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Comment by cpursley | Hacker News Reader

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-...

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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.

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).

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