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China Missiles Could Overwhelm U.S. Military in Asia in ‘Hours’, Says Think Tank
- tyingq 7y agoAre they talking about nuclear missiles? Doesn't "mutually assured destruction" still hold?
- hacym 7y agoDoesn't sound like it. From the article: > “As these facilities could be rendered useless by precision strikes in the opening hours of a conflict, the PLA missile threat challenges America’s ability to freely operate its forces from forward locations throughout the region,” Nuclear weapons probably don't fall under precision strikes.
- ohaideredevs 7y agoThen the article is likely talking about anti-ship missiles (AShMs). Every "real" country can overwhelm a naval battle group of any other "real" country with guided missiles. A lot of these missiles can be fired from the shore. AShMs defenses are very questionable when it comes to supersonic/hypersonic AShMs.
- SEJeff 7y agoThis in specific is what the Navy is betting on lasers for. The 60-kilowatt HELIOS will be on board Arleigh Burke-class by 2021 or sooner. There is the obvious problem of detecting hypersonic projectiles, but assuming that is "done", then lasers and a lot of them, will be quite effective.
- ohaideredevs 7y agoIt holds and China only has 300 nukes, which isn't even close to the US and Russian numbers, which both have more experience handling them. Bait-y headline.
- JeremyBanks 7y ago> only has 300 nukes
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- simonblack 7y agoI once did the exercise of finding a list of US cities ranked by size. By the time I got down to number 300, it was some small, insignificant place that only had a population of about three thousand. 300 nukes is well and truly enough.
- ohaideredevs 7y agoYou aren't hitting cities with nukes, you are hitting launch sites, command centers, AFBs, naval facilities, carrier battle groups, etc. Sure, in all out war, you will hit a few major cities, but only a small percentage of the nukes will go there. Fair point nonetheless.
- simonblack 7y agoThat 'military objectives only" thing was tried in WW2, but found wanting. In bombing against both Germany and Japan, it was found that destroying civilians' homes was far more effective. Read up on Curtis Le May's methods in Germany, Japan, and then later in North Korea. He was a great proponent of fire-bombing large areas in the centre of cities. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Tokyo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Tokyo One fire-bombing raid killed as many people in Tokyo as were killed a few months later in Hiroshima's atom-bombing.
- ohaideredevs 7y agoYou and I both know the goal of that was to get Hirohito to surrender and that Japan lost most of it strike capability. If strike capability is present, it's a priority.
- dsfyu404ed 7y agoExactly. Nobody knows what the threshold for opening a can of nuclear whopass is. Who's willing to bet a billion lives on it being in a particular spot? The US and China have far too much common economic interest to go to war short of China doing something so absurdly aggressive that you can't not go to war (e.g. invading Japan) I don't see that happening.
- ericmay 7y agoOr maybe miscalculating (I mean here thinking the U.S. isn't willing to go to war but turns out they are) and invading Taiwan. I'm honestly not sure how the U.S. and allies would respond. In my opinion, with the current Chinese administration there's no reason to think they won't continue to act in ways that the West views as aggressive, the question is whether or not we can avoid a war of a misstep. Certainly any military action against Japan (or the Republic of Korea) would guarantee a U.S. military response, but what about other countries? If you're China, it seems like the goal here would be to have Chinese citizens immigrate to countries like Australia and subvert their resolve through their own democracy. We see some of those actions taking place on college campuses in Canada, for example. It's certainly interesting to chat about.
- hacym 7y agoSadly, Taiwan probably wouldn't get protections from outside nations.
- myrandomcomment 7y agoThe US is legally obligated to protect Taiwan. Also the US would have to fight even without that because not doing so would be the end of US power in the world. We could NOT afford NOT to fight.
- scarmig 7y agoLegal obligations are worth the paper they're written on, when it comes to war between two major world powers. Any decision to retaliate would end up being based on what's best geopolitically for the USA. Giving up Taiwan, of course, would announce to the world that allies of the US should look for other world power sponsors, because our support is paper thin. That kind of choice is very costly, and it would take a very unique type of President willing to piss away a century of alliance building.
- rhino369 7y agoSeems like they just mean cruise missiles. But yea, fixed targets are definitely vulnerable to cruise missiles.
