navy in Israel's nation state wars...
Yes, nations can decide that their most talented officers will be encouraged to go to Air Force as opposed to Army for example.

What, do they regularly ram themselves on shore lines or something?

A lot of their "new" stuff is barely catching up to US tech from decades ago. North Korea also has a lot of "new" equipment but that doesn't mean their new tanks are better than a 20 year old Leopard 2.

In naval and air warfare, the quality/quantity curve is much more biased towards the former than in land warfare. In land warfare you can use 50 year old tanks and SPGs with little modifications and they are good enough. Try that with a 50 year old submarine...

Who knows. Depends what the submarine has to do. Can a 50 year old submarine no longer provide a more survivable platform to drop mines, torpedo supply ships, and launch cruise missiles than a surface combatant? 50 year old subs we are talking about 1970s subs. Has there been an immense tech improvement that makes such old submarines useless? I'm not sure. Maybe we have to the point your better using speedboats to do the sub mission. I'm not sure.

Lanchester laws are meant for land warfare with established frontlines and forces exchanging fire, and contain appropriate assumptions and limitations,. Modern naval warfare is way more encounter based, with mobile units not being able to spot each other and being able to hit each other over distances measured on world maps.

Lanchester is actually even more perfect for Naval war from my understanding, because frontage and terrain are less issues, theoretically. At the very least I'm not sure there's particular reason for it to be less of an issue, even if the way it becomes Lancastrian is somewhat different than in the model. You have 1 destroyer engage 2, those two have twice as many countermeasures and deeper ammunition piles. Or, you have two destroyers, the one destoyer sees 1, shoots, who radios the second undetected one which shoots the other destoyer from an unexpected angle.

Once above a bare minimum level, it seems likely to be lancastrian.

In land warfare since ages immemorial routs are the most deadly, and with modern technology there are ways to force them through swift and focused offensive. Blitzkriegs against France and Soviets are even more demonstrative of that, despite the troops not being all that different technologically, and the advantage was mostly in training and strategic organization.

But I don't believe your trying to invade China, so what point are you trying to make? Modern forces are practically much harder to rout anyways.

Again, land warfare is not air warfare is not naval warfare. For example in land warfare fortifications and defensive positions are a thing and are a major force multiplier for the defending side, while water is water, and besides, it would be China that would start the war by going on the offensive. The Chinese aim is absolutely not to stalemate such a conflict because that stalemate could mean essentially naval blockade of China with pretty damn painful consequences.

China currently could survive fairly well for a year on current stockpiles with fairly minimal sacrifices. America just doesn't have the depths of reserves to maintain high tempo operations for all that long, so its more a matter of letting the american fleet attack until it cumulates in 1-3 months of fighting, then doing the counterattack as necesary, all the while engaging in guerilla actions.

There is really no reason early on for the Chinese fleet to leave the cover of land based aircraft, and probably not even land based missiles, for the first 1-3 months of the war outside some raiding activities. Force the US to grind its teeth down on the full unified strength of the Air Force, missile force, Navy, bunkers, and civilian economy, hopefully wasting as many strikes on decoys and other wasted shots.

Then once the US attack cumulates you can then work to grind forward. While the army advances in the middle east, South East Asia, Europe, and Korea, in that order of priority. If after 3 months the US navy hasn't successful annihilated the Chinese air force and Navy, while the US has been pushed out of the middle east, net win.

Its a big long war. If the US decides to escalate directly to WWIII, then Taiwan is merely the trigger, not the goal, like Serbia in WWI. Goal is to defeat the US, as it would be in any situation where America decides to violently contest China's claim on Taiwan. In which case the primary goal is to undermine and break American power wherever it can be hit, and Taiwan, like Serbia, can be captured at a point where it is tactically convient. Taking it end of year 1, or year 3, doesn't particularly matter.

The need for munitions to dispose of large quantities of improvised warships that China may try to use to soak the superior yet expensive US munitions with sheer willingness to lose hulls was noticed, and it's far from an unsolvable problem.

America’s New QUICKSINK Bomb Targets China’s Vast Low-Tech Navy

Here's how QUICKSINK changes things in the Pacific.

www.forbes.com

Even China cannot build ships cheaper than a JDAM, and even peacetime production of those is in 5 digits.

Sure, but the weak link there is the plane. I do not believe current stealth planes can carry a 2,000 lb bomb in a stealthy set up. Making the plane more identifiable, at which point a SAM or intercept craft can be sent. If Yugoslavia is a guild, the reaction of a plane with such heavy ordinance being shot at is to drop the bomb prematurely and maneuver to dodge.

Thus the immense importance of the PLA navy and air force not dieing. Higher civilian casualties to preserve the force is well worth it. As long as the Air force and Navy continue to exist, the effectiveness of the US navy and Air force is greatly diminished.

Plus, well, its not like China couldn't equip all its small boats with radars and early warning systems. I could by a 4 KW radar for a boat for about $2,000 bucks. Equipping all 1 million ships in the maritime militia with such a system optimized to early warn about a bomb, or just sense radar or something like that, would be about $2 billion dollars.

If you need something a bit more, you can apparently buy an S band radar with 15 km range against ships for $50,000 bucks. So, early warning radar's about as much as a JDAM. So, $50 billion to equip the Entire militia with 1 million radars. Probably just put those on the bigger ships, and then see if you can make do with something cheaper for the unpowered sail boats. Then again, maybe the militia can be encouraged to embrace the militianess and buy out of their own pocket, maybe with a tax subsidy or something. Those who bought a $1 million dollar fishing boat probably wouldn't take too much proding to buy a 100-200k countermeasure system, while those with 10,000 and below might be convinced to buy a 1-2k countermeasure system, even if its main use is zerba level countermeasures, of just adding 10 million radars spewing out into the area to confuse people.

China does also produce millions of radars. In 2023 they installed 20 million for cars alone. Radars are mass producible, spammable tech at this point.

So, sure, a fishing boat can't shoot down a modern fighter, but that was true pre-quicksink. I'm not actually sure what big change is theorized by this. 100 aircraft can sink a 100 ships. That's the same pre- and post. The counter is to just spam more, with air and naval cover to limit US effective spamming.

 

[Marduk]

Well, one, the US has not just lost minesweepers to mines, so, what? I can also call some arbitrarily small formation from Luxemburg to the American equivalent. Doesn't really make them equivalent as were talking here.

Slava class is a guided missile cruiser too, and of similar tonnage to Ticonderoga.

So, what, cannibalism? WWII America was America too.

Yet it *somehow* was able to fight a war without putting a set of utterly retarded and self-imposed restrictions on itself that made the war unwinnable.

I mean, South Vietnam obviously was not able to sustain those casualties, and collapsed as a military force. It seems even more arbitarty to define sustainability as such where "its not what they were actually able to sustain, but what in my imaginary Utopian model they should have been able to sustain". Also, even if this was not a good model of sustainable, saying no, reality was wrong without any argument is not, well, an argument.

South Vietnam collapsed because USA reduced material military aid while Soviets increased theirs.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/why-south-vietnam-was-defeated/2016/11/25/aa01f752-b03f-11e6-bc2d-19b3d759cfe7_story.html.

What you are trying to do is relabel politically driven incompetence/treason/distilled idiocy as a military failure. Technically the war was perfectly winnable. But if you decide to not fight, or fight only with arbitrarily limited assets, any war can be made unwinnable, and any casualties can be called unsustainable.

Yes, and a China - US war would be faught in a way limited by international, national, and media politics with arbitary (though many aren't actually particularly arbitrary) which will have massive strategic implications. Having established water is indeed wet and war occurs in political contexts, what's the argument?

The political-ideological complex that stands behind most of those restrictions is not very experienced or equipped to hamper US efforts in naval warfare.
There won't be journos going around and interviewing third world families hit by collateral damage from urban fighting with jihadis and putting it all over the media in this one.
No whining about drone striking weddings or civilians shot by twitchy guards.

Well, the scenario I was giving would result in the war happing this year, so the US military as it currently exists. Which I don't believe is a military that would engage in such a riskly, escalatory strategy, but it seem here its driven by a belief that a war with China is a zero risk activity. Which strikes me as a bit crazy, but that's what were exploring. Can the US fight a war with China at zero risk.

Sullivan is exactly the kind of screwup who could push such retarded ROEs, but even then he's not the only one of the puppeteers. But governments in USA still do change every few years.

Yes, as has been a case since WWII. Somehow, that did not result in anyone's navy being killed off immediately, even in fairly tight places like the black sea or Baltics. All of those have range limits, signal to noise ratio limits, countermeasures such as jamming and camouflage, and that's before all the things done by a detected ship not to be hit, or destroyed.

Praying Mantis, Falklands. Massive losses of hardware in very short time. Of course no one's navy was massacred in places where there was no large scale war to begin with, and WW2 naval warfare was quite different from modern one, much like WW2 air warfare was very different. Planes spotting each other was actually a major issue and so the patrol routes and numbers had to be there, now a handful of fighters or one AWACS can surveil a mid sized country.

I'm not sure how the US is supposed to have exact info on the exact location of every chinese ship from their bases on Okinawa. You can send out scout planes, but those would obviously be the primary target, to blind the US.

Sats, planes, subs, sonar networks, ELINT, this is the job of military intel and generals.

What, do they regularly ram themselves on shore lines or something?

Hanit incident. Loss of Dakar. Mysterious explosions on missile boats. This sort of stuff. Worse than running aground.

Who knows. Depends what the submarine has to do. Can a 50 year old submarine no longer provide a more survivable platform to drop mines, torpedo supply ships, and launch cruise missiles than a surface combatant? 50 year old subs we are talking about 1970s subs. Has there been an immense tech improvement that makes such old submarines useless? I'm not sure. Maybe we have to the point your better using speedboats to do the sub mission. I'm not sure.

Yes. Being so old, mechanically probably not doing great, it means it's a loud fuck, and will get utterly screwed by the first modern ASW platform it encounters.

Lanchester is actually even more perfect for Naval war from my understanding, because frontage and terrain are less issues, theoretically. At the very least I'm not sure there's particular reason for it to be less of an issue, even if the way it becomes Lancastrian is somewhat different than in the model. You have 1 destroyer engage 2, those two have twice as many countermeasures and deeper ammunition piles. Or, you have two destroyers, the one destoyer sees 1, shoots, who radios the second undetected one which shoots the other destoyer from an unexpected angle.

Nope. How do you simulate the airbase or carrier 1000 km away? It may or may not mount a missile strike on the other side's destroyers.
Also it doesn't simulate active defenses at all.

Once above a bare minimum level, it seems likely to be lancastrian.

Nope, not even in gun era naval battles, less so now.

But I don't believe your trying to invade China, so what point are you trying to make? Modern forces are practically much harder to rout anyways.

Kherson retreat. Supply collapse and/or blitz tactics absolutely can do that to modern forces.

China currently could survive fairly well for a year on current stockpiles with fairly minimal sacrifices.

They can dream. 2-4 months tops.

America just doesn't have the depths of reserves to maintain high tempo operations for all that long, so its more a matter of letting the american fleet attack until it cumulates in 1-3 months of fighting, then doing the counterattack as necesary, all the while engaging in guerilla actions.

What guerilla action on the fucking open ocean?
What is the reserve bottleneck?
Also remember, in naval warfare since WW2 ignoring the impact of airforce is an extremely dangerous thing to do. Ships aren't the only factor, USA has shitloads of aircraft, good aircraft at that.

There is really no reason early on for the Chinese fleet to leave the cover of land based aircraft, and probably not even land based missiles, for the first 1-3 months of the war outside some raiding activities. Force the US to grind its teeth down on the full unified strength of the Air Force, missile force, Navy, bunkers, and civilian economy, hopefully wasting as many strikes on decoys and other wasted shots.

China's land based aircraft may have bigger concerns than covering the fleet. Like surviving.
Also US forces do not need to enter the range of either to launch long range missiles at Chinese ships.

Then once the US attack cumulates you can then work to grind forward. While the army advances in the middle east, South East Asia, Europe, and Korea, in that order of priority. If after 3 months the US navy hasn't successful annihilated the Chinese air force and Navy, while the US has been pushed out of the middle east, net win.

How, with what? Are you suggesting China will lead a 4 front land war, some in other regions, and succeed? This is some World in Conflict level fantasy.

Its a big long war. If the US decides to escalate directly to WWIII, then Taiwan is merely the trigger, not the goal, like Serbia in WWI. Goal is to defeat the US, as it would be in any situation where America decides to violently contest China's claim on Taiwan. In which case the primary goal is to undermine and break American power wherever it can be hit, and Taiwan, like Serbia, can be captured at a point where it is tactically convient. Taking it end of year 1, or year 3, doesn't particularly matter.

If it's WW3, Japan and SK get tagged in, turning around a lot of your arguments on quantity and defense advantage.

Sure, but the weak link there is the plane. I do not believe current stealth planes can carry a 2,000 lb bomb in a stealthy set up. Making the plane more identifiable, at which point a SAM or intercept craft can be sent. If Yugoslavia is a guild, the reaction of a plane with such heavy ordinance being shot at is to drop the bomb prematurely and maneuver to dodge.

It is not a matter of belief, it is a matter of data.

Aerospaceweb.org | Ask Us - F-35 JSF Weapon Carriage Capacity

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A and C variant F-35 can carry 2,000lb class weapons internally. Assuming a stealth plane is needed at all.

Thus the immense importance of the PLA navy and air force not dieing. Higher civilian casualties to preserve the force is well worth it. As long as the Air force and Navy continue to exist, the effectiveness of the US navy and Air force is greatly diminished.

Plus, well, its not like China couldn't equip all its small boats with radars and early warning systems. I could by a 4 KW radar for a boat for about $2,000 bucks. Equipping all 1 million ships in the maritime militia with such a system optimized to early warn about a bomb, or just sense radar or something like that, would be about $2 billion dollars.

You sir are joking. A 50 nm range civilian navigational radar is absolutely not something you can use to warn about bombs, detect warplanes and do shit like that.
This is like claiming your gaming PC can do pretty much the same stuff a NASA supercomputer does at a tiny fraction of the price. This is an admission of not knowing even the basics of subject matter.
Why does every navy go through so much trouble with putting expensive radars on huge warships that cost hundreds of million dollars most of which is the electronics when a 2k USD radar people put on their yachts and half rotten fishing boats can do it *almost* as well, for real?

If you need something a bit more, you can apparently buy an S band radar with 15 km range against ships for $50,000 bucks.

As above. Look at the price of a SHORAD vehicle like Pantsir or Skyranger. Even that is not really adequate defense against gliding bombs as it is outranged, but it is a bare minimum of useful sensor capability as far as remotely modern air defense is concerned.

So, early warning radar's about as much as a JDAM. So, $50 billion to equip the Entire militia with 1 million radars. Probably just put those on the bigger ships, and then see if you can make do with something cheaper for the unpowered sail boats. Then again, maybe the militia can be encouraged to embrace the militianess and buy out of their own pocket, maybe with a tax subsidy or something. Those who bought a $1 million dollar fishing boat probably wouldn't take too much proding to buy a 100-200k countermeasure system, while those with 10,000 and below might be convinced to buy a 1-2k countermeasure system, even if its main use is zerba level countermeasures, of just adding 10 million radars spewing out into the area to confuse people.

China does also produce millions of radars. In 2023 they installed 20 million for cars alone. Radars are mass producible, spammable tech at this point.

And radars are not made equal.

Proximity fuze - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Radio Proximity Fuzes

www.smecc.org

People put tiny passive radars in artillery and AA shells since WW2.
Long range AA missiles have their own active radars, yes even US ones.
Missiles, single use missiles have radars of their own, better and way more expensive than your examples.

Active radar homing - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Of course it's not the sort of radar you would put in a fighter or Shilka, and even that is orders of magnitude weaker than the radars you put on a destroyer or AWACS plane. And all these radars are priced accordingly to their capabilities. You can get a 500$ PC, but it will not have the capabilities of a 10,000$ PC, and the 10,000$ PC will still not have the capabilities of a 100,000$ server, and the 100,000$ server will not have the capabilities of a 50 million dollar supercomputer.
Is it so hard to understand?

