plawolf
Lieutenant General
If that’s the mindset you might as well just submit already without even trying to fight. You cannot win a fight if you are unwilling or unable to hit the enemy where it hurts.
Trying to ‘win’ by only hitting enemy local bases and forces is like trying to make the enemy loose interest because it’s hurting their fists too much punching you. A viable strategy for insignificant (on the grand scheme of things) proxy players like Vietnam and Afghanistan, but not for peer powers like China, since it will be worth America’s while to destroy you even if it costs them an arm and a leg.
Hitting the US homelands early is important both strategically and psychologically. Strategically it degrades critical US war production capacity that can be slow and hard for the Americans to regenerate. But more importantly, it will cause them to divert massive resources to homeland defence instead of focusing purely on offence. The key is to strike the right balance in terms of resource allocation. It would be foolish to be like the German navy that made harassment attack their primary focus, but the attacks also need enough teeth to make the Americans need to seriously reconsider their homeland defences. This is why I am not in favour of using subs, since those assets are too valuable to risk for such high risk missions and also lack the scale and sustainability without an excessive amount of investment by the PLAN, which risk repeating the German mistake.
But strategically, even if China can destroy all US expeditionary forces and capabilities for minimal damage, without the ability to take the fight to the enemy, all that will achieve is a WWI Armistice like temporary victory. Given the Anglo nature, there could be no question of them rebuilding their forces to come back to try again later. Sure, there is a tiny chance America might descent into internal bickering and civil war after such a calamitous defeat. But that was only ever a tiny fringe scenario that diminishes to insignificance with the Republicans and a demagogue like Trump in power, who’s bread and butter is uniting the people behind the threat of an external foe. Besides, even if that was a highly probable eventuality, it’s still not something any responsible Chinese leader would leave the fate of his country and people to. China isn’t going gamble its future on chance.
China is still massively hiding its capabilities, but this time, it’s not with hiding its own weaknesses as the aim, but rather to hide its strength. Partly to slow boil the frog to avoid tipping off the Americans how little time they have left, but mostly I think, to wait for technological advancement to allow them to have a reasonable chance of breaking the nuclear MAD deadlock dilemma. That, I think, is the primary limiting factor for China.
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