PLA Strategy in a Taiwan Contingency

aqh said:

Sure I agree with a lot of that. But compared to the US being reliant on half a dozen bases or so with a large share of their forward deployed assets positioned there, individual Chinese fixed assets are much less operationally important than Guam and Okinawa. Also only a portion of PLA tracking assets are fixed and they are defended by the Chinese SAM complex and incoming fires will be tracked by all the sensors the PLA has in west pac.

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james smith esq said:

USN surface combatants will have to hazard the risks of being within range of land-based DF-17s and DF-21s, and sea-based YJ-21s, in order to achieve range for their weapons. Air platforms launching the jassm-er and lrasm might have a slightly higher probability of successful launches, but those systems‘ ranges are within the patrol-ranges of J-16s and J-20s, and their BVRMs, as well. The USN SSG fleet will be heavily-tasked in this scenario.

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Blitzo said:

That's a different problem to the one you were talking about, which is whether the US could launch viable long range standoff strikes with LRASM or JASSM-ER pattern missiles against viable PLA targets without close in ISR.

The answer is yes, there absolutely are a significant portion of PLA targets that fulfill that criteria:
- PLA fixed land based targets in general, which do not need midcourse guidance
- PLAN ships known to be operating in relatively small waterways where midcourse guidance is not needed, and where the missiles can rely on their own onboard terminal guidance once they reach the area where PLAN ships are expected to be (think Taiwan strait when PLA is conducting the amphibious invasion phase and/or resupply shipping)

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Boltzmann said:

Ok but does this include the use of GPS?
Unless these missiles are relying entirely on inertial guidance, Chinese EW is going to be extremely oppressive. We've already seen how much even an orders of magnitude less intense EW effort by the Russians has seriously damaged Ukraine's ability to use its long range weapons supplied by Britain even with all the ISR in the world.

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vincent said:

The Pacific Ocean is a big one. American planes can attack from many different vectors. PLA needs to forward deploy lots of KJ-500 and one of the purposes of the US Marine’s new island hopping strategy is to shoot them down.

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aqh said:

Sure I agree with a lot of that. But compared to the US being reliant on half a dozen bases or so with a large share of their forward deployed assets positioned there, individual Chinese fixed assets are much less operationally important than Guam and Okinawa. Also only a portion of PLA tracking assets are fixed and they are defended by the Chinese SAM complex and incoming fires will be tracked by all the sensors the PLA has in west pac.

Click to expand...

Hood_Rat said:

The US is at a massive disadvantage in terms of being bottlenecked by maybe a dozen operationally significant bases but on the flip side the PRC itself gets put on a timer the moment the USN and JMSDF and probably the Indian navy shut down Chinese maritime shipping. There is good progress being made on overland trade corridors and oil & gas pipelines but these are not sufficient to sustain the Chinese economy at anything approaching pre-hostility levels.

The threshold for American success IMO is sustaining a blockade of Chinese commercial traffic long enough to force a capitulation in Beijing. The threshold for Chinese success is probably at least clearing the Arctic maritime route with Russia so that maritime cargos can flow again. This necessitates boots on the ground in the Japanese mainland IMO.

I've studied the figures and to my understanding, assuming the overland trade corridors are completed on schedule and a 20-50% wartime rationing scheme, there is about 3-5 years of state reserves of critical commodities (foods, rare earths, fossil fuels, etc) for the PRC to smash through the blockade and destroy/severely degrade the US global strike command.

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Hood_Rat said:

The US is at a massive disadvantage in terms of being bottlenecked by maybe a dozen operationally significant bases but on the flip side the PRC itself gets put on a timer the moment the USN and JMSDF and probably the Indian navy shut down Chinese maritime shipping. There is good progress being made on overland trade corridors and oil & gas pipelines but these are not sufficient to sustain the Chinese economy at anything approaching pre-hostility levels.

The threshold for American success IMO is sustaining a blockade of Chinese commercial traffic long enough to force a capitulation in Beijing. The threshold for Chinese success is probably at least clearing the Arctic maritime route with Russia so that maritime cargos can flow again. This necessitates boots on the ground in the Japanese mainland IMO.

I've studied the figures and to my understanding, assuming the overland trade corridors are completed on schedule and a 20-50% wartime rationing scheme, there is about 3-5 years of state reserves of critical commodities (foods, rare earths, fossil fuels, etc) for the PRC to smash through the blockade and destroy/severely degrade the US global strike command.

Click to expand...

Hood_Rat said:

but on the flip side the PRC itself gets put on a timer the moment the USN and JMSDF and probably the Indian navy shut down Chinese maritime shipping.

Click to expand...