You don't even need to use such an exaggerated example as "infinite". The US will run out of ships, subs, and missiles due to attrition quickly enough that they will resort to tactical nukes to salvage their own situation. Clowns are asking if China can offer reassurance that they will not resort to nukes to avoid losing in a conventional match. That is projection as usual for Westerners. The real question is whether the US will offer reassurance they will not resort to nukes to avoid losing in a conventional match. The answer is that they won't, they can't, and even if they say they won't, you should never trust them because they lie like they breathe.
PLA Strategy in a Taiwan Contingency
- Thread starter pugachev_diver
- Start date
It is important that I use the term infinite to highlight how much the blockade argument being presented seems to involve unexamined assumptions of infinitives that I am asking to be examined. There is no point proceeding in any scenario work discussions if those infinitives are not examined first. Hence the emphasis.
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I know. I guess my position is that when I see people who are extremely confident in total ignorance of how wrong they are, I just add them to my block list. Some of you guys put in the effort to disprove what is wrong and back it up with facts. I can't be bothered because the number of people who think they know something but know nothing is billions. Easier to just filter out all the noise and only read what is most likely to be signal.
I think this is one of those cases where someone is presenting a good teaching moment. I want to see if they’re willing to do the legwork to actually justify their arguments beyond fuzzy hand wavy abstractions. No one learns and sharpens their understanding without first looking at their own assumptions, and I think today we have some cases of people not realizing that there are assumptions they’re making that they should probably try to scrutinize more closely.
FriedRiceNSpice
Captain
No, GDP would be lower. Why the hell else would countries rely on export driven growth?
You guys all need to cool it with the nuclear talk btw. The US isn’t even willing to entertain a no fly zone against Russia out of fear of nuclear escalation. However big you guys think the US’s hate boner for China or hegemonic prestige boner for itself is, it’s pretty clear the US does seem to care a lot about baseline survival that’s rationally meaningful. And there really isn’t much to discuss if this situation goes nuclear anyways.
If we were dealing with Cold War-era rational players such as Lyndon Johnson or Robert McNamara that would make sense, but as the US is now reaching Nazi levels of political ideological extremism they may very much do so out of irrational desperation, which is why being prepared for such possibilities is still the prudent course of action.
No lol. You guys are seeing chickenshit and misreading it as cowboy bravado. These people are talking loudly because they’re scared, not because they’re suicidally hateful.
If US uses the bulk of its forces (which will be needed) to be in the Indian ocean to cut civilian goods trades coming out of China, China shouldn't try to play convoy protection, because as you also noticed, it's force structure is not optimized for it.
Instead, China would exploit the lack of US power in East and southeast Asia, to directly strongarm neighbors into supporting Chinese war effort.
Let Americans stay west of Malacca and sink as many commercial ships they want, China will threaten SK, Japan, Thailand, anyone else in range, saying, obey our total sanctions on US and start supporting our war effort, or get invaded. US will then be starved of necessary imports to replenish both civilians and military, while China still has its in house industry fully functioning.
Then from there, it's just a matter of building more missiles, more ISR assets, and keep pot shotting at American vessels hiding in the high seas, like the u boat hunt in ww2, while the PLA island hops against US forces across the Pacific.
All the resources from its neighbors will give China more than enough boost to keep going. There's also some chance that US will piss off the global community so much by disrupting global trade that China won't even need to go fully Imperial Japan on Asia to make them all bend the knee. Not that China would hesitate about doing so, if it was a war about protecting China itself.
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