PLA strike strategies in westpac HIC

tphuang said:

Sure, I'm just saying if they do take Penghu, they can use cheaper, short ranged ammunitions to hit various targets. The narrowest part of the strait is still over 150 km IIRC, so I think you'd still need rockets.

If you take out the strategic oil reserve, military fuel depot and establish a blockade, that would be sufficient imo. No need to target all the gas stations. That would just incur greater civilian casualities and the cost of repairs after the war is over. Of course, if they actually have to do a landing, it would incur much greater civilian casualty and damage. But if a conflict does happen, you'd hope that Taiwanese gov't gives in and have a negotiated settlement after a couple of weeks. Of course, PLA still needs to prepare themselves for an invasion, but ideally you don't get there.

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I would agree on not targeting the petrol stations as they would be emptied out anyway within hours. And there are more important targets for Day 1.

Also, there's no practical difference between a military fuel depot and a commercial fuel depot, as it is the same fuel.
See the figures below.

AndrewS said:

Most fuel depot attacks will have to wait for unpowered munitions to be used instead of more expensive BM/CM/Rockets

For Taiwan, I've got the following figures:

a) 3 oil refineries
b) approx 20 fuel distribution terminals
c) a guestimate of 5000 individual Fuel Distribution Tanks in various fuel depots/terminals
d) 2494 petrol stations

e) approx 20,000 mobile telephone masts
f) approx 1500 telephone (Broadband) exchanges

It also appears that JH-7s were still being produced in 2015, so they still will be around in a 2027/2032 timeframe

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FairAndUnbiased said:

If you have ever done an electronics project before, I hope you remember the bullshit of finding compatible connectors. Or for mechanical projects the specific fastener types which are often not interchangeable. And much of this is ODM tribal knowledge.

To make matters worse sometimes you buy an assembly of parts and you don't know what goes into that either. For example a low noise DC power supply. Not final product but also not a single chip.

It took YMTC a year to do a similar supply chain audit for a single company producing a single product.

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That is an example which is being driven top down through the various tiers of the supply

But in a China blockade scenario, every company at every tier of the supply chain would be conducting their own audit at the same time

AndrewS said:

I would agree on not targeting the petrol stations as they would be emptied out anyway within hours. And there are more important targets for Day 1.

Also, there's no practical difference between a military fuel depot and a commercial fuel depot, as it is the same fuel.
See the figures below.

Click to expand...

I actually don't know if it is even needed to destroy fuel depots if UCAVs can operate with impunity. If you can cut out strategic reserve and blockade + maybe take out the refiners, that would just completely ground things to a stop. When ROC Army move, they will get attacked and very quickly run low on fuel also. Taiwan gets about 35% of electric from natural gas. So if you blockade, that's a 35% reduction in power. Attack the grid, military backup generators and some coal plants and things get bad pretty quickly. None of these need to be struck in the initial attack. There are so many military targets in Taiwan that you'd just spend the first couple of days just attacking all of them. After a couple of weeks of lack of fuel, power and communication while constantly being terrorized by drones/artillery, I would have no idea how well ROCA can counter a landing. I will leave that speculation to someone else.

Another thing to look at are the targets in Okinawa.
The main targets would be the Kadena air base, the Futenma air station, service area and ammunition storage as well as the JASDF base at Naha. I'm not sure exactly where the Patriot missiles and air defense are stationed. But I would think in this case, PLARF would start with DF-16/17 attack on these primary areas to degrade air defense and runway while a wave of J-16s, J-10s and JH-7A will come after that with ground attack missiles and PGMs. It's also probably close enough that Yuan class and Type 22s would be used here to attack whatever naval ships are in the area. Given the short distance to mainland, it would be very hard for Okinawa base to not be out of commission for a while. I don't think they will deploy H-6s (which serve as missile carriers basically) to be used against targets this close to mainland.

This is the other place that I think after the initial round of bombing, we'd see a lot of drone presence. Okinawa itself is 1500 km from Tokyo and 2000 km from Misawa. So the 2 main air bases for JASDF and USAF in Japan are actually quite far from here. In the scenario where JASDF/USAF can generate meaningful sortie from Honshu, it's actually not simple operation for fighter jets to come and clear the skies over Okinawa of drones. With advanced warning, the drones can just simply back to mainland.

Aside from this, it does look to me that PLAAF's tanker force just appears to be insufficient for sustained high tempo operation. as we look at potential targets further away. They'd need to rely a lot more on DF-16/17, ground and air launched cruise missiles. At least until H-20s becomes available.

AndrewS said:

That is an example which is being driven top down through the various tiers of the supply

But in a China blockade scenario, every company at every tier of the supply chain would be conducting their own audit at the same time

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No because they also need the monetary reserves and inventory to financially survive without income. Almost all major US companies follow Lean Six Sigma which categorizes raw material buildup, in process work pieces and inventory as wasted value.

This is the just in time manufacturing model. It holds for stable supply chains and maximizes value because it is true that inventory, in work pieces, etc is paid for but unsold, not generating value.

