Will Artificial Intelligence Lead to War?

The foundation of this idea is wrong. I would guess that at some point you read something about sea mines being able to seriously complicate a PLA amphibious assault, remembered that as "PLA military objectives over Taiwan can be hurt by sea mines", and have applied it in a context where it makes the opposite of sense. If Taiwan mines its own waters or the US mines those waters for them, that's a self-blockade - hell, it's reasonably possible that mining the Taiwanese coast would be the PLAN's earliest naval goal in a war outside of initial fires. Naval mines are a blockading tool or a tool to frustrate an amphibious assault - they can't prevent a blockade, which can be enforced from Fujian with ground based ASBMs or air launched AShMs. A blockade is preventing ships from making deliveries to an area, and large numbers of civilian ships are the only extant ships which can carry enough resources to support the Taiwanese population.

Also, US subs will have free reign east of Taiwan, but they're not going to be in the strait. Waters shallow enough that the subs are visible with the naked eye, surrounded by the densest hydrophone network in the world, facing an active ASW force with depth charges and potentially operationalised SQUIDs, are not going to survive long enough to achieve anything and they know that. Their role will be to prevent uncontested PLAN encirclement of Taiwan and decrease the salvo volume of fires directed at deep strike targets like Guam, as well as ensuring the PLAN dies if they attempt to reach outside the 1st chain with surface vessels.

Stealth bombers with a fighter escort would very likely be able to deliver ordinance around Taiwan while running significant risks, but using that ordinance to contribute to a blockade of Taiwan would be wrongheaded compared to strikes on PLARF or PLAAF assets on the mainland that could actually degrade PLA capabilities rather than teaming up with them to achieve their goals.

>China is dependent on foreign imports of fossil fuels and other raw materials. That tactic was highly effective against Japan in WW2.

This always gets brought up, and I really doubt it will work in the way it gets talked about (i.e. severe enough to stop the PLA from performing X operation 1 month or 1 year into the war). For one, people can ration and the Chinese population is very nationalistic, for another the PRC is keenly aware of these risks and has been actively mitigating them for more than a decade with significant success. Some non-comprehensive examples: car electrification to reduce civilian oil dependency; the trade link from inland China through a nuclear-armed ally to Gwadar port to bypass a potential Malacca blockade; electric high speed trains to replace otherwise fuel intensive domestic flights; massive roll out of nuclear power plants, renewables, and energy storage to lessen fossil fuel dependence for power generation; importing fossil fuels from e.g. Australia rather than significantly digging into their own reserves; building out hundreds of high capacity inland pipelines and railways with Russia to ensure uninterrupted trade in bulk cargo in the event of a naval blockade; and of course the PRC's strategic stockpiles of various goods (pork, oil, rice etc) that they've been building up for decades.

Basically, China is not Japan and Japan didn't have land borders with 12 countries, one of whom is a significant ally and controller of the world's largest natural resource reserves and another of which gives them port access to the Red Sea trade route an ocean away from the westpac theatre.

China had a much worse corruption problem 15 years ago; it was so bad that it enabled massive CIA infiltration of their military and political apparatus, in a situation analogous to an American finding out that the Republican and Democrat party machines as well as several 3-star generals were on the Chinese payroll. The discovery of how significant CIA infiltration was in ~2010 was a huge shock to the system, and after they were finished catching and killing everyone involved they began the work of trying to root out corruption more seriously to destroy the incentive structure and culture that had allowed that CIA network to take root. It's still ongoing, but anecdotally it seems like they've been making significant success. There's a reasonably good YouTube video on the general topic of "Chinese military corruption" released recently by Perun, it's here: https://youtu.be/vhI_tTEE2ZQ?si=gtZ5YGWnV8q8TLcT

I have watched it, it is a generally good overview that doesn't get any major factual issues wrong. My only quibbles with it would be things like minor word choices, emphasis, etc.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-06/us-intell...