PLA Strategy in a Taiwan Contingency

ZeEa5KPul said:

Even if the PLA wins a local war, the US can escalate horizontally by shutting off Chinese shipping at distant chokepoints, launch attacks from the sea that China can't respond to, etc. This will severely degrade its economy and destroy its war production. Then there's one of two choices: 1) Surrender and accept terms that make the Unequal Treaties look like paragons of fairness. 2) My preferred option: Launch a nuclear war that ends the US, China, and probably the rest of the planet.

Click to expand...

ZeEa5KPul said:

Too many people, especially when considering China's strategic deterrent, have a poverty mentality where they seek "asymmetric" means to counter the US, as if China can be a superpower on the cheap.

Click to expand...

Historically, China has always been a land power. I see no reason for China to imitate the United States by trying to become a second global hegemon. The purpose of the BRI is to develop the land-based trade routes into China. Resource-wise, China is both self-sufficient and has secured the support of Russia. Therefore I don't see any US naval blockade to be crippling to Chinese war efforts.

In contrast, the developed world has basically outsourced the production of all consumer goods to China. These production capabilities take years if not decades to build up. By blockading trade with China, Western nations would just be condemning its people to hyperinflation, with all the ensuing social upheavals that come with it. A trade blockade would be far more crippling to them than to China.

I'm done with this discussion. Multiple people keep asking the same questions and ignoring previous answers or misportraying previous answers in a manner that borders on making straw man arguments.

For example, yes, a westpac conflict would primarily be an air-naval conflict and that would be the most decisive domain of such a conflict, even if a Korean front was opened. Yes, opening a Korean front in such a conflict would be disadvantageous to China because it means they would have to pull air forces away from the air-naval conflict, meaning they will end up losing the overall westpac conflict faster.
Or alternatively, interpreting statements about how Chinese production of key military equipment could be significantly crippled by targeting key factories essential to complex military systems, and suggesting I implied all Chinese military production facilities would have to be destroyed.
The innumerable comparisons with past conflicts like Korea, Vietnam or Iraq and Syria and demonstrating their "facts" as if they are a useful guide for the key centers of gravity in how a modern war would go and the geopolitical rationales and national resolves as being similar, and suggesting the outcomes of those conflicts are ones where the opponents of the US had "won" and the US "lost" as if that is anything resembling a sort of outcome that is desirable for China.
And I cannot count the number of times in which people have been unable to recognize the timeline in which this conflict would occur on, despite saying multiple times that the final outcome would be one resulting from multiple years of high intensity conflict and a war of attrition. No, I am not saying the entire PLAAF is going to be obliterated in the first six months of the war to nothing.

Now, it's understandable that keeping track of such a long discussion and all the posts is difficult and given how many pages it has gone on for I don't have such an expectation. But I'm not going to keep repeating the same things that I've written every other day over the last week and a half.




I will end my part here, with my last remark being:
That in event of a conflict with the US, I think most people here (even people in this thread who disagreed with me) would be much more comfortable if the PLA went into it with capabilities that were capable of fighting the US in a war of attrition where the US had plentiful resolve -- for if the US lacked the resolve or capacity to fight a war of attrition, that would allow the PLA an even easier victory than expected as the PLA would have merely overprepared... but if the US did have the will to fight such a war, then you'd be thanking the lucky stars that the CMC chose to conduct their strategic planning and procurement the way that they did.

solarz said:

Historically, China has always been a land power. I see no reason for China to imitate the United States by trying to become a second global hegemon. The purpose of the BRI is to develop the land-based trade routes into China. Resource-wise, China is both self-sufficient and has secured the support of Russia. Therefore I don't see any US naval blockade to be crippling to Chinese war efforts.

In contrast, the developed world has basically outsourced the production of all consumer goods to China. These production capabilities take years if not decades to build up. By blockading trade with China, Western nations would just be condemning its people to hyperinflation, with all the ensuing social upheavals that come with it. A trade blockade would be far more crippling to them than to China.

Click to expand...

China's biggest historical mistakes were from voluntarily discarding, abandoning or overlooking potential development paths, e.g. scuttling the worlds most advanced timber ship fleet in the 1600's, disregarding advancements in european military hardware and organization in the 1800's, etc.
Not to cast a bad light on your post, however it's vein of thinking is the same as previous historical mistakes "we can rely on how things were" rather than the world is a constantly changing place, and any and all opportunities must be seized to their fullest extent. China has increasingly more and more resources to explore these avenues and they should be taken.
Only by taking the second approach can China avoid finding itself back in a Ming / Qing dynasty scenario of hubris and eventual defeat.

