PLA strike strategies in westpac HIC

One thing I realized is that I have not even looked at the bomber units and where they are located, so using Scramble. I have the following (H-6K unless otherwise specified)

10th bomber division at Anqing - about 1100 km to Okinawa, 1250 km to Sasebo, 2200 km to Tokyo, 2400 km to Misawa, 3400 km to Guam

106th Air brigade at Dengzhou -1680 km to Okinawa, 1670 km to Sasebo, 2560 km to Tokyo, 2700 km to Misawa, 3900 km to Guam

8th bomber division at Leiyang -1470 km to Okinawa, 1790 km to Sasebo, 2730 km to Tokyo, 2950 km to Misawa, 3550 km to Guam

10th bomber division at Nanjing/Luhe (H-6H and H-6M brigades) - about 1050 km to Okinawa, 1000 km to Sasebo, 1930 km to Tokyo, 2200 km to Misawa

8th bomber division at Shaodong -1570 km to Okinawa, 1830 km to Sasebo, 2780 km to Tokyo, 3050 km to Misawa, 3700 km to Guam

36th bomber division at Wugong -2050 km to Okinawa, 1960 km to Sasebo, 2840 km to Tokyo, 2960 km to Misawa, 4300 km to Guam

36th bomber division at Xi'an (H-6H) - Similar distance to Wugong

PLAN locations
6th Division 17th air regiment at Denyang (changzhou) H-6G - 920 km to Sasebo and 1880 km to Yokosuka
5th independent regiment at Denyang H-6J (2 digit serials)

8th Division 23rd air regiment at Guiping H-6G - 2210 k to Sasebo and 3120 to Yokosuka
1st indepdent regiment at Guiping H-6J

I'm assuming the H-6K will be used as missile carriers for both LACMs and YJ-12s, so I listed major regions where they'd called upon to hit with cruise missiles and YJ-12s.

For H-6J, I'm assuming they will only be used against naval targets in the beginning phase of the war. It's unclear to me if they can be used for land attack.

I'm assuming in most cases, each H-6K/J will carry 4 YJ-12s for anti-ship missions and 6 LACMs for land attack missions. In limited cases like Anqing, it may be asked to also carpet bomb with a lot of PGMs on Taiwan and Okinawa. Big difference between hitting 30 targets by mission vs 6 targets. It would seem to me that Changzhou is a great location for the start of a conflict, so PLAN would want to deploy as many H-6Js there as possible if they are planning an attack. Moving H-6J to south command or even Spratlys would make sense in the middle as they try to attack possible enemy fleet coming from the south or the west.

watdahek said:

I just saw the conversations in this thread that happened around mid-May regarding a chinese nuclear retaliation upon receiving conventional strikes to its industrial base. I would like to add another example that I think pretty convincingly invalidates this.

Back in WW2, Nazi Germany had a lot of chemical weapons stored, but never used them even until its unconditional surrender and fall of Berlin. This is a regime that is far more fanatical, evil, and aggressive than China, and had plenty of opportunities to deliver chemical weapons to Britain or Soviet civilian centers via V1/V2 rockets and bombers/artillery, but never committed to it because it knew it will get retaliated with chemical weapons as well.

I do not think China will face situations that will be worse than Nazi Germany.

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Interesting choice of words. The comparison is more apt at describing the US
American will be delusional if they think China will not use nukes if America bombs and invades China.

vincent said:

Interesting choice of words. The comparison is more apt at describing the US
American will be delusional if they think China will not use nukes if America bombs and invades China.

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Sure, Nazi Germany is more aggresive, evil, and fanatical than US, no problem with that.

If Nazi Germany restrained itself from using chemical weapons on enemy states that possess chemical weapons, I think it is more delusional to say modern great powers will use WMD on another great power possessing WMD even when there are no existential threat. I will stop here, since it is off topic, I just felt this example shows the incredibly high threshold for situations that warrant using WMD.

watdahek said:

If Nazi Germany restrained itself from using chemical weapons on enemy states that possess chemical weapons, I think it is more delusional to say modern great powers will use WMD on another great power possessing WMD even when there are no existential threat. I will stop here, since it is off topic, I just felt this example shows the incredibly high threshold for situations that warrant using WMD.

