manqiangrexue
Brigadier
The deployment of critical assets within the country is going to be much faster than a few weeks. At no point would China want to bring all of its military equipment and personel to the conflict zone. Troops can be transported across the country like normal people; they don't all need to be packed into military vehicles. Trains can be stopped for civilian use and all be used to transport PLA. A huge amount can be done in one night, and with the heavy equipment that is already around Taiwan, the invasion can start quite soon, with more and more forces pouring in.
The most critical phase of the conflict is the opening where missile salvos should take out the majority of the ROC defenses. Assets like aircraft to close off and control the airspace and environnment below move very quickly to the conflict zone. The fiercest part of the fight does not see boots on the ground; the missiles and planes that do this are never too far from ready. The majority of the transport that needs to happen is the landing fleet, which will move in the time that the airforce and rocket force are doing thier jobs. This is much faster than the US sailing from around the world. And while I assume it will take more than a few days, it's because the nature of a land invasion but that is to simply cement the control that your heavy machinery has already won. I don't expect that intense fighting from the onset to last long at all; the ROC doesn't even have enough targets for the PLA to kill.
The low altitude makes the missile more difficult to track and engage reduces the time between detection and impact. I did a little googling so I revised what I wrote, but it seems to be after you responded. From what I believe, the vehicle exiting mid-course phase and entering terminal phase still needs to speed up to mach 25 and I question if THAAD/SM6 are designed to catch it before it reaches that speed or to actually catch it at that speed. The revision is below:
"Were they made into intercept ICBMs when they actually reach mach 25, or prior to that when they are speeding up? As far as I know, once an ICBM reaches that speed, there is no catching it. And I do believe that interception of a ballistic object at mach 9 is much harder than intercepting one on a predicatble trajectory at mach 25 because interception depends on prediction rather than actively chasing down its speed. If you can compute fast enough where something will be, even if it's at mach 25, you can meet it there. If you can't, you are left with nothing but trying to chase down an object moving at mach 9."
I've heard that kill chain is also built with many redundancies and HGVs like DF-ZF are far less reliant and more autonomous than previous generation ones.
The fact that it is flying in a ballistic patten, even one that is predetemined, means that the primary means of interception, which is predicting its location to meet it, is unusable.
And this, once again, goes back to the numbers game. How many of these missiles do they think they can fend off before one connects and they lose a carrier, with all the jets and people on board? Those are the stakes that the USN will be betting with. Are they confident enough to make that bet?
OK so it's a combo of quad-packed and non-quad-packed. I figured that but it obfuscates a direct VLS comparison.
Well, that comparison still would need to be done with the forces in the area (China's navy is much more in Asia than the US) and the fact that the conflict zone is within range of the PLARF.
What is your thesis on this? What do you believe will happen if China decides to reunite the ROC by force now or close to now? Are you simply saying that it won't be so straight-forward and cost-free for China to win, or that today, it cannot win? I don't think this fundamental question is clear.
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