LesAdieux said:

north Vietnam has an area amounts to1.6% of China, with no navy, airforce, or industry to talk about, America dropped three million tons bombs in ten years and lost the war.

conventionally and theoretically, America only has some SSNs which can sneak into the chain and launch some cruise missiles, four to five (six, seven?) magnitudes lower than what they dropped in Vietnam, which you assume will wipe out everything in China.

Click to expand...

He is assuming the US can strike China with its carrier and land-based assets too which China somehow wouldn't be able to destroy. Tbh I just can't see that happening, even assuming the worst for China and nothing but luck for the US. China just has so many redundant A2/AD systems and so much firepower that it's hard for me to even see US forward-positioned forces being able to survive. Besides ASBMs, you have submarines, PLAAF (fighter/bomber) based maritime strike, shore-based ASCMs, the PLAN surface force itself, even things like the Type 022, etc...

Taking out US bases/land-based air forces and keeping them suppressed may be more difficult and not as straightforward as I first thought especially if they use ACE/distributed deployment, but most of them are close enough and within range of such a large quantity of ballistic and cruise missiles I don't think it'll be too much of a problem. The furthest ones like Guam may be harder to destroy totally and keep offline because they're only possible to range with a couple (less numerous) weapons systems, e.g. IRBM/H-6K-fired ALCM, but they're also too far from China to reach it with any aircraft besides strategic bombers.

sinophilia said:

Why not just attack the aircraft hangers, revetments, tarmac space, for planes on the ground. Keep attacking those areas and you'll destroy the planes eventually because they have to land at some point.

Click to expand...

that's exactly what happened in 2017. Note that this was after 5 years of civil war in Syria and after the Syrian Arab Army had almost collapsed in a ground war of attrition. Yet... what was the result of the strike?

On the morning of 7 April 2017,[1][6] the United States launched 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles from the Mediterranean Sea into Syria, aimed at Shayrat Airbase controlled by the Syrian government.

Click to expand...

The Syrian Air Force launched airstrikes against the rebels from the base only hours after the American attack.

Click to expand...

Fact: . But before you target airbases you need to target SAMs to prevent your strike assets from being shot down.

Let's say that there are no false negatives and human analysts can further reject 90% of these SAM candidate sites. That's still 210 sites, in a tiny slice of Southeastern China. They can't send a scout to verify as the scout will be shot down in a high intensity conflict and this is already after satellite + human analysts have gone through the data. This means there's no alternative - they need to actually hit those sites. 5 missiles per site since the vehicles are spread out (see photos in article). That's 1000 missiles for SAM sites in a tiny slice of Southeast China alone.. This is assuming that the SAM sites can't even defend themselves.

Now let's compare to Serbia. In 1999 the US intervened in the Kosovo War against Serbia, launching one of the largest strategic bombing campaigns in modern history. Serbia had been at war since the collapse of Yugoslavia in 1992. That's 6 years of a war of attrition on the ground.



Serbia (at the time, Federal Republic of Yugoslavia) has area 100,000 km2. China has area 9,300,000 km2 (93x larger).

Serbia in 1998 had 64 Mig-21s fighters and 16 Mig-29s fighters along with some domestic subsonic trainers which weren't very important. In 2003 (after the bombing campaign) they still had 33 Mig-21s and 5 Mig-29s.

So even in a context of absolute overwhelming air supremacy and 2300 missiles launched against a tiny landlocked and impoverished European country bordering NATO that had been at war for 6 years up to that point.... they could only destroy 10% of Serbian armored vehicles and half its air force.

clockwork said:

He is assuming the US can strike China with its carrier and land-based assets too which China somehow wouldn't be able to destroy. Tbh I just can't see that happening, even assuming the worst for China and nothing but luck for the US. China just has so many redundant A2/AD systems and so much firepower that it's hard for me to even see US forward forces being able to survive. Besides ASBMs, you have submarines, PLAAF (fighter/bomber) based maritime strike, shore-based ASCMs, the PLAN surface force itself, etc... Taking out US bases/land-based air forces and keeping them suppressed may not be as straightforward as I first thought especially if they use ACE/distributed deployment, but most of them are close enough and within range of so many ballistic and cruise missiles I don't think it'll be too much of a problem. The furthest ones like Guam may be harder to destroy totally and keep offline because they're only possible to range with a couple (less numerous) weapons systems, e.g. IRBM/H-6K-fired ALCM, but they're also too far from China to reach it with any aircraft besides strategic bombers.

