Wasn't there a pretty famous case, in a wargame meant to simulate conflict with Iran, where the red team general actually played to win but the game leaders reset things with new constraints that played to US advantages?
There are also pretty significant intrinsic problems with a Taiwan strait conflict: it's literally in China's backyard and the PLA is modernizing so the US can no longer rely on having an overwhelming technological advantage. IIRC, Taiwan's military strategy also assumes that they'll have a technological over the PRC, so they haven't embraced asymmetric tactics as much as they should.
From my armchair, it seems to me that Taiwan needs to adopt something like the Israeli model, where pretty much their whole population is in the reserves and can be mobilized quickly for a conflict. The US needs to figure out a way to reinforce and resupply it, and disentangle its supply chains from China to make that workable.
However, I'm not hopeful with the kind of leadership we have now. It's thinking is too short term and it's unwilling to make any really costly commitments.
yes, wargames are designed to be difficult to win, unless political expediency interferes with the design.
BLUFOR kept getting revived because it was also a training exercise in addition to a wargame. You've got dozens of ships gathered in the area to practice formation maneuvering, underway replenishment, etc, under wartime conditions. If you're on a ship that's blown up on day 2 of 20, what are you supposed to do for the rest of the time? It's better for training to revive casualties.
Stuff like this is why it's not easy to trust the outcome of a wargame.
Where we failed miserably was at turning the result into a stable country, but Taiwan is already a country.
Besides that, stability is always relative, in the longer term no country is ever stable, in the shorter term in the case of countries like Afghanistan they are stable about as long as other nations don't cross their borders.
Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran and many others besides. All of these were at some point reasonably stable, and then someone somewhere decided to attempt to enlist them in one scheme or another and/or tried to wage a proxy war through them or actively tried to install regimes more friendly to foreign interests.
The Roman Empire in the long run also wasn't stable, but it fell to rot from within, as most countries eventually do. But in the case of Afghanistan the destructive force was applied from without.
Wouldn't just be the U.S.
Oh, and two of the above mentioned countries have real blue water navies that can go anywhere to cut supply lines like say, oil from the Middle East. One does not.
Cutting oil from the ME would not be enough. China would ration oil and increase imports from Russia massively as well as reactivate domestic oil production, it would be great for the environment, China would carry on, and the US would make a lot of enemies.
Europe was okay with the first invasion of Iraq because they frankly had very little to lose and a lot to gain.
Meanwhile suiciding the EU economy by cutting off Chinese exports would hurt the EU a lot more than it would hurt China and certainly much more than the invasion of Kuwait.
In any case I'd recommend reading what Chinese generals write on the subject. For the exact same reason as you cited they don't want to invade Taiwan unless "necessary" until the balance of trade shifts far more into the Chinese side.
Yet when confronted on the possibility of doing it now they make a very solid point. China is the only country in the world that produces everything it needs for daily operations, without a single exception, in one way or another.
That is to say, in the Chinese calculus, the EU and US cutting themselves off of Chinese trade would hurt the former more in the short term and medium term than it would hurt China, and their arguments for it are compelling.
Beyond that, the truth is that there is a lot more to the economy than the EU and the US. China would still trade with Russia, Africa, South East Asia, almost definitely South Korea, and most of Central and South Asia.
The real thing that is at issue in Chinese military planning is not a voluntary embargo, it's a blockade by the US. But even the ability for the US to execute such a maneuver is already questionable and dwindles every year, and it would assuredly royally piss of the entirety of the world and definitely kill millions outside of China from economic dysfunction.
Tell me what I'm missing about their domestic oil industry then, because everything else I'm reading tells me they need to import around 10 million barrels of crude oil a day (primarily to produce gasoline and diesel, so it's very hard to substitute).
Meanwhile, China has reserves for 100 days of imports.
In the long term domestic and Russian production will catch up fully.
And even if Russia repudiated every other contract they have in Asia, it doesn't look like they have the pipeline capacity to get that much oil to China, even if the cross border capacity for China to import it existed. So it would have to come on tankers, which would generate some interesting geopolitical brinkmanship.