Now recalculate that with the minimum useful yardstick of air defense electronics, land SHORAD vehicles.
An export Pantsir costs about 15m USD, its kinda meh turns out, but perfect for our yardstick. Let's say China makes a cheaper, shoddier version, even stripping off the weapons because can't trust the fishermen, for 5m USD.
See the problem?
Now the 1 million defense systems of limited utility cost 5 trillion USD. That's about 7 years worth of China's whole defense budget. Before even the cost of training people to actually maintain this stuff and the costs of parts for it.

So, sure, a fishing boat can't shoot down a modern fighter, but that was true pre-quicksink. I'm not actually sure what big change is theorized by this. 100 aircraft can sink a 100 ships. That's the same pre- and post. The counter is to just spam more, with air and naval cover to limit US effective spamming.

Even if 100 aircraft can sink only 100 ships... They can do it very 8-16 hours. Again and again and again. It adds up to thousands of ships in a month.

 

[Zachowon]

@JagerIV you do know that you can use civilian satellites to track ships right?

And cheap radars are not the same as expensive ones.
They have diffrent capabilities

 

[JagerIV]

Slava class is a guided missile cruiser too, and of similar tonnage to Ticonderoga.

Yes, and the US has had a Ticonderoga heavily damaged by a mine. 90s American Damage control is better than modern Russian damage control. I'm not sure this is a suprise to anyone. That's what I'm not sure what your argument here is.

Yet it *somehow* was able to fight a war without putting a set of utterly retarded and self-imposed restrictions on itself that made the war unwinnable.

Sure, since it won.

South Vietnam collapsed because USA reduced material military aid while Soviets increased theirs.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/why-south-vietnam-was-defeated/2016/11/25/aa01f752-b03f-11e6-bc2d-19b3d759cfe7_story.html.

What you are trying to do is relabel politically driven incompetence/treason/distilled idiocy as a military failure. Technically the war was perfectly winnable. But if you decide to not fight, or fight only with arbitrarily limited assets, any war can be made unwinnable, and any casualties can be called unsustainable.

Sure, and we can say if only the Germans were willing to fight harder in WWII, they could have totally won. After all, the war ended with tens of million of Germans still alive, so obviously without such politically driven treason of every German not being willing to die to the last man for Hitler Germany could have won.

That would be my concern with this explanation, and why I'm always a bit concerned its a cope. sustainability is almost always primarily a political calculation. A set level of casualties was less sustainable for the Italians than the Germans, who could sustain less casualties than the Japanese could in certain situations. On raw numbers entering drafting age, Ukraine and Russia can theoretically sustain 100-200k vs 300-600k casualties per year indefinitely. The raw numbers of new bodies available per year is probably not however going to be the limiting factor in that campaign.

The political-ideological complex that stands behind most of those restrictions is not very experienced or equipped to hamper US efforts in naval warfare.
There won't be journos going around and interviewing third world families hit by collateral damage from urban fighting with jihadis and putting it all over the media in this one.
No whining about drone striking weddings or civilians shot by twitchy guards.

Sullivan is exactly the kind of screwup who could push such retarded ROEs, but even then he's not the only one of the puppeteers. But governments in USA still do change every few years.

Eh, without discussing what restrictions were talking about, this is probably just stabing at air, which is never going to amount to anything.

Praying Mantis, Falklands. Massive losses of hardware in very short time. Of course no one's navy was massacred in places where there was no large scale war to begin with, and WW2 naval warfare was quite different from modern one, much like WW2 air warfare was very different. Planes spotting each other was actually a major issue and so the patrol routes and numbers had to be there, now a handful of fighters or one AWACS can surveil a mid sized country.

I don't think Praying Mantis or Falklands were particularly large losses in particularly short periods of time. I'd have to see a timeline on that to be sure. I'm expecting losses to be huge, but that they don't occur as fast as the US needs it to. If China can keep military dead under 1 million for the first year, that's probably a pretty good year. But, keep in mind, 1 million casualties a year is only about 3,000 dead a day, probably something like 10,000 overall serious casualties a day. Though that's still only comes to about 3-4 million casualties a year, with probably 1-2 million of that being recoverable on the multi year timeline.

This is good number if it could be reached because losses on the Korean front itself is likely to be something like 10,000 casualties a day, at least I think that's the number I've seen. And given the South Korean military size, it would take a year of that level of intensity to burn through the South Korean military, longer with American and Japanese reinforcements.

Probably would do a year of grinding war on the existing boarder while air and naval campaigns degrade/steal the Korean fleet and steadily deplete Korean reserves, which is going to take at least a year. Once the blockade has degraded the South Korean economy after 1-2 years, plus any grind on the front line, then you can push through.

Taiwan front your probably talking serval major warships lost a day and a dozen+ aircraft on the Chinese side.

Sats, planes, subs, sonar networks, ELINT, this is the job of military intel and generals.

Yes, and those are the platforms which would be the primary target of China early on. I'm not sure how deep the US reserves are on how many of these it can afford to lose before it has to ease up on the pace of operations.

Hanit incident. Loss of Dakar. Mysterious explosions on missile boats. This sort of stuff. Worse than running aground.

I guess I'll take your word for it.

Yes. Being so old, mechanically probably not doing great, it means it's a loud fuck, and will get utterly screwed by the first modern ASW platform it encounters.

Sure, but as I said, the question isn't compared to utopia, but compared to the next best tool: is it so poor that a fishing boat has a better chance of completing its mission?

Nope. How do you simulate the airbase or carrier 1000 km away? It may or may not mount a missile strike on the other side's destroyers.
Also it doesn't simulate active defenses at all.

Nope, not even in gun era naval battles, less so now.

Salvo combat is Lancastrian, which is what I've been referring to. I've been using my salvo combat model to check my conclusions in the post on the effect of numbers vs quality. When someone discusses how combat is Lancastrian, one is generally discussing the relationship between numbers and quality to ultimate battlefield outcome. And how it generally can take a very large quality advantage to overcome a numerical advantage. Not the specific model/formula from 1916, which obviously is extremely simplified. Just as a Newtonian model isn't necessarily using Newtons exact formula's from the 1600s, but the basic logic of a Newtonian universe.

History and Technology - N-Squared Law - NavWeaps

www.navweaps.com

Kherson retreat. Supply collapse and/or blitz tactics absolutely can do that to modern forces.

Yes, that's a retreat, not a rout. The other front was a bit of a rout, but even with how bad the situation was, it wasn't even that much of a rout. It being hard to do with modern weapon is not the same thing as it never happens.

They can dream. 2-4 months tops.

The Navy disagrees with you.

What guerilla action on the fucking open ocean?
What is the reserve bottleneck?
Also remember, in naval warfare since WW2 ignoring the impact of airforce is an extremely dangerous thing to do. Ships aren't the only factor, USA has shitloads of aircraft, good aircraft at that.

I'm not. I assume this would primarily be an air war, at least on the Chinese side in the Taiwan area, with the Navy playing a supporting role to the air force.

Guerilla actions

1) mine laying. Just about everything subs do.

2) Sinking/capturing various civilian vessels. Well, ideally siezing as much as possible. Korea, Taiwan, and Japan have large fishing and tranport ships. Every one sunk undermines the civilian economy, removes a potential sensor point, and raises pain for continuing's the war. Every one captured gains prisoners who at worse remove labor from the enemy, and at best are future bargaining chips, and can probably be put to labor for the Chinese side. Taiwan and South Korea between them have at least 100,000 fishing ships. Any captured by light boats or helicopters can help make up for the high losses, while still undermining Korean supplies.

3) Attacking American and other blue logistics. Probably the main target of the Stealth planes the Chinese do have would be taking out AWACs, freight, air refueling. Shooting F-22 and F-35 is probably hard and riskly. Much better to do the relatively low risk actions to degrade the effectiveness of sorties while wearing out the logistic support and steadily degrade the ability to launch and sustain F-35 and F-22 operations. For example, there are about 90 E-2 Radar planes in service with the US Navy. The Chinese air force can hide when the the US deploys fighters in mass, while using the stealth planes to launch long range missiles to take out the radar planes. If the Chinese can take out 1-2 radar planes a day, a lot of the American sensor network would be degraded and counter attacks can be launched.

A US Carrier can be very hard to strike out at ocean. So don't waste effort if its going to have a low return. Rather than using an E-2 to try and find the Carrier, shoot the E-2 to degrade the Carrier's aircraft's ability to launch effective attacks. Eventually it has to return to port, and then your human intelligence can report its arrival, and you can then launch an air attack to either try and sink it or just drop a bunch of mines in the harbor so it stays stuck in port for a bit longer can't can' meaningfully contribute. Or have commandos plant some bombs on it and sink it that way, though on such a large vessel a Cole like operation might make more sense. Or just have a partisan get into a hotel the pilots are taking leave at and stab them. Stabbing pilots in their bunks probably effectively degrades Carrier operations as much as anything else.

4) General hiding of forces. With about 3,000 aircraft, you might divide it between 1,000 on the front in coastal areas, dispersed across the 100s of airfields I believe they have to improve survivability, another 1,000 in deeper reserves, say 1,000 km or so back where they're harder to hit, and I think its where most of the 40+ underground bases are, so you can do maintenance and rest with relative safety, but attempts to actually punch through or deep into Chinese airspace can still be countered. And then keep the remaining 1,000 back as the deep reserve, or deployed to other fronts.

Missile boats and subs are very hidable. Subs already have at least one underground sub pen in China, and given North Korea's tendency to build lots of under ground naval bunkers for subs and boats, China probably has a good number more of them. And since they're not particularly tall or wide, having simply covered ports is pretty easy, to at least cover for satellite and aerial reconnaissance.

Covering bigger ships is harder, but still doable. There are several covered shipyards, and adding tents or building a metal roof over various ports and especially dry docks is probably not particularly difficult. You can build these pretty big. At worst, you cover things with tarps, so its harder for the US to tell what's damaged or not, determine what's a functional ship vs a shell of one or a decoy. And general camouflage operations. There's a lot of coastline to hide on, and with at sea replenishment abilities is quite doable to park most anywhere and still get resupplied. Depending on the balance of survivability of hiding vs moving ships.

But, if a harbor has 10 warships, a 1,000 locations where it could be, and 90 decoys that could be mistaken for the warships, the effectiveness of strikes can be dramatically reduced.

5) Tipiz like stuff, but in a much closer fight where the amount of material that ship ties down is actually impactful.

China's land based aircraft may have bigger concerns than covering the fleet. Like surviving.
Also US forces do not need to enter the range of either to launch long range missiles at Chinese ships.

Yes, the aircraft would be doing a guerilla campaign, just as the navy. Which weapons are you talking about that the US can launch without entering range?


Lets look at the Map or ranges 500 km, 1,000, and 2,000 km: 500 is easy range of everything, 1,000 is the fighter range, and 2,000 km is bomber range, or fighters/ships moving out with their own cruise missiles.

The Chinese navy generally doesn't need to leave the 500 km umbrella to do most of what it needs to do, while everything in the green can be subject to harassing attacks to degrade the amount of power the Blue can project into China's water.

What weapons are you talking about?

How, with what? Are you suggesting China will lead a 4 front land war, some in other regions, and succeed? This is some World in Conflict level fantasy.

I've described the basic idea earlier. I can go into it again with more thought, though this reply is already getting pretty long.

If it's WW3, Japan and SK get tagged in, turning around a lot of your arguments on quantity and defense advantage.

Yeah, I'm assuming Japan and SK get tagged in for the sake of @LordsFire scenario of a general blockade. On the logic that if any one of Taiwan, South Korea, or Japan don't agree to a general blockade, a general blockade doesn't happen. I'm less sure on whether they would actually be willing to commit to a general war with China. But, taking as given that they are, then they have to be involved and part of breaking blue is breaking S. Korea and Japan will. S. Korea probably just gets destroyed, and will provide a good place to attrition out American and Japanese troops. Japan hopefully if things go to plan for China eventually sees reason and flips like Italy. Otherwise breaking Japan probably eventually requires nuclear war. But, that's a 2-4 years into the war problem.

However, the principle advantages of defense still applies to the Taiwan front. Breaking the Island chain is key to destroying the US power in the area. And, as with most lines, its likely easier to turn the flank than break through the center. So, you do as Germany in the World wars: France can try to attack directly into the France German frontier, and the Germans move to turn the flank. South East Asia/the middle east is the relative Belgium of the American defensive line, and thus would be the main target of offensive.

Ideally, you don't need to go through S Korea, the Switzerland equivalent of the other front. I think S Korean neutrality is not as impossible as people here might think, but if they are involved, it makes sense to commit troops against it, not to push through now, but to tie down Blue troops and supplies holding the line so other fronts are more likely to be successful, and steady attritioning the front, so that over the course of 3-5 years South Korea is eventually destroyed.

Europe is the same thing. Putting more troop and supplies to support Russia keeps Ukraine a sink for Blue troops and material, ideally without having to actually do all that much fighting on the Chinese side. But, if China can move 300,000 light infantry and support personnel in Belarus can keep several hundred thousand American troops and lots of planes, tanks, and artillery in Europe in case of invasion of Poland or the Baltics, that's a net win. And if Poland does decide to invade Belarus, the Chinese, Belarusians, and Russians can hopefully lose slow enough for other fronts and mobilizations to occur to carry out counter attacks later.

It is not a matter of belief, it is a matter of data.

Aerospaceweb.org | Ask Us - F-35 JSF Weapon Carriage Capacity

aerospaceweb.org

A and C variant F-35 can carry 2,000lb class weapons internally. Assuming a stealth plane is needed at all.

You sir are joking. A 50 nm range civilian navigational radar is absolutely not something you can use to warn about bombs, detect warplanes and do shit like that.
This is like claiming your gaming PC can do pretty much the same stuff a NASA supercomputer does at a tiny fraction of the price. This is an admission of not knowing even the basics of subject matter.
Why does every navy go through so much trouble with putting expensive radars on huge warships that cost hundreds of million dollars most of which is the electronics when a 2k USD radar people put on their yachts and half rotten fishing boats can do it *almost* as well, for real?

As above. Look at the price of a SHORAD vehicle like Pantsir or Skyranger. Even that is not really adequate defense against gliding bombs as it is outranged, but it is a bare minimum of useful sensor capability as far as remotely modern air defense is concerned.

And radars are not made equal.

Proximity fuze - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Radio Proximity Fuzes

www.smecc.org

People put tiny passive radars in artillery and AA shells since WW2.
Long range AA missiles have their own active radars, yes even US ones.
Missiles, single use missiles have radars of their own, better and way more expensive than your examples.

Active radar homing - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Of course it's not the sort of radar you would put in a fighter or Shilka, and even that is orders of magnitude weaker than the radars you put on a destroyer or AWACS plane. And all these radars are priced accordingly to their capabilities. You can get a 500$ PC, but it will not have the capabilities of a 10,000$ PC, and the 10,000$ PC will still not have the capabilities of a 100,000$ server, and the 100,000$ server will not have the capabilities of a 50 million dollar supercomputer.
Is it so hard to understand?

Now recalculate that with the minimum useful yardstick of air defense electronics, land SHORAD vehicles.
An export Pantsir costs about 15m USD, its kinda meh turns out, but perfect for our yardstick. Let's say China makes a cheaper, shoddier version, even stripping off the weapons because can't trust the fishermen, for 5m USD.
See the problem?
Now the 1 million defense systems of limited utility cost 5 trillion USD. That's about 7 years worth of China's whole defense budget. Before even the cost of training people to actually maintain this stuff and the costs of parts for it.

It depends what you need it to do. If without warning, the bomb has a 90% chance of scoring a kill, but with a $10,000 system it can give the driver 10-30 seconds to know your being shot at and you do evasive maneuvers that reduces chance of a kill to 80%, and if you can tie that into a smoke/whatever launcher that reduces chance of a kill to 40-60%, then that's probably a fairly cost effective system, especially considering its the absolute last line of defense.

