When I was talking about a densely packed urban area, it wasn't just in reference to highways. OTOH highways are numerous in Taiwan to begin with, especially on the west side where the invasion force would presumably land, which doesn't make things much easier when it comes to how much surface area you have to cover. Even if you can rule it out because it's empty, you still have to look at it in the first place.
To a satellite, it's all how much distance it has to cover vs how much clutter there is to weed out. Taiwan is a small place, next you argued that it's very dense and cluttered, but if you say the highways won't be cluttered, then that makes it a small place with little clutter, hence very easy for satellites and drones to pick up jets on a scan.
Just by way of an example, according to Google AI there are 928,000 buildings in Taipei. Presumably there are even more in larger neighboring Taoyuan which is a more likely place for the PLAN to land given its port facilities. If the PLARF even really just has to destroy just a HUNDREDTH of that number that's still 9,280 buildings. No way the PLARF has that many DF-series SRBMs. I'm sure even the combined might of both the PLARF and the PLAAF couldn't take out that many buildings before running out of ammo. This is why you would absolutely HAVE to follow up PLARF/PLAAF attacks with actual boots on the ground.
I don't understand this. Why would they be trying to level all the buildings? If they wanted to do that, they'd just nuke the place. The whole point has been to take the island with little collateral damage so that it is not a phyrric victory. So they would be targetting military assets, first in a first strike, then continuously to prevent resurgence.
The PLARF will not be able to use ground artillery, as they do not control any. Unless by that you mean the newer ultra long range rocket artillery systems like the PCH-191 (and maybe the PHL-16), but such systems are only a small minority of PLAA's (not PLARF's) artillery forces and would not be able to "carpet bomb" Taiwanese cities in any significant quantities; these would be used in more precise attacks against specific high value targets.
All PLA artillery and missiles regardless of which branch they are controlled by, will be in play.
Escorts have missiles that have hundreds of km of range; they would normally be (roughly evenly) spread out around the carrier a few dozen km out from the carrier (as opposed to what you see in photo ops), or at least spread out around the expected threat axis, so there wouldn't be much maneuvering needed to attack an inbound HGV. What efforts could be made would be to make the shot in line/inbound as much as possible rather than crossing (crossing shots are harder with lower Pk) as much as feasible, but if the escorts are covering the carrier correctly, this is not a huge problem.
Yes, this I know. They need to intercept missiles that are incoming towards the carrier even if they are hundreds of km away. That means they have to chase it. There will be a tons of maneuvering needed as they are very far away and trying to target a ballistic path headed for a significantly different direction from where they are because they are going for the carrier, not the interceptors. And dozens of them can be inbound at once.
What's good for the goose is good for the gander. It's not easy making course corrections for a heavy object traveling at hypersonic speeds, especially last second corrections.
Yes, the difference between mach 9 and 35mph means that there's really not much of a correction needed at all from the mach 9 object even if the 35mph object was going nuts.
And the carrier would be doing anything except moving predictably in a straight line.
I said straight line speed of 35mph, meaning that if it was heavily maneuvering, it'd be much slower than that even.
BTW, there are plenty of YouTube videos of carriers making flank turns at high speeds; you'd be surprised at how nimble those large ships actually are, thanks to their nuclear reactors. The flight deck would of course turn into utter chaos, but if it's between losing some fighters/crew overboard and taking a hit, I'm sure the captain would choose the former over the latter. BTW, it's kind of an open secret that USN carriers have a top speed that is actually much closer to 40 knots than to 30 knots.
Yeah, I'm not gonna bet on a 45mph object outmaneuvering a mach 9 object anymore than I'd bet on a 35mph object doing it. And this all means that regardless of whether it gets hit, every round of missile dodging puts the carrier in a hell state, losing crew/fighters, and likely even causing jets and maintenance vehicles to slam into each other inside the hangers. Even if it doesn't get sunk, is it going to be in any fighting shape after doing that multiple times?
That kind of hyperbole out of him makes it even more likely he either doesn't know what he's talking about, or is hyping up the China Threat even harder.
America has a known idiot and blabbermouth with the highest clearance making statements in public he shouldn't be. The correct analysis is that he's likely giving away secrets or at least sensitive information. It's dishonest to say that he's an idiot so let's pretend all his words are gibberish.
BTW "more" carriers isn't a USN solution to defeating Chinese ballistic missiles. They would be bringing that many carriers for other reasons anyway, like overwhelming strike power.
Yeah, I know. And they'd be facing China's overwhelming missile force, which is a few zeros more than the number of carriers they can bring.
You're referring to a 'mission kill'. I've not heard anything even remotely authoritative about HGV payloads, and have no reason to believe that the PLARF would automatically rule out using AOE munitions to enhance hit probability. Maybe you can link some articles. BTW, fragmentation and cluster munitions don't have great penetrative capability. What they would do is mainly surface damage to a flight deck by (potentially) setting planes on fire, detonating fuel and munitions, kill people, damage catapults, and damage the island. Whether such munitions are likely to result in a mission kill would depend on the extent of damage to mainly the catapults and the island, and possibly what types and how many fuel tanks and munitions were set off; those explosions could potentially penetrate the armored deck (depending on location) and cause big problems. Planes and people can be replaced, but these things can't. Is one cluster munition-based HGV enough to mission kill a carrier? Maybe. I don't think anyone knows.
So firstly, DF-21D is believed by the West to one-hit kill carriers. That right there is going to cause huge problems for the USN.
The rest of your assumption is basically based on the idea that the PLARF could nerf a missile designed to kill carriers into one that would serve a severely reduced payload and no longer have the one-shot capability. And even then, you did not assume them to actually have the significant increase in hit probability because the, "I don't think anyone knows" would remain that anyway. To me, this is a darned-if-they-do-and-darned-if-they-don't situation for the USN. If the PLARF was to foresake one-hit-kill capability for increases in hit rate, I'd assume it's because they believe they would increase the hit so significantly that they can pepper a carrier at will with it and turn into swiss cheese with great reliability. After all, it's their study and their call on whether or not to make that exchange.
Most of Trump's picks for cabinet positions are fairly shocking TBH. Like known anti-vaxxer RFK Jr. for Secretary of HHS.
Yeah, but stupid means too stupid to keep something secret. It doesn't mean so stupid we have to pretend that all his words are gibberish.
"It's going to be" is the key operative phrase here.
OK, I used it loosely. Logically, China did build them and will continue to build them with a large margin of error for a Taiwan conflict that involves the US.
I have no doubt that if any country can mass produce and maintain large numbers of large ballistic missiles, it's going to be China. But whether it can produce enough in time for invasion and has the money to produce to levels that the PLARF wants, we don't know.
Produce them in time for the invasion? We call when that time is. If the PLARF says they're not ready, there is no invasion. If the PLARF says we need this many missiles, that will be the highest priority to get them produced... or what are we even doing here? What's the point of building all this to invade and then not arming up with enough missiles? This is another instance of "we don't know" being technically true but operationally not reflective of what's absolutely favored to be true.
@latenlazy @Iron Man could you 2 stop insulting each other? There was already moderation to stop this between you 2 and I don't wanna get mixed up as part of that and get banned too for continuing.