China Missiles Could Overwhelm U.S. Military in Asia in ‘Hours’, Says Think Tank
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
It isn't necessarily a question of who would win a fight to the death, and more a question of how big a bloody nose the US would accept. My guess is China would be willing to accept a much bigger bloody nose, who reaches their limit first?
Of course theres a fine balance here. Vietnam was never an existential threat to the US, could China be/ portrayed to be? That obviously changes the calculation.
Their only hope is that there would be a multinational response. The US certainly wouldn't go it alone against China on their own doorstep.
Your point about the political system is valid, but if the USA was behind the invasion of Iraq, I imagine watching another great power chew up an ally would unite the country as well. Times do change, though, and I could be wrong.
Parking an invasion+battle fleet off of Taiwan's coast would probably lead to huge US ship losses to Chinese missiles.
However, island hopping campaign is a thing. Islands make for good unsinkable carriers.
Assuming war isn't concluded permanently in a couple months[1], the real advantage is self-sufficiency in regards to raw materials (especially oil[2]) and ability to ramp up and then build out military production. High tech is secondary issue, and would be only slightly on the US' side. Probably the most important advantage would be in submarines and to extent in carriers, again as it was historically. Lastly, the presumable advantage in comms crypto protection, and codebreaking/backdooring could make or break any long term war, by repeatedly giving better starting positions before each battle or campaign; again to historical precedent.
All in all, US would do just fine, however the local allies would suffer a lot.
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[1] i.e. excluding an overwhelmingly effective ABC attack on mainland China or US
[2] both previous and current administration helped ramp it up
The US' carriers would be sunk in the first few minutes of open warfare.
They are useless in case of open war - and only of use as a threat of war/policing device. All-out war means the carriers get sunk, first.
Snark first: weapons[1] to defeat rockets and free-falling bombs have been operational for quite a while now. Next gen (laser) is being made operational; both shipboard versions and air versions for the CAP. Next next gen (railgun) is on the horizon, but still uncertain.
Serious reply: a carrier is a highly mobile, flexible airport. Like any other major fleet element, it's a threat in being, and best used that way. Might even be best used by always being held beyond radar horizon, to keep the opposing forces spread thin and deployed overtime, preventing any transports from resupplying the enemy troops deployed to Taiwan.
A carrier is also by its nature an anchor point for a whole battle group, with flexible capabilities of long range detection, jamming, attack, and defense, including major ASW threat. It can also make a 300 mile dash at 30kn to deliver several dozen F35 to an island. An overnight miracle.
[1] anti-rockets and CIWS
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DF-26
There is no known defense yet fielded against this missile.
Lasers might do it, but those aren't going to be ready for deployment for a few years yet .. none of your "rocket/free-falling bomb" defenses are relevant against this thing.
And, then there's this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3M22_Zircon
https://www.newsweek.com/russia-tests-missiles-us-no-defense...
This is why the US desperately needs to complete its laser program ... until then, the Carriers are a complete and utter liability in all-out-war ..
Carriers in today's world are as obsolete as the battleships that the carriers displaced 80 years ago.
Mind you, the fact that battleships were obsolete did not stop the US from building quite a few more in the 1940s before the penny finally dropped.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/10/asia/china-missiles-south-chi... 'According to a report from the Missile Defense Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, China may have an anti-ship version of the DF-26 under development -- and may have even tested it in 2017. However military analyst Carl Schuster, a former director of operations at the US Pacific Command's Joint Intelligence Center, cast doubt on whether the DF-26 was workable as an anti-ship weapon. Using one effectively would require practicing procedures and tactics that China had not yet shown, he said. "Remember, the Soviet Union never successfully developed an ASBM (anti-ship ballistic missile) and no country in the West has one," Schuster said.'
Do you have some information to the contrary?
Second, DF26 is all over the South China Sea. You think they'd be deploying them if they didn't have confidence in their efficacy?
One of the first political acts of the US would undoubtedly be to officially recognize the state of Taiwan. Given how much of the world relies on Taiwan's manufacturing output, other countries would be close behind and China would be looking at a joint liberation force rather than China vs the US.
Yes, consider the following scenario, Using some political pretence, China invade Taiwan in a blitzkrieg which is over in a few days. All US communications and GPS are wiped out before the attack begins. Total chaos. Allies are blind. Any US forces in the vicinity trying to prevent the attack are obliterated. Next days China issue the following decree, Taiwan has joined the motherland and all regrettable attacks on US forces have stopped and a ceasefire is in effect. Any attack on China and Taiwan will be meet with nuclear forces. What will US and Nato do? What did they do when Russia elbowed itself into the Syrian conflict? That's right, nothing.