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If that’s the case, why don’t NATO send troops to Ukraine then?

watdahek said:

Sure, Nazi Germany is more aggresive, evil, and fanatical than US, no problem with that.

If Nazi Germany restrained itself from using chemical weapons on enemy states that possess chemical weapons, I think it is more delusional to say modern great powers will use WMD on another great power possessing WMD even when there are no existential threat. I will stop here, since it is off topic, I just felt this example shows the incredibly high threshold for situations that warrant using WMD.

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Chemical weapons are generally ineffective and many Nazi Germans hoped for - and got - high positions in postwar Germany including and . If they used chemical weapons they wouldn't have been able to decisively cripple any allies and the cushy postwar jobs would be replaced by long prison sentences, minimum.

Agree that chance of WMD use is almost zero.

And no, China would not use it even if the US committed a war crime by attacking civilians.

The real question is, from which base can US attack civilians from anyways? Not any Korean or Japanese bases, so Guam or an aircraft carrier? Highly risky and useless action because the volume of engagement is so small anyways. Not using it to fight military targets doesn't make sense.

And if a Korean or Japanese base is used, China could not just launch symbolic conventional hypersonic strikes on the US mainland, but more importantly, carpet bomb major Jap and SK population centers in retaliation. So no sane west Pacific leader would allow their territory for the US to commit an atrocity, because their own human cost will be immense.

10 years ago, I would have said that China would NOT have attacked US forces in a surprise first-strike over Taiwan, because China didn't believe the US would actually intervene in a China-Taiwan war.

And 10 years into the future, I think Chinese economic and military power would have grown enough that the US knows it can't meaningfully affect the outcome a renewed China-Taiwan civil war. So therefore the US would decline to militarily intervene and there's no need for a China surprise first-strike on US military forces.

But that leaves the situation today, where I think the [Trump and Biden Administrations] have convinced China that the there would be a joint US/Japan military intervention in a China-Taiwan war. If the US doesn't have access to local Japanese bases, there's no way for the US to project anywhere near enough military power in the Western Pacific, and everyone knows this. So yes, there is a logic that China might as well conduct a surprise first-strike on the US military if a war is going to happen anyway

There are significant military advantages to China for such an approach, but it does commit China to a war against the USA and doesn't leave open the possibility that the US declines to get involved.

It could also mean a significant difference in US popular support for a war against China.

Let's say China were to avoid attacking the US military and then Biden declares war. If China still succeeds in conquering Taiwan and then China-US are locked in a stalemate. As per the modelling, this would result in an US economic depression (25-35% decline in GDP).

In such a scenario, I can imagine Trump (who is the current favourite for the next Republican Party Presidential Candidate) facing off Biden in the 2024 Presidential Election. Trump could easily accuse the Democrats for dragging the US into yet another pointless foreign war which costs American lives and has caused an economic depression in the USA. The worse the economy, the more likely Trump will be re-elected as President and cancel the US-China war.

But if China were to attack first, I think it effectively kills off this scenario and increases the likelihood of a unity Democrat-Republican government and a total war mobilisation by the US.

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So let's look at a longer-term war (beyond 2 months) for the key players - USA, China, Japan. Remember if Japan is exhausted and denies access to local basing, the US would have no choice but to also give up on a US-China war.

In terms of economic effects of a war, figures of a GDP decline of 25-35% in a US-China war have been mentioned in the economic modelling for both China and the USA, with perhaps China ending up in a better position because it has more of the upstream supply chain and manufacturing. I'm also curious as to whether any economic modelling has been done with regard to Japan.

Japan is essentially a geographically small but densely populated island archipelago which has to import almost all its natural resources. In comparison, China and the US are continental-sized nations which can be broadly self-sufficient. At the same time, Japan is close enough to China to receive the full brunt of Chinese attacks, whereas the US and China would be comparatively untouched. In addition, Japan is far more dependent and integrated with Chinese supply chains than the USA.

