First, it was going to take 3-5 minutes to defeat the balloons. Now seconds?
Your airplanes have very short time-on-target unless you’re using helicopters or A-10’s, and I’ve never heard of a US carrier with a fleet of either. Do they exist?
As to size and complexity: who says all functions have to be in the same box, or even all arrive with the missile?
My merchant fleet and fishing boats have dropped of mines which do nothing, These are really cheap.
Oh - costs: I’m assuming we’re still talking about China. They can afford to seed the entire globe with passive GPS receivers - they know where they are and can add that part of the equation to the balloon’s data and then send it along. That is likely the first time you know of that mine’s existence (once activated, it blows its ballast and surfaces - and then relays the tracking data to the next unit. My little system is now anywhere I can put a missile.
And the point of the balloon is to keep the radar at a fixed altitude - say 60,000 feet - your time to climb is all of a sudden an eternity, given that 10 seconds from now, a mine within my hearing will relay the targeting data.
In case you haven’t guessed: I have no specific knowledge of existing radars or counter-radar technology. Could a small (2-3’ diameter) mine communicate with my subs? You may have killed the ones within 500 miles, but you didn’t get all of them - and if you can kill a mine as soon as it transmits, well, that transmission also activates the 5 nearest mines - your aircraft’s range is what?
If I CAN disguise my traffic as background noise (neat idea!), how are you going to know to even look?
China can take Taiwan anytime it wants - the US can send all the carriers it wants - unless they are prepared to attack China, China can simply smile for the camera and send along a note about leaving one’s toys in a war zone, and pointing out that they are too busy defeating US defense systems to worry about stray bullets, and that their systems might have trouble distinguishing between Taiwanese-owned systems and American owned ones.
The reason it hasn’t (yet) is simple economics - they still want Americans to give them more factories so they can finally feed all of its people, thus ending the biggest threat to the rulers: a revolution by disgruntled peasants. It happened twice in the 20th century; the lesson has not been forgotten…
No, China cannot invade Taiwan any time it wants. Yes, Taiwan is a small country, with a tiny military compared to China. So what? China can’t invade Taiwan without sending troops 100 miles across the straits. You can’t organize an amphibious invasion like that without advance warning.
I guess you’re thinking that the United States would be trying to help Taiwan resist the invasion without actually firing on Chinese forces? I agree that a carrier force can’t park itself off the coast of China and provide assistance to Taiwan and not expect to be attacked. Therefore in any real invasion, not just saber rattling, the real threat to the troop transports won’t be the carriers, but our attack subs. One torpedo, one troop ship.
Of course it’s ridiculous to hype American technology and assume we’re invulnerable to the primitive Chinese. It’s also ridiculous to hype Chinese technology. America doesn’t have the capability to ignore potential Chinese threats to our ships and aircraft, that doesn’t mean the Chinese would have an easy time of it. Again, what’s their war aim? Taiwan doesn’t add much to the Chinese economy if you have to kill thousands of sailors from your largest trading partner trying to conquer it. The wily inscrutable five dimensional chess playing Chinese overlords are in reality petty provincial autocrats looking to advance their personal interests, just like the assholes who are in charge of every other country.
China has come a long way in the last few decades simply by wising up and copying the way normal countries work. They’ve still got a lot farther to go before they can match the per capita income of economic powerhouses like Mexico.
Why do you think there would be nice, slow troop transports in numbers small enough to match the torpedo count on your subs?
The Chinese could deploy 100,000 paratroops with armor and artillery. Those could be loaded inside hangers using “workers” who come in and don’t go out.
This is after their special ops folks have taken out the leadership and an EMT device has blinded everybody in the area.
For the purposes of such a small area so near, command and control could be done via hand-held transceivers, in lead jackets.
And any soldiers could be inserted months before the attack and become a sleeper unit if more bodies are required to cut off the political head.
Are you prepared to send US ground troops into Taiwan? Again, this a civil war - if there are any native Taiwanese left, I"m not convinced that they are real happy about Chiang Kai-shek and his thugs running the place
Yep. Dead easy to invade an island 100 miles offshore. Just drop some paratroopers! You can do it all in secret!
