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Trevor wrote: Mon Jun 08, 2020 10:40 pm I've looked at both Taiwan's and China's current military capability, so I have a few thoughts on it.

I don't believe China would be able to conceal an invasion, as it would require hundreds of ballistic and cruise missile systems as part of an opening attack. They'd hit every airfield, naval base, and vessel they could. Taiwan would have ample warning, although some of their aircraft would be caught on the ground. You can't keep every plane in the air all the time.

China greatly outnumbers Taiwan in terms of its naval forces, air forces, and ground forces. That being said, Taiwan's capable of inflicting heavy losses on them. In fact, 20 years ago, i would even say they were capable of repelling a Chinese invasion without outside help.

However, I no longer believe that's the case. China would suffer enormous losses, but they've made it clear people are a mere resource to be expended. They will call up reserves, even use civilian boats to transport troops to the island should it prove necessary.

And I believe Taiwan knows they're not going to be able to stop China from establishing a beachhead. However, the island is mountainous, providing ample opportunity for guerilla warfare, and if I was part of the Taiwanese military, I'd ensure there were hundreds of hidden caches of weapons buried so deep China could never find them. China would lose tens of thousands of their troops securing territory in Taiwan, maybe more taking over the major population centers.

Even so, if Taiwan fought alone, they would lose the fight. And our intervention is an open question. The United States is very much in a mood of: "Screw foreign entanglements; let people deal with their own problems!" The attitude dominates both conservatives and progressives. We'd find ourselves in a position where if we intervene, it'll be a bloody war, but if we don't, we send a message to the world that American protection means nothing.

I think it's more an attitude of screw those people who aren't willing to make an effort for their own defense. Note the difference between, say Germany, who spends 1.38% of GDP and Poland which spends well over 2%. The latter is appreciated while the former is a source of irritation.

China would certainly threaten us with force not to get involved in an internal matter, perhaps cutting off medical supplies or other crucial items. However, let's say. . . they offer an agreement where all debt we owe them will be forgiven in exchange for not assisting Taiwan. It'd be a tempting offer for some, especially with an anti-intervention mood. Our government is paralyzed with the knowledge we have two impossible choices in front of us, which would likely end in a bitter partisan battle as Taiwan falls. Japan would likely be in a similar situation, arguing between a clear danger and their Post-WWII pledge not to declare war.

Taiwan is indeed a hard question since no other countries have formal defense treaties with it. I don't see Japan getting involved unless the US did and that's by no means assured. Though Japan would not be declaring war but supporting an ally which allowed under the new reading of the Japanese constitution. For China it would face sanctions probably worse than Russia has had since 2014. All high tech using US components would be cut off, no more waivers. There's also the possibility of a naval blockade cutting off imports. That would mean no more oil for China as well as no food imports. Would it still be worth it for China? Only if internal politics demanded it. My thinking is that the younger generation would no accept privation willingly. Though the CCP isn't opposed to breaking heads and mass imprisonment if necessary.

Our assistance is far from guaranteed, though refusal would have untold consequences. The Philippines would be a prime target for China. Their military is far weaker than Taiwan's, underequipped and poorly trained, Moreover, their strategic location would be an excellent buffer state against the U.S. Navy, where they could station thousands of anti-ship missiles in opposition to us.

Again, conquering the Philippines doesn't bring any real benefit to China. While it's military wouldn't be much more than a speed bump, it DOES have a defense treaty with the US. Occupying the Philippines would be a nightmare without total security over the South China Sea. The US would be launching anti-ship missiles or torpedoes to sink every transport and cargo ship. And remember the Philippines has some 108 million people and they really don't like Chinese people. Occupation wouldn't be fun.

The question is: how effective are China's "carrier killers"? I've read many articles on the topic, with varying opinions of how deadly they are. I've seen the massive crater in a desert test against our carrier, but there's a difference between that and how well they perform under battlefield conditions. I expect we won't have a true answer until they're actually used.

