Cargos planes and ships can be hit, in the air or water, after landing and docking, or the airports and ports can be destroyed.
PLA Strategy in a Taiwan Contingency
- Thread starter pugachev_diver
- Start date
The best place to destroy shipping is actually in harbor/while they are docked. Chokes them up and renders them unusable until salvage operations clear the carcasses. This is a multi-month undertaking even in peace. Under fire, it's functionally impossible.
Ports are hard to destroy without strategic nukes.
You can disable them, but usually not for too long.
Thermobaric warheads can do a pretty good job with those type of structures, the issue is having these facilities under constant attack as Air Defenses deplete, if they know, because the have recon satellites, that cargos with probably weapons are going to arrive they can attack the port, before the ships arrive or when the ships arrive and they are more vulnerable.
Cranes, pumps and elevators are soft static targets. They're also custom made per port and difficult to replace. You're not unloading ships if those are gone.
They aren't all that soft, and they're pretty repairable.
We have more than enough recent experience on the matter - you need to put a lot of tonnage ler port to disable it for long; it just won't happen through expensive long range stand off weapons (especially for Japan, which is quite far). Only unnecessary waste of weapons.
They are pretty soft targets and they are not that repariable, a crane take like a year to build and a month to install. To put it into perspective the constant attack of missile on fortify US bases has made them useless, is over and these are fortify structures. And the only reason the US has not attacked critical Iran Infrastructure is because they know Iran is capable to destroy the entire GCC infrastructure including ports critical for oil and that will cause the biggest energy shock in a generation.
Provide your citations then.
Port crane collapse in Jacksonville due to a thunderstorm. Far less energetic than even a relatively cheap glide bomb.
Six weeks just for clearing the debris.
Also, Japan is not far. H-6s can comfortably hit Japan with ALCM from within Chinese airspace.
i should point out that there are significant distortions in using america as an example. the francis scott key bridge (the one that got rammed by the tanker) still isn't anywhere close to being rebuilt where any other country may already have a replacement under construction.
China's like 70% of the world's ship-to-shore container crane industry. Suffice to say, China will not be rebuilding the ports that it bombed in a war. I literally could not find an example of any other country doing replacements and repairs.