So my gut tells me that Japan would suffer even more than either the US or China, with a Japanese GDP decline in excess of 40%. That is comparable to the GDP declines we see in Ukraine today.

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In terms of societal cohesion in a war, I would rate China and Japan at a similar high level whereas the US would be far more divided, especially if it was the US that decided to attack China. That takes into account: race, religion, culture, language, class and support for a war.

On most of the factors above, Japan is really, really homogenous in a way that many foreigners fail to understand. I expect support for a wartime government to be high no matter how it starts.

China is less ethnically homogeneous, with 92% of the Chinese population identifying as Han. But it still means each ethnic minority is outnumbered by 11 to 1 by the Han. There is a clearly dominant mainstream religion, culture and language in China. There are huge income differentials in China, but "class" doesn't seem to be as much of an issue because of the egalitarianism that runs through Chinese society, which is a legacy of Confucian meritocratic ideals and Communist ideology around equality. As for support for a war, I expect it to be very high, no matter how it starts. There is also an approval rating of 95% for the Chinese Central Government, as per Harvard. I'll go into this in additional section.

In comparison, the US faces a situation where white non-Hispanics will soon be a majority of the country. The Blacks are a particular issue because they account for 1 in 7 of the US population and many believe they face institutionalised discrimination from an oppressive police state. That previously led to the rise of the Black Panthers but I doubt such an organisation could exist in today's surveillance society in the US. More recently, we've seen Black riots and the police move in like an occupying army.

The other key statistics are that in 2021, a poll found that 46% of the US voters believe there will be another US civil war. In 2020, another poll found "Sixty-one percent of Americans are worried that the U.S. could be on the verge of another Civil War, while 52% say they’ve already started stockpiling food and other essential in anticipation of social unrest"

Whilst there aren't comparable surveys for Japan or China, I doubt that even 5% of the population worried about an internal civil war. Of course, that excludes the ongoing Taiwan-China Civil War. So there are many more stresses in US society which will be exposed during a US-China war.

In terms of Chinese support for a war over Taiwan, it doesn't really matter how it starts as the level of domestic support will likely be the same. Remember that for 70 years, every Chinese schoolchild has been taught that Taiwan is Chinese territory and that Taiwan is the result of an unfinished Civil War. No outsider is going to be able to change that dominant narrative in China. So whilst some may disagree with this narrative, remember that China believes this to be the case and will act accordingly. Plus there are tangible geopolitical, economic and military advantages to taking Taiwan and conversely also denying US access to Taiwan.

But on a brighter note, the Taiwan issue has remained unresolved for 70 years and the power balance continues to shift in China's favour every year because there is still so much Chinese economic development for hundreds of millions of poor peasants. China recognises that a war would be hugely disruptive, so China can actually live with status quo.

Popular support for the Central Government in China was last polled at 95% in 2020 by Harvard. But if you think about it, such a figure is believable.

For the past 40 years of living memory, China has posted the world's highest economic growth rates and wage increases by far. People's lives have been transformed beyond recognition.

And if you look at China's economic performance since January 2020 when COVID started until today, China has still posted the world's best economic performance by far and also the lowest death rates by far of any major nation.

The lockdowns in China actually did work in completely eliminating COVID, which meant that for the first two years of COVID, over 90% of the population did not have to worry about COVID or any lockdowns for over 90% of the time.

It's only in 2022 that the emergence of more infectious COVID variants have cast doubt on whether COVID zero is sustainable in China, and whether it is better than completely opening up. I think the jury is still out on this, particularly since the effects of Long Covid are not well known. The UK is estimated to have 1-2million people suffering from Long Covid for example. The equivalent figure for the US would be 5-10 million people, and for a China which lets COVID run free, 22-44 million people.