Click to expand...

Even in terms of pure resilience against attack - no offense, no countermeasures, just outright resistance to damage - China is one of the toughest targets on the planet due to size, political stability, infrastructure, military inventory and geography.

Even Serbia, a tiny country bordering NATO, with less than 100 fighters, most of which were built in the 1960's, and was in a war of attrition for 6 years prior to bombing... suffered less than 10% tank casualties according to the US itself, despite 2300 missiles and 14000 bombs being dropped on it.

Serbia, a country with absolutely zero capability to resist in any meaningful way... still had 90% of its tanks remaining after a massive strategic bombardment... according to the US itself. Serbia claims that in fact the US barely even destroyed 1% of its armored vehicles due to decoys.

las

Bltizo said:

I'm done with this discussion. Multiple people keep asking the same questions and ignoring previous answers or misportraying previous answers in a manner that borders on making straw man arguments.

For example, yes, a westpac conflict would primarily be an air-naval conflict and that would be the most decisive domain of such a conflict, even if a Korean front was opened. Yes, opening a Korean front in such a conflict would be disadvantageous to China because it means they would have to pull air forces away from the air-naval conflict, meaning they will end up losing the overall westpac conflict faster.
Or alternatively, interpreting statements about how Chinese production of key military equipment could be significantly crippled by targeting key factories essential to complex military systems, and suggesting I implied all Chinese military production facilities would have to be destroyed.
The innumerable comparisons with past conflicts like Korea, Vietnam or Iraq and Syria and demonstrating their "facts" as if they are a useful guide for the key centers of gravity in how a modern war would go and the geopolitical rationales and national resolves as being similar, and suggesting the outcomes of those conflicts are ones where the opponents of the US had "won" and the US "lost" as if that is anything resembling a sort of outcome that is desirable for China.
And I cannot count the number of times in which people have been unable to recognize the timeline in which this conflict would occur on, despite saying multiple times that the final outcome would be one resulting from multiple years of high intensity conflict and a war of attrition. No, I am not saying the entire PLAAF is going to be obliterated in the first six months of the war to nothing.

Now, it's understandable that keeping track of such a long discussion and all the posts is difficult and given how many pages it has gone on for I don't have such an expectation. But I'm not going to keep repeating the same things that I've written every other day over the last week and a half.




I will end my part here, with my last remark being:
That in event of a conflict with the US, I think most people here (even people in this thread who disagreed with me) would be much more comfortable if the PLA went into it with capabilities that were capable of fighting the US in a war of attrition where the US had plentiful resolve -- for if the US lacked the resolve or capacity to fight a war of attrition, that would allow the PLA an even easier victory than expected as the PLA would have merely overprepared... but if the US did have the will to fight such a war, then you'd be thanking the lucky stars that the CMC chose to conduct their strategic planning and procurement the way that they did.

Click to expand...

last point

America assumes it may lack resolve sometimes, it never lacks capacity. far right wishes for a Pearl Harbor to wake America up, they believe a wake-up America can destroy everything it wants. you must subscribe to that assumption to do your attrition.

Now, can we discuss me beating-up a 9 year old girl? That could last 9 or 10 pages, too, depending on how many times I have to repeat that I will win because I’m bigger!

I don't know a lot of assumption and conjecture here. The idea that the US can degrade Chinese industry and weapon manufacturing with impunity is contentious They will be hotly contested over pacific and even if they pass the screen which I doubt they will face barrage of surface to air missile , anti stealth radar, the most dense IAD world ever know . Judging by Shenzhen air show we see the proliferation of short, middle and long range missile. All of them will be thrown to any intruder. Another thing most of US fighter, bomber are all short legged and most of Chinese defense establishment are deep in hinterland. Most Chinese airforce brigade are based on single brigade for single airfield .

Most of them are heavily reinforced and some of them are even under cave or mountain. Whereas most US and Japanese fighter brigade are bunched up in few large air bases like Naha, Yokosuka etc and all of them are unreinforced . Those bases will be decimated at first week of war by missile attack follow by follow on air attack. Once those bases are gone the only mean for air war is aircraft carrier but they will be rained with ASBM And I am not sure why China only have few ASBM Missile. It is way cheaper than destroyer or Aircraft carrier Captain Jimmy Hendrix once calculated that for 1 aircraft carrier you can built 1000 ASBM missile. You can spread the airbases along smaller bases but it is not optimal for high tempo air war because it lack the support system of weapon storage, repair, maintenance etc. fighter jet must take off and landed to give assumption of air superiority just based on number of aircraft is not realistic.

