@What_Exit: My apologies for missing this thread for a week. I saw it on my phone when I couldn’t make substantive reply, but pretty well forgot it immediately thereafter. And must not have looked at it long enough to trigger Discourse to consider it Unread. So once it was gone from both my New and my Unread, it was out of my sight out of my mind. I wasn’t trying to slink away from responding to your quite reasonable question.
To refresh everyone’s recollection, here’s the pertinent bit of what I had written in the other thread about China in general and the PLAN in specific versus the Philippines, not versus Taiwan:
IMO @Stranger_On_A_Train has ably defended my position. With a close second place medal to @Sam_Stone. Over their 10+ combined excellent posts, they’ve both written roughly the same ideas I would have.
The USA in general, and USN in particular has rather shallow magazines of munitions and a rather shallow bench of reserve forces or even other-ocean fleets compared to what Ukraine has taught us about lethality and consumption rates of 2020’s combat. Full bore modern combat has insane rates of consumption of blood and treasure.
The US has also sent a large fraction of those magazines to be consumed in Ukraine, and is looking at replacement times measured in years and decades, not weeks. Recognizing that after that decade-plus of effort we’d only be back up to the too-low 2020 levels that Ukraine has exposed as too low. Building up the US stocks and the US Navy to the point we could confidently enter combat against China at will with virtual certainty of success is the very expensive work of multiple decades. And that assumes the Chinese will stand still while we do that. As Mr. Spock might put it: “Unlikely, Captain.”
Having said that, that does not mean the Chinese would simply sweep the seas clean of our fleets then dismember the Philippines or Taiwan at their undamaged and unobstructed leisure. US forces of all sorts would inflict one hell of a lot of pain on the way to the bottom.
But what we see in Ukraine / Russia today is that totalitarian states can cause more damage for longer, and absorb more pain for longer, than many / most Western democracies are willing to sustain. The West is on the verge of giving up on Ukraine after merely two years and nearly zero Western casualties. It’s the work of a decade (at least) to fund & empower Ukraine to outlast Putin’s Russia. And will take Western troops before it’s over; the Ukrainian forces are heavily exhausted and their population doesn’t have too many un-deployed men left.
If China was to make an all-out grab for Taiwan (shifting targets here), the US would suffer severe losses trying to prevent that. Leading quickly (a couple weeks, a month tops) to the nuke-or-withdraw decision. The public, if asked, would favor the latter. And rightly so.
As @Stranger_On_A_Train so eloquently said, deterrence (conventional and nuclear) requires rational actors on both sides. Putin has proven he’s not rational, or that he’s being lied to about reality on the ground so thoroughly that the decisions appear to be irrational versus true reality no matter how much sense they make within the distorted reality fed to Putin. From our POV the outcome is the same.
And it’s quite plausible that Xi is riding that same train towards the same crazytown destination. Admittedly with Chinese characteristics, but with externally similar broad-brush outcomes: an increasingly harsh ill-tempered peace with increasing pinprick provocations that slowly warm into sustained low-intensity conflict followed by a build-up and conventional wargasm.
This recent whole post
said it well. The PRC / Taiwanese status quo will not last 300 years. Something will break someday sooner than that. Will it be Xi getting antsy? Hard to know, but it’d be foolish to say “Never! The Chinese are far too rational / long-sighted to act in such haste.” They are driving in that direction today and are currently picking up speed.