The problem with the DF-21D is that it's untested against a mobile target. I don't expect to see one because that would show exact capabilities which China would prefer to be known. It's also only a 600 kg warhead. I'd be more worried about a P-800 or Brahmos missile.

Navigator wrote: Mon Jun 08, 2020 11:26 pm Trevor,

The problem is that the carrier launched aircraft has been superseded today (this will be debated until weapons are actually used) by surface to surface and air/surface missiles. This has been the case for decades. Its just that there are only a few instances of naval combat since WW2 to show this. The weapons today (see the Russian/Indian Brahoms missle, the Russian SSN-27 or 30, and, especially the Chinese YJ-91) have incredible capabilities. These kinds of missiles can fly low (sea skimming) using a turbojet for a hundred miles or so. They have multiple sensor capabilities, active radar, passive radar, infrared homing, and so on. If you try to jam them, they can home in on the jamming signal. When they are close to the target, a terminal rocket or even ramjet accelerates them to Mach 3 or higher. Hundreds would be launched simultaneously at a Carrier task force.

The carrier and its escorts could shoot down dozens. But they aren't going to shoot down all of them or even the majority.

I don't agree with your sentiment nor do other countries. Russia is spending heavily to update their one carrier while China and India are building their own. Since they're all spending billions of dollars, they must think they are still worth having. And they are. Missiles can deny access to a certain area but they can't control that area. They are also expendable weapons. Aircraft are reusable, are much more flexible in their employment and much more versatile in the targets they can hit.

While anti-ship missiles have gotten better, so have the counters to them. The most important is aircraft which can engage the launch platforms before the missiles are in range of ships. Also, SAMs have gotten much better, especially with the SM-6 using the sensor from AMRAAM missiles and cooperative engagement meaning they can can use targeting information from other sources and even be controlled by them, including F-35's.

The non Carrier ships in the task force that get hit are going to really get damaged. Look at what a single 1980s exocet missile did to the British ships in the Falkans that got hit by them. The Carrier itself doesn't need to be sunk. All you have to do it make it incapable of launching aircraft. And to do this, all it takes is a fire. A couple of planes catching fire is usually all it takes. Yes, they will put the fire out, but the carrier is inoperative for hours. Worse would be damage to the flight deck or elevators. And a bunch of missile hits are going to do this.

Yes, any real hit on a carrier can render it ineffective for an extended period. The Falklands isn't a great example for the US though since the British forces didn't correspond to what the USN has. The UK had only 42 aircraft, all Harriers which were better than nothing, but hardly top of the line even in 1982. Importantly, there was no AEW limiting air detection ranger to that of individual ships or the Harrier's own myopic sensors. Sheffield's SAM defenses were not great even at the time: Sea Dart was marked inferior to the Standard Missiles of the day.

On top of this, the Chinese also have high precision guided ballistic missile warheads that the USN cannot shoot down. One or two of these, and the carrier needs 6 months in port (minimum) to fix the flight deck.

DF-21D is untested against a mobile target. Both SM-3 and SM-6 would be usable against it so it isn't unstoppable. But I will admit that neither missile has been tested against a replica of a DF-21D so how well they would perform is also unknown.

To cut to the chase, surface naval combatants are mostly obsolete. Anything that floats can now carry viable anti shipping missiles. See this scary article on shipping containers being used as the missile holders.

https://freebeacon.com/national-securit ... container/

Anti-ship missiles have been in use for decades now so this is nothing new. Unprotected shipping has been at risk since the invention of the submarine.

That article is a bit hysterical. There is a similar launcher for NSM which can be added to any ship with the room for it. You still have to have sensors capable of finding the target and personal to operate the launchers. They're not going to be hidden away on commercial freighters.

So, I think that with enough anti ship missiles, the Chinese navy can clear a corridor to Taiwan for the PLA.

Yes, the Nationalist Chinese will fight, and fight hard, and it will be a bloodbath. And yes, the Nationalists will take to the hills if it comes to that, which I think it will.

