China's SCS Strategy Thread
- Thread starter lilzz
- Start date
plawolf
Lieutenant General
The U.S. lost all credible ability to challenge China militarily in the SCS the moment China’s SCS islands were completed. It just took the US this long to do the maths and accept reality.
The whole American play with the SCS was to make it a choke point to strangle Chinese maritime shipping lanes to the rest of the world without creating an impossible IFF logistical burden on the USN, since that’s the only place on earth where you could potentially isolate civilian shipping to/from China from the rest of the world’s by mere geopolitical location (without needing to get suicidally close to the Chinese coast). Essentially they can reroute shipping to friendly and neutral countries around the outside of the Philippines and make the SCS a free fire zone and not have to really worry about IFF against civilian transports.
But the fundamental prerequisite of making that plan work was to have military dominance in the SCS. Which the USN lost once the PLAN had its SCS island bases as lynchpins to complement its growing naval fleets, since those bases gives China dominance in surveillance, offensive and defensive combat capabilities and above all else, unparalleled attritional dominance. Even if the USN can hit those islands with a hundred missiles before taking one missile hit in return (which they cannot come anywhere close to), the entire USN will be sunk and those islands will still be operational so long as the PLAN can keep them supplied.
All of the nonsense with the Philippines is mostly a combination of institutional inertia and scoring cheap political points, with some spiteful poison pilling to boot. But there is no serious military investment because the amount of investment needed to build up the Philippines to a level where they would become an actual asset would be beyond what America can afford. And even then no amount of investment can change the geographical reality of the Philippines being too far away from China to be meaningfully useful as a forward operating base.
Whats the goal or purpose of the VN reclaimed island(s)?
Not sure, to ally with the US to contain China?
Same as everyone in SCS.
Claims, based on extreme dependence/importance of this basin for the countries.
plawolf
Lieutenant General
Land grab for strategic space.
Vietnam is, somewhat rightfully, paranoid about being locked in by China.
If China was concerned about the U.S. threatening its sea lines of communication, Vietnam is in a far more precarious position wrt China doing the same to them.
They want their own SCS fortress islands as a copycat move. That’s something the Vietnamese do a lot btw, for a people who claim to hate everything Chinese so much.
The problem for Vietnam is that they don’t have the naval power of China to adequately protect and back up their island bases, and China has bases so very close that it doesn’t need to reply sole on naval power to attack those bases. Essentially, China is annoyed by the land grabs, but isn’t truly concerned because if push comes to shove, it can easily take those islands by force no matter how much Vietnam builds them up. The only thing Vietnam can realistically do is increase the price a little for China in taking those bases. But the balance of power is so stark that realistically speaking, that will just amount to a higher munitions bill for China.
Much too far, a lot of visitors in Sydney will want to board and take photo ops
Yes, that’s why China have set up its proxy, Rouge Khmer and wage war with Vietnam for over a decade to try to “stabalize” Vietnam but failed.
As a Vietnamese, though my country still have numerous problems with politics and economy, I have a firm believe in Vietnam’s foreign strategy. As we share a border with China, of course we don’t want China to be our enemy. But we still do have some deterrence against China, for example our Scud missile, which I believe can reach entire pearl river delta and Hainan
If you want to research more on this matter, I recommend this interview with former chief of Vietnamese military intelligence (have English subtitle)
TLDR: “Vietnam is not intermediary. Vietnam is not neutral. Vietnam is independent”
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