A radar good enough to realize your under attack is a much, much lighter ask than a radar to get targeting data, like a what a Pantsir would have. This is sort of like suggesting, since tank optics are expensive, binoculars that can see a tank moving down a road also have to be expensive.

Even if 100 aircraft can sink only 100 ships... They can do it very 8-16 hours. Again and again and again. It adds up to thousands of ships in a month.

Sure. Same with any other situation. Unchallenged anything can kill lots of anything. Pre bomb unchallenged aircraft could also destroy cumulatively thousands of ships. That's what I meant. What prevents 100s of aircraft from sinking thousands of ships were other things pre bomb, and what limits how quickly they can kill are going to be the other issues post bomb.

 

[Marduk]

Yes, and the US has had a Ticonderoga heavily damaged by a mine. 90s American Damage control is better than modern Russian damage control. I'm not sure this is a suprise to anyone. That's what I'm not sure what your argument here is.

It was a major ship loss, to a handful of second rate missile, because a ship that looks quite scary on paper turned out to have maintenance and training issues and so be a paper tiger just on account of those little details.

Sure, since it won.



Sure, and we can say if only the Germans were willing to fight harder in WWII, they could have totally won. After all, the war ended with tens of million of Germans still alive, so obviously without such politically driven treason of every German not being willing to die to the last man for Hitler Germany could have won.

No we cannot. Germans by the end were fighting in total war mode. They could throw more manpower at it (crappy manpower, they were already scrapping the bottom) but industrially they were exhausted already. USA never even went to total war mode, and since WW2 was always more far more restricted by optics than material resources.

That would be my concern with this explanation, and why I'm always a bit concerned its a cope. sustainability is almost always primarily a political calculation. A set level of casualties was less sustainable for the Italians than the Germans, who could sustain less casualties than the Japanese could in certain situations. On raw numbers entering drafting age, Ukraine and Russia can theoretically sustain 100-200k vs 300-600k casualties per year indefinitely. The raw numbers of new bodies available per year is probably not however going to be the limiting factor in that campaign.

No, if you bring WW2 with few players going total war, physical resources very much were their bottleneck. No amount of propaganda can make you have more oil, or make your steel better.
There is a "set" level of sustainable casualties in the material sense in terms of "available bodies", and there is a political set that in more hostile political climate is a tiny fraction of one percent of the abovementioned number. These two limits cannot be confused.
And yeah, in modern warfare countries are going to run out of material assets to equip troops way before they run out of warm bodies, as sending soldiers into modern peer warfare with just a crappy rifle is only one step ahead of mass suicide.

Eh, without discussing what restrictions were talking about, this is probably just stabing at air, which is never going to amount to anything.



I don't think Praying Mantis or Falklands were particularly large losses in particularly short periods of time. I'd have to see a timeline on that to be sure. I'm expecting losses to be huge, but that they don't occur as fast as the US needs it to. If China can keep military dead under 1 million for the first year, that's probably a pretty good year. But, keep in mind, 1 million casualties a year is only about 3,000 dead a day, probably something like 10,000 overall serious casualties a day. Though that's still only comes to about 3-4 million casualties a year, with probably 1-2 million of that being recoverable on the multi year timeline.

Yet again, we don't talk land war. Important casualties would be measured in ships and planes, not people. It takes month to build new planes and years to build new ships, and that's with economy in perfect order.

This is good number if it could be reached because losses on the Korean front itself is likely to be something like 10,000 casualties a day, at least I think that's the number I've seen. And given the South Korean military size, it would take a year of that level of intensity to burn through the South Korean military, longer with American and Japanese reinforcements.

Probably would do a year of grinding war on the existing boarder while air and naval campaigns degrade/steal the Korean fleet and steadily deplete Korean reserves, which is going to take at least a year. Once the blockade has degraded the South Korean economy after 1-2 years, plus any grind on the front line, then you can push through.

Taiwan front your probably talking serval major warships lost a day and a dozen+ aircraft on the Chinese side.

China would not have much of an economy after 1-2 years of such war. Export based economy is a bitch.

Yes, and those are the platforms which would be the primary target of China early on. I'm not sure how deep the US reserves are on how many of these it can afford to lose before it has to ease up on the pace of operations.

Would they be successfully targeted? With what?

I guess I'll take your word for it.



Sure, but as I said, the question isn't compared to utopia, but compared to the next best tool: is it so poor that a fishing boat has a better chance of completing its mission?

Only slightly better, at dramatically higher cost.

Salvo combat is Lancastrian, which is what I've been referring to. I've been using my salvo combat model to check my conclusions in the post on the effect of numbers vs quality. When someone discusses how combat is Lancastrian, one is generally discussing the relationship between numbers and quality to ultimate battlefield outcome. And how it generally can take a very large quality advantage to overcome a numerical advantage. Not the specific model/formula from 1916, which obviously is extremely simplified. Just as a Newtonian model isn't necessarily using Newtons exact formula's from the 1600s, but the basic logic of a Newtonian universe.

History and Technology - N-Squared Law - NavWeaps

www.navweaps.com

Modern naval combat is not salvo combat.

Yes, that's a retreat, not a rout. The other front was a bit of a rout, but even with how bad the situation was, it wasn't even that much of a rout. It being hard to do with modern weapon is not the same thing as it never happens.



The Navy disagrees with you.

Then they or you got something wrong.

Will China’s Increased Oil Supplies Change Xi’s Taiwan Calculus?

As Chinese forces brush back U.S. ships and planes in international waters, concerns about war over Taiwan rise. For decades, free-world leaders banked on two advantages to deter China: its military weakness and its economic Achilles’ heel, a dependence on Middle Eastern energy that could be...

www.hudson.org

In short, while China guards its secrets, experts' analysis supports assessments that its reliable supply in a crisis might exceed four months' worth of imports.

*may* exceed 4 months. Years? Not a chance.

I'm not. I assume this would primarily be an air war, at least on the Chinese side in the Taiwan area, with the Navy playing a supporting role to the air force.

Guerilla actions

1) mine laying. Just about everything subs do.

2) Sinking/capturing various civilian vessels. Well, ideally siezing as much as possible. Korea, Taiwan, and Japan have large fishing and tranport ships. Every one sunk undermines the civilian economy, removes a potential sensor point, and raises pain for continuing's the war. Every one captured gains prisoners who at worse remove labor from the enemy, and at best are future bargaining chips, and can probably be put to labor for the Chinese side. Taiwan and South Korea between them have at least 100,000 fishing ships. Any captured by light boats or helicopters can help make up for the high losses, while still undermining Korean supplies.

Mine laying means not fighting, and mines know no friends. If China wants to blockade itself, nice. Same goes for fighting Japanese civilian fleet. Capturing? Really? Great way to arrange meetings between Chinese warships/helicopters and Japanese missiles, that's it.

3) Attacking American and other blue logistics. Probably the main target of the Stealth planes the Chinese do have would be taking out AWACs, freight, air refueling. Shooting F-22 and F-35 is probably hard and riskly. Much better to do the relatively low risk actions to degrade the effectiveness of sorties while wearing out the logistic support and steadily degrade the ability to launch and sustain F-35 and F-22 operations. For example, there are about 90 E-2 Radar planes in service with the US Navy. The Chinese air force can hide when the the US deploys fighters in mass, while using the stealth planes to launch long range missiles to take out the radar planes. If the Chinese can take out 1-2 radar planes a day, a lot of the American sensor network would be degraded and counter attacks can be launched.

That's nothing like guerilla warfare, have fighters take pot shots at AWACS, and it's full scale war, period. Stealth is a continuum, not a binary. F-22's and F-35's will try to intercept these planes and their airbases and will have some success.

A US Carrier can be very hard to strike out at ocean. So don't waste effort if its going to have a low return. Rather than using an E-2 to try and find the Carrier, shoot the E-2 to degrade the Carrier's aircraft's ability to launch effective attacks. Eventually it has to return to port, and then your human intelligence can report its arrival, and you can then launch an air attack to either try and sink it or just drop a bunch of mines in the harbor so it stays stuck in port for a bit longer can't can' meaningfully contribute. Or have commandos plant some bombs on it and sink it that way, though on such a large vessel a Cole like operation might make more sense. Or just have a partisan get into a hotel the pilots are taking leave at and stab them. Stabbing pilots in their bunks probably effectively degrades Carrier operations as much as anything else.

WTF do you think in a war the carriers will go to ports in Vietnam or Thailand?
Pilots in hotels? In middle of war? Do they ever?
It's gonna be Japan, Guam or Pearl Harbor. Good luck getting partisans there.
Cole situation worked on account of the whole situation being semi-peacetime.

4) General hiding of forces. With about 3,000 aircraft, you might divide it between 1,000 on the front in coastal areas, dispersed across the 100s of airfields I believe they have to improve survivability, another 1,000 in deeper reserves, say 1,000 km or so back where they're harder to hit, and I think its where most of the 40+ underground bases are, so you can do maintenance and rest with relative safety, but attempts to actually punch through or deep into Chinese airspace can still be countered. And then keep the remaining 1,000 back as the deep reserve, or deployed to other fronts.

If they are hidden they cannot fight. China cannot afford that.

Missile boats and subs are very hidable. Subs already have at least one underground sub pen in China, and given North Korea's tendency to build lots of under ground naval bunkers for subs and boats, China probably has a good number more of them. And since they're not particularly tall or wide, having simply covered ports is pretty easy, to at least cover for satellite and aerial reconnaissance.

Missile boats suck in most scenarios, that's the situation with them since a long time, many tried on the cost-effect basis, few made it work and only a little.
Chinese subs, not great. Hiding them doesn't work that well when they simply are loud as fuck and have to deal with US SSN patrols when they go out.

Covering bigger ships is harder, but still doable. There are several covered shipyards, and adding tents or building a metal roof over various ports and especially dry docks is probably not particularly difficult. You can build these pretty big. At worst, you cover things with tarps, so its harder for the US to tell what's damaged or not, determine what's a functional ship vs a shell of one or a decoy. And general camouflage operations. There's a lot of coastline to hide on, and with at sea replenishment abilities is quite doable to park most anywhere and still get resupplied. Depending on the balance of survivability of hiding vs moving ships.

Sure, clearly no one thought of doing the basics... As if that's gonna help much. Logistics on this scale are near impossible to hide now.

But, if a harbor has 10 warships, a 1,000 locations where it could be, and 90 decoys that could be mistaken for the warships, the effectiveness of strikes can be dramatically reduced.

If that was so easy, why isn't Russia protecting their warships in fucking Crimea better?

5) Tipiz like stuff, but in a much closer fight where the amount of material that ship ties down is actually impactful.

Again, it's not WW2 anymore.

Yes, the aircraft would be doing a guerilla campaign, just as the navy. Which weapons are you talking about that the US can launch without entering range?


Lets look at the Map or ranges 500 km, 1,000, and 2,000 km: 500 is easy range of everything, 1,000 is the fighter range, and 2,000 km is bomber range, or fighters/ships moving out with their own cruise missiles.

The Chinese navy generally doesn't need to leave the 500 km umbrella to do most of what it needs to do, while everything in the green can be subject to harassing attacks to degrade the amount of power the Blue can project into China's water.

What weapons are you talking about?

The return of anti ship Tomahawk from cold war fiction to reality:

What is the Maritime Strike Tomahawk cruise missile?

The Maritime Strike Tomahawk is designed to provide a naval anti-surface warfare capability to the long-serving land-attack cruise missile.

www.naval-technology.com

And that point works both ways, Chinese navy has no place to go that's outside of the 500 km range of enemy bases, which is way worse. US and allies can optimize for which bases to use for more or less defensible/important roles. China gets no choices in that matter.

I've described the basic idea earlier. I can go into it again with more thought, though this reply is already getting pretty long.




Yeah, I'm assuming Japan and SK get tagged in for the sake of @LordsFire scenario of a general blockade. On the logic that if any one of Taiwan, South Korea, or Japan don't agree to a general blockade, a general blockade doesn't happen. I'm less sure on whether they would actually be willing to commit to a general war with China. But, taking as given that they are, then they have to be involved and part of breaking blue is breaking S. Korea and Japan will. S. Korea probably just gets destroyed, and will provide a good place to attrition out American and Japanese troops. Japan hopefully if things go to plan for China eventually sees reason and flips like Italy. Otherwise breaking Japan probably eventually requires nuclear war. But, that's a 2-4 years into the war problem.

However, the principle advantages of defense still applies to the Taiwan front. Breaking the Island chain is key to destroying the US power in the area. And, as with most lines, its likely easier to turn the flank than break through the center. So, you do as Germany in the World wars: France can try to attack directly into the France German frontier, and the Germans move to turn the flank. South East Asia/the middle east is the relative Belgium of the American defensive line, and thus would be the main target of offensive.

Ideally, you don't need to go through S Korea, the Switzerland equivalent of the other front. I think S Korean neutrality is not as impossible as people here might think, but if they are involved, it makes sense to commit troops against it, not to push through now, but to tie down Blue troops and supplies holding the line so other fronts are more likely to be successful, and steady attritioning the front, so that over the course of 3-5 years South Korea is eventually destroyed.

Yeah, SK neutrality is possible. But on the navy/air front Japan is a bigger player by much.
Japan knows its history, and they know that unlike Italy they are trying to make compromises with the communist dragon, not western allies. If they flip, they know that after the war any deals and treaties with China will be "renegotiated" unilaterally.

Europe is the same thing. Putting more troop and supplies to support Russia keeps Ukraine a sink for Blue troops and material, ideally without having to actually do all that much fighting on the Chinese side. But, if China can move 300,000 light infantry and support personnel in Belarus can keep several hundred thousand American troops and lots of planes, tanks, and artillery in Europe in case of invasion of Poland or the Baltics, that's a net win. And if Poland does decide to invade Belarus, the Chinese, Belarusians, and Russians can hopefully lose slow enough for other fronts and mobilizations to occur to carry out counter attacks later.

Nope, they cannot. As things stand Europe is supporting the Ukraine effort with the equivalent of a pinky finger. Things could and would look differently if it used a fist, nevermind 2.

It depends what you need it to do. If without warning, the bomb has a 90% chance of scoring a kill, but with a $10,000 system it can give the driver 10-30 seconds to know your being shot at and you do evasive maneuvers that reduces chance of a kill to 80%, and if you can tie that into a smoke/whatever launcher that reduces chance of a kill to 40-60%, then that's probably a fairly cost effective system, especially considering its the absolute last line of defense.

Sorry, it's not the 60's, you don't reduce the kill probability of modern anti ship weapons with cheap shit by half.

The Air Force’s New Ship-Killing Smart Bomb Has Sunk Its First Vessel

The Air Force has moved a step closer to fielding a version of the ubiquitous Joint Direct Attack Munition that can hit moving warships.

www.thedrive.com

It uses combined radar/infrared guidance. It's not a WW2 era TV guided bomb or some dumb early Exocet that will get fooled by some chaff. A first rate warship's defense suite may have a chance, but even then would probably not want to take chances and use its AA capabilities to keep the plane out of its range instead.

A radar good enough to realize your under attack is a much, much lighter ask than a radar to get targeting data, like a what a Pantsir would have. This is sort of like suggesting, since tank optics are expensive, binoculars that can see a tank moving down a road also have to be expensive.

False positives, nuff said. A system like that needs to have advanced discriminatory capability (which is something that costs serious money), otherwise it either won't detect most attacks, or detect attacks every bloody hour even when no attacks happen.
Meanwhile, civilian navigational radar exists for "don't ram into into other vessels" purposes mostly, good luck with the tiny radar signature of bombs. It's a challenge that even many older air defense systems may fail.

Sure. Same with any other situation. Unchallenged anything can kill lots of anything. Pre bomb unchallenged aircraft could also destroy cumulatively thousands of ships. That's what I meant. What prevents 100s of aircraft from sinking thousands of ships were other things pre bomb, and what limits how quickly they can kill are going to be the other issues post bomb.

Well now they can sink them cost efficiently too. Which in turn means not running out of decent munitions to do it with.

