I saw some really interesting thoughts by patchwork on Reddit. Up to this point, my assumption has been that china will attack and wait for us military to cross some kind of red line before attacking us positions. And even if they do attack us military position, they will try to use threats to keep Japan out of the conflict. The idea here is that keeping both countries out of a war is the best way for a conflict to end early and quickly.
Patchwork discussed something that I haven't thought about, which is a lightning surprise attack on American, Japanese and taiwanese bases across the region. This would involve basically priming the military to be at most available at the desired attack time while American and Japanese military are still in peace time posture. This would not involve a major build up of forces for an amphibious landing, but would involve moving some aircraft closer to action area or doing early maintenance on ships so they can be available. These stealth surge or build up may take a week to 10 days and would be hard to get noticed by western intelligence.
First of all, I think they are still a long way from ready to do this, since they have to normalize certain naval or aircraft movements in order to make them look like routine exercise movements. Secondly, I think they still need do a lot more long range deployment to west Pacific and to Japanese adiz to train air force and navy. Finally, I think we are still a couple of years away from the recent round of naval construction and more adequate number of j20s to join service.
In this surprise attack scenario, china would launch pre-emptive attack against all Taiwan, us and Japan assets at the same time. The initial wave will probably be df26 against Guam, df16/17 against ryushu, the 7th fleet and jmsdf. They may be able to get some easy kills if the Japanese and American ships are stationary and not on high alert. I would also expect them to be targeting Taiwan and try to sink all of its navy and military targets with pcl191, df16, air launched stand off missiles, yj83s and yj62s. After the initial hypersonic and ballistic missiles damage many targets and weaken air defense, you will see h6s, j16s, jh7a conducting land attack and anti ship missions. You will also see 055s and 052ds launch their asbm and lacms against standing targets. The goal is to deliver a decisive blow on day 1 to sink most if not all the capital ships in the region as well as disabling all the naval ports and air bases in the first and second island chain. With no runway to take off from, plaaf would have free reign to launch bombs and stand off missiles to keep runways out of commission. Drones will be a huge part of targeting any first island chain bases where repair works are done. I would assume they also want to target strategic reserve so that they can cripple Japanese and taiwanese economy and force the former out of war and deflate the morale of the latter.
At this point, they can talk to countries like Philippines to convince them to use their air bases for the duration of the war and for countries like Palau and Papua new guinea to stay neutral.
If they can and won't suffer nuclear retaliation, they can also try to take over Guam, so that us military will not have any operating base within 4000 km of Chinese mainland.
Obviously, this would be extremely egregious and outrage all of the western world. It would also require that they have enough nukes to not risk immediate nuclear attack. The advantage of such a move is that they have a better chance of destroying all possible bases within second island chain. In most likelihood, they would be facing at most 3 usn csg with very long supply line where replenishment ships could be targeted with hypersonic missiles. The closest USAF would be able to take off from would be Alaska or Australia.
This would seem like a strategy for them to take only if they can deal a fatal first blow. I would have to take sometime to look at how many major Japanese assets they would attack. Patchwork seems to think this is a very possible scenario.
