PLA Strategy in a Taiwan Contingency
- Thread starter pugachev_diver
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Exactly. The U.S. has never lacked ambitious plans or the funding to back them. The harder part is turning those plans into durable strategic advantage. History offers plenty of examples, from Afghanistan, Korea, Vietnam, where massive resources and detailed planning met the harsh limits of geography and determined adversary. It's even harder for US in the first-island chain where China's rapidly growing military and regional geography proximity naturally favors the defender.
It’s worse than that tbh. America’s plans these days are all aspirational and their realization gets rolled back on the calendar every year. It’s only been getting worse the last five years.
That isn't it. These adversaries were weak but determined and faced a strong US. China is strong and determined and faces a weak US. The joke going around now is that America is a nation of lawyers and China a nation of engineers - it's not that at all. America is a nation of grifters.
That China can curbstomp the US in the FIC is a given at this point, and it's the least of the US's problems. China just unveiled HCMs shot out of torpedo tubes, American MIC ppt fantasies like KEI made real, and the H-20 is being redesigned into an extremely stealthy HCM truck that can smack any target in the US homeland with complete impunity.
The 2027 meme is founded on the expectation that America can compete because it now takes the China threat seriously and retooled from GWoT occupations to "near peer" competition, and China needs to sneak a sucker punch in while it has a chance. That isn't how it works.
The outcome of a fight between me and a 1980s Mike Tyson is not a function of how seriously I take the fight.
I looked at the USAF budget proposal and it calls for just 500 AMRAAMs! This is unquestionably the most important missile in the American inventory, and either the entire USAF leadership doesn't get it, or they're far from preparing for a war.
It gets worse! China isn't even the defender here - they're the attacker and they get to choose when, how, or if a conflict will happen in the first place. But at the same time, the geography is so favorable that China also gets to enjoy all the advantages of the defender!
The bigger point though is that the US miliary is rotten through and through. The reason why so little can be done despite their sky-high budgets is because the mechanisms of the MIC exist to shove money from public funds into the pockets of the private contractors. Whether this process serves to build a military that the US needs is not that important to the process.
But this is a fixable problem. Supposedly. The processes that the Pentagon has been using have to be reevaluated and reworked so that they can function as they're supposed to. But when's the last time you heard any American leader have the guts to say anything about that. I suspect that the US won't be able to fix anything significant in regards to its military until they lose a major war. The last time this happened was the Vietnam War, and they didn't fully learn their lessons until the Operation Eagle Claw fiasco.
, it looks like a continuation of the embarrassing failure for the DPP on 7/26. The votes are still being tallied but the No Recall to Recall votes are at a 2:1 ratio, so overwhelmingly against recall.
What's more interesting in this round of voting is the vote to restart the third nuclear plant at is also being done on the same day. This is probably the most relevant to a Taiwan contingency, since most of Taiwan's energy resources are from imported non-renewable sources like gas and coal. If the plant isn't restarted, it would make Taiwan more vulnerable to a PLA naval blockade. The threshold to succeed on that vote is a little over 5 million votes, so it's unlikely to pass the threshold even if a majority vote to restart it.
Some are suspecting a Strait Thunder 2025B soon.
Wow another 剃头 for DPP, would be interesting to see the fallout afterwards and who gets thrown under the bus.
Reactivating reactors would have affect on armed reunification but I always felt when necessary it wouldn't be that hard to knock out the transformer yard or transmission lines outside the plants. I'm not really sure why Russia is so resistant on doing this with Ukraine.
While 3.33% of GDP might not seem outrageous on the surface, it actually accounts about a one-third of Taiwan's tax revenue, very close to Russia's 30-40%
Taiwan's tax revenue as a percentage of GDP is very low, at only 13.2% in 2024. It is because their GDP calculation includes GDP generated by Taiwanese businesses in mainland China, effectively inflating it and the Taiwanese government cannot tax.
Some Americans' desire for military spending to account for 10% of GDP means that alomost all tax revenue would be allocated to military spending, which is completely foolish.
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TSMC is also probably part of that equation, it is a big contributor to GDP but most of it its exported. I read somewhere that TSMC contribute 18℅ of Taiwan GDP. Its like Samsung for South Korea