 

[LordsFire]

Not really relevant unless you believe the US is going to escalate to a nuclear war. In which case you probably have better than even odds that China would win that conflict

I mean, punching holes in the arguments you're putting forward is basically like shooting fish in a barrel at this point, but still, sometimes that's fun.

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archive.is

The US has some corruption problems in its military too, but those don't extend to fueling its rockets with water.

I'm genuinely curious as to where your confidence in the CCP's military efforts originated from.

 

[Zachowon]

Everything he is saying is basically "if the US gets the stupidest ideas and acts like it is at peace and not at war, and plays into every hand of the chinese"
As well as not understanding how radars work.
And the fact that most support aircraft are flying further back and higher then most systems can reach.

Welcome to modern naval and air combat.
You are dead before you even see the enemy and before you even see the AWACS.

 

[TheRejectionist]

I am wondering if the Alex Jones 2024 Chinese War prediction over Taiwan will come true.
If so, the world is fucked, not in the sense of Global Nuclear War. Unless those happen as well.

On Germany potentially fighting harder...they would have been nuked first before Japan, major cities before the capital is hit but if Hitler continues with his shenanigans Truman would have cooked Berlin like cajun-style shrimp.

 

[JagerIV]

It was a major ship loss, to a handful of second rate missile, because a ship that looks quite scary on paper turned out to have maintenance and training issues and so be a paper tiger just on account of those little details.

I just don't agree it means particularly much.

No we cannot. Germans by the end were fighting in total war mode. They could throw more manpower at it (crappy manpower, they were already scrapping the bottom) but industrially they were exhausted already. USA never even went to total war mode, and since WW2 was always more far more restricted by optics than material resources.

No, if you bring WW2 with few players going total war, physical resources very much were their bottleneck. No amount of propaganda can make you have more oil, or make your steel better.
There is a "set" level of sustainable casualties in the material sense in terms of "available bodies", and there is a political set that in more hostile political climate is a tiny fraction of one percent of the abovementioned number. These two limits cannot be confused.
And yeah, in modern warfare countries are going to run out of material assets to equip troops way before they run out of warm bodies, as sending soldiers into modern peer warfare with just a crappy rifle is only one step ahead of mass suicide.

Well, it comes down to which is the limiting factor. If your politics won't allow the material one, then its the political one. And politics can generally push further or less on the material.

Yet again, we don't talk land war. Important casualties would be measured in ships and planes, not people. It takes month to build new planes and years to build new ships, and that's with economy in perfect order.

Yes, thus the importance of preserving ships and planes, and thus using bodies, tanks, and artillery to substitute for them when possible.

China would not have much of an economy after 1-2 years of such war. Export based economy is a bitch.

Eh, not really. What previously goes to exports goes to war. An export economy just means you have potential massive surpluses to dedicate to the war effort. I believe the US and England were export economies in WWI -WWII era, and the industrial base of being an exporter didn't particularly hurt.

China's big problem is its much less of an export economy than it used to be, and consumes a lot of imports. Thus, the problem of being blockaded. Which is why various land invasions are necesary to secure access to raw materials to import to feed the war machine.

Would they be successfully targeted? With what?

... is your contention that China doesn't have anything capable of spotting a propeller plane first produced in the 1960s emitting theater radar signatures?

Only slightly better, at dramatically higher cost.

Modern naval combat is not salvo combat.

I'm not sure either of really have any data on this to be honest.

Then why did you link to an article about Salvo Combat?

Then they or you got something wrong.

Will China’s Increased Oil Supplies Change Xi’s Taiwan Calculus?

As Chinese forces brush back U.S. ships and planes in international waters, concerns about war over Taiwan rise. For decades, free-world leaders banked on two advantages to deter China: its military weakness and its economic Achilles’ heel, a dependence on Middle Eastern energy that could be...

www.hudson.org

*may* exceed 4 months. Years? Not a chance.

Those look like the same numbers that give about 12 months of stretching out hold out time with plausible countermeasures.

https://digital-commons.usnwc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1735&context=nwc-review

4 months of supply can be dramatically streched out with plausible reactions. Ceteribis paribis obviously doesn't apply to wartime. Obviously a lot changes. And in a sprint to war situation where China spends a dedicated year building up more options, such as expanding Russian and central Asia supply and building more reserves, can further extend it.

Mine laying means not fighting, and mines know no friends. If China wants to blockade itself, nice. Same goes for fighting Japanese civilian fleet. Capturing? Really? Great way to arrange meetings between Chinese warships/helicopters and Japanese missiles, that's it.

Eh, Russia and Ukraine have laid a lot of mines, but I wouldn't suggest that means there's no fighting going on. Unless China's plan is to invade, via ports, Korea, Japan, and Taiwan in the first 3-6 months of the war, mined Japanese harbors is a far future China problem, which quite likely will not come up.

My assumption is that Taiwan probably won't fall quickly unless there really is no will to fight on Taiwan's side. Ukraine has reminded people that war takes a while. Assuming the Taiwanese air force decides not to commit sucide, attritioning it away is going to be a long, drawn out campaign. They have roughly 200 combat aircraft, even at fairly high casualties of say 10-20 aircraft a day, that takes a few weeks of campaigning, and after losing say a hundred they're likely going to be much more cautious with when they risk their planes, so it might take another 100 days to get that last 100. Plus, aircraft and low weight high value military equipment is the stuff that would be hardest for the Chinese to stop deliveries of, so Taiwan is likely to get more planes and SAMs in any plausible siege.

If a landing won't make sense for 2-3 years of siege anyways when Taiwan's air and naval weapondry has been degraded, the island has run out of fuel, and the US navy has been pushed back, likely through victory in either S. Korea or the Middle East, mining the East China sea to make attacking China and supplying local blue forces more difficult isn't any loss. Its accepting that local fronts aren't likely to move all that much until attrition and other fronts have shifted balance of power dramatically.

Which I think would take somewhere in the realm of 2-4 years in the Eastern Front.

If China wants to blockade itself, nice. Same goes for fighting Japanese civilian fleet. Capturing? Really? Great way to arrange meetings between Chinese warships/helicopters and Japanese missiles, that's it.

So China arming ships is impossible, but Korea arming ships isn't? Is the expectation that Korea is just going to preemptively kill off its own fishermen rather than let them fall into enemy hands? Admittedly with mines and such there is simply going to be a lot less fishermen and cargo ships going out, so there's going to be less opportunity to take or sink civilian ships.

That's nothing like guerilla warfare, have fighters take pot shots at AWACS, and it's full scale war, period. Stealth is a continuum, not a binary. F-22's and F-35's will try to intercept these planes and their airbases and will have some success.

Certainly some will be intercepted. Though fighters defending AWACS are fighters not striking targets, and thus degrading American rate of advance, blunting the attack.

WTF do you think in a war the carriers will go to ports in Vietnam or Thailand?
Pilots in hotels? In middle of war? Do they ever?
It's gonna be Japan, Guam or Pearl Harbor. Good luck getting partisans there.
Cole situation worked on account of the whole situation being semi-peacetime.

Carrier in Taiwan front would probably be Japan or Guam. Maybe Taiwan or Korea, but only likely in cases where a Carrier gets hit and has to make emergency berthing. Partisans would probably be Pearl Harbor or San Francisco, admittedly. Maybe somewhere in Europe or middle east. Japan or Guam would probably be commandos if you had such an operation, with Japan probably easier to organize.

If they are hidden they cannot fight. China cannot afford that.

And they can afford to lose the air force less. Thus, preservation is more important than wasting forces where they don't achieve useful objectives. Victory would be in Korea, Singapore, and the middle east. Or American domestic front. Taiwan is a holding front. All they have to do is outlast the US's ability to launch offenses.

Missile boats suck in most scenarios, that's the situation with them since a long time, many tried on the cost-effect basis, few made it work and only a little.
Chinese subs, not great. Hiding them doesn't work that well when they simply are loud as fuck and have to deal with US SSN patrols when they go out.

I mean, these are basically just assertions. Maybe your right, maybe your wrong.

Sure, clearly no one thought of doing the basics... As if that's gonna help much. Logistics on this scale are near impossible to hide now.

If that was so easy, why isn't Russia protecting their warships in fucking Crimea better?

Well, the basics are apparently good enough that the Russian Army still exists. How many ships should Russia have lost at this point by your reconning, within 200-300 km range of land based missiles, and under observation it can't actually interfere with? Within a very tight operational area? Which is a much worse situation than China would be dealing with, generally.

Looking at the wiki, its currently about 16 ships hit over about 22 months of war. So, less than a ship a month. Actual warship losses is around 5, with something like 90% of the tonnage being the Cruiser. Plus 9 support ships, which are going to be much more easily replaced.

Which seems to be about 30,000 tons lost, about 1,300 tons a month. Even if wiki is conservative by about 1/3, so Russia has really lost 100,000 tons of ship, that's still only about 5,000 tons of of military ships lost a month, which doesn't sound particularly high.

Again, it's not WW2 anymore.

And everything that happened in WWII isn't completely irrelevent.

The return of anti ship Tomahawk from cold war fiction to reality:

What is the Maritime Strike Tomahawk cruise missile?

The Maritime Strike Tomahawk is designed to provide a naval anti-surface warfare capability to the long-serving land-attack cruise missile.

www.naval-technology.com

And that point works both ways, Chinese navy has no place to go that's outside of the 500 km range of enemy bases, which is way worse. US and allies can optimize for which bases to use for more or less defensible/important roles. China gets no choices in that matter.

That would be a good harassment weapon, though if its like our current production, produced in pretty low numbers.

I don't really get your point with the second one. For one, if your talking about places to attack, Taiwan is within that 500 km radius, which is the main point of the initial operation, and S korea is pretty closely to that, and is once operating from N Korea. Then if South Korea falls, much of Japan would be under heavy risk of air attacks. And heading south they can leapfrog land base to land base.

And even before expansion to outflank the first Island chain, there's about 4,000 km of coast. That's a lot of choice of where to put things. The US meanwhile has Okinowa if it wants to forward deploy, S korea and Taiwan if it wants to really forward deploy within easy striking distance of Chinese aircraft, and then Guam and Japan if they want to deploy into the relatively close rear.

I'm not sure the US and allies have anywhere they can afford to not particularly protect, forcing them to forward deploy to defend things, and partially defend everything, while China can afford to to not defend a lot particularly hard. What is the US going to do, blow all their firepower on particular undefended cities? Cities can absorb huge amounts of munitions without dying, and if its one city can be easily recovered while the military does other things. Invade? Nothing is likely to end the war quicker on terms favorable to China than the US trying to launch an amphibious land invasion of China, while China's navy and air force are still alive.

Yeah, SK neutrality is possible. But on the navy/air front Japan is a bigger player by much.
Japan knows its history, and they know that unlike Italy they are trying to make compromises with the communist dragon, not western allies. If they flip, they know that after the war any deals and treaties with China will be "renegotiated" unilaterally.

If SK doesn't agree to the initially theorized blockade, the war obviously doesn't happen, since all trade to China just gets "delivered" to SK, and then delivered to China. China pays something like a 10% mark up for this, but that's cheaper than War, and it would be such an embarrassing situation the US probably couldn't maintain it. Especially after Taiwan reads the tea leaves and also leaves the blockade. The possibility of the US ordering a blockade and not everyone jumping is one reason I see it as unlikely to be done: that being demand, and then people not committing to even that shatters general credibility of a US promise.

But, for sake of the scenario where both Japan and S Korea enthusiastically join the American scheme, Japan is the bigger total threat, but the way to Japan is, well, through South Korea and the middle east. If South Korea falls, its going to put the main island at a much more vulnerable position, if nothing else the Chinese can lay more naval mines around them, and if things somehow advance to a land invasion of Japan without/with nukes involved, Korea is the obvious staging area for such an attack.

Thus, if the Korean War II is kicked off, Japan is going to be obligated to dedicate resources to the fight in Korea. Which means its a place Japan can be drawn into and bled. And if China wins in Korea, Japan is going to have to reevaluate whether it wants to keep to the US alliance which has morphed into a suicide pack. Risk unfavorable negoatiations in peace, or invasion and occupation in war becomes a pretty hard choice.

And obviously Japan gets a lot of oil and exports from and through the middle east, so China taking ground there imposes a distant blockade on Japan, which makes resistance more difficult.

Nope, they cannot. As things stand Europe is supporting the Ukraine effort with the equivalent of a pinky finger. Things could and would look differently if it used a fist, nevermind 2.

I'm not sure what your saying here: checking wiki, Poland currently has 48 F-16s, which I believe have not been sent to Ukraine, and Poland does not intend to send to Ukraine. Are you suggesting the F-16s that are not being sent to Ukraine under current situations would be sent to South Korea to replace their losses, with a Chinese army across the boarder in Belarus, even if its not a particularly heavily equipped force? Are you going to send back the South Korean tanks you already have? Would Poland really disarm in the face of a threat of potential invasion?

Or is it going to cling to every bit of kit it has, and try to gain more? I'm guessing most European forces in such a situation are either going to hang on to any weapons they have, try to acquire more weaponry in Europe, and at most pour it into Ukraine. And every tank, aircraft, and boat kept in Europe deterring an invasion of Poland or grinding Russians into paste is equipment not dedicated to a front actually critical to the war China is fighting. Specifically the middle east.

And if the Poles do decide to invade Belarus or Europe dedicates enough material to Ukraine to start invading Russia, well, hopefully the Russians and reinforcements China can spare can lose slowly enough for other developments to allow a turn around on the European front.

And if they can't lose slow enough Russia nukes Europe, which will probably be enough to stabilize the european front so China can deal with it later.

I guess its possible Poland could hand over all its weapons and troops to fight elsewhere. Then, well, its free real estate and of course China/Russia should invade and exploit Poland for all its worth to feed the Red War effort. This seems the least likely outcome through.

Sorry, it's not the 60's, you don't reduce the kill probability of modern anti ship weapons with cheap shit by half.

The Air Force’s New Ship-Killing Smart Bomb Has Sunk Its First Vessel

The Air Force has moved a step closer to fielding a version of the ubiquitous Joint Direct Attack Munition that can hit moving warships.

www.thedrive.com

It uses combined radar/infrared guidance. It's not a WW2 era TV guided bomb or some dumb early Exocet that will get fooled by some chaff. A first rate warship's defense suite may have a chance, but even then would probably not want to take chances and use its AA capabilities to keep the plane out of its range instead.

Maybe it would only be a 10-20% reduction then, though who knows, people can be clever, and smart systems can be fooled by relatively dumb things. See humans and such. Like I said, last layer of the onion, and a 10% save roll after 10 other save rolls can be a big difference.

False positives, nuff said. A system like that needs to have advanced discriminatory capability (which is something that costs serious money), otherwise it either won't detect most attacks, or detect attacks every bloody hour even when no attacks happen.
Meanwhile, civilian navigational radar exists for "don't ram into into other vessels" purposes mostly, good luck with the tiny radar signature of bombs. It's a challenge that even many older air defense systems may fail.

I mean, how many other objects are going to be approaching's a ship at Mach 0.8 or above? That seems a pretty easy thing to screen for. You can probably tune it down to Mach 0.6 without much false positives. If the bomb is like most guided ones with fins, those tend to give pretty good radar signatures. Made mortars readable on radar since WWII. A radar able to see fast moving objects, maybe with a good enough IR camera to see something undergoing friction heat against the sky background, just do not seem like particularly big asks of modern tech, given all the tech we can fit into cameras these days and mass produce millions of for under a $1,000 a piece.

Now, your right it might not be a big improvement in survivability, but if its cheap enough, it doesn't matter. Binoculars might not dramatically improve the effectiveness of infantry, but these days a really nice pair might cost $500 bucks, so even if the utility is marginal and occasional you might as well give one to at least every platoon, if not lower.

Well now they can sink them cost efficiently too. Which in turn means not running out of decent munitions to do it with.

That's what I was saying: unguarded unarmed boats could be engaged cost effectively pre this bomb too. It probably is a useful improvement in kit, but not revolutionary to the dynamic.

 

[Marduk]

I just don't agree it means particularly much.