But the CCP and the PLA will be in it for the long term. And the long term means that the true nature of modern warfare will come into play. By this I mean that real wars are not just between Armies, but between entire populations. To this end, the CCP will starve Taiwan if they are dealing with a guerrilla war in the mountains. They will just stop feeding the population. And seeing everyone starve will cause the Nationalist Army to surrender.

Everyone in Asia dependent on shipping for importing food is going to have a BIG problem. And that is that large slow-moving cargo ships will be impossible to protect.

I agree with you on the rest of this.

Xeraphim1,

I greatly appreciate your points of debate. Shows you have a clear understanding of the issues at play.

Here is my “counter counter point”.

I don't agree with your sentiment nor do other countries. Russia is spending heavily to update their one carrier while China and India are building their own. Since they're all spending billions of dollars, they must think they are still worth having.

First is about Russia and China building their own carriers. Luckily for us, I see this as incredibly misguided. It is a huge waste of resources for both of them, and I am glad they are doing it. It is roughly the equivalent of the German Kaiser building a hugely expensive battleship fleet prior to WW1, which was not only almost worthless, it diverted resources away from the German Army.

Every time there is a technology shift, there is a big debate. The big ship proponents in the US and Japan didn’t slink off into the corner until after Midway (if at all). There was plenty of prewar evidence of the ascendancy of the carrier, yet both countries continued to build huge battleship fleets. Heck, think of the waste of the Yamato and Musashi for Japan (what if they had built another 4-6 carriers instead, which is what they could have done with the resources put into those behemoths).

Fortunately for us, the Russians and Chinese are building carriers instead of building modern diesel electric submarines, which would be MUCH more cost effective for them. They have fallen into the trap of building what we have built (like the Kaiser trying to match the British battlefleet), rather than what would be best for them.

While anti-ship missiles have gotten better, so have the counters to them. The most important is aircraft which can engage the launch platforms before the missiles are in range of ships. Also, SAMs have gotten much better, especially with the SM-6 using the sensor from AMRAAM missiles and cooperative engagement meaning they can can use targeting information from other sources and even be controlled by them, including F-35's.

Missiles can deny access to a certain area but they can't control that area. They are also expendable weapons. Aircraft are reusable, are much more flexible in their employment and much more versatile in the targets they can hit.

Next, about missiles. They used to be wildly inaccurate and cumbersome. Now they are not. They can indeed make it so nothing that floats goes anywhere near a concentration of them. Yes, aircraft are more versatile, but they are also hugely more expensive. And they because of this, there are not that many of them available in the air at any given time.

Yes the counter to missiles (SSMs and ASMs for surface to surface and air to surface missiles) are better. But the tactic is to overwhelm the defense with more targets than it can handle at once. The idea is to fire HUNDREDS of SSMs at once. Even if you take out 80% of the incoming, 20% still hit. And the reason I used the Falkand’s experience is to point out that even a single missile hit is catastrophic for a modern warship. They have no armor.

Next point is that the defense against the missiles requires many many aircraft airborne at the time of the attack. Keeping huge numbers of aircraft on station is very difficult as it requires late wartime effort (when you actually have huge numbers of aircraft on hand). It also requires radars working optimally and the targeting working well. This gets into a whole lot of radar vs countermeasure debate that is way too deep for this forum.

I will just point out that every time there is a new major war, both sides are pretty unprepared for what is going to happen as the militaries do not understand the implications of their new weapon systems.

In the US Civil War the militaries were trained in how to fight with muskets, which are wildly inaccurate past about 80 yards. Instead they were armed with rifles that were deadly accurate to 300-400 yards. Result: Unimaginable carnage. In WW1, they were trained in how to fight with rifles, but had machine guns and rapid fire, past line of sight artillery. Result: Unimaginable carnage. WW2 was much closer to WW1 timewise, but there was still difficulty in dealing with the aircraft (especially against ships), massed tanks, and coordinated submarines.