This doesn't hold when you need to keep equipment warm, ready to go, unable to produce, yet still need to pay people to conduct a supply chain audit. There's also lots of tribal knowledge here so you still need at least a few people at the lowest levels to come in. In the mean time you have input shortages completely blocking new production.

There are very few US businesses that can survive 9-10 months with 0 revenue while keeping up their spending. If they print money to fix this, it'll just cause hyperinflation as no goods are being produced to spend on.

Remember that YMTC is also getting supplier cooperation. Much of this work is almost impossible without suppliers cooperating with you and agreeing to give info out.

FairAndUnbiased said:

No because they also need the monetary reserves and inventory to financially survive without income. Almost all major US companies follow Lean Six Sigma which categorizes raw material buildup, in process work pieces and inventory as wasted value.

This is the just in time manufacturing model. It holds for stable supply chains and maximizes value because it is true that inventory, in work pieces, etc is paid for but unsold, not generating value.

This doesn't hold when you need to keep equipment warm, ready to go, unable to produce, yet still need to pay people to conduct a supply chain audit. There's also lots of tribal knowledge here so you still need at least a few people at the lowest levels to come in. In the mean time you have input shortages completely blocking new production.

There are very few US businesses that can survive 9-10 months with 0 revenue while keeping up their spending. If they print money to fix this, it'll just cause hyperinflation as no goods are being produced to spend on.

Remember that YMTC is also getting supplier cooperation. Much of this work is almost impossible without suppliers cooperating with you and agreeing to give info out.

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Given that we're looking at depression-era levels of economic decline (25-35% for both China and the US), we'll likely see both governments printing money to keep companies on life support until they have reconfigured their supply chains.

After all, we just saw this happen during the pandemic when companies and people were paid just to stay home.

tphuang said:

I actually don't know if it is even needed to destroy fuel depots if UCAVs can operate with impunity. If you can cut out strategic reserve and blockade + maybe take out the refiners, that would just completely ground things to a stop. When ROC Army move, they will get attacked and very quickly run low on fuel also. Taiwan gets about 35% of electric from natural gas. So if you blockade, that's a 35% reduction in power. Attack the grid, military backup generators and some coal plants and things get bad pretty quickly. None of these need to be struck in the initial attack. There are so many military targets in Taiwan that you'd just spend the first couple of days just attacking all of them. After a couple of weeks of lack of fuel, power and communication while constantly being terrorized by drones/artillery, I would have no idea how well ROCA can counter a landing. I will leave that speculation to someone else.

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Taiwan has the standard oil stocks equivalent to at least 90 days of net oil imports. Note Taiwan imports all of its oil.

Now, I don't know what the split is like for Taiwan between refined oil products like Petrol, Diesel, Kerosene versus unrefined petroleum.

But in the UK, one-third of these oil stocks have to be refined products. That would imply 30days of normal petrol and diesel usage are located somewhere between the Petrol Pump and the Refinery.

If you applied that to Taiwan, I reckon Taiwan could operate vehicles for an additional 2-3 weeks, which is a big deal.
So it would make sense to target fuel depots in Taiwan generally.

AndrewS said:

Given that we're looking at depression-era levels of economic decline (25-35% for both China and the US), we'll likely see both governments printing money to keep companies on life support until they have reconfigured their supply chains.

After all, we just saw this happen during the pandemic when companies and people were paid just to stay home.

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during the pandemic they printed money knowing that they could still import with those dollars. what are they going to buy when they can't import anything with the dollars printed?

China would have idle production capacity so money printing works, US doesn't so money printing doesn't work.

FairAndUnbiased said:

during the pandemic they printed money knowing that they could still import with those dollars. what are they going to buy when they can't import anything with the dollars printed?

China would have idle production capacity so money printing works, US doesn't so money printing doesn't work.

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It's obvious that US money would be targeted on replacing Chinese imports, whether that is directly government-driven or from private initiatives.

It's really painful and expensive, which is part of the reason why it hasn't happened. But it is doable.

AndrewS said:

It's obvious that US money would be targeted on replacing Chinese imports, whether that is directly government-driven or from private initiatives.

It's really painful and expensive, which is part of the reason why it hasn't happened. But it is doable.

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It is in theory possible, but nowhere as easy or quick to do as you think it might be.

In fact, it might be so painful and hard/long process that we might even see breakdown in society and civil war, even if not, then there would still be large scale unrest, and a need for government rationing of stuff.

AndrewS said:

It's obvious that US money would be targeted on replacing Chinese imports, whether that is directly government-driven or from private initiatives.

It's really painful and expensive, which is part of the reason why it hasn't happened. But it is doable.

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No it's not. I provided actual proof and historical precedent: YMTC supply chain audit and Russian sanctions related inflation. And these are small compared to replacing the entire economy. Further proof: Saturn 5 plans being lost and unable to be recreated.

Targeting money where? They can't even fully identify all Huawei equipment, and that's a branded product with giant logos on it, in peace time, over years. Good luck identifying the parts of PCBs or mechanical assemblies with no logo or only serial numbers, without vendor cooperation.