Well, it comes down to which is the limiting factor. If your politics won't allow the material one, then its the political one. And politics can generally push further or less on the material.

The flip side is that even slight variations in the political limits, due to how ridiculously powerful they became in modern West, can mean significant changes in amount of resources thrown at any way.

Yes, thus the importance of preserving ships and planes, and thus using bodies, tanks, and artillery to substitute for them when possible.

Impossible of course, as these things can't go out to the ocean to fight.

Eh, not really. What previously goes to exports goes to war. An export economy just means you have potential massive surpluses to dedicate to the war effort. I believe the US and England were export economies in WWI -WWII era, and the industrial base of being an exporter didn't particularly hurt.

What do you continue to make the exports out of? China, unlike WW2 USA and British Empire, is also a hugely reliant on imports for inputs.
While the inputs go for export goods, the money adds up.
If they shift for war production, those who sell the inputs will say, so how are you going to keep paying us? Sorry, you firing a missile at the Japanese is not valid currency.

China's big problem is its much less of an export economy than it used to be, and consumes a lot of imports. Thus, the problem of being blockaded. Which is why various land invasions are necesary to secure access to raw materials to import to feed the war machine.

Due to sheer quantities of resources needed, the land invasions would have to happen years, if not decades before those routes are needed, otherwise the required infrastructure with the required capacity cannot be built.

... is your contention that China doesn't have anything capable of spotting a propeller plane first produced in the 1960s emitting theater radar signatures?

If you put it that way, don't you think Soviets thought that too? You think the Cold War admirals and generals didn't know about Mig-25's?
Targeting an AWACS plane is not nearly as easy as you think.
AWACS typically has fighter escort, hangs out far away, a on account of what it is, has EWAR capabilities way beyond anything else in the air.

I'm not sure either of really have any data on this to be honest.

Then why did you link to an article about Salvo Combat?

To show you the part where it specifically does not account for active defenses, which are a feature of any decent warship now.

Those look like the same numbers that give about 12 months of stretching out hold out time with plausible countermeasures.

https://digital-commons.usnwc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1735&context=nwc-review

4 months of supply can be dramatically streched out with plausible reactions. Ceteribis paribis obviously doesn't apply to wartime. Obviously a lot changes. And in a sprint to war situation where China spends a dedicated year building up more options, such as expanding Russian and central Asia supply and building more reserves, can further extend it.

Such stretching out is not magic, it's called strict rationing. So it would hurt the economy on top of other war effects, that's the point.

Eh, Russia and Ukraine have laid a lot of mines, but I wouldn't suggest that means there's no fighting going on. Unless China's plan is to invade, via ports, Korea, Japan, and Taiwan in the first 3-6 months of the war, mined Japanese harbors is a far future China problem, which quite likely will not come up.

How do you deliver mines to Japanese ports without getting shot at?
How do you make mines stay in one spot for months, despite waves, currents and storms?
The fact is that Russia laid a lot of mines, usually out of range of Ukraine's limited assets, few civilian ships hit them, and they show up in a lot of random places.

My assumption is that Taiwan probably won't fall quickly unless there really is no will to fight on Taiwan's side. Ukraine has reminded people that war takes a while. Assuming the Taiwanese air force decides not to commit sucide, attritioning it away is going to be a long, drawn out campaign. They have roughly 200 combat aircraft, even at fairly high casualties of say 10-20 aircraft a day, that takes a few weeks of campaigning, and after losing say a hundred they're likely going to be much more cautious with when they risk their planes, so it might take another 100 days to get that last 100. Plus, aircraft and low weight high value military equipment is the stuff that would be hardest for the Chinese to stop deliveries of, so Taiwan is likely to get more planes and SAMs in any plausible siege.

If a landing won't make sense for 2-3 years of siege anyways when Taiwan's air and naval weapondry has been degraded, the island has run out of fuel, and the US navy has been pushed back, likely through victory in either S. Korea or the Middle East, mining the East China sea to make attacking China and supplying local blue forces more difficult isn't any loss. Its accepting that local fronts aren't likely to move all that much until attrition and other fronts have shifted balance of power dramatically.

Which I think would take somewhere in the realm of 2-4 years in the Eastern Front.

China has no means to put meaningful fighting forces in Middle East, in case of naval war against the West, it's downright impossible to supply such.
It would be such a logistical kerfuffle that it would make Hitler's run on Moscow look reasonable.
Logistical routes going through several thousands of kilometers through semi-lawless lands with exceptionally terrible infrastructure in the middle of a world war with its economic effects...

So China arming ships is impossible, but Korea arming ships isn't? Is the expectation that Korea is just going to preemptively kill off its own fishermen rather than let them fall into enemy hands? Admittedly with mines and such there is simply going to be a lot less fishermen and cargo ships going out, so there's going to be less opportunity to take or sink civilian ships.

No, capturing means an enemy ship has to get close to the civilian ship's known position, and the operation can take several hours.
The capturing ship is inherently under a massive risk of eating a Harpoon, Maverick, or other missile in a modern conventional war scenario.
Is capturing a fishing vessel worth such a risk to a warship? Hell no.
Either way the ships are worth more economically than they are as fighting force. Korea also has the options of simply sending off its fishermen to safer waters for few years.

Certainly some will be intercepted. Though fighters defending AWACS are fighters not striking targets, and thus degrading American rate of advance, blunting the attack.

Obviously one that probably is accounted for already, enemy fighters taking long range pot shots at AWACS is a well known problem since the R-33 exists, there's no need to reinvent a 40 year old wheel.

Carrier in Taiwan front would probably be Japan or Guam. Maybe Taiwan or Korea, but only likely in cases where a Carrier gets hit and has to make emergency berthing. Partisans would probably be Pearl Harbor or San Francisco, admittedly. Maybe somewhere in Europe or middle east. Japan or Guam would probably be commandos if you had such an operation, with Japan probably easier to organize.

Again, if China had the kind of global network of militant sympathizers Soviets had in their heyday, we would be hearing of them. And that's a bare minimum of what would be needed for such operations to work. Antifa clowns are no RAF, and GWOT related security policies made such shenanigans much harder in general.
Also there is an obvious reason you don't hear of carriers berthing in ME even in peacetime.

And they can afford to lose the air force less. Thus, preservation is more important than wasting forces where they don't achieve useful objectives. Victory would be in Korea, Singapore, and the middle east. Or American domestic front. Taiwan is a holding front. All they have to do is outlast the US's ability to launch offenses.

American domestic front is the biggest wildcard here. Middle East is a joke for logistical reasons, Singapore would split China's already stretched naval assets and give them a vulnerable, relatively long logistical route to defend, let's stick to the obvious war theater, Taiwan, Korea and Japan, China's attempts to go beyond would be simply a mistake on their side and will only help lose them the war.
China's bigger problem is making their economy outlast the war.

I mean, these are basically just assertions. Maybe your right, maybe your wrong.

These are informed opinions. Many countries, including certain ME ones, went heavily for FAC based navy due to how cheap that is, when were they successful in a war?
As for subs, the US government doesn't think they are great, and with the stories of corruption and general quality coming from China, it's easy to believe. Building good subs requires *extreme* focus on quality in manufacturing of every single component. If things get passed because they are good enough to work, that still doesn't mean they are good enough to work quietly, and in China merely good enough to work quality is something to be appreciated.

Maybe the newest SSNs that are in construction won't be that bad, but we know that the subs that already exist and were spotted on patrol, those aren't very quiet at all, and China's SSN fleet numbers aren't impressive for some reason.

Well, the basics are apparently good enough that the Russian Army still exists. How many ships should Russia have lost at this point by your reconning, within 200-300 km range of land based missiles, and under observation it can't actually interfere with? Within a very tight operational area? Which is a much worse situation than China would be dealing with, generally.

Against an orders of magnitude weaker opponent than US and Japan. One with not a single missile destroyer or submarine, even old one.
If Russia was competent, it may lose some boats and maybe a small warship or two, but no more.

Looking at the wiki, its currently about 16 ships hit over about 22 months of war. So, less than a ship a month. Actual warship losses is around 5, with something like 90% of the tonnage being the Cruiser. Plus 9 support ships, which are going to be much more easily replaced.

Which seems to be about 30,000 tons lost, about 1,300 tons a month. Even if wiki is conservative by about 1/3, so Russia has really lost 100,000 tons of ship, that's still only about 5,000 tons of of military ships lost a month, which doesn't sound particularly high.

30,000 tons out of how many they had in Black Sea in the beginning of the conflict?
We aren't talking of WW2 navy tonnages, Black Sea Fleet is kinda artifically isolated case study due to Montreux convention on account of which Turkey blocks warship movement into the sea during wartime.

And everything that happened in WWII isn't completely irrelevent.

I meant very different technological environment, you may as well start bringing up world wind maps because those were very relevant for all the history of naval warfare before steam ships lol.

That would be a good harassment weapon, though if its like our current production, produced in pretty low numbers.

Tomahawk production infrastructure is actually quite decent due to their mass use in ME kerfuffles. US Navy fired hundreds of those *in a day* back in Iraq war for example.

I don't really get your point with the second one. For one, if your talking about places to attack, Taiwan is within that 500 km radius, which is the main point of the initial operation, and S korea is pretty closely to that, and is once operating from N Korea. Then if South Korea falls, much of Japan would be under heavy risk of air attacks. And heading south they can leapfrog land base to land base.

And even before expansion to outflank the first Island chain, there's about 4,000 km of coast. That's a lot of choice of where to put things. The US meanwhile has Okinowa if it wants to forward deploy, S korea and Taiwan if it wants to really forward deploy within easy striking distance of Chinese aircraft, and then Guam and Japan if they want to deploy into the relatively close rear.

I'm not sure the US and allies have anywhere they can afford to not particularly protect, forcing them to forward deploy to defend things, and partially defend everything, while China can afford to to not defend a lot particularly hard. What is the US going to do, blow all their firepower on particular undefended cities? Cities can absorb huge amounts of munitions without dying, and if its one city can be easily recovered while the military does other things. Invade? Nothing is likely to end the war quicker on terms favorable to China than the US trying to launch an amphibious land invasion of China, while China's navy and air force are still alive.

That seems like a massive application of "China will bomb everyone, but no one is going to bomb China in return" fallacy and implying it's US missile targeting capability that sucks exactly as much as Russian so it's mostly good for wasting missiles on terror bombing cities while Chinese one is good, while if anything that situation is reverse in reality.
China has its industry located near coastal areas, ports are all on coast, airfields that are close to coast are relevant.
You know, all those ships China would need to use to invade any island? USA will blow their firepower on those, their munition cargo to be, and their fuel cargo to be, and the places where those would be stored. Exactly like Ukraine does with Russian supply ships and warehouses in Crimea, except on far larger scale (hello practical experience btw).

SK alone also has 2,500 km of coastline, for whatever good that is.

If SK doesn't agree to the initially theorized blockade, the war obviously doesn't happen, since all trade to China just gets "delivered" to SK, and then delivered to China. China pays something like a 10% mark up for this, but that's cheaper than War, and it would be such an embarrassing situation the US probably couldn't maintain it. Especially after Taiwan reads the tea leaves and also leaves the blockade. The possibility of the US ordering a blockade and not everyone jumping is one reason I see it as unlikely to be done: that being demand, and then people not committing to even that shatters general credibility of a US promise.

I don't see SK jumping to China's rescue as long as NK-China alliance is a thing.

Why would Taiwan leave a blockade that was set up for on account of Taiwan being attacked or blockaded by China in the first place?
You are saying in a roundabout way that Taiwan would simply one day decide to surrender.
Any hard actions US takes in that region are for the defense of the SK/Taiwan/Japan, not just some ego stroking project.

But, for sake of the scenario where both Japan and S Korea enthusiastically join the American scheme, Japan is the bigger total threat, but the way to Japan is, well, through South Korea and the middle east. If South Korea falls, its going to put the main island at a much more vulnerable position, if nothing else the Chinese can lay more naval mines around them, and if things somehow advance to a land invasion of Japan without/with nukes involved, Korea is the obvious staging area for such an attack.

China barely has naval assets to successfully invade Taiwan at best, how the hell are they going to invade far bigger and better armed Japan?

Thus, if the Korean War II is kicked off, Japan is going to be obligated to dedicate resources to the fight in Korea. Which means its a place Japan can be drawn into and bled. And if China wins in Korea, Japan is going to have to reevaluate whether it wants to keep to the US alliance which has morphed into a suicide pack. Risk unfavorable negoatiations in peace, or invasion and occupation in war becomes a pretty hard choice.

Again, Japan of all countries has an understanding of how untrustworthy China is in deals. Relying on nothing but China's word for safety is suicide.

And obviously Japan gets a lot of oil and exports from and through the middle east, so China taking ground there imposes a distant blockade on Japan, which makes resistance more difficult.

So China is going to invade SK, fight a naval war against the western coalition, and also launch a logistically breakneck effort to take over ME without naval assets all at the same time, and you think all these 3 fronts will be successes?

I'm not sure what your saying here: checking wiki, Poland currently has 48 F-16s, which I believe have not been sent to Ukraine, and Poland does not intend to send to Ukraine. Are you suggesting the F-16s that are not being sent to Ukraine under current situations would be sent to South Korea to replace their losses, with a Chinese army across the boarder in Belarus, even if its not a particularly heavily equipped force? Are you going to send back the South Korean tanks you already have? Would Poland really disarm in the face of a threat of potential invasion?

There are 7 F-16 using countries in EU now. If every sent mere 8, that would be more than Poland has now. And that's just the F-16's, not all the other jets, nevermind actually you know, doing actually reasonable moves and ordering production of new ones at maximum capacity ASAP, but we have the politicians we have.
Also is the Chinese army going to teleport to Belarus?

Or is it going to cling to every bit of kit it has, and try to gain more? I'm guessing most European forces in such a situation are either going to hang on to any weapons they have, try to acquire more weaponry in Europe, and at most pour it into Ukraine. And every tank, aircraft, and boat kept in Europe deterring an invasion of Poland or grinding Russians into paste is equipment not dedicated to a front actually critical to the war China is fighting. Specifically the middle east.

Except that... Europe is still not using a lot of its production capacity, and it would take no more than a fraction of existing stock to walk all over Russians with how they are doing in Ukraine. And once that's done, a lot of the kit can be sent. Sometimes a sword hanging over you is worse than a sword that has already struck.

And if the Poles do decide to invade Belarus or Europe dedicates enough material to Ukraine to start invading Russia, well, hopefully the Russians and reinforcements China can spare can lose slowly enough for other developments to allow a turn around on the European front.

If China is invading Korea and Taiwan, it will support Russia less, not more than now. That is unless China wants to lose on all fronts at the same time.
The fact is, the logistics of sending any major reinforcements to Russia's western border from China are downright nightmarish, and the capacity of existing transport routes, horribly insufficient.
So, why would China go out of its way to make it possible for the whole EU's otherwise uninvolved mass of armies help grind their own land forces in a logistically unfavorable setup? Every soldier sent there is a soldier not invading Korea, and several trucks of supplies not getting to the latter.
Will they also send them air support? Will they take away the planes from the Japan front, Taiwan front or Korea front? And they better be good planes, if they sent those reserve old Mig-21 clones, on European front would get treated like training targets by Eurofighters, Rafales and F-35's.

And if they can't lose slow enough Russia nukes Europe, which will probably be enough to stabilize the european front so China can deal with it later.

If Russia nukes Europe, Europe nukes Russia. Including its oil industry. China says bye to its fuel support from Russia.

I guess its possible Poland could hand over all its weapons and troops to fight elsewhere. Then, well, its free real estate and of course China/Russia should invade and exploit Poland for all its worth to feed the Red War effort. This seems the least likely outcome through.

Well if China wants to waste the troops it needs to invade Korea by having them die due to lack of supplies in Belarus or Middle East, that's definitely going to help the western war effort.

Maybe it would only be a 10-20% reduction then, though who knows, people can be clever, and smart systems can be fooled by relatively dumb things. See humans and such. Like I said, last layer of the onion, and a 10% save roll after 10 other save rolls can be a big difference.

