If the US decides to stay 1500 km away from Chinas borders and just loiter around volleying JASSM XRs at PLA targets how can China respond? The only thing I can think of is lobbing YJ 21s back but how much of them does the PLA have (an answer we won't have)
PLA Strategy in a Taiwan Contingency
- Thread starter pugachev_diver
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It is a numbers game here. If China has more antimissiles than U.S's missile stockpile, then it shouldn't be a problem.
Next important thing is very good long range radars.
Russia has launched 50-60 cruise missiles salvo to Ukraine in many occasions but they were shot down. Sometimes 1 or 2 missiles get through.. The interception rate is huge.. China needs something like this.. If China can achieve those high interception rate, there is no way U.S can sustain a war this way. U.S is known to produce things very slow. Once their missile supply is exhausted, they will need to wait a long time for replacement. In a war, it cannot wait.
At their current posture, the USA cannot do that for long. 6 carriers each launching 100 missiles a day means the US would run out of cruise missiles in 15 days. China would suffer around 2000-2500 hits, but that's not much. Even Ukraine absorbed multiples of that.
But yes this is a legitimate concern. China needs to expand its effective anti-shipping range to 4000 km from today's 1500 km. Because of this reason, ASW capabilities (enabling PLAN surface combatants to venture far away), the Type 095 and YY-20U are very important.
Also DF21, DF17, DF15, CJ100, CJ10 etc. 5000km is safer rather than 1500km where there's a guarantee of being engaged with lots of different stuff.
You'd need a lot of subsonic cm to saturate air defenses if that's the only thing you have.
Closing to relatively close ranges like 1500km is one approach US could use, because they need to generate a breakthrough rather quickly. But it also has significant risks.
D
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Stop being a schizo. The US is not going to strike China's early-warning system either because that is tantamount to a nuclear attack. Every relevant decision maker knows this. The goal of the US is to win not to commit mutual suicide out of spite.
And stop invoking the Russian experience in Ukraine, it's not a smart gotcha, it just betrays a complete lack of understanding of contemporary power dynamics and inability to critically interpret Russian self-aggrandizing.
What source, I'm interested in
I think a rudimentary radar altimeter added is possible to allow for terrain hugging flight capabilities. That is much cheaper than TERCOM which requires an altitude map of a specific terrain path, which is much harder to obtain and likely requires much more memory. You can buy a radar altimeter with 0.2 m minimum detection in the <50 m range on Ebay for $300 USD. You can force its orientation to point downwards with a MEMS gyroscope chip which is on the order of $1 USD.
The advantage of TERCOM is for complex flight paths but you don't need that here, coordinate waypoints for 2D location + altimeter for 3D location is good enough.
That's a good point. Unlike in WW2, most industrial companies can't easily produce high end stuff like planes or missiles anymore. China needs to have a range of simple but effective products that can easily be made by repurposed civilian factories like those of car, electronics or textile manufacturers. That's the highest possible production capacity. Ukraine could be a good model, with their improvised naval drones, grenade dropping FPV drones and the Russian shahed style long range drones. China has enough capacity to produce millions of these per month.
If China wants to, it can launch a million shahed drones and all of Japan (flying over Vladivostok) and the Philippines will be in range. This is not a threat they can defend against and should help deter their involvement in any Taiwan war.
Simple suicide drones, even if not very capable, can be built by anyone if supplied with the engine and electronics. What other weapons are as suited as that for wartime industrial production?
China sold individual electronic components that Russia used to make drone jammers. They never sold the whole package or MSM would’ve cried foul a long time ago.