But looking towards China's economic future, China has a commanding overall lead in the technologies underpinning the Third Industrial Revolution (ie Solar, Wind, Nuclear, Electric Vehicles, Batteries, 5G, Artificial intelligence, etc). The middle and upper classes know this and frequently comment on how backward the West is in many ways in terms of technology. And if China becomes hi-tech, the chances are that China will also become a high-income country with high living standards. The rise of Artificial Intelligence (ML) also raises the question of who should make decisions. Should it be the individual or the algorithm? And if the algorithm, should this be completely in the hands of a private profit-seeking company like Facebook or does it require a higher level of regulation like in Europe or China? We don't yet know the answer to this question.

In addition to this, we seen a huge change in the past decade on how China views the US. 10 years ago, the Chinese population had a fairly benign view of the US. But the past 5 years have seen near relentless China-bashing from the US media and US government, along with various sanctions by the US against China. That hostility has filtered through to the Chinese population and has been amplified by Chinese government messaging that the US is jealous because China is doing better, and that the US wants to keep China technologically backward and therefore poor.

So this has had a large effect in rallying Chinese people around the flag and support for the Chinese Central Government.

In addition, because Chinese economic growth has been so recent, people have living memories of when China was very poor. Grandparents tell stories of hunger and grinding poverty. Parents have stories of eating meat only for special occasions and grew up with few material possessions or luxuries. That means the population is far more accustomed to material hardship than in the US.

If you look at what's going on in the theater, the Japanese nationalists have to the stupidest ones. It's the Japanese that keeps urging America to get more involved in Asia, because they feel at danger from a strengthening China. As such, they are the most committed to keep the status quo, where they remain relevant in Asia and America will come to defend them and Taiwan in Asia. On the other hand, SK has clearly opted to not get involved in any conflict. Now, SK will still be a collateral damage in any conflict, but they won't suffer as much.

Let's say that Taiwan doesn't cross any red line and we don't get any real conflict in next 3 to 4 years (I would put this as over 90% likely), we get to a point where China has replaced all the old DF-11/15/21 with 16/17/26 and added a whole bunch of PCL-191 on the east coast. Now you have a situation where they can probably destroy all the Taiwanese air power/defense in the first few hours, completely degrade Okinawa, 7th fleet, most of Japanese major bases and Guam. Is Japan likely to wise up and realize that they need to be less antagonistic to China? I don't think they will. I think they will hope that America can properly defend them in a conflict igniting at Taiwan.

The 5 most likely outcome in the next 20 years:
1) China and Taiwan have some kind of de facto "unification/peace" situation. By far the best case scenario for everyone. A combined greater China is likely to be fully integrated with rest of the world and recognized as the leading power in APAC area. Aside from Japan, SK and Australia, all other countries in APAC are likely to look for China for leadership in the region. Even SK/Japan/Australia are likely fully integrated with China's industries/supply chain.

2) China invades Taiwan and US/Japan do not get involved. China is likely to have schism with Western countries. Most ASEAN countries are likely to recognize China as the de facto power, but there will be a lot of negative feelings toward China in many countries. Japan and Australia will have a hard time since it will probably try to "stand up" to China and reduce trading with China. Not a great situation for Japan to be. I could see them seeking for nuclear weapons in this case.

3) China invades Taiwan and US/Japan do get involved and loses out. This is likely to have profound effect in geopolitics. We are likely to see a tremendous recession in US powers. USD might loose its reserve status. Japan's entire economy is likely to collapse. It will suffer the great economic loss of any nation. China might take the Japanese islands between Okinawa and Taiwan. US military will withdrawn from the region. The closest to China will be Wake and Australia. Result in decoupling. What European countries will do here is hard to say. A huge defeat of America along with evidence that China has technology advantage will probably lead them to continue to trade with China. This is the second best scenario for China and worst scenario for US/Japan.

4) China invades Taiwan and the follow on conflict either result in China losing or unable to successful invasion of Taiwan. In this case, I still see Japanese economy collapse through China's initial strikes and follow on blockade. The conflict turns around when US and its Western allies come at China and succeed in degrading PLAN/PLAAF enough. US military is likely to suffer pretty high loss in this case, but PLA will suffer almost crippling loss. This is the worst case scenario for China probably, because it will be economically isolated and humiliated in the progress.