Those weapons, once released, are controlled by computers, not humans. You need an adequate defensive suite to deal with them, and if those were cheap, everyone would be buying them.

I mean, how many other objects are going to be approaching's a ship at Mach 0.8 or above? That seems a pretty easy thing to screen for. You can probably tune it down to Mach 0.6 without much false positives. If the bomb is like most guided ones with fins, those tend to give pretty good radar signatures. Made mortars readable on radar since WWII. A radar able to see fast moving objects, maybe with a good enough IR camera to see something undergoing friction heat against the sky background, just do not seem like particularly big asks of modern tech, given all the tech we can fit into cameras these days and mass produce millions of for under a $1,000 a piece.

Now, your right it might not be a big improvement in survivability, but if its cheap enough, it doesn't matter. Binoculars might not dramatically improve the effectiveness of infantry, but these days a really nice pair might cost $500 bucks, so even if the utility is marginal and occasional you might as well give one to at least every platoon, if not lower.

Yeah, those are abilities of military grade radars, not some 2k USD crappy one, those can't tell speeds of objects so precisely, if at all, especially at distance. For comparisons mortars operate at relatively short ranges, so to spot them small radars with very short wavelengths and conversely good resolution but very short range (aka counter-battery radars) get used.

Poland Cancels Its Airfield ATC Radar Procurement Tender

The Armament Agency had announced a procurement procedure, regarding the acquisition of 15 systems for airfield ATC radars (RKRL systems) in March last year. Up to five bidders were expected to be invited, meeting all of the criteria. The final selection was to indicate the bid that was the best...

defence24.com

That's an example of a civilian version of radar with such abilities.
15 airport radars, about 200m USD.
You are basically trying to magic up a breakthrough technology for China which lets it build second rate military electronics for the price of currently cheapest civilian ones, basically giving them discount Ace Combat manufacturing, through the power of your ignorance of the nitty gritty details of differences between radars of various price points and capabilities.

That's what I was saying: unguarded unarmed boats could be engaged cost effectively pre this bomb too. It probably is a useful improvement in kit, but not revolutionary to the dynamic.

You don't get it. Those bombs aren't just effective against unarmed boats. They can take anything other than warships with medium-long range air defense.
Corvette with 9km short range missile and gun based defense, which China has many of? Also vulnerable.
Any auxiliary, landing or transport warships not escorted by a frigate+ warship? Also vulnerable.
What does it mean? US and allies need expensive high tech weapons only to sink China's first rate AAW surface combatants. There aren't that many and that's not something that can be easily or cheaply improvised. Once those get decimated, China has to either keep most of its Navy and auxiliaries out of operations against Taiwan or Japan, nevermind futher out, because they will be easy pickings otherwise.

 

[JagerIV]

The flip side is that even slight variations in the political limits, due to how ridiculously powerful they became in modern West, can mean significant changes in amount of resources thrown at any way.

Eh, I'm less certain not having political limits is going to be the giant power up you assume.

Impossible of course, as these things can't go out to the ocean to fight.

Thus land invasions.

What do you continue to make the exports out of? China, unlike WW2 USA and British Empire, is also a hugely reliant on imports for inputs.
While the inputs go for export goods, the money adds up.
If they shift for war production, those who sell the inputs will say, so how are you going to keep paying us? Sorry, you firing a missile at the Japanese is not valid currency.

Due to sheer quantities of resources needed, the land invasions would have to happen years, if not decades before those routes are needed, otherwise the required infrastructure with the required capacity cannot be built.

If your under blockade. Your not exporting. This seems pretty obvious. Once you loosen the blockade, you just order the occupied people to continue producing what they previously were producing. Or just pay people.

If you put it that way, don't you think Soviets thought that too? You think the Cold War admirals and generals didn't know about Mig-25's?
Targeting an AWACS plane is not nearly as easy as you think.
AWACS typically has fighter escort, hangs out far away, a on account of what it is, has EWAR capabilities way beyond anything else in the air.

Of course the Soviet's thought of that. My dad flew on an AWAC, during the cold war, and asking him he figured the E-2s would have been the first thing shot down. Soviet's apparently had a long range missile specifically designed for that.

To show you the part where it specifically does not account for active defenses, which are a feature of any decent warship now.

Yes, we have more advanced Lancastrian models to actually try and model real outcomes. Salvo model is such a more advanced Lancastrian model.

Such stretching out is not magic, it's called strict rationing. So it would hurt the economy on top of other war effects, that's the point.

Is the expectation that fighting a world war is not going to result in economic pain?

How do you deliver mines to Japanese ports without getting shot at?
How do you make mines stay in one spot for months, despite waves, currents and storms?
The fact is that Russia laid a lot of mines, usually out of range of Ukraine's limited assets, few civilian ships hit them, and they show up in a lot of random places.

https://digital-commons.usnwc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1002&context=cmsi-red-books

China has no means to put meaningful fighting forces in Middle East, in case of naval war against the West, it's downright impossible to supply such.
It would be such a logistical kerfuffle that it would make Hitler's run on Moscow look reasonable.
Logistical routes going through several thousands of kilometers through semi-lawless lands with exceptionally terrible infrastructure in the middle of a world war with its economic effects...

Here are the two obvious land routs:

China -> Russia -> Iran

China -> Pakistan -> Iran

Both of those routs gives you enough transport to supply several hundred thousand troops.

No, capturing means an enemy ship has to get close to the civilian ship's known position, and the operation can take several hours.
The capturing ship is inherently under a massive risk of eating a Harpoon, Maverick, or other missile in a modern conventional war scenario.
Is capturing a fishing vessel worth such a risk to a warship? Hell no.
Either way the ships are worth more economically than they are as fighting force. Korea also has the options of simply sending off its fishermen to safer waters for few years.

So, you don't use a warship. This is what helicopters and light boats are for. Like what Iran just did. Maybe speedboats of seized yatches if you need more hulls. You can then have warships providing overwatch, so when a Blue force makes itself known by shooting on the speedboat you have your warship engage the enemy warship.

Seizing fishing boats and other civilian ships is the job of the naval militia. Warships have more valuable things to do. If the militia effectively works as a meat shield for the navy, even better. Better lose a 1,000 fishing boats than 100 actual warships.

Obviously one that probably is accounted for already, enemy fighters taking long range pot shots at AWACS is a well known problem since the R-33 exists, there's no need to reinvent a 40 year old wheel.

Then why did you acted surprised that AWACs would be shot at, and the need to defend will limit how aggressive the US can be?

Again, if China had the kind of global network of militant sympathizers Soviets had in their heyday, we would be hearing of them. And that's a bare minimum of what would be needed for such operations to work. Antifa clowns are no RAF, and GWOT related security policies made such shenanigans much harder in general.
Also there is an obvious reason you don't hear of carriers berthing in ME even in peacetime.

. . . we do. They're called Chinese people. I was friends with one of them in college. Chinese national, dad designed work camps. And I knew another one in middle school who was quite patriotic. Plus I recall the Confucius centers on the major college campuses I visited when I was in college.

US vs China would not primarily I think be a communism or Capitalism fight, but Chinese nationalism vs American empire. And broadly just those who are Pro America and Anti America. China obviously has a pretty expansive global network of sympathizers, many of which can be used to raise/fund militant sympathizers as useful.

American domestic front is the biggest wildcard here. Middle East is a joke for logistical reasons, Singapore would split China's already stretched naval assets and give them a vulnerable, relatively long logistical route to defend, let's stick to the obvious war theater, Taiwan, Korea and Japan, China's attempts to go beyond would be simply a mistake on their side and will only help lose them the war.
China's bigger problem is making their economy outlast the war.

And the way you help the economy last longer is by expanding the war. You can't argue that holding Singapore makes the War unwinnable for China, and that it wouldn't possibly be worthwhile to conquer it, if that's even necessary. Those are contradictory arguments. Singapore if it needs to be conquered would probably be done so from Land, unless the US naval pretense is just defeated in the South China Sea and the Chinese fleet can just sail in.

These are informed opinions. Many countries, including certain ME ones, went heavily for FAC based navy due to how cheap that is, when were they successful in a war?
As for subs, the US government doesn't think they are great, and with the stories of corruption and general quality coming from China, it's easy to believe. Building good subs requires *extreme* focus on quality in manufacturing of every single component. If things get passed because they are good enough to work, that still doesn't mean they are good enough to work quietly, and in China merely good enough to work quality is something to be appreciated.

Maybe the newest SSNs that are in construction won't be that bad, but we know that the subs that already exist and were spotted on patrol, those aren't very quiet at all, and China's SSN fleet numbers aren't impressive for some reason.

Eh, they have to do something much less extreme than US subs are required to do.

Against an orders of magnitude weaker opponent than US and Japan. One with not a single missile destroyer or submarine, even old one.
If Russia was competent, it may lose some boats and maybe a small warship or two, but no more.

I mean, yes if Russia won the war 2 years ago, they'd have less naval losses. Seeing they haven't won, and have ships in missile and attack range, losing several ships seems quite reasonable, even if they were supremely competent. And Russians are generally middling at best.

30,000 tons out of how many they had in Black Sea in the beginning of the conflict?
We aren't talking of WW2 navy tonnages, Black Sea Fleet is kinda artifically isolated case study due to Montreux convention on account of which Turkey blocks warship movement into the sea during wartime.

Irrelevant to the argument. In fact, as you said above, if they had a bigger fleet, they likely would lose less. Or lose more, because they might have more tonnage in range of land and air based anti ship systems.

What we would actually have to see to get a better idea of how well the Russians are actually doing is to see something like a ratio between attacks and hits.

I meant very different technological environment, you may as well start bringing up world wind maps because those were very relevant for all the history of naval warfare before steam ships lol.

Except there are many similar elements between WWII and today as well. Or even earlier wars. You could likewise say its pointless to bring up morale, because that's an old war consideration. Or overland vs water supply.

Tomahawk production infrastructure is actually quite decent due to their mass use in ME kerfuffles. US Navy fired hundreds of those *in a day* back in Iraq war for example.

Which I believe was several years of production. I believe total lifetime production is under 10,000, and the current stockpile under 5,000.

Tomahawk (missile) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

If wiki is to be believed, the largest number used in a single operation was the 2003 invasion, which used 800 of them. Other use case we see like Shayrat is 59 Tomahawk missiles used against a single airport. Which China has at least a hundred military airports. If each of those took as many Tomahawk's as Shayrat, that's about 6,000 Tomahawks, just to temporarily suppress the Chinese air force. Assuming minimal effectiveness of Chinese countermeasures. There are then several hundred civilian airports that can be impressed into military service.

That seems like a massive application of "China will bomb everyone, but no one is going to bomb China in return" fallacy and implying it's US missile targeting capability that sucks exactly as much as Russian so it's mostly good for wasting missiles on terror bombing cities while Chinese one is good, while if anything that situation is reverse in reality.
China has its industry located near coastal areas, ports are all on coast, airfields that are close to coast are relevant.
You know, all those ships China would need to use to invade any island? USA will blow their firepower on those, their munition cargo to be, and their fuel cargo to be, and the places where those would be stored. Exactly like Ukraine does with Russian supply ships and warehouses in Crimea, except on far larger scale (hello practical experience btw).

I am assuming the US will bomb the Chinese. I don't see how you could have thought otherwise. My argument has been even if the US targeting is perfect, the reserves aren't deep enough to maintain an offensive to the destruction of the Chinese military, and if the US is anything less than perfect and the Chinese at all capable, the initial offensive stalls short of victory and people rebuild and you have the multi year attritional war.

SK alone also has 2,500 km of coastline, for whatever good that is.

I don't see SK jumping to China's rescue as long as NK-China alliance is a thing.

Its not required for SK to jump to China's rescue, just not participate in the blockade. If South Korea doesn't forbid trade with China, and the US/Japan/Taiwan don't intercept shipping headed to South Korea, then every ship that would eventually go to China touches base in S. Korea and pays some fee to have it marked there before pushing on to China.

If they do engage in the blockade, then they're signing up for the War of annihilation the US pushes people to in this theoretical scenario.

Why would Taiwan leave a blockade that was set up for on account of Taiwan being attacked or blockaded by China in the first place?
You are saying in a roundabout way that Taiwan would simply one day decide to surrender.
Any hard actions US takes in that region are for the defense of the SK/Taiwan/Japan, not just some ego stroking project.

I think Taiwan would, given the choice, prefer a limited regional war than a global war, and specifically a war of Annihilation against itself.

Remember that the initial scenario I purposed was China offering a limited war over some particular islands, a repeat of the 1950s straight crisis. The suggested counter was a general blockade, which is a tactic for a war of Annihilation, which is the only situations we've applied it to. Thus, China is told to either lower its head like a beaten dog, or escalate to a global war.

Now, I don't think Taiwan, S. Korea, or Japan would actually want to take on the risks of a general blockade. Taiwan and S. Korea would be marked for death as states in such an unlimited war, and with their demographics what they are, even if the US won the millions of casualties they would take would destroy them.

The only one who would have interest in carrying out such an aggressive strategy would be the United States, dragging its allies along with it.

But, its the scenario people wanted to talk about, so I'm going with the assumption of a US willing to escalate to WWIII, and looking at things from China's side of how to win and maximize the returns to fighting WWIII.

China barely has naval assets to successfully invade Taiwan at best, how the hell are they going to invade far bigger and better armed Japan?

Again, Japan of all countries has an understanding of how untrustworthy China is in deals. Relying on nothing but China's word for safety is suicide.

So China is going to invade SK, fight a naval war against the western coalition, and also launch a logistically breakneck effort to take over ME without naval assets all at the same time, and you think all these 3 fronts will be successes?

Over time, quite possibly. Remember, while your assumption seems to be the US can fight a 6 day war and shock and awe china to give up, I'm assuming that China can't be militarily destroyed in a short period of time, and over time build up.

Lets say China decides to kick off the war in 2025. Maybe after finding the US is willing to go all or nothing after some displays in 2024.

2024 is spent laying the groundwork, sharply increasing military spending and shifting export production to military production, and hording civilian material that is valuable. You implement a draft or otherwise expand the military. Ideally you try to reduce exports to the US to something like zero, while taking out everything of any value in the US you can. China currently has something like 3 trillion in foreign reserves, and at least in 2023 had a $857 billion dollar export surplus.

So, technically China could import $2 trillion dollars more this year, export a trillion dollars less, and making up the difference while only spending down the roughly $1 trillion dollars US dollar assets. Which China would have every reason to get rid of since its value to China is going to approach zero when war with America starts, and if China is really successful with actually generally approach zero if the US global financial system collapses.

So, just in the year leading up to war China can build up nearly a $1 trillion dollars in stockpiles just from spending the entirety of its trade surplus, and increase that to 1-3 trillion dollars liquidating soon to be worthless American assets. Plus you can borrow lot of money from people you have no intention of paying back.

Ideally when war starts military spending as a % of GDP has been pushed up to about 10% as easily converted things are converted and the military increased to about 10 million troops. So, military spending about $2-$3 trillion dollars of military budget at start of the war, plus a $1 trillion dollars of stockpiles. And mid ramp up to total war, assuming the US doesn't just quit.

Now, a 1-3 trillion shopping spree is going to drive up lots of prices, especially if your taking something like $1 trillion dollars of exports off the market as you start domestic stockpiles and switching over to a war economy. But, spiking oil costs as China stockpiles as much as possible is just going to pour billions of dollars into friends like Russia and Iran to help them pay for their own build ups. Its also going to trigger potentially a bit of a shortage in Europe and America as their imports fall and raw materials get taken off the market. But, economic trouble in America is good for China in the lead up, and everything China can buy in America and ship to China is something America isn't going to have when the war starts.

This might make some people rich in the US, but that will just undermine people's willingness to move against china and screw up the good thing they have going, and if the war starts and China has goods and people in the US have paper, which they can't use to buy anything, China comes out ahead there.

Also probably headhunt as aggressively as possible. Your spending trillions of dollars, a $100 billion at say $100k a person can headhunt for the 1 million most valuable people. Targeting primarily Taiwan and S. Korea, though again any productive people you can convince to leave any blue area if they're not likely to be an asset to red where they are is a big hit.