That's assuming things don't escalate far beyond sanctions or a possible blockade. The risk with a naval confrontation is that it's very easy to quickly generate casualties that would make backing down politically suicidal. Even just a few of the smaller ships getting sunk means hundreds of dead sailors.
The pipeline capacity alone from Russia to China is 1.6mbd. Of that, 600 000bd are used, so there is 1mbd of spare capacity just in that pipeline.
It doesn't really matter if the US can or can't back down. It will be disastrous politically and economically to the US and its allies to a level that can scarcely be imagined. Even then, US naval forces have a serious chance of defeat. China is not a small country you can roll over. They have a very well thought out, multilayered, exceedingly technologically sophisticated A2/AD umbrella that means that millions of square kilometers will be in practice off limits to the US. Beyond those zones, China enjoys extremely prompt hypersonic strike capability that has no real counter, which means that in a hot war any US vessel that gets it's rough location leaked running a blockade or running through a strait risks getting sunk straight up.
It's not a war that the US can win. What are the objectives? Take back Taiwan? Literally impossible. Regime change in China? Forget about it. About the only thing that can be done is to hurt the Chinese economy roughly as much as the US economy, enrage the entire rest of the world and destroy any semblance of goodwill the US has, and trigger a recession followed by a restructuring of the US economy that reduces the place of the US in the value chain.
It's simply a stupid move that has no upside. It doesn't matter how the public acts immediately, eventually the US will have to give up.
...produces finished goods. China cannot do this without massive imports of raw materials copper, iron ore, coal, etc. China has effectively colonized Africa for access to said raw materials.
Belt and Road is a way to set up overland routes to avoid any naval blockades.
Where do you you get this crap from?
I live in Africa and I have never been told what to do by a Chinese official or business - or even a local official actin on the instructions of a mandarin.
Unless you have watered 'colonisation' down to 'Chinese interests own some stuff in parts of Africa'.
Which - to indulge my woke hat - pretty offensive to people who lived under actual colonisation.
There is just science.
[Unless people truly believe the Chinese space programme uses its own, different physics, or that the concrete in the new Ethiopian dam on the Nile river has its own chemistry.]
China produces very significant amounts of copper ore, iron ore, coal, and has the facilities to expand production on short notice .
It would hurt production in the short term, yes, but there wouldn't be anything that China would completely miss.
A war between the USA and China would ultimately do no one good, even Chinese wolf warriors should realize that.
I agree it would do no good to have a war between the US and China for anyone. I want Taiwan to stay independent and chose its own destiny. But the reality is that China has an overwhelming advantage in-theater over anyone and it's only getting worse.
Why would the US treat Taiwan any differently when China is the US biggest trading partner?
As for Japan, they are constitutionally prevented from declaring war.
So of Taiwans strongest alies, one cant defend them,and one wont defend them.
We legit need their semi production for defense much more than we need cheap plastic kids toys at Walmart.
>One does not.
PRC has blue water Navy that operates up to ME and has been for years. It's also signifantly larger and more capable than Japans. I suspect you need to update understanding from old Zeihan powerpoints.
With respect to US, PRC has 30 CEP ICBMs which means USNavy vessels become scrap the second they pull into port. Even nuclear carriers can't stay at sea forever, nevermind their sustainment / oilers / resupply ships will be long gone. US carrier groups will likely be one-time deployment assets. This is roughly reality now, and and even more dire in the coming years. US can sink every PLAN ship on the waters and PRC can sink every USN ship in port. Or destroy entire east Asian fab supply chain, setting back US industry/tech decades. Or bait US security commitments in Korea / Japan which compels US to send assets within 1st island chain where they are weakest, negating point of blockade outside of 1st island chain. The wank over blockading PRC via Malacca / SLOC overlooks the fact that at minimum PRC can force US to sign a hegemony suicide pact. PRC can make US lose everything even in defeat. And is willing to over TW.
I don’t see a need to rebut your false claims and would encourage folks to read your comment history.