With what is the US going to attack Chinese production facilities? Aircraft? All nearby US airbases would be under 2nd artillery fire. Any remaining operational US aircraft would have to contend with Chinese SAM systems and the PLAAF. Long range missiles? China has more missiles than the US. If you think Chinese missiles aren't enough to permanently take out a few US airbases, then what makes you think US missiles can permanently take out hundreds of Chinese factories? Not to mention most of the production would be done inland, out of US strike range.
Control SLOC? China is completely self-sufficient in resources and energy, and it can continue to import resources via land routes. This is war we're talking about, not business as usual.
Furthermore, are there any US weapon systems that can strike China without satellite coverage? Because they're not going to have any satellites over China you know. Or any type of C&C for that matter, as recent Pentagon wargames have shown.
I'm going to break down my reply in parts.
1. I never said that the US would be able to "permanently take out" hundreds of Chinese factories. What I said was that the US would have the capability to strike at Chinese production facilities while China would not have the capability to do the same to the US.
2. In any sort of serious westpac conflict, the US will frontload its airbases in the region with aircraft yes (at both major air bases and dispersed air bases), and also have multiple CSGs in the region. Additionally, the US would deploy a large fraction of its SSN fleet (most if not all of which can launch LACMs) to the region, as well as additional surface combatants as part of surface action groups (SAGs) -- and those SSNs and SAGs of course can carry Tomahawk LACMs capable of quite long ranged strike. Furthermore, the US will be capable of launching long range bomber raids carrying long range ALCMs from Hawaii and CONTUS. And in the future, basing of IRBM/hypersonic weapons in the region during wartime is virtually a given as well.
Taking all of those capabilities together at a system of systems level, versus what the PLA can field in the near future at a system of systems level, I do not see the PLA having the capability to robustly and quickly smash US westpac capabilities and mobile units (CSGs and naval forces) in the region in a manner that will permanently cripple US capability to project air and naval power in the region, which would be the prerequisite for China to be capable of robustly protecting its key military industrial complex facilities from US attack.
3. The production pipeline for modern weapons systems is much more fragile than we often believe. Think about various key subsystems that modern fighters, warships, and missiles cannot function without. The most obvious are key avionics systems like radars, and the other are powerplants. Think about how many factories there are which are able to produce those key subsystems. If I were a competent adversary, I would focus my strikes on the small number of key production sites that produce those key subsystems, and sure maybe I'll launch some strikes against final assembly/production factories as well. Those together would greatly hinder and delay China's ability to replace losses of many military systems. Sure, over time we can argue that China will be able to build replacement factories, distribute their operations, and so on -- but over that same period of time the US will be able to greatly expand its production facilities in CONTUS and in Europe -- all on top of continuing to run its unmolested existing production facilities. Meaning that in a prolonged conflict, the US will almost certainly end up being able to outproduce China the longer that time goes on.
4. China has no capability in the foreseeable future to realistically to strike US production facilities that the US uses for the production of its military assets. Fairly simple.
5. SLOCs -- sure one can argue that in a "wartime economy" China might be self-sufficient in energy and materials. But you are talking about a war of attrition. In such a conflict, the side with secure SLOCs and superior resource lines will hold a significant advantage.
All of which, brings me back to the point I wrote in my previous post -- as the current balance of military power stands, a war of attrition would be unfavourable to China and the PLA.
That is simply because of two things:
1. The pre-positioning of US forces in westpac (air bases, facilities) and mobile US forces (CSGs, naval forces) are in close proximity to the Chinese mainland where they are capable of striking production facilities of China, while the PLA has no way of realistically doing so to the US. That combined with the US having greater freedom to rely on global SLOCs for maintaining its resources and denying those SLOCs to China, means that the longer a war goes on, the worse it is for the PLA.
2. The degree of military power the PLA holds is not sufficient to defeat and annihilate said US forces (both pre-positioned and mobile) described above, in a sufficiently comprehensive and rapid manner to allow the PLA to cripple US capability to project power in the western pacific and allow the PLA to take the strategic initiative in the pacific in general, and also to allow the PLA to secure its SLOCs in the key important area/s of the western pacific and Indian Ocean.
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Directed to everyone in general:
Now, let me describe a degree of PLA military power whereby a "war of attrition" might actually be a positive for them:
Such a PLA force (let's call it PLA XYZ) would be capable of doing two things:
1. Defeating a massive combined US force (including both their based forces and their mobile naval/air forces, which would make up over half of total US global forces) in the western pacific in relatively quick order (such that the US has no chance to wear down PLA defenses of the mainland let alone robustly strike at Chinese production facilities), AND
2. After the action described in 1., the remaining surviving PLA forces (air and naval) that they have, are able to significantly quantitatively and qualitatively outnumber the remaining surviving US forces in the world, enabling the PLA to take strategic advantage
in the pacific in general (i.e.: not just the western pacific, rather including the central and eastern pacific) as well as in the Indian Ocean.
By achieving that, the PLA will be able to:
A. Secure the production facilities of their own home turf and to be capable of expanding production robustly
B. Secure SLOCs for efficient, expansive transport of resources in a way that provides both redundancy and capacity
C. Have a globally sufficient and quantitative balance of forces capable of placing the US on the geostrategic defensive, by placing Hawaii and Alaska at serious risk and also to have the capability to conduct a degree of strikes against the US western seaboard and force the US to reposition and suboptimize their own production facilities on CONTUS.
Needless to say, PLA XYZ would need to be very large and very powerful to be able to achieve such a mission -- at minimum it would require PLA XYZ's total high end military capability to be quantitatively larger than that of the US's
total global force and to be at minimum qualitatively equal if not qualitatively superior.
Such an operation would require the PLA XYZ to be able to robustly defeat a frontloaded US force (composing of over half, or at least a major fraction of US total global forces in existence) in the western pacific while suffering minimal losses on its own, to result in the PLA having a quantitative correlation of forces on the scale of something like at least 3:1 against the US's total globally available forces that still survive.
.... Or, putting it another way, I believe for a "war of attrition" to be plausibly desirable for China, will require the PLA to at least be 50% larger than the US military in key mobile air-naval forces, and to have massive regional/westpac advantages to be capable of robustly defeating a forward deployed US force (composing of 50-60% of total US global forces) in the western pacific while suffering minimal PLA losses of its own, to seek a correlation of naval and air forces that is at least 3:1 in the PLA's favour by the time that the dust settles in the western pacific phase of the conflict.