Once the War kicks off, as I said I think S. Korea and Taiwan take 1-3 years to beat. So, taking the 3 year assumption, by that point China is 3-4 years into its mobilization, and is probably at peak military mobilization of about 100 million in uniform and a military budget of something like $10-$20 trillion dollars equivalent. At which point China obviously can build/has built extensive naval landing forces, Japan has been under siege for 3 years, and has probably lost 1-2 million troops.

That would be where Japan is deciding whether or not to stick with the US, or sue for some sort of peace.

There are 7 F-16 using countries in EU now. If every sent mere 8, that would be more than Poland has now. And that's just the F-16's, not all the other jets, nevermind actually you know, doing actually reasonable moves and ordering production of new ones at maximum capacity ASAP, but we have the politicians we have.
Also is the Chinese army going to teleport to Belarus?

Except that... Europe is still not using a lot of its production capacity, and it would take no more than a fraction of existing stock to walk all over Russians with how they are doing in Ukraine. And once that's done, a lot of the kit can be sent. Sometimes a sword hanging over you is worse than a sword that has already struck.

If China is invading Korea and Taiwan, it will support Russia less, not more than now. That is unless China wants to lose on all fronts at the same time.

The fact is, the logistics of sending any major reinforcements to Russia's western border from China are downright nightmarish, and the capacity of existing transport routes, horribly insufficient.

I mean, Russia has trains, and China has 1-2 years to build up forces. Ideally, a war isn't necessary in Europe, but maintaining a plausible threat of War inflicts a lot of virtual attrition. So, on the timeline, as China unwinds exports and ups military production, the treat of US sanctions to support Russia goes down, and more direct support can be supplied.

Chinese commitment would mostly there to provide credible support to Russia, maintain its war with Ukraine through 2024-2025, and when coinvent invade Ukraine through Belarus to wrap that up. Probably a relatively light force overall in 2025. Most of the fight there would be Russia. Major Chinese forces would be 2026-2027 as the Chinese military forces approach their tens of millions and other critical fronts are secured.

Europe, if its committed to the American system, may ramp up production at some point. But, Russia and China would have a lead on mobilization.

So, why would China go out of its way to make it possible for the whole EU's otherwise uninvolved mass of armies help grind their own land forces in a logistically unfavorable setup? Every soldier sent there is a soldier not invading Korea, and several trucks of supplies not getting to the latter.

Will they also send them air support? Will they take away the planes from the Japan front, Taiwan front or Korea front? And they better be good planes, if they sent those reserve old Mig-21 clones, on European front would get treated like training targets by Eurofighters, Rafales and F-35's.

If Russia nukes Europe, Europe nukes Russia. Including its oil industry. China says bye to its fuel support from Russia.

So they're not in the Middle east, and virtual attrition of keeping them in Europe. As I said, ideally war in Europe besides continuing the Ukrainian war wouldn't be necessary. But, if threat of war in Europe can be maintained, the EU's forces are nullified by keeping them in Europe, and lots of virtual attrition is inflicted.

This whole war obviously has the high risk of nuclear war, but if it can be delayed until the civilian economy and population can be hardened and dispersed, the better China can pull through the nuclear war. But, obviously, if Europe is nukes, Blue's economy is dramatically reduced, and thus the amount of oil needed to sustain the war effort is also reduced. Plus securing the middle eastern oil may be easier, as a nuked Europe will be less able to support US operations in the middle east, and Europe generally will have less leverage there.

Well if China wants to waste the troops it needs to invade Korea by having them die due to lack of supplies in Belarus or Middle East, that's definitely going to help the western war effort.

You do realize Russia has had extensive train systems to the middle east and far east for over a 100 years now, right? And belt and road has been a thing for the last 10 years, and it actually has built a lot of infrastructure, right? Are you also aware that Iran and Belarus currently get enough supplies to feed millions of people now? Pakistan in fact are a food exporter?

Iran of course has oil. Iran and Russia in fact do have economies, so they can actually locally provide quite a bit of support. The supply needs of Chinese forces in Europe and the Middle East probably aren't actually that extensive, outside of shells. And for Shells transport ability is pretty substantial.

Those weapons, once released, are controlled by computers, not humans. You need an adequate defensive suite to deal with them, and if those were cheap, everyone would be buying them.

. . . computer controlled doesn't mean cheap options aren't viable. Chaff for example has been one of the most effective anti missiles system at least through the 2000s, and smoke seems to be useful keeping Russian tanks alive when actually used.

Chaff and smoke still are basic equipment that as far as I'm aware everyone buys and uses. The newest tank I'm aware of, the K2 Black Panther from South Korea, still comes with smoke launchers.

Maybe the newest $1 million missile is immune to the countermeasure it took to counter $100,000 laser guided weaponry, but that might mean you need a $1,000 counter compared to a $100 dollar counter.

Yeah, those are abilities of military grade radars, not some 2k USD crappy one, those can't tell speeds of objects so precisely, if at all, especially at distance. For comparisons mortars operate at relatively short ranges, so to spot them small radars with very short wavelengths and conversely good resolution but very short range (aka counter-battery radars) get used.

Poland Cancels Its Airfield ATC Radar Procurement Tender

The Armament Agency had announced a procurement procedure, regarding the acquisition of 15 systems for airfield ATC radars (RKRL systems) in March last year. Up to five bidders were expected to be invited, meeting all of the criteria. The final selection was to indicate the bid that was the best...

defence24.com

That's an example of a civilian version of radar with such abilities.
15 airport radars, about 200m USD.
You are basically trying to magic up a breakthrough technology for China which lets it build second rate military electronics for the price of currently cheapest civilian ones, basically giving them discount Ace Combat manufacturing, through the power of your ignorance of the nitty gritty details of differences between radars of various price points and capabilities.

I just don't find it plausible that its an impossible job, with modern tech, to duplicate the performance of lightweight local WWII radars in an even cheaper and lighter local radar. That would suggest Radar has not followed the path of all other electronics. This would suggest radar would be worse than what we know a camera with now fairly basic image analysis program can do.

Now, you might be right that cheap short range radar might be a very marginal, and the computer revolution is pretty new. Counter battery radars need to do something much more advanced and complicated than what I was suggesting.

You don't get it. Those bombs aren't just effective against unarmed boats. They can take anything other than warships with medium-long range air defense.
Corvette with 9km short range missile and gun based defense, which China has many of? Also vulnerable.
Any auxiliary, landing or transport warships not escorted by a frigate+ warship? Also vulnerable.
What does it mean? US and allies need expensive high tech weapons only to sink China's first rate AAW surface combatants. There aren't that many and that's not something that can be easily or cheaply improvised. Once those get decimated, China has to either keep most of its Navy and auxiliaries out of operations against Taiwan or Japan, nevermind futher out, because they will be easy pickings otherwise.

So, yeah, that doesn't upset the dynamic too much. I mean, destroyers in WWII were also quite vulnerable even with 5 inch guns to air attack. Lighter craft more so. Ships have generally been quite vulnerable to air power, and the Navy would ideally operate within cover of land air power, and you'd want to convoy a bit.

Naval survival vs military aircraft then continues to be a mixture of protection from friendly aircraft, not being spotted by aircraft, or mass firepower. Which still at this point seems to be anything heavier than corvettes.

 

[JagerIV]

I mean, punching holes in the arguments you're putting forward is basically like shooting fish in a barrel at this point, but still, sometimes that's fun.

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archive.is

The US has some corruption problems in its military too, but those don't extend to fueling its rockets with water.

I'm genuinely curious as to where your confidence in the CCP's military efforts originated from.

We can kill 500 million of them and still lose, and I think they can impose more suffering on their people for the goal of Taiwan and ascending to full major power status, than we are willing to sacrifice for the good of the American Empire. Ability to endure suffering is quite valuable to winning modern wars.

If they are approaching peak power, it then makes more sense to push now at maximum relative strength and destroy they're potential rivals: if the US is pushed out of dominance in the middle east, S. Korea and Taiwan are destroyed, Japan either pushed into neutrality or destroyed, then even in the case of decline for a generation or so, China's position is more secured.

And if they can take Australia and push Anglos out of Asia, they can have a secured outer parameter, some conquests allow them to distribute rewards to people to pay off people in the war, and secures a more secure 2nd world block to ride out the demographic transition. Hell if they can give their farmers a bunch of new land, say plot a 100 million Chinese farmers to crowd out the Australians, that might create a high fertility population to jumpstart through the demographic slump faster.

 

[Marduk]

Eh, I'm less certain not having political limits is going to be the giant power up you assume.

All the kerfuffles you and many others bring up to talk down US capabilities ultimately come down to the war in questions being bound by political limits so strict that they would be unthinkable to the point of being target of satire in WW2 or earlier.

Thus land invasions.

Land invasions of what? China has not enough bribe money to get USA to bring landing forces to it so that they can throw own army at them. Korea means fighting a war through the shit-tastic infrastructure and mountainous terrain of North Korea again.

If your under blockade. Your not exporting. This seems pretty obvious. Once you loosen the blockade, you just order the occupied people to continue producing what they previously were producing. Or just pay people.

Produce with what? It's not the 12th century when you just tell farmers to go back to the burned fields and plant new crops. Ukraine shows nicely how destructive warfare is to industry.
Most of the important factories would look like the Mariupol steel works by the time they are occupied. Nevermind getting the feedstock for it.

Of course the Soviet's thought of that. My dad flew on an AWAC, during the cold war, and asking him he figured the E-2s would have been the first thing shot down. Soviet's apparently had a long range missile specifically designed for that.

Yup. And there are ways to defend from that.

Yes, we have more advanced Lancastrian models to actually try and model real outcomes. Salvo model is such a more advanced Lancastrian model.



Is the expectation that fighting a world war is not going to result in economic pain?

How much economic pain can China take? It's a question Chinese leadership does not want to get an empirical answer to.

https://digital-commons.usnwc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1002&context=cmsi-red-books

Here are the two obvious land routs:

China -> Russia -> Iran

China -> Pakistan -> Iran

Both of those routs gives you enough transport to supply several hundred thousand troops.

In all these cases, you are trying to supply modern troops through 3 areas (China's far west is their poverty ridden backyard with nasty terrain) characterized by crappy terrain and crappy infrastructure. 4k km from border, more like 7k if you include getting this stuff from China's economic centers rather than the western boonies of it. Of land transport in such conditions.
Let it sink in.
The Berlin-Moscow distance is about 1800km by road, and some of it was covered with German infrastructure, and we know what a logistical pain that was.

So, you don't use a warship. This is what helicopters and light boats are for. Like what Iran just did. Maybe speedboats of seized yatches if you need more hulls. You can then have warships providing overwatch, so when a Blue force makes itself known by shooting on the speedboat you have your warship engage the enemy warship.

Helicopters are expensive and vulnerable to western airpower. Speedboats are short ranged and kinda useless if the ship has armed security.
Not having at least a few mg's on every ship of any importance is an artifact of modern ideological and legal climate around weapons combined with the generally safe environment, not a physical or economic limitation.
And then there is scuttling, a common practice in WW1 and WW2 capture attempts of civilian ships.

Seizing fishing boats and other civilian ships is the job of the naval militia. Warships have more valuable things to do. If the militia effectively works as a meat shield for the navy, even better. Better lose a 1,000 fishing boats than 100 actual warships.

They can only succeed at that much if unopposed.

Then why did you acted surprised that AWACs would be shot at, and the need to defend will limit how aggressive the US can be?

I did not act surprised, i said it's not a new problem and it's not without counter-tactics.

. . . we do. They're called Chinese people. I was friends with one of them in college. Chinese national, dad designed work camps. And I knew another one in middle school who was quite patriotic. Plus I recall the Confucius centers on the major college campuses I visited when I was in college.

US vs China would not primarily I think be a communism or Capitalism fight, but Chinese nationalism vs American empire. And broadly just those who are Pro America and Anti America. China obviously has a pretty expansive global network of sympathizers, many of which can be used to raise/fund militant sympathizers as useful.

They sure are loyal when big money come out of it and little to no risk of any punishment. But how many will stay loyal when the guns start speaking and the price of doing favors for CCP will be 20 years of prison or an expediated execution?

And the way you help the economy last longer is by expanding the war. You can't argue that holding Singapore makes the War unwinnable for China, and that it wouldn't possibly be worthwhile to conquer it, if that's even necessary. Those are contradictory arguments. Singapore if it needs to be conquered would probably be done so from Land, unless the US naval pretense is just defeated in the South China Sea and the Chinese fleet can just sail in.

Singapore without war damage and its logistical and economic links ruined by a sudden change of ownership produces maybe 10% of China's GDP. After being conquered, it might be 2%, 5% max, at least for few decades. How much does that help China's war effort, and how much of war effort it does consume to hold?

Eh, they have to do something much less extreme than US subs are required to do.

They will have to fight US SSNs.

I mean, yes if Russia won the war 2 years ago, they'd have less naval losses. Seeing they haven't won, and have ships in missile and attack range, losing several ships seems quite reasonable, even if they were supremely competent. And Russians are generally middling at best.

Their biggest losses were early in the war.

Irrelevant to the argument. In fact, as you said above, if they had a bigger fleet, they likely would lose less. Or lose more, because they might have more tonnage in range of land and air based anti ship systems.

What we would actually have to see to get a better idea of how well the Russians are actually doing is to see something like a ratio between attacks and hits.

That would be self-deception, because a smart opponent probably doesn't even attempt attacks that would knowingly fail.

Except there are many similar elements between WWII and today as well. Or even earlier wars. You could likewise say its pointless to bring up morale, because that's an old war consideration. Or overland vs water supply.

No, between WW2 and today the effective "engagement range" and detection range of warships has changed from low tens to high hundreds, even low thousands of nautical miles in few cases.
This is particularly notable with how small seas like Baltic are effectively turning into surface warship killzones with the increasing reach of land based AShMs and aviation, which was not true earlier.

Which I believe was several years of production. I believe total lifetime production is under 10,000, and the current stockpile under 5,000.

Tomahawk (missile) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

If wiki is to be believed, the largest number used in a single operation was the 2003 invasion, which used 800 of them. Other use case we see like Shayrat is 59 Tomahawk missiles used against a single airport. Which China has at least a hundred military airports. If each of those took as many Tomahawk's as Shayrat, that's about 6,000 Tomahawks, just to temporarily suppress the Chinese air force. Assuming minimal effectiveness of Chinese countermeasures. There are then several hundred civilian airports that can be impressed into military service.

I am assuming the US will bomb the Chinese. I don't see how you could have thought otherwise. My argument has been even if the US targeting is perfect, the reserves aren't deep enough to maintain an offensive to the destruction of the Chinese military, and if the US is anything less than perfect and the Chinese at all capable, the initial offensive stalls short of victory and people rebuild and you have the multi year attritional war.

What you have shown here is that airfield infrastructure is not a great choice of target in that situation. But one can focus targeting on the aircraft on the airfields too, and that will add up with the air warfare attrition. What good are airfields when you have no planes?
If we talk 6,000 Tomahawks, that means allocating one for every single Chinese combat jet that's about a third of that.

Its not required for SK to jump to China's rescue, just not participate in the blockade. If South Korea doesn't forbid trade with China, and the US/Japan/Taiwan don't intercept shipping headed to South Korea, then every ship that would eventually go to China touches base in S. Korea and pays some fee to have it marked there before pushing on to China.

If they do engage in the blockade, then they're signing up for the War of annihilation the US pushes people to in this theoretical scenario.

Russia sanctions show that it's possible to lawfare up such maneuvers. Particularly for a country as economically and militarily dependent on USA as SK.
I can't imagine USA not going "so, if you are going to sabotage our sanctions against China, why are we busying our valuable troops and aircraft with helping to protect you from China's ally when they could be bombing China instead?"
Again, many in SK understand this would be classic "feeding the crocodile in hope he will eat you the last". Which is what would happen in that scenario.

I think Taiwan would, given the choice, prefer a limited regional war than a global war, and specifically a war of Annihilation against itself.