- lm28469 7y agoYeah, as soon as shit hits the fan you can be sure there will be nuclear warheads aimed at any major known military bases, ports and electricity plants of the country. There would be no winner in a total war between nuclear super powers. Sure China could probably destroy US bases in Asia easily, but what then ?
- Someone 7y agoMutually assured destruction only prevents war if both parties think the other will take the “tie” of “we both lose, and terribly so” in favor of “I’ll rattle my sabres a bit to show that I mean it, but grudgingly accept a status quo, certainly if you give back a bit of what you took to let me save some face”. The big question is whether that is still the case if the area fought over isn’t US soil. Russia in the Ukraine already might be an indication that the answer isn’t an unqualified “yes” anymore. The USA leaving the INF treaty, thus allowing Russia to develop mid-range nuclear missiles, and even threatening to leave NATO are much stronger signals. One might conclude that the USA isn’t as willing to go to nuclear war for invasions of its partners as it used to be.
- Symmetry 7y agoNo, China has a no first use policy on nuclear weapons and their relatively modest nuclear arsenal matches their rhetoric. China might be willing to risk war over Taiwan or something similar but that isn't the sort of existential stakes you start a nuclear exchange over.
- JanSolo 7y agoA decade of “delayed and unpredictable funding” for the U.S. military’s budget has seen America lose its primacy in the Western Pacific, giving the edge to an increasingly sophisticated China, a Sydney-based think tank warned. So you're saying there's a 'Gap' in missile technology between the US and China? A 'Missile Gap', perhaps? Perhaps we should have a good old-fashioned arms-race to sort it all out?
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- jswizzy 7y agoHow? Wall Street has control of the US defense Industry and Chinese investors are a big part of that. The last time we had a healthy defense industry was the mid nineties before the last supper destroyed all the small to medium size defense contractors by forcing them to merge in mega corporations like Raytheon and L3.
- mcphage 7y ago> The last time we had a healthy defense industry was the mid nineties before the last supper destroyed all the small to medium size defense contractors What was "the last supper"?
- dexen 7y agoThe much feared cold-war era 'Missile Gap' turned out to be mostly a myth[1], based off of extrapolation form incomplete data and considering worst case over best. That's not to disrespect the opponent; both historical USSR and present day China pack quite a punch. It warrants careful approach rather than outright panic. [1] e.g., https://www.armscontrol.org/act/2011-05/missile-gap-myth-its-progeny https://www.armscontrol.org/act/2011-05/missile-gap-myth-its...
- ComputerGuru 7y agoThis is a pointless exercise in creating the think tank equivalent of click bait. So China could wipe out America’s military presence in Asia. What then? Do we assume that somehow the rest of America’s military back home and abroad doesn’t respond? That this inevitable retaliation does not weigh into a decision to “wipe out” Asian-deployed forces? American forces deployed overseas are nothing more than “ambassadors” for its military, mere pawns on the chessboard. Imagine a newspaper headline “black queen could wipe out white pawns” and realize how ridiculous this is.
- benj111 7y agoOn the other hand Vietnam could be summarised as black spends 5 pawns a rook and a knight to take out 1 pawn. It isn't necessarily a question of who would win a fight to the death, and more a question of how big a bloody nose the US would accept. My guess is China would be willing to accept a much bigger bloody nose, who reaches their limit first? Of course theres a fine balance here. Vietnam was never an existential threat to the US, could China be/ portrayed to be? That obviously changes the calculation.
- nradov 7y agoIronically the US has recently been courting Vietnam as a potential local ally to counterbalance China.
- jbattle 7y agoBy the time reserve US forces arrive in theatre, China has troops on Taiwan. How well situated is the US to do a cross-Pacific amphibious invasion of Taiwan? How likely is the US political system to be willing to take on that project?
- hailwren 7y agoThis is a completely different scenario from the op, but I don't think anyone projects Taiwan lasting more than a couple of hours if China decides to invade. Their only hope is that there would be a multinational response. The US certainly wouldn't go it alone against China on their own doorstep.
- bitlax 7y agoSo did the attack on Pearl Harbor.