We now have MUCH greater acceleration of weapon technology between WW2 and now than ever before. The debate over what “modern warfare” looks like will not actually end until a year or so into WW3. Until then, there will not be enough hard evidence to end the debate.

But I am pretty confident that things will look quite different from WW2.

Lastly, the DF21 threat is not a fact, it is conjecture. However, the USN has stated that it doesn’t have a good response. I am not sure how the anti missile tracking and interception would work at the speeds involved. But I agree that a couple of dozen SSM hits would make any carrier pretty inoperative anyway.

That article is a bit hysterical. There is a similar launcher for NSM which can be added to any ship with the room for it. You still have to have sensors capable of finding the target and personal to operate the launchers. They're not going to be hidden away on commercial freighters.

Lastly, I would agree that the article is a lot of hyperbole. But it is what I could find quickly that had pictures of the missiles. The point to take away though is that while you needed a big ship to have viable anti ship weapons in WW1 or WW2, you can now put the weapons on any floating platform. Yes, they have to be controlled by something with good target acquisition, but the idea here is that you have a way to put hundreds of these things into the air simultaneously, and from multiple vectors against your intended target.

All of this is of course the debate I alluded to at the start of my original post. This debate will continue well into the next war. But I think the repetitive lessons of history will support what I am suggesting.

I also wanted to weigh in on some non-military subjects.

1. Moving away from the USA.

I would not advise this. While things are getting more chaotic here at home, it will be worse in other areas. If the US economy tanks, the rest of the world tanks too. And I would not want to be in a place where I stick out as a foreigner, and what the locals view as a RICH foreigner. The locals are not going to protect you. BECAUSE you are a foreigner.

It might be different if your wife is a local, but not outside in a crowded place.

In the case of war, you might want to be in Costa Rica or New Zealand, but I wouldn't want to be anywhere in Asia. Nor in Europe. I think both will be battlefields. China might not want to occupy the Philipinnes, but food imports will become extinct, and the place will get bombed a lot (its a staging area for defending or counter attacking Taiwan).

If you can get out of Korea, I would get out. If you can't emigrate, have a plan in place to visit Canada as a tourist for as long as possible when the Chinese start to mass for war. Korea is going to be stuck in the middle (again) when the Chinese, Japanese and US fight.

2. Investments

The stock market departed reality decades ago. It is all speculation, and who knows when it will all come crashing down. I wouldn't want to be in it when it does.

Many people say Gold/Silver. I say that any investment is pointless if there is nothing to buy with it. When a war starts, you are not going to be able to buy stuff. All production will have to immediately shift to a war economy. Even food will be rationed. As things calm down from the initial WuHu flu scare, staples are becoming available again. I would ensure that all of your major appliances are relatively new, as you won't be able to get a replacement for years.

Even more important to pay off debt if you have any. One thing that won't stop is interest on your outstanding debts.

3. Implosion of USA

I do not see it as imminent. We have been through things like this before. Vietnam and the post MLK assasination riots were much worse. We are headed towards the implosion, but it takes a lot for that to happen. An economic crisis and a major war will leave the US extremely weak. But these things take years to work through.

Frankly, I think Trump will start shooting with the Iranians, or some other misguided affair, to try and gather support. I think this will happen within a couple of months of the election. It will backfire and we will have much more difficulty. A Trump reelection will cause the left to become even more unglued. In any case, I think domestic turmoil will embolden our foes, and make it much more likely for someone to miscalculate that war now is a good option.

