Re: economy's role in long wars
This whole thread is just a waste of time from the start.
The entire premise of this thread was to establish a scenario whereby attrition was only determining factor, and then impose an utterly unrealistic scenario whereby China is totally cut off form the rest of the world.
In an attritional warfare scenario, the side that controls the greater resource and population pools wins, so in this scenario, China was always going to loose no matter what. Reverse the roles and set up a scenario where the USN was magicked out of existence and the US was under total embargo from the rest of the world and the US looses as well at the end.
Its a waste of time thread because the unrealistic and fanciful scenario itself has determined the outcome no matter what else is said unless someone introduces similarly unrealistic and fanciful additional scenarios into the equation on China's favour.
In any remotely realistic scenario, no embargo can be 100% effective or even remotely so because China is a land power and not totally beholden to the sea. Cut off China's sea based LOC and it will be painful, no doubt, but China can and will adapt and rely on land based trade routes. It is already making solid moves along that approach with pipelines, railway and highway links to neighbouring countries that may on day connect Beijing to London directly. Any sea based blockade will only massive accelerate those existing plans and projects.
The USN can cut China off from using sea based shipping, but it cannot cut China off from the world market. Land based trade can reach Europe and Africa, and as Chuck pointed out, fair weather allies cannot always be relied upon to pull their weight when things get real. I'm sure he was aiming that at China, but it cuts both ways.
The likes of the Philippines might be all talk now because they think China doesn't want to risk the diplomatic fallout of smacking them down and because they think America got their back and will step in to prevent them from getting pulped. But when the proverbial has actually hit the fan and China has taken the gloves off and they find themselves on the front of the line for some woopass from the PLA, I somehow doubt third rate powers would be so keen and pulling the dragon's tail any more.
A land based blockade of China is impossible, and it is also impossible that everyone else in the world would simply decide they don't want to trade with China. With those two simple, realistic facts, China can easily adapt to a total sea based blockade. Chinese goods can get to Europe and Africa via land routes, and raw materials can flow the other way. Hell, Chinese goods will probably even still reach the US market as industrious people engage in a little repackaging.
All of that is only looking at the impact of a blockade on China. When the fact is a blockade will hit the US and the rest of the world almost as hard. China has made sure of that as a means of passive defence. Crack open the casing of even the most high end electronics and odds are it will be stuffed full of Made In China components. So even if something doesn't have 'Made in China' stamped on it, there is a very good change a total blockade of China will take it off the shelves.
Blockade China and you can expect USSR style rationing of basic everyday items and cues around the block in New York, London and Johannesburg. If the US government decided to blockade China tomorrow, it can no doubt do it, but it may find previous allies as peeved off and against the blockade as China, and its own population could quickly turn against its own government once the full reality of how that move will impact on the daily lives of each and every one of us start to hit home.
People bring up WWI, but that was a blatant anomalie because no one going in had any idea at what such a war would entail and cost them. Even WWII can be seen as a case study of how WWI has impacted on the willingness of great powers to go to war when their own interests are not directly threatened.
Neither the USA or USSR willingly entered the war. Both were dragged in kicking and screaming by the axis powers who attack them both.
It we look at the trend from WWI to WII to present, the obvious trend is a marked reduction on the willingness of great powers to engage each other directly in warfare, and that would correlate with a little thing called learning from the past as people appreciate the costs and consequences of full scale war against another major power.
The only exceptions may be the US and China.
The US, after the first Gulf War and a relentless coordinated government info campaign and media blitz, seem to have largely erased the hard learnt lessons of WWI and WWII from the collective memory of most of its citizens. Even the painful lessons from Iraq II and Afganistan seem to have been successfully ring fenced by the US government and media, whereby there is a clear impression in the minds of the overwhelming majority of Americans that their military can win a conventional war easily and with minimal cost, and the casualties and losses from Iraq and Afghanistan stem overwhelmingly from the 'bad guys fighting dirty'.
As such, they may be less resistance than one should expect from the American populous at large to a conventional war with China because they think their military can win it with minimal losses and disruption to their own lives.
OTOH, China has not really fought in a real war since Korea, with the minor boarder clashes with India and Vietnam leaving negligible legacies to the point where most young Chinese are not even aware of the 1962 boarder war with India and only have a foggy idea of the boarder wars with Vietnam. Even Korea has been largely sanitised and romanticised whereby it is remembered for its David vs Goliath nature rather than for the cost and suffering it caused. There is a prevalent sense in China that if the PLA could fight the united armed forces of the west to a standstill when it was using mainly bolt action rifles with minimal air, armour and artillery and no navy, imagine what they can do now with a full fledged modern military.
As one can see, there is a great deal of selective memory, romantic wishful thinking and arrogance all round, so the threat of a shooting war between America and China is real, and probably more likely than what most of us would like to believe. But any war between America and China will be either short, localised and extremely vicious, or it will end the rein of man and leave a lot of glow in the dark fossils for the cockroach people to dig up in a few hundred million years time.
