Very senseless to establish camps in Indian claimed land and then move back months later. ANI and Indiatimes have been behind many false information already debunked but this is too big a lie to be fake. So what has China gained from all this? Huge blunder by CCP if they've gone all this way to antagonise India and create some Indian solidarity against China and all this to just move back to previous positions?
Ladakh Flash Point
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I feel like you're grasping for something, anything.
If you want to succeed in life, you have to develop a thicker skin and accept there will be haters.
Any successful politician, academic and business executive will tell you the same thing
The complimentary nature of the EU and Russia is that Russia is a major military power, while the EU is a major economic power. Alone, they're both doomed to irrelevance as the EU is not technologically competitive and has no growth prospects, while Russia is in massive economic rot. Together, the EU gains access to lots of skilled Russian labor or professional Russian labor, alongside massive resource wealth. Russia, on the other hand, gains access to EU money.
You are being very short-sighted about all of this. Putin is fighting to keep NATO off Russia's borders, but for what? People assume that Russia has no endgame or victory scenario and can only punch back and hurt the West as it's doomed to irrelevance. But it has an alternative to such.
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Put another way, Russia's future is either in European arms or Chinese arms. When it comes to Russia in Chinese arms, Russia will become wholly a Chinese satellite as Russia has no advantages at all against China except in its number of nukes. When it comes to Russia in European arms, on the other hand, Russia isn't facing 10 times its population, it's facing 3-4 times its population. As I've stated before, while Europe is economically strong, Russia is militarily strong, and the asymmetry allows Russia to negotiate a better deal with the Europeans than it would with China.
The present circumstance, however, has the EU as essentially a US satellite without an independent foreign policy. See weakness in the United States, on the other hand, and further EU-US conflict, the EU is now free to choose. While Russia wouldn't want to join the Western bloc that's led by the same power, the United States, that betrayed it and destroyed its empire (and remember that the Chinese betrayed the Soviets in the Sino-Soviet Split), the EU is something different.
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Or, in other words, what you're implicitly saying is that you expect Russia to become a Chinese satellite and under effective Chinese domination as Russia can't afford its Armatas or its Su-57. That's the direction of Russia without Europe.
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Also, just for educational purposes, the F-35s don't matter. The real problem with the F-35 isn't the stealth or the technology, but rather the sheer numbers the F-35s are going to be deployed in.
Since the F-35s are around 80 million a piece, India's ability to afford F-35s is going to be relatively limited. That's not to say that India won't have F-35s at all, but the numbers you're more looking at would be 75-150 total, compared to currently 272 Su-30MKIs, which are far cheaper than the F-35s.
Now, the F-35 has much vaunted stealth capabilities. But guess what? The Chinese have effective ground-based VHF radar to detect the F-35 at long ranges. Moreover, the J-20 is designed to offset the F-35, and while the J-20s can see the F-35s via networked radar, the F-35s can't see the J-20s.
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In general, the Indians can't do anything about China. Hopefully the border disputes are resolved amicably within the next 5 years and India doesn't bother to join the Quad, because that'd be wasteful and expensive for both sides.
plawolf
Lieutenant General
Your starting point is that the Chinese proactively made advances to antagonise India, when all reliable reports have this as simply false, with that claim being wholly manufactured by the Indian fake news industry.
It was the Indians who were making salami slice probing advances against China, no doubt fooled by western MSM propaganda fake news about China faking it’s COVID19 numbers(hence hiding a far worse outbreak) and emboldened by America’s ever more ridiculous rhetoric against China to deflect against its own incompetence in handling the outbreak.
China pushed back in response (setting up tents on the river bend was in response to Indian building work in disputed territory downstream), and India meekly back down as the speed and scale of the PLA mobilisation response definitively disproved their hopes that China and the PLA were hobbled by COVID19, and the deafening silence from the rest of the world proved they would have zero outside help if push really came to shove.
This has been happening once every few years routinely for decades, with the only difference this time being the stupidity of the dead hothead colonel getting himself and a lot of his men killed for nothing elevating this standoff above all previous ones for decades.
But it is now clear to me that this escalation to lethal force was not something either government planned on happening, and was the direct result of the lack of discipline within the Indian military and an indirect result of the decades of fake news blaming China for everyone wrong under the sun in India.
The big deciding factors in the two nations responses is that India doesn’t have the actual military capabilities to throw down with the PLA for real, nor did it make any meaningful preparations for actual combat to support its probing. OTOH, China not only has the raw power to crush the Indians militarily, it has far better contingency plans in place, whereby massive force deployments to the boarder happened almost automatically as soon as tensions rose above pre-determined thresholds, thereby when things escalated to lethal force, the PLA was waiting on the boarder with all the main combat forces and logistical support ready to throw down while India, who initiated the crisis with its probing, was caught woefully unprepared at both the tactical (force forward deployments and combat readiness) and strategic levels (munitions supplies and supply chains). As such it was inevitable that India would back down, as the alternative was a major beat down on the same, if not worse, level as 1962.
