Yes, and that's what's going to happen.
Chinese Hypersonic Developments (HGVs/HCMs)
- Thread starter A.Man
- Start date
Yeah China can't do that lol. If the US based lots of M/IRBMs in SK or Japan (especially mobile) they could be anywhere in country and attack nearly all important Chinese facilities. The question is why they don't do that instead of dicking around with ludicrously expensive hypersonics that aren't even necessary to get through Chinese defences (MaRV at most is more than enough). The US should've just created its own DF-26, TEL & all, after (smartly) pulling out of INF then built as many as possible. Even just restarting Pershing II production would be great; it has all the right attributes: mobile, sufficient accuracy etc., just the range is on the low side.
Except they literally can't:
manqiangrexue
Brigadier
I think the correct response is to grow China's ICBM force instead, which is being done as well. Growing IRBMs mean that if a missile from Guam/Japan attacked China, China would attack them back; that's just not good enough. The US doesn't care about these places; they are expendable in a Pacific war and the US would be happy to trade them for Chinese cities. China needs to say that if Chinese cities were attacked, China would respond by striking NY, LA, DC, etc... Thus the need for more DF-ZF, DF-41, etc... that is, unless we get based in Cuba, Venezuela, or something.
They're not mutually exclusive. The IRBM force can be expanded for tactical warfighting (including tactical nuclear warfighting) while the ICBM force can be expanded for strategic deterrence. Although I agree with the argument that the strategic force should be given priority in the immediate future because without sufficient deterrence at the highest level, anything China does at lower levels will be built on sand.
Yes, but why assume the US will base it there when it could put them in those 2 countries instead? Even the Phillippines (they're just less likely to agree). Also, even just Guam itself is far too large for China to completely cover with conventional warheads and "blast it out of existence".
It's really a matter of having a PLARF versatile enough to respond to any enemy force posture, the 2IC thing was just an example. By "blast out of existence" I meant blast any expensive assets like America IRBMs based there out of existence, not the island itself. The idea is the geography of the islands is too small to hide them.
Basing these missiles on Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, etc. is politically fraught since that would open those countries to attack by China. China could even threaten nuclear attacks on those countries since it could credibly claim not to know whether the American missiles based there would be conventional or nuclear.
But then wouldn't you need sufficient ISR to know precisely where they are, and not just that but ISR to terminally guide the missile in real time if it's a mobile IRBM moving around on the island? And the US can negate that kind of ISR with ASAT if even feasible in the first place.
Anyway, good thing the US is apparently incompetent and/or corrupt enough that they're not planning on any non-hypersonic theatre-range ballistic missiles in large quantities, such that we'd need to worry about that.
Not mutually exclusive.
You don’t seem to know anything about the specific challenges of aerodynamic and propulsion design for hypersonics. There are lots of chaotic and turbulent flow conditions that are extremely difficult to observe, predict, and model as you lose assumptions of smooth continuous flow to errant shockwaves in the hypersonic regime, and as the high heat environment introduces plasma dynamics into the tangle of additional factors you have to account for. The ability to incorporate those complex factors into your standard finite element analysis becomes very difficult and esoteric in the face of those conditions. As you add complexity of elements into your analysis you start to hit computational constraints over what you can model, and thus what solutions you can find for a set of conditions, which is why supercomputers have become so essential to advancing hypersonic research. “AI”, specifically neural nets, are actually very promising solution generating tools for getting around these challenges, because neural nets are actually better described as a mathematical method to efficiently map and find solutions in complex mathematical topographies. They offer a much more thorough and efficient search of a solution space than traditional computation solutions do. This will matter significantly for both coming up with better mechanical design, and for defining control laws for both flight and propulsion systems. So depending on what you mean by “design the entire projectile”, the claim itself is not that far out of a leap. It’s not as simple as taking a picture and letting your neural net do all the work, but the specific elements of a solution can be increasingly outsourced to neural nets.
You need Japan and South Korea’s permission to house US missiles. That makes Japan and South Korea fair game as targets in a nuclear standoff scenario. So if you don’t guarantee that they will also be covered under your nuclear umbrella, they essentially become sacrificial lambs. Even if there are some groups okay with that in SK and Japan, that would be deeply unpopular and probably incur domestic political consequences with their respective broader public. But even if the US were willing to expand that nuclear umbrella, the US will find itself in a situation where it’s putting its own domestic population on the line in any situation where these countries end up in conflict with another nuclear power that doesn’t involve the US. That is why the US hasn’t deployed MRBMs and ICBMs in Japan and SK. It’s a very politically fraught and challenging thing to do, and unless the SK and Japanese publics really felt it was necessary in concurrence with the US public, domestic public opinion for all these countries is very unlikely to allow it (ftr we’ve already run this experiment before in real life. This was a massive sensitivity for Turkey when the US deployed missiles there during the Cold War).
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