The only long distance missile that US can launch with impunity are missile from submarine. but most of them are slow subsonic missile which with face phalanx of radar and can be detected.They will be hunted by hundred of J7 that they still have or surface to air missile. That is assuming that China ASW is useless which I doubt it since by now they should be completed the undersea network of sensor and communication. They have enough conventional sub to guard the choke point where US sub must transit.

I would even argue that in long attrition war China will prevail since she is basically self sufficient in food and produce 45% of oil domestically that can be substitute with import from Russia and central Asia . she has the most complete supply chain of industrials and weapon production. million of skill worker. She has raw material sourced domestically sufficient for war production. The war material production will sky rocket I am pretty sure they have built in contingency for war time production. I once see the video of tank factory in Batou where row of row of machinery stay idled and only handful of tank are produced! I assume the same contingency plan is built in Chengdu and Xian

But having said so I agree China need to increase the defense budget to 3% if they are serious about recovering Taiwan. There is no more excuses. Because there is no more Technical bottle neck and they finish with building new factory and shipyard. Now is the right time to increase the defense budget And greatly increase the production of fighter, ship, sub, missile etc. But the most important is strategic missile of ICBM, Hypersonic missile etc the big stick! they need to built fast China should be prepared to face the combine arm of US and Japan because Japan will enter into the fray once their based got bombed out.

The idea that the US will move their western Europe based asset to the war in Asia is just not realistic. Nato won't allowed it because they are then naked against the Russian!

FairAndUnbiased said:

that's exactly what happened in 2017. Note that this was after 5 years of civil war in Syria and after the Syrian Arab Army had almost collapsed in a ground war of attrition. Yet... what was the result of the strike?

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

Fact:

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

. But before you target airbases you need to target SAMs to prevent your strike assets from being shot down.

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

Let's say that there are no false negatives and human analysts can further reject 90% of these SAM candidate sites. That's still 210 sites, in a tiny slice of Southeastern China. They can't send a scout to verify as the scout will be shot down in a high intensity conflict and this is already after satellite + human analysts have gone through the data. This means there's no alternative - they need to actually hit those sites. 5 missiles per site since the vehicles are spread out (see photos in article). That's 1000 missiles for SAM sites in a tiny slice of Southeast China alone.

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

. This is assuming that the SAM sites can't even defend themselves.

Now let's compare to Serbia. In 1999 the US intervened in the Kosovo War against Serbia, launching one of the largest strategic bombing campaigns in modern history. Serbia had been at war since the collapse of Yugoslavia in 1992. That's 6 years of a war of attrition on the ground.

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

Serbia (at the time, Federal Republic of Yugoslavia) has area 100,000 km2. China has area 9,300,000 km2 (93x larger).

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

Serbia in 1998 had 64 Mig-21s fighters and 16 Mig-29s fighters along with some domestic subsonic trainers which weren't very important. In 2003 (after the bombing campaign) they still had 33 Mig-21s and 5 Mig-29s.

So even in a context of absolute overwhelming air supremacy and 2300 missiles launched against a tiny landlocked and impoverished European country bordering NATO that had been at war for 6 years up to that point.... they could only destroy 10% of Serbian armored vehicles and half its air force.

Click to expand...

To be fair to NATO’S operation called "ALLIED FORCE" much of the reason(s) why the air campaign was sort of a tactical failure was due to the strict air campaign guidelines then NATO SACEUR, GEN. Wesley K. Clark had ordered the Air Force to operate on:

No Greater Priority'

Allied pilots were also given firm instructions to take no chances with Yugoslavia's vaunted air defense network by flying at low altitudes; in most cases, a threshold was established at 15,000 feet. "There is practically no greater priority than avoiding the loss or capture of one of our pilots," a NATO military officer said.


For further understanding on this matter, I refer you to the RAND study of the air operation here:

And from Gen.Wesley Clark's pseudo memoir "Winning Modern Wars" published right his firing or cut short of his tenure as SACEUR for ruffling the feathers of just about everybody in the Pentagon and his own service, the U.S. Army.