PikeCowboy
Junior Member
hard to fight a whole nation war when the effort is bottlenecked at transportation across the pacific.
PLA Strategy in a Taiwan Contingency
- Thread starter pugachev_diver
- Start date
yea I agree. The tyranny of distance is one of the main reasons why the US will have trouble with a conflict anywhere near China. ESPECIALLY against a near-peer opponent like China, the tyranny of distance will have a greatly exaggerated effect. Much more so than if the US was dealing with third-world countries.
Money is not real. Financial capital is not real. Production is. Physical goods are. If a war disrupted China's access to USD denominated global finance, all that would mean is China would have to develop more capacity for self finance which, while certainly a hassle, is a lesson many governments have had to learn and put into practice in major wars throughout history. This is *a* problem for China, but it's hardly the problem you're making it out to be. If you were given the choice, would you rather have all the production and no monetary tender, or all the monetary tender but no production? GDP doesn't tell the story you think it does here. As a market price based aggregate it really doesn't tell you about real economic capacity in autarkic conditions.
"The world" (aka the Colonial powers) adapted to the Confederacy because the Confederacy was only one of many commodities providers. Replacing Chinese production would be far more difficult in today's economic context.
China's biggest vulnerability would be its trade routes and sea lanes. If you look at it from a purely objective POV. I don't think it takes a rocket scientist to guess where the US and its allies would choose to focus their efforts in a prolonged conflict.
It currently does not have the same capacity to do sustained deployment of large CSG away from its continental shelf. It also has very sparse over seas bases and resupply depots. Its refueling assets for the PLAAF is also a small fraction of that of the US, and cannot have large fleet of strike platforms too much beyond the first island chain. The US is also beefing up its marine expeditionary units to do air and sea control around island groups.
Given this, places like the strait of Malacca, and too lesser extent Lombok and Sunda, would be major choke points that adversaries can use to choke off trade and especially energy. Some amount of increase in over land routes could mitigate some of the issues, but at a much higher cost, and possibly some delays. Other straits like Tsushima, Batanes, and Miyako would also be choked off to some extent, although those locations would be highly contested. The Indian Ocean is another area that would even be more difficult for China to do any commerce protection and the like.
Just looking at this dispassionate way, the current platforms and force structure of China would not allow much possibility of countering those types of moves.
The reason chokes are valuable is because interdicting mercantile activity in open ocean to any meaningful degree, as defined by crippling economic pressure, is actually both extremely difficult and extremely inefficient, to the point of practical infeasibility. And this is putting aside the geopolitics of whether China's major trade partners (which is basically all of SEA) would be okay with picking up all that splash damage and being equally affected collateral parties.
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Commerce protection is the wrong way to think about it. Trying to protect slow, fat, vulnerable civilian shipping is a losing game in the modern information-rich battlespace. Instead of conceding the initiative, a better approach would be to exploit asymmetric vulnerabilities. The first and second island chains are islands. Unlike China, they can only be resupplied to any significant degree by sea. In order to contest anything in Asia, the US must protect its own supply lines. Degrading port infrastructure and distribution networks on those islands has a direct impact on their ability to project power. And in the case of island nations, like Japan or the Philippines, civilian consumption will also be vital. If you can only protect a limited number of convoys, do you send munitions or food? The more assets devoted to protect such convoys, the fewer the US has available to run interdiction.
In a conflict which cuts off trade, China will suffer. Its enemies will starve.
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That would for the most part depend on how committed are US, Japan, and Australia are to winning a prolonged conflict.
Having live fire in the strait the Malacca would definitely damage relations with the like of Indonesia, Malaysia, and maybe even Thailand, but that's probably not enough to force them to participate in the conflict. The same can be said of most countries in the northern India ocean basins. The other closer choke points are along the first and second island chain, that are either bordered by close US allies like the Phillipines or Japan, or basically inconsequential countries like Palau or Micronesia. If US was really committed to preventing China from dominating the western pacific, then a decade or even two of damaged relationships would not be a deciding variable in the equation.
US generally has enough bases in the region, and can beef up certain critical bases in the area from itself, or very close allies. If you look at places like Diego Garcia, Coonawarra/Darwin, Guam, Wake, etc, are all relatively protected areas that can currently serve, or be relatively quickly built up to be major logistic hubs. They are still vulnerable to intemediate range ballistic missiles, but it would be difficult for China to reach out to regularly threaten those locations with forces other than PLARF.
I don't think the USN and USMC are dumb enough to put a lot of assets around Naha and bases on Luzon, basically exposing them to constant rain of strikes, but controlling access points to the wider world ocean, from relatively rear areas that can be somewhat protected by their own small A2AD network, that they would be able to do.
In today’s day and age the US simply would not have enough ships to do a meaningful blockade by open ocean, especially once you factor in attrition. There’s much more traffic and much fewer warships. Also keep in mind the choke works both ways. The blockading power will also be vulnerable to counter-offense because holding the chokepoint also requires force concentration.
If the US pushed SEA hard enough economically, these countries are probably going to give China positional access to fight against the US’s blockade just as a matter of economic survival. The level of strangulation needed to impact China is also strangulation for their own economies. This is just a nonsense proposition.
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How does the US plan on replacing China's exports to 140+ of the world's nations? Shortages of components in one industry will have cascading effects to adjacent ones. Without access to China's supply chain we're gonna see large scale industrial and economic collapse across the globe. Hundreds of millions of lives would be at risk.
A blockade on China is a blockade on the rest of the world as well. That idea died a long time ago.
Yeah, that may have to be the counter of China to such a US strategy.
But that basically comes down to whose population can take the most pain. Which is not a good long term strategy for either the US or China.
While it is very difficult to find historical parallels, and there is only limited analogy you can make among different historical periods, in such a scenario, you are basically making the rising of a third power to become eventually dominant, much more likely. During WWI it was clear that the mutual distruction of GB and Imperial Germany played a role in paving the way for another player like the US to reach hegemony status. This type of dynamic may play out again, if your imagined scenario comes to pass.