I don’t want to sound like a have roll of tin foil on my head, but when I see articles like this in the open press, my spider sense starts up. With America distracted with its bread and circus games and Wuhan virus, two nuclear armed, former empires with different degrees of xenophobia start sparring then shifting units around in the open media, I get alarmed. China’s economy is tanking, civil unrest rising, imprisoning whole swaths of the population based on religious or ethnic background, what is a better way to rally the support of the population than break out the foreign bogeyman? War have started over less silly shit: https://www.scmp.com/news/china/militar ... ear-border

If smart, Taiwan, could hold its own against the CCP/PLA if it has a few of these. Used skillfully by a good weaponeer, they could buy enough time for a strategic embargo to be put in place by the USN and USAF. No modern megacity can function without electricity. No pumps to push fresh water or run sewage systems. No refrigeration for food. Hospitals will shut down. Chaos in a few weeks. Just a few strands of graphite fibers floating over power stations or distribution nodes on the electrical grid. https://www.globalsecurity.org/military ... lu-114.htm
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/5666135
https://search.proquest.com/openview/c9 ... &cbl=60395
https://warontherocks.com/2013/10/block ... a-a-guide/

** 09-Jun-2020 World View: Ladakh border conflict - India vs China

utahbob wrote: Tue Jun 09, 2020 9:09 pm > I don’t want to sound like a have roll of tin foil on my head, but
> when I see articles like this in the open press, my spider sense
> starts up. With America distracted with its bread and circus games
> and Wuhan virus, two nuclear armed, former empires with different
> degrees of xenophobia start sparring then shifting units around in
> the open media, I get alarmed. China’s economy is tanking, civil
> unrest rising, imprisoning whole swaths of the population based on
> religious or ethnic background, what is a better way to rally the
> support of the population than break out the foreign bogeyman.
> War have started over less silly shit:
> https://www.scmp.com/news/china/militar ... ear-border

I think you're absolutely right to raise the alarm on this issue. I
wrote briefly about it a few weeks ago when you previously raised the
issue.

*** 25-May-2020 World View: India-China border conflict in Ladakh
*** http://gdxforum.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=52293#p52293

What's remarkable about this situation is its similarity to the Marco
Polo Bridge incident that triggered World War II. In particular, both
the Indian and Chinese populations are in highly nationalistic and
xenophobic moods, and this is the kind of mood that leads to a "shoot
first, look later" situation. All it would take is one gunshot to
trigger an escalation situation.

A lot of people might say, "Why would they do that?" People get
confused and think that things are the same as in the 1990s, when
everyone was in the mood to compromise. Today, compromise is rare.
If there are Chinese and Indian forces facing each other across this
border, then a lit match could spread a fire rapidly.

** 09-Jun-2020 World View: Navigator article

Navigator wrote: Mon Jun 08, 2020 11:38 pm > I should probably write an in-depth article for John and for my
> own blog about "what would I do if I were the Chinese Military".

> It will take me at least a week.

That would be great!

Again, conquering the Philippines doesn't bring any real benefit to China.

Some benefit, namely food and even fresh water. The Chinese wouldn't even try to feed the locals. The food would be given to the Chinese army or sent back to the mainland.

Also military bases, airstrips, and harbors.

While it's military wouldn't be much more than a speed bump

The Filipinos have allowed their military to degrade to nothing. It has nil military capabilities. (I am talking in terms of real capability.)

it DOES have a defense treaty with the US. Occupying the Philippines would be a nightmare without total security over the South China Sea. The US would be launching anti-ship missiles or torpedoes to sink every transport and cargo ship.

The current administration of the Philippines is a complete joke, and an unreliable joke at that. No one in Asia trusts these backstabbers. Duterte is easily the worst president the Philippines has ever had. He flip-flops constantly. His foreign policy can only be describe as self-defeating. I fully expect him to switch sides during WW 3 if he can.

And remember the Philippines has some 108 million people and they really don't like Chinese people.

That's alright. The Chinese hate them too.

Occupation wouldn't be fun.

Not for the Filipinos.

I don't see Japan getting involved unless the US did and that's by no means assured. Though Japan would not be declaring war but supporting an ally which allowed under the new reading of the Japanese constitution.

Japan would go to war to help Taiwan because the Japanese know that they would be next. You don't understand how the Japanese think. Even Japanese leftists would support a war with the mainlanders in the event of an attack on Taiwan.