They don't have a choice, never had. A sufficiently dumb politician may delude himself that they do, but they don't.
Not singing up means a limited war of conquest that they will lose. So the choice boils down to the war of annihilation, or may aswell surrender to CCP right away while skipping the steps where they get bombed, invaded and conquered and only then enslaved, much cheaper that way. Though the recent vote shows they don't lean that way and understand their lack of choice.

Remember that the initial scenario I purposed was China offering a limited war over some particular islands, a repeat of the 1950s straight crisis. The suggested counter was a general blockade, which is a tactic for a war of Annihilation, which is the only situations we've applied it to. Thus, China is told to either lower its head like a beaten dog, or escalate to a global war.

Now, I don't think Taiwan, S. Korea, or Japan would actually want to take on the risks of a general blockade. Taiwan and S. Korea would be marked for death as states in such an unlimited war, and with their demographics what they are, even if the US won the millions of casualties they would take would destroy them.

The only one who would have interest in carrying out such an aggressive strategy would be the United States, dragging its allies along with it.

But, its the scenario people wanted to talk about, so I'm going with the assumption of a US willing to escalate to WWIII, and looking at things from China's side of how to win and maximize the returns to fighting WWIII.

Your analysis of the position of Taiwan, Japan and SK is worthless because it treats such a scenario of limited escalation as a singular event, a settling of the score, end of the matter.
The whole hoopla would be pointless from China's perspective if it was to be the last move, it only makes sense as the first move towards much greater ambitions, and evidence of such ambitions being realized.
But everyone knows it would be just the beginning, and of all the political establishments in the world, those 3 are some of the most able of thinking a few steps ahead. Backing down would simply mean that China, in the next month, year, or decade, will make another step against one of the three, now from a better strategic position than the last one. And another. And then another. If CCP get too many small wins, there will be no one to fight for them when CCP demands something they are willing to fight a full scale war over from them, and they know a CCP high on small victories will absolutely come and make rapidly expanding demands of all of the 3. Ending with destruction or some form of conquest of all 3.
Fight for effect from decent position at first opportunity, wait to be forced to fight from a bad one later?
And if you are going to fight from a bad position, why not surrender right away?
Well, everyone knows what being ruled by CCP implies, the story of HK and Uyghurs kinda screwed up the effectiveness of any potential Chinese regional PR offensives.

Over time, quite possibly. Remember, while your assumption seems to be the US can fight a 6 day war and shock and awe china to give up, I'm assuming that China can't be militarily destroyed in a short period of time, and over time build up.

No, that is not my assumption. My assumption is that China would take major losses in its first rate equipment in first few weeks

Lets say China decides to kick off the war in 2025. Maybe after finding the US is willing to go all or nothing after some displays in 2024.

2024 is spent laying the groundwork, sharply increasing military spending and shifting export production to military production, and hording civilian material that is valuable. You implement a draft or otherwise expand the military. Ideally you try to reduce exports to the US to something like zero, while taking out everything of any value in the US you can. China currently has something like 3 trillion in foreign reserves, and at least in 2023 had a $857 billion dollar export surplus.

So, technically China could import $2 trillion dollars more this year, export a trillion dollars less, and making up the difference while only spending down the roughly $1 trillion dollars US dollar assets. Which China would have every reason to get rid of since its value to China is going to approach zero when war with America starts, and if China is really successful with actually generally approach zero if the US global financial system collapses.

So, just in the year leading up to war China can build up nearly a $1 trillion dollars in stockpiles just from spending the entirety of its trade surplus, and increase that to 1-3 trillion dollars liquidating soon to be worthless American assets. Plus you can borrow lot of money from people you have no intention of paying back.

Ideally when war starts military spending as a % of GDP has been pushed up to about 10% as easily converted things are converted and the military increased to about 10 million troops. So, military spending about $2-$3 trillion dollars of military budget at start of the war, plus a $1 trillion dollars of stockpiles. And mid ramp up to total war, assuming the US doesn't just quit.

Now, a 1-3 trillion shopping spree is going to drive up lots of prices, especially if your taking something like $1 trillion dollars of exports off the market as you start domestic stockpiles and switching over to a war economy. But, spiking oil costs as China stockpiles as much as possible is just going to pour billions of dollars into friends like Russia and Iran to help them pay for their own build ups. Its also going to trigger potentially a bit of a shortage in Europe and America as their imports fall and raw materials get taken off the market. But, economic trouble in America is good for China in the lead up, and everything China can buy in America and ship to China is something America isn't going to have when the war starts.

This might make some people rich in the US, but that will just undermine people's willingness to move against china and screw up the good thing they have going, and if the war starts and China has goods and people in the US have paper, which they can't use to buy anything, China comes out ahead there.

Also probably headhunt as aggressively as possible. Your spending trillions of dollars, a $100 billion at say $100k a person can headhunt for the 1 million most valuable people. Targeting primarily Taiwan and S. Korea, though again any productive people you can convince to leave any blue area if they're not likely to be an asset to red where they are is a big hit.

Once the War kicks off, as I said I think S. Korea and Taiwan take 1-3 years to beat. So, taking the 3 year assumption, by that point China is 3-4 years into its mobilization, and is probably at peak military mobilization of about 100 million in uniform and a military budget of something like $10-$20 trillion dollars equivalent. At which point China obviously can build/has built extensive naval landing forces, Japan has been under siege for 3 years, and has probably lost 1-2 million troops.

That would be where Japan is deciding whether or not to stick with the US, or sue for some sort of peace.

China is not Russia, its economy doesn't have a massive store of oil money floating around and growing since such a long time that it no longer raises all that much suspicion, yet even in case of Russia NATO knew of the war preparations for several months at minimum.
The mere attempt to reserve such a massive amount of money out of the economic cycle would create waves in world economy that may have unpredictable socioeconomic consequences back home, as in China could cause a massive economic crisis for itself merely trying to prepare for war this way.

Secondly, the numbers you throw around... is insane.
100 million in uniform? Are you for real? It would mean the other 1.3 billion are starving in cold and darkness.

The problem with China headhunting is that it's a great deal for people who can travel a safe and welcoming world with that money...
If it raises enough stink that you would need to live in China, well... It's not that safe to have money in China even in peacetime, as some billionaires found out. Imagine being a foreign millionaire in Xi's China during or after WW3. Sucker's deal. Either your money will end up being worth a small apartment in an impoverished, CCP run city at most... or you will be disappeared eventually.

"Some sort of peace" for Japan in this scenario "China will try again with us later, and we will be fighting alone then".

I mean, Russia has trains, and China has 1-2 years to build up forces. Ideally, a war isn't necessary in Europe, but maintaining a plausible threat of War inflicts a lot of virtual attrition. So, on the timeline, as China unwinds exports and ups military production, the treat of US sanctions to support Russia goes down, and more direct support can be supplied.

There are not enough trains and lines to do it in the whole region. Start worrying when Russia starts massively expanding their own railway in Far East, but China would have to explicitly sponsor that as long as Russia is heavily sanctioned by the West.
As things stand, Russia's rail links in that region are insufficient even for properly supplying own smaller efforts in Ukraine.

The Trans-Siberian rail corridor could reach a million TEUs in 2023 - Maritime Gateway

News, This year, container traffic transported between Europe and China via Russia increased by 47 per cent compared to the same nine-month period last year,

www.maritimegateway.com

"Ambitions" to have a million TEU max capacity per year in the future, not accounting for sanctions, nevermind military action in case of WW3.
There are singular ports in Europe with many times that. There are singular ships that carry 20k TEU. A decently sized port in Europe, far from the biggest, does over 2 million TEU per year for comparison. You're not floating up Russia's economy, waging a massive war in ME and also supporting a Russian military contingent of Chinese troops on that on a million TEU, and certainly not all at the same time.

This shit is why sea trade is still king despite railways existing for well over 2 centuries now.

Chinese commitment would mostly there to provide credible support to Russia, maintain its war with Ukraine through 2024-2025, and when coinvent invade Ukraine through Belarus to wrap that up. Probably a relatively light force overall in 2025. Most of the fight there would be Russia. Major Chinese forces would be 2026-2027 as the Chinese military forces approach their tens of millions and other critical fronts are secured.

Europe, if its committed to the American system, may ramp up production at some point. But, Russia and China would have a lead on mobilization.

So far Chinese commitment to Russia seems very questionable.

So they're not in the Middle east, and virtual attrition of keeping them in Europe. As I said, ideally war in Europe besides continuing the Ukrainian war wouldn't be necessary. But, if threat of war in Europe can be maintained, the EU's forces are nullified by keeping them in Europe, and lots of virtual attrition is inflicted.

This whole war obviously has the high risk of nuclear war, but if it can be delayed until the civilian economy and population can be hardened and dispersed, the better China can pull through the nuclear war. But, obviously, if Europe is nukes, Blue's economy is dramatically reduced, and thus the amount of oil needed to sustain the war effort is also reduced. Plus securing the middle eastern oil may be easier, as a nuked Europe will be less able to support US operations in the middle east, and Europe generally will have less leverage there.

EU's land forces are kept in Europe by not being very applicable to the war and logistics, Air forces, probably kept in Europe by politics better if they don't join the war directly, and naval forces, well if China is fighting a land war in the EU they have nothing better to do than join up with US forces in Pacific for they have nothing to do in Belarus or Ukraine.

You do realize Russia has had extensive train systems to the middle east and far east for over a 100 years now, right? And belt and road has been a thing for the last 10 years, and it actually has built a lot of infrastructure, right? Are you also aware that Iran and Belarus currently get enough supplies to feed millions of people now? Pakistan in fact are a food exporter?

Having them doesn't mean their capacity is worth much, and even if it does, it doesn't mean it will remain so for long during WW3.
Pakistan has major ports btw.

Iran of course has oil. Iran and Russia in fact do have economies, so they can actually locally provide quite a bit of support. The supply needs of Chinese forces in Europe and the Middle East probably aren't actually that extensive, outside of shells. And for Shells transport ability is pretty substantial.

Iran and Russia cannot supply current Russian forces with half the stuff they need in the quantity they need. So the choice for them is to their take from Russian conscript's stores, or China has to bring its own toys.

. . . computer controlled doesn't mean cheap options aren't viable. Chaff for example has been one of the most effective anti missiles system at least through the 2000s, and smoke seems to be useful keeping Russian tanks alive when actually used.

Chaff and smoke still are basic equipment that as far as I'm aware everyone buys and uses. The newest tank I'm aware of, the K2 Black Panther from South Korea, still comes with smoke launchers.

Maybe the newest $1 million missile is immune to the countermeasure it took to counter $100,000 laser guided weaponry, but that might mean you need a $1,000 counter compared to a $100 dollar counter.

Lots of maybes here. I would not bet money on them, as they seem ridiculously favorable to cheap solutions to expensive weapons.
Even smoke launchers are not made equal. You can have cheap WW2 grade smoke launchers, or you can have fancy ones with automatic discharge, hooked up to various warning receivers, with infrared smoke and so on.
There are discussions on how much things like that are still worth and also modernization of them.

Is Chaff Dead? Softkill Countermeasures and Millimetric Wave Radar

Millimetric wave radar seekers for anti-ship missiles are concentrating the minds of naval soft-kill countermeasures experts and triggering debates. Guest post by Dr. Thomas Withington Millimetric …

dsm.forecastinternational.com

Those basic aircraft countermeasures also aren't equal, and on modern planes are used in combination with ever better EW suites.

Here Is How Much Those Decoy Flares Cost That Military Aircraft Fire Off All The Time

In combat, they are essential to the survivability of the aircraft that carry them, but they don't come as cheap as one may think.

www.thedrive.com

This one gives fun figures, you can have 75$ flares similar to Cold War ones, or 3,000$ ones that may work against the more modern missiles. Cheapness has a price in those things, being that it probably won't work against the nice toys.

I just don't find it plausible that its an impossible job, with modern tech, to duplicate the performance of lightweight local WWII radars in an even cheaper and lighter local radar. That would suggest Radar has not followed the path of all other electronics. This would suggest radar would be worse than what we know a camera with now fairly basic image analysis program can do.

Now, you might be right that cheap short range radar might be a very marginal, and the computer revolution is pretty new. Counter battery radars need to do something much more advanced and complicated than what I was suggesting.

WW2 radars were good if they were detecting WW2 aircraft and where they are going, that was their performance benchmark. Not low flying objects barely bigger than a large bird if that, while also not triggering a dozen alerts every time a flock of seagulls flies by.
So you are not trying to duplicate that, you are trying to duplicate a part of the performance of modern military radars and some of better cold war radars that can reliably discriminate drones and semi-stealthy ordnance from clutter and birds, and put it in a package that civilians can operate, and also expect it to be dirt cheap while at it.
Meanwhile even a Bayraktar TB2, which is considered a medium sized drone with reduced RCS, has a much lower radar return than a typical WW2 fighter, nevermind the smaller drones and ordnance, it's far from undetectable, but still can be a pain in the ass for poorly operated late Cold War air defenses.

So, yeah, that doesn't upset the dynamic too much. I mean, destroyers in WWII were also quite vulnerable even with 5 inch guns to air attack. Lighter craft more so. Ships have generally been quite vulnerable to air power, and the Navy would ideally operate within cover of land air power, and you'd want to convoy a bit.

Naval survival vs military aircraft then continues to be a mixture of protection from friendly aircraft, not being spotted by aircraft, or mass firepower. Which still at this point seems to be anything heavier than corvettes.

Radar laid guns and radar proximity fuzes changed that a lot, even in late WW2, and later forced planes to use standoff weapons outside the range of guns.
Now it's all about EW, point defense, and killing the enemy before they launch, and these things are to some degree common with protection from land and surface combatants.
There are much better ways to spot, even mid cold war missiles with active radar homing could be fired in merely the general area the enemy ship is expected to be, and then the missile would look for something resembling it. Open ocean, prepared and geographically complex coastline and underwater are only places where detection can still be some challenge for those with resources of a major power.

 

[Zachowon]

Let's put this into perspective.

The US military has the capability for something an F 35 sees to guide in a strike from a ship that can't see it

 

[The Whispering Monk]

Also...Lockheed Martin has announced the 1000th F35 has been produced.

How many stealth aircraft has China made...that are actually flying?

 

[ATP]

Also...Lockheed Martin has announced the 1000th F35 has been produced.

How many stealth aircraft has China made...that are actually flying?

Good qestion.But they made about 100,i think.If we add F22,then USA have 12:1 advantage in numbers.
Well,USA and Allies - some of F.35 go to Japan and other countries.

 

[TheRejectionist]

Also...Lockheed Martin has announced the 1000th F35 has been produced.

How many stealth aircraft has China made...that are actually flying?

Is 1000 F35 actually good or just over-engineered flying coffins ? Because even I that I am not into aviation or any other industry related have heard how the company produced goods were lacking in several factors.

On China, I would be more worried not if they aren't developing F35 equivalents but more on how to disable the F35. Not to mention that Anglo and Australian ex-pilots have been found teaching Chinese pilots on many things so that should be more worrying on that than how many flying coffins they build.

 

[LordsFire]

Is 1000 F35 actually good or just over-engineered flying coffins ? Because even I that I am not into aviation or any other industry related have heard how the company produced goods were lacking in several factors.

On China, I would be more worried not if they aren't developing F35 equivalents but more on how to disable the F35. Not to mention that Anglo and Australian ex-pilots have been found teaching Chinese pilots on many things so that should be more worrying on that than how many flying coffins they build.

The only thing that can compete with the F-35 right now, is the F-22. They have the highest combat capability of any fighter flying.

The Chinese J-20 is, at least in theory, also a generation 5 fighter, but it's been plagued with issues, and given they've no actual combat experience, it's not at all clear how well it can perform.

The track record of combat aircraft from communist nations suggests that at best they'll be about a third as good as the F-22 or F-35, and possibly a great deal worse. If it does come to a war, pilots will probably instructed to treat them as a near-peer threat in first engagements, and then the actual combat will let the world see how much the Communists have been lying, this time.