Do you know anything about the history of paratroop assaults? It’s a very short record of many disasters and a few successes pulled off while taking massive casualties while waiting for regular troops to reinforce. Paratroops in the sense of literally dropping soldiers out of airplanes with parachutes behind enemy lines are totally obsolete, and a good way to get your elite soldiers massacred.
In war you have to do simple things, but those simple things are extraordinarily difficult. It is very very hard to sink an aircraft carrier. Contrariwise, it is very very hard to keep an aircraft carrier from sinking. It takes the constant efforts of thousands of highly trained sailors just to keep the damn thing from going to the bottom.
Same thing with invading another country. You plot and you plan and you look at how you’ve got ten times the troops and ten times the equipment and the enemy are decadent shopkeepers while your guys are crack veterans from a warrior race. And sometimes your warrior race ubersoldiers walk over and crush the enemy. And sometimes your warrior race ubersoldiers get their ass handed to them because their equipment doesn’t work, they don’t want to fight, their generals can’t keep from fighting each other, there’s weather you didn’t expect (who could expect snow in winter? Or storms in summer?) and the political leader who ordered the operation is a complete idiot, plus the decadent shopkeepers are defending their homes, have defense in depth, equipment that works, and esprit de corps.
The point is, the correlation of forces might look one way on paper, and turn out completely differently on the battlefield. Sometimes it’s because the superior forces on paper are actually even more superior than they seemed. Sometimes it’s because the “inferior” forces are actually much better than expected. And you don’t know until you’ve launched your glorious invasion.
China decides it wants to invade Taiwan. American intelligence gets wind of this and the United States sends some carrier groups to the Taiwan Strait to warn off the Chinese from attacking across the strait. Historically, at this point, China has backed down from the brink - they’ve always figured the “correlation of forces” was not in their favor.
But suppose they decided this time, they want to push onward. The Chinese sent aircraft and small ships out into the strait to harass the Americans while publicly shouting their long-standing principle that Taiwan is a part of China and no outside country will be allowed to dictate China’s internal affairs.
The purpose of the harassment is to provoke a response. At some point, a Chinese plane or boat will cross a line and be fired upon. This is China’s plan - it’s willing to make this sacrifice so it can claim America shot first and China’s only acting in self-defense.
Now they launch the pre-planned attack I’ve described in previous posts. Hundreds of cheap missiles are launched within minutes against the American carriers. Almost all of these missiles are shot down but some get through. I’ll discount nuclear warheads but even conventional warheads inflict enough damage that the carriers have to withdraw from the strait. China has shown that an American carrier group can’t safely operate off the Chinese coast.
The less-damaged carriers may stay on station but they’re now going to stay a few hundred miles off shore where they’ll have less exposure to Chinese attacks. This distance and the damage they’ve suffered limits their abilities to launch attacks into the Taiwan Strait. The Taiwanese people meanwhile are stunned as they see the American fleet driven off and realize they’re now on the frontline.
This is the point where China launches a combined airborne/amphibious attack. China has numerous divisions of troops that have been trained for this. The American and the Taiwanese attack the transports but they’re fighting at a disadvantage. China is able to land a substantial portion of its invasion force. Taiwan’s an island the size of New Jersey and they’re outnumbered sixty to one - they’re not going to win a land war.
Once Taiwan is occupied, China wants things to settle down. They point out that Taiwan has always been a part of China and even the United States recognized this - so nothing’s really changed. Yes, there was some shooting on both sides but they’re willing to ignore the American first strike if America will ignore the Chinese counter-strike. What’s America going to do? We just got driven away from the Chinese coast - are we going to go back for more? Do we really want to start a world war? Or do we decide to accept the fait accompli in Taiwan - which as pointed out, we already recognize as Chinese territory?
Just want to add my nitpick. A ballistic missle is very fast and has long range but not very smart (or it won’t be ballistic.) A smart missile is slow and range is usually less but is harder to track and destroy. Bottomline, a conventional warhead land-based missile will either be too slow or too obvious to take out a carrier in mid-ocean.
Did the Soviets have such a system during the cold war? The only successful land-based missile attacks on warships I know were the Glamorgam using an exocet and an Israeli frigate using a Chinese silkworm. Both ships were stupid enough to come close to shore.