- maximente 7y agolooks like the principal US export (military-industrial complex + all that entails - in this case, think tanks justifying insane defense projects/spending) is getting some play down under
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- imagetic 7y agoIs it me or is Bloomberg just total trash news?! And why on earth are they using a wire photo of the Thunderbirds for an article about war?
- jorblumesea 7y agoThen what? The US builds a coalition of regional and international powers, boxes China in and destroys them economically. China needs the world to trade with, otherwise the CCP house of cards collapses.
- openasocket 7y agoIt's complicated. Any war between the US and China will likely be over disputed territories in the South China Sea, the reunification of Taiwan, maybe taking South Korea. The US can't invade the Chinese mainland, and China can't project power to the US mainland. The only way such a way ends is when both sides come to the negotiating table, where victory or defeat will be determined by political factors. The US wins by blocking shipping. China wins by destroying ships and bases. The political fallout from losing a carrier would probably be enough to bring the US to the table.
- SEJeff 7y agoThe official death toll of Pearl Harbor was 2,403. A Nimitz class US Navy Aircraft carrier houses ~6,000 sailors and airmen. If a carrier was sunk in a first strike, I'd expect a similar response to what the US responded to Pearl Harbor with. The US still has a first strike nuclear weapons doctrine. China does not. This would be bad for everyone so I do NOT want this, but am just pointing out the reality of how it would escalate. Disclaimer: I'm spit balling as a US Army Veteran here.
- duxup 7y agoThat seems a sort of absurd scenario / click bait type story where any given conflict would be far more complex / nuanced. Was there an assumption that US forces stationed there right now alone could somehow fight a battle and win vs the volume of China's forces in Asia? Seems unlikely. I recall a US general testifying and noting that if N. Korea chose to cross the DMZ, just based on their sheer volume of men and material would take a great deal of territory in a short period of time. It was not a surprise, it's a known thing. Even during the cold war I belive most plans expected that if the soviet union chose to move into the rest of Europe, they could do so to some extent. What happens after that is what would really matter.
- openasocket 7y agoThe report they are citing (https://www.ussc.edu.au/analysis/averting-crisis-american-strategy-military-spending-and-collective-defence-in-the-indo-pacific https://www.ussc.edu.au/analysis/averting-crisis-american-st... if you didn't see the link) is much more interesting. Though it doesn't seem to cite a source or give evidence for the claim that the missiles could overwhelm US forces within hours, and there doesn't seem to be any elaboration about that figure. Honestly I don't think they are taking into account ballistic missile defense systems in place, the rate of fire the PLA can sustain, the risk of escalation (depending on the scenario, some of the countries these bases reside in could be neutral in the conflict), and the fact that the PLA will likely want to hold on to their longer-range DF-26 missiles until they get the opportunity to take down a carrier.
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- canistr 7y agoIf I'm China, wouldn't I be concerned if the opposite were true? That my military capabilities didn't allow me the ability to at least defend my continent/sphere of influence from my greatest enemy? It's one thing to go on the offensive to attack another country like the US at their home, but it's another to have the capabilities to defend areas of interest that are relatively close to home.
- hajile 7y agoThe cruise missiles go both ways. The US loses some military bases. China loses their economic infrastructure and their own internal military bases. The US would have tens of thousands of casualties. China would have a couple orders of magnitude more casualties. The US would lose one trading partner. China would lose almost all of their trading partners. The article seems like a sensationalist attempt to justify increasing the US military budget.
- decoyworker 7y agoI've served over there and of the bases I've seen I doubt a single one would be "destroyed" in the total sense. There are just so many, most of them are large and spread out, and the structures are usually reinforced concrete. At the start of this soft targets would be moved anyway. Meh.
- decoyworker 7y agoActual think-tank paper: https://www.ussc.edu.au/analysis/averting-crisis-american-strategy-military-spending-and-collective-defence-in-the-indo-pacific https://www.ussc.edu.au/analysis/averting-crisis-american-st... After skimming I'm not too impressed with this. It makes a lot of sweeping assumptions, some totally inaccurate, about our readiness in the area and seems to disapprove of them not being at peak war-time levels. More alarmist than anything. I might be biased since I served in Okinawa for a few years.