Comment by rjzzleep | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rjzzleep | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Why do people still compare Taiwan with Ukraine, can people not read maps? This isn't 1996 anymore. Contrary to the US China has hypersonic missiles that the US military admitted they work.

The area Russia has captured in Ukraine is 3 or 4 times the size of Taiwan. Ukraine borders a couple of NATO countries with huge borders, has pipelines going through its country that Russia didn't touch the entire conflict. Taiwan on the other hand is 150 miles away from China and thousands of miles away from its big backers. Most of eastern Ukraine was Soviet infrastructure heavily fortified over 8 years. Taiwan on the other hand is mostly uninhabitable mountains that barely have roads going through them with very densely populated cities on the west.

Taiwan gets its oil and gas from Indonesia and most of its resources from China. Last time they did missile drills they had to stop them because the launchers failed.

China just embargoed the island for a couple of days and nothing could move in an out. China doesn't really need to do anything to win. There isn't really any scenario where this plays out in Taiwans favour. The US can't even keep up with Russia's ammunition production[1], how would it match China's manufacturing?

While the US moves their warship through the area every now and then as a show of power everyone agrees that there is no protection from hypersonic or even most supersonic missiles and that much of the US Navy are sitting ducks if there were ever a real conflict.

Biden was born in 1942 and believes the world is stuck in the 90s. It's extremely dangerous to think and act like that.

[1] https://www.military.com/daily-news/2023/01/11/navy-might-ha...

You’re getting downvoted for stating extremely uncomfortable truths. It’s not what westerners want to hear. Ignoring these objective facts is foolish and dangerous.

The reality is, with hypersonics (currently deployed), Russia or China could disable entire surface battle groups and there’s not much the US could do about it (conventionally).

I encourage everyone to break from their myopia and get a better understanding of the significant geoeconomic and power realignments going on right now.

It’s no longer 1992. We’re either headed towards global nuclear holocaust or back to a multi-polar world. May calmer heads prevail.

Two books on these topics:

- https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/40658433

- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52962238-principles-for-...

Glad to see a book by Andrei Martyanov being recommended here. I have read all three of his books. There is no reason to trust or agree with everything he writes, but unfortunately the current trend is to try and suppress any kind of discussion rather than try and understand someone's viewpoint.

I also don’t agree with everything he writes or says (his YouTube channel is wildly entertaining). But I trust him more than others as he’s a pro western US citizen who has a solid background in the Soviet navy (anti shipping missile expert, I believe). He even gets into military mathematics and field manuals from time to time.

https://www.youtube.com/user/smoothieX12

Yes I watch all his videos. My favourite is “Some very needed comparisons”. I started doing.(just for fun) a complete under-graduate and graduate course in Mathematics in my spare time after watching this video.

Are you doing an online course? Funny enough, I was thinking of the same thing (or at least some mathematics basics before an online CS curriculum). I'd love recommendations if you have any. Cheers.

No, just via books. I have a degree in mathematics which I completed 20 years ago so part of it is just recalling what I had learned. But otherwise I just bought books covering the entire curriculum - some based on Susan Rigetti’s blog post on mathematics (should be easy to search).

It's neither uncomfortable nor a truth. If it were that easy Taiwan would have been conquered years ago. It isn't Ukraine - China can't just invade by rolling tanks and artillery across a field.

Its invading force will have to cross a 150 mile sea where it will be decimated before landing on one of about 4 viable landing sites where the invading force will again be decimated. Setting up supply lines would essentially be impossible. Keeping morale up when 6 out of 10 invading soldiers snuff it before reaching the island will be impossible.

US carrier groups would be useless in this war, but they're useless against anything resembling a peer competitor. US nuclear subs would tear up the invading fleet though, while Taiwanese missiles would turn the PRC economic heartland to ash.

We're not in disagreement.

US subs can't operate permissively in strait and increasingly within 1IC where PRC has built comprehensive seabed monitoring infra. Or that current TLAMs from SSGNs aren't performant againt even shit tier Iraqi/Russian hardware (~50% failure/interception rates), of which US has only 4 with 612 shots. Nor does TW remotely have or can stockpile enough fires to dent PRC heartland with aggressive defense budget. For reference currently US doesn't either hence rush to build up stockpiles for potentially 100,000s aimpoints most of which will be delivered by b21s 10+ years from now and that's just for some current PLA targets. Realistically PRC would destroy most of TW C4ISR in openning strikes and prevent TW from threatening invasion fleet which would make 150 mile sea transit relatively uncontested. Under such conditions - open waters where modern sensors has less noise to sort - establishing maritime logistics would be easier to protect than the land/air logisitics wagon US had to sustain for AFG. Current US vision for TW porcupine doctorine rests on TW fighting to the last man on TW soil because it's forgone PRC can land massive amounts of troops and hardware. The hope is US can disrupt this as TW buys time, not TW itself. Ultimately, PRC simply wouldn't attempt landing without securing theatre air superiority first, by the time they commit to maritime invasion, thousands of UAVs and would be droning a TW resistence reverted to Taliban tier capabilites. The other fundemental uncomfortable truth is PRC can mine TW shores and destroy airfields long term to siege island, and historically sustained sieges that prevent resupply generally end in capitulation.

All this plus PRC can blockade TW and completely sink their economy (while also straining all the economies that depend on their chips, including their own). In fact, they could even do that without physically invading the island after the C4ISR hit and just wait for TW to cry Uncle and capitulate. PRC has escalation dominance in this arena and without going nuclear, I don’t see the US winning. The solution here is political compromise (as it should have been in Ukraine). Either that or nuclear holocaust.

They’re not the same, I even pointed out some specific ways they are different. My point is though that if (just a guess) the PRC analysis said Russia would take Ukraine easily, the fact they got that one wrong points out flaws in their approach to strategic analysis. If their strategic analysts is flawed, then that damages the credibility of any of their analyses.

What is the range on hypersonic missles? Perhaps the defense is avoiding detection and keeping a standoff distance until you want to strike?

“Launch in August of nuclear-capable rocket that circled the globe took US intelligence by surprise”

Not sure where your stand-off distance would be.

https://www.ft.com/content/ba0a3cde-719b-4040-93cb-a486e1f84...

Chinese and Russian hypersonic capabilities are a money bell for American defence contractors. For cross-strait warfare, they’re irrelevant. (Conventional artillery dominates at that range.)

Hard for American carrier based air assets and AEGIS cruisers to help defend Taiwan if they all got killed by hypersonic missiles.

That carriers would be sunk pretty much instantly is a given, and has been for a while now. The USN invests heavily in subs, and you don't hear much about them for a reason...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com