There are so many mistakes above, but I'll address the major ones which blow away the rest of your analysis.
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Your assertion that the EU is only an economic power is incorrect.
Active Military Personnel:
Combined EU (1.4 million) versus (0.9 million) Russia
Military Spending:
Combined EU (255 billion USD) versus (65 billion USD) Russia
You can see that the EU is clearly a bigger military power than Russia, even if that spending is inefficient.
So why would the EU need Russia as a military partner?
If Russia and the EU ever get into a long conventional war, Russia is going to lose badly, and Russia knows this.
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Your assertion that the EU is not technologically competitive is also incorrect.
Have a look at the R&D spending comparison below.
You can see the EU is in the same ballpark as the USA and China.
In comparison, Russia lags behind in R&D spending, both in terms of quantity and *quality*
In summary:
Russia is at a large disadvantage with respect to both China and the EU
It doesn't matter if Russia is dealing with China or the EU.
But Russia is big and self contained enough to play in the middle.
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Brumby
Major
The problem is in a real conflict (not imaginary), the number of aim points available are much more than China’s inventory of missiles. It is more likely that China will run out of ballistic missiles before India runs out of ammunition. Long range precision strike might achieve certain desired effects but they are not magical solutions to every problem in a conflict. How do we know? Just look at the number of aim points generated during the Iraq campaigns or the number of Tomahawks expended against the Shayrat airbase in Syria.All Indian airbases, even those in Kerala, are well within range of Chinese ballistic and cruise missiles. What makes Brahmos impossible to intercept?In truth, the Chinese side can throw a lot more missiles at the airbase problem.
If numerical and geographical advantage does not translate to gains how does such a situation instead reverse to a Chinese advantage as many seems to suggest? That is a logic I cannot reconcile to.
Nothing except dispersal. China might very well used up all its precious inventory of ballistic missiles and still not achieve the desired outcome. Then what?
Admittedly there are a lot of unproven and un-demonstrated capabilities on both side of the fence. With India being a lot more transparent than China we are aware of some of its deficiencies. That does not mean China does not have operational issues except everything is censored and so we don’t know.
In a situation full of unknown I simply question why the presumptive view is that any conflict will be one sided.
The open source estimates out there is that China has an inventory of somewhere between 1400 to 2500 of ballistic missiles and GLCM. That might last more than a day but unlikely into the week if the strategy is just to lob missiles.
That is a terrible logic in causative reasoning. It reminds me of Ernie with the banana in the ear (Sesame Street).
There are other better reasons such as conflict is bad for the economy – both China and India. That once started it is like opening the pandora box. There are many risks and outcomes that cannot be anticipated or controlled. Starting one is a last resort.
I don't know much about the Brahmos program but are you kidding me that it was in existence decades ago? Seriously? Give me link to back up your assertion.
Opinion is not fact. You have no idea how any of those toys will perform in actual conflict. No one knows behind that veil of Chinese secrecy and that has been one off my key point. When facing uncertainty how do you arrive at certainty as a conclusion?
You have to ask Modi. I am not in the speculation business.
Brumby the strategy isn't to just lob missiles. Indian bases don't exceed Chinese ones by that much. But Chinese missiles do exceed Indian ones by that much. India having more airfields nearer to LAC isn't going to yield them any advantages. They are all within range of even rocket artillery. China's solution isn't to send 100 cruise missiles against each Indian base. And missile numbers don't need to stretch into the week even though they can. Indian bases only need to be destroyed once and they have about a dozen of them around the area.
Fair enough point. Still would be personally disappointed if CCP withdraws from PP14/15 and Finger 4 because even in your own presentation of the motivations, the CCP is in every right to continue responding to India's aggression. The Indians have "retaliated" with trade war and solidarity against China. If your version of 1. India got aggressive 2. China responded 3. India ceases aggression 4. China ceases aggression and moves back 5. India creates a huge narrative of evil China and ban this and that etc don't buy from China, meanwhile we've seen no Chinese response to this. China is at a net loss, that's summed as three Indian provocations and 2 Chinese responses. And if withdrawal happened/happens, then China's got nothing to show for it while the end result of all this may be return to status quo with India's initial aggression checked, but India has ended up with unified determination to work against China and increase cooperation with the west. China's loss overall. For these reasons, I hope the news of moving back to status quo positions is fake news but I have doubts it is. It's all over Indian media now and it would be too much of an embarrassing lie, even though the Indians are really no strangers to such things.
Brumby
Major
Mate,
You are spreading cow droppings all over the place.
India is not getting any F-35 in the foreseeable future. It is just not happening - period.
You should advise the Syrian to put up the VHF radar because the Israeli F-35s are bombing the crap out of the Syrians even with their much vaunted S-300. VHF radars by nature are easy to target and easy to jam and not much use except to tell you that there is something out there.
I would refrain from the F-35 vs J-20 as it would ruffle too many feathers.
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