The US navy, on the other hand, rarely comes within 30 miles of a hostile shore except with stealthy destroyers or submarines. In a real shooting situation, it’s usually a New Jersey class battleship that approaches.
Well that’s another big question. I imagine that Lemur866 would respond that the Chinese are basically sitting ducks for attacks by American submarines. I’m not sure how true this is especially given the numbers problem. How many attack submarines can we get into position; how many torpedos can be fired and how many Chinese vessels can be disabled or sunk?
That’s part of the problem – mainland China wants Taiwan much more badly than the US wants mainland China not to have Taiwan.
We don’t. While I’m pretty confident that in a more drawn out war, the US could hold its own pretty well against China, in a short term scenario where China exploits a temporary advantage to get control of Taiwan, there will be a lot of pressure on the US to let it go. After all, it’s just a civil war.
It actually might work out really well for the US. We could declare war, suspend economic relations and declare all US debt held by China to be void, and then sue for peace - Chinese options being A) they get to keep Taiwan and we go back to friendly relations, or B) total war.
While the traditional intelligence rule-of-thumb is to study the potential adversary’s “capabilities, not intentions,” it might be worth giving a thought to the Chinese style of warfare.
Chinese doctrine is heavily influenced by – more might more properly say founded upon – Sun Tzu’s Art of War. The Art of War emphasizes, among other things, not directly confronting strength with strength. I would interpret that to mean, in this case, the Chinese have no serious intent to blow through American carrier groups, taking losses as they come – that would be really taking untried and questionable Chinese strengths against the previously-unchallengable naval might of the United States; not at all what Sun Tzu would recommend.
What Sun Tzu would recommend, in fact, would be to “appear strong where you are weak.” Perhaps this anti-ship ballistic missile is, at least in part, a Sun-Tzu-like attempt to put on a demon mask and scare off the opposition.
How could you get the idea that I believe that the United States could defeat any Chinese attack?
I’m saying that sinking a US carrier group is a lot harder job than people think. And brand-new weapons that have never been used in real world conditions very often perform extremely poorly. And that the military forces of authoritarian countries tend to perform better on the parade ground than they do on the battlefield.
A can guarantee that in the event of a shooting war between the United States and China, we will not be able to park our carriers off the coast and bomb targets at will. Those carriers are extremely vulnerable to dozens of methods of attack, and we cannot treat China like we could treat Iraq.
But an amphibious and/or airborne invasion of Taiwan would require complete naval and air superiority to succeed. It’s one thing for China to have weapons that make it too dangerous to park a carrier off the coast. It’s another to move landing ships across the straits with impunity. It’s one thing to think like an American commander and worry about the vulnerability of our surface fleet. It’s another to think like a Chinese commander and worry about how you guarantee defeat of the American surface fleet. Achieving tactical surprise and sending a lot of expensive American ships to the bottom is one thing. Achieving your war aims is another.
I’ve said in other threads that the United States assumes amphibious invasions require a huge logistic tail because that’s the way we do it. But while our suspenders-and-belt approach might be the best way, I think countries can conduct a successful amphibious invasion with less support than we would use. A bigger risk and more casualties but success is still possible.
I don’t think any nation expects a country who is at war to keep making payments to the nation that they’re fighting.
In the hypo I was addressing, China attacked the US first. Cancelling the debt would be completely reasonable under those circumstances and I doubt it would give Japan or the UK any pause at all.
China can have Taiwan anytime it wants:
Forget any military action-that is completely unnecessary. All the Chinese Central Bank has to do is engineer a run on the Taiwan dollar. Then it just has to stop shipping food and raw materials to Taiwan. Within a week, the Taiwan stock exchange will crash, as will the Taiwan $…and the Taiwan president will capitulate to China’s demands/requests.
No muss, no fuss-and no need to get the US Navy involved at all.
Except, what do you think a shooting war between China and America is going to do to the global economy and global trade? How is China going to maintain its export based economy they are shooting at the US Navy?
This scenario could only happen if China was on the verge of economic collapse due to some shakeup in the world economy and some Generalissimo decided to roll the dice on some WWII style territorial expansion.
Wars don’t happen in a vacuum with one side out of the blue conducting a sneak attack, not even Pearl Harbor or the invasion of Poland.
