Like I said before, it all depends on if US and its closest allies (Japan, Australia, GB) are willing to go to a total war footing.
PLA Strategy in a Taiwan Contingency
- Thread starter pugachev_diver
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Like I said before, it all depends on if US and its closest allies (Japan, Australia, GB) are willing to go to a total war footing.
Eh China will probably be fine irregardless of what ends up happening. It’s got strategic alternatives for fossil fuels via Russia and Iran and is already on an accelerating ramp to transition away from hydrocarbon anyways. In the absolute worse case scenario they can also gasify coal. China’s also mostly self sufficient on food staples, and can lean on SEA, Central Asia, and Russia if it needs more food imports. Similarly, Russia and Central Asia can compensate for mineral commodities. None of this is ideal or costless, but the point is there’s really no realistic way to cripple China economically right now.
Define your interpretation of total war footing. The level of devastation caused by such a comprehensive collapse would rapidly spiral out of control into nuclear war territory.
I think you are missing the point. It's not that the resource will not be available, but that the cost of acquiring and transporting them would be on a different scale. Especially if you lose access to many primary resources from places like Australia, Brazil, Chile, and the like. And then the export costs will also be far higher, once you lose reliable access to the Indonesian straits.
The best counter to that would actually to develop robust capabilities to consistently and persistently target rear area logistic basis of US and close allies, which means you would need to be able to have the likes of H-20, JH-26, robust CSG with large number of ASW assets and emission guided land strike weapons, or a large number of SSGNs with land strike capability, to threaten US forces in those areas, so that USAF and expeditionary USMC forces could no longer reliably protect those rear operating areas. You would be able to have the persistence and magazine depth, to hit locations like Guam, Wake, northern Australia; and if the war extends into years, then also western parts of the Aleutians and Hawaii, maybe even Diego Garcia and other British Indian Ocean territories. . They you can push the sea and air assets from US/Japan/Australia to be unable to persistently operate where they can constantly threaten your sea routes.
That's a very good reason neither China or the US is truly prepared to go hot, even though the rhetoric currently says otherwise.
Nuclear exchange can never be ruled out, once both sides are on total war footing. But I am sure there are some less risk averse military planners on both sides still think that they could avoid such with a carefully architected escalation ladder.
I’m not missing any point. Like I said to MarKoz81 in a war economy you will invent the finance to buy what you need. So long as you can get the production you are fine. Right now China exports to the US and Europe to get USD to buy commodities from Australia Brazil etc. In a blockade scenario China would just be trading its exports for those same commodities from Russia and Central Asia with its own currency instead of USD. Worry about flow and production of materials, not money. Is there some costs to these adjustments? Yeah of course. Wars are costly news at 11. That doesn’t mean those costs must have any real prohibitive force.
Before you try to get too clever about “strategy” you may want to do the math (especially wrt force capacity and attrition needed to make a blockade even happen) to assess whether the blockade scenario is even feasible or realistic.
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Attrition calculation here is not symmetric. The US in those cases, where forces other than PLARF do not have a persistent capability to hit those operating areas, would not be able to afford the force or commerce protection necessary for those far away sea lanes, regardless of how many surface or tactical air platforms they would have. PLARF by itself also would not have a the magazine depth really to be the primary leg in such a fight.
The primary attrition would be the commercial vessels, and as soon as losses start to mount, most commercial entities may decide to no longer even use any of those sea lanes. Attrition and attritable platforms would only be the limiting factor, in areas where the conflict is symmetric.
No lol the primary attrition will be US assets, especially wrt to their magazine depths. The US is on the offensive and is strategically thin in the contested geography. They can sustain fewer losses, have less geographic persistence, and also happen to have much worse regeneration capacity. Do the math for how much force the US would actually need to exert to both maintain the choke *and* defend it from counter-offense first.
China has a blue water navy and carriers for a reason. The chokepoints are also all along the 1st island chain, where China also built basing capacity, for a reason. If instead you are arguing for a blockade by open ocean good luck supporting those ops with sufficient intensity to actually generate economic effects that won’t just be shrugged off when the search area is that vast and you only have so much sortie capacity for ships and planes to comb them. All the factors that make fighting China within the 1IC difficult for the US *also apply for the blockade scenario*.
If you actually read my original post, the primary scenario I was describing was along the Indonesian straits (Malacca, Sunda, Lombok, etc), and lanes further out, either in northern Indian ocean, or central/western pacific such as near Wake, Micronesia, Palau, etc. For those choke points close to the continent, such as Batanes, Tsushima, Miyako, etc, I already said they will be contested, and explicitly NOT what I was referring to as the primary vulnerability.
Do the math on how much force capacity the US would need to deploy to do what you’re suggesting first. The US doesn’t have infinite ships and infinite planes and infinite bases with infinite magazine depths.
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