5) US/Japan sees rising China as intolerable and attempt a surprise attack. They fight to a standstill. American public cannot stand a war of aggression that is extremely damaging to US economy and pressures politicians to stop. US & China negotiates a peace treaty. Through the conflict, Japanese economy is significantly damaged. China does not get decoupled since they are not the aggressor here.

I don't see any war scenario that ends up well for Japan. As long as there are enough missiles pointed at Japan and China is able to cut off its energy routes, Japan will be in trouble. So, Japanese government is not doing itself any favors by pushing up tension in the region.

tphuang said:

If you look at what's going on in the theater, the Japanese nationalists have to the stupidest ones. It's the Japanese that keeps urging America to get more involved in Asia, because they feel at danger from a strengthening China. As such, they are the most committed to keep the status quo, where they remain relevant in Asia and America will come to defend them and Taiwan in Asia. On the other hand, SK has clearly opted to not get involved in any conflict. Now, SK will still be a collateral damage in any conflict, but they won't suffer as much.

Let's say that Taiwan doesn't cross any red line and we don't get any real conflict in next 3 to 4 years (I would put this as over 90% likely), we get to a point where China has replaced all the old DF-11/15/21 with 16/17/26 and added a whole bunch of PCL-191 on the east coast. Now you have a situation where they can probably destroy all the Taiwanese air power/defense in the first few hours, completely degrade Okinawa, 7th fleet, most of Japanese major bases and Guam. Is Japan likely to wise up and realize that they need to be less antagonistic to China? I don't think they will. I think they will hope that America can properly defend them in a conflict igniting at Taiwan.

The 5 most likely outcome in the next 20 years:
1) China and Taiwan have some kind of de facto "unification/peace" situation. By far the best case scenario for everyone. A combined greater China is likely to be fully integrated with rest of the world and recognized as the leading power in APAC area. Aside from Japan, SK and Australia, all other countries in APAC are likely to look for China for leadership in the region. Even SK/Japan/Australia are likely fully integrated with China's industries/supply chain.

2) China invades Taiwan and US/Japan do not get involved. China is likely to have schism with Western countries. Most ASEAN countries are likely to recognize China as the de facto power, but there will be a lot of negative feelings toward China in many countries. Japan and Australia will have a hard time since it will probably try to "stand up" to China and reduce trading with China. Not a great situation for Japan to be. I could see them seeking for nuclear weapons in this case.

3) China invades Taiwan and US/Japan do get involved and loses out. This is likely to have profound effect in geopolitics. We are likely to see a tremendous recession in US powers. USD might loose its reserve status. Japan's entire economy is likely to collapse. It will suffer the great economic loss of any nation. China might take the Japanese islands between Okinawa and Taiwan. US military will withdrawn from the region. The closest to China will be Wake and Australia. Result in decoupling. What European countries will do here is hard to say. A huge defeat of America along with evidence that China has technology advantage will probably lead them to continue to trade with China. This is the second best scenario for China and worst scenario for US/Japan.

4) China invades Taiwan and the follow on conflict either result in China losing or unable to successful invasion of Taiwan. In this case, I still see Japanese economy collapse through China's initial strikes and follow on blockade. The conflict turns around when US and its Western allies come at China and succeed in degrading PLAN/PLAAF enough. US military is likely to suffer pretty high loss in this case, but PLA will suffer almost crippling loss. This is the worst case scenario for China probably, because it will be economically isolated and humiliated in the progress.

5) US/Japan sees rising China as intolerable and attempt a surprise attack. They fight to a standstill. American public cannot stand a war of aggression that is extremely damaging to US economy and pressures politicians to stop. US & China negotiates a peace treaty. Through the conflict, Japanese economy is significantly damaged. China does not get decoupled since they are not the aggressor here.

I don't see any war scenario that ends up well for Japan. As long as there are enough missiles pointed at Japan and China is able to cut off its energy routes, Japan will be in trouble. So, Japanese government is not doing itself any favors by pushing up tension in the region.

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I really like option 3. Can we have option 3?

Why do you call it the second best, though? It's clearly the best by far!