The point is, any serious attack done by China will be over before US an allies can stop it or reply properly, unless there is a believable rapid response force on location.
Russia didn't attack US forces in Syria or the rest of the middle east, so the US could ignore it. It might work if there was no attack on US military, but any attack, significant enough to disable the US military for a few days, would almost certainly be responded to with force.
As an aside, the PLA trying to capture Taiwan will be a huge bloody mess. Any attack plan would be known as the build up would be seen by everyone. The Taiwan military is not a push over and has dug hole in every mountain. This is a pretty realistic view here - https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/09/25/taiwan-can-win-a-war-wi...
All of that being said, we should all work to find a solution that does not involved killing lots of people. China is still trying to find its place in the world and has a bit of a chip on its shoulder about how it was treated in the past. I have to believe there is a path in which we are all better off.
So you're saying there's a 'Gap' in missile technology between the US and China? A 'Missile Gap', perhaps? Perhaps we should have a good old-fashioned arms-race to sort it all out?
What was "the last supper"?
That's not to disrespect the opponent; both historical USSR and present day China pack quite a punch. It warrants careful approach rather than outright panic.
[1] e.g., https://www.armscontrol.org/act/2011-05/missile-gap-myth-its...
Was there an assumption that US forces stationed there right now alone could somehow fight a battle and win vs the volume of China's forces in Asia? Seems unlikely.
I recall a US general testifying and noting that if N. Korea chose to cross the DMZ, just based on their sheer volume of men and material would take a great deal of territory in a short period of time. It was not a surprise, it's a known thing.
Even during the cold war I belive most plans expected that if the soviet union chose to move into the rest of Europe, they could do so to some extent.
What happens after that is what would really matter.
The US loses some military bases. China loses their economic infrastructure and their own internal military bases.
The US would have tens of thousands of casualties. China would have a couple orders of magnitude more casualties.
The US would lose one trading partner. China would lose almost all of their trading partners.
The article seems like a sensationalist attempt to justify increasing the US military budget.
It's one thing to go on the offensive to attack another country like the US at their home, but it's another to have the capabilities to defend areas of interest that are relatively close to home.
After skimming I'm not too impressed with this. It makes a lot of sweeping assumptions, some totally inaccurate, about our readiness in the area and seems to disapprove of them not being at peak war-time levels. More alarmist than anything.
I might be biased since I served in Okinawa for a few years.
From the article: > “As these facilities could be rendered useless by precision strikes in the opening hours of a conflict, the PLA missile threat challenges America’s ability to freely operate its forces from forward locations throughout the region,”
Nuclear weapons probably don't fall under precision strikes.
AShMs defenses are very questionable when it comes to supersonic/hypersonic AShMs.
There is the obvious problem of detecting hypersonic projectiles, but assuming that is "done", then lasers and a lot of them, will be quite effective.
300 nukes is well and truly enough.
Sure, in all out war, you will hit a few major cities, but only a small percentage of the nukes will go there.
Fair point nonetheless.
Read up on Curtis Le May's methods in Germany, Japan, and then later in North Korea. He was a great proponent of fire-bombing large areas in the centre of cities.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Tokyo
One fire-bombing raid killed as many people in Tokyo as were killed a few months later in Hiroshima's atom-bombing.
The US and China have far too much common economic interest to go to war short of China doing something so absurdly aggressive that you can't not go to war (e.g. invading Japan) I don't see that happening.
Giving up Taiwan, of course, would announce to the world that allies of the US should look for other world power sponsors, because our support is paper thin.
That kind of choice is very costly, and it would take a very unique type of President willing to piss away a century of alliance building.
Have you forgotten about the incompetent fool that the US elected to be in control of the nuclear arsenal?
That's probably what people said in, oh, 1910 about Germany, Britain, and France.
Sure China could probably destroy US bases in Asia easily, but what then ?
The big question is whether that is still the case if the area fought over isn’t US soil.
Russia in the Ukraine already might be an indication that the answer isn’t an unqualified “yes” anymore. The USA leaving the INF treaty, thus allowing Russia to develop mid-range nuclear missiles, and even threatening to leave NATO are much stronger signals.
One might conclude that the USA isn’t as willing to go to nuclear war for invasions of its partners as it used to be.
Disclaimer: I'm spit balling as a US Army Veteran here.