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As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, I used to think it was inevitable that China will be able to successfully invade Taiwan, but its almost impossible to pul

As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, I used to think it was inevitable that China will be able to successfully invade Taiwan, but its almost impossible to pull of an amphibious invasion. Taiwan's geography makes this particularly difficult.

caycep 6y ago
This. I think if China wanted to go all out, it could take Taiwan via massive force but it would be extremely costly for them and I don’t think the calculus of risk vs benefit adds up for them politically or practically. They certainly can maybe sink an American carrier, maybe, if their missiles are as good as they say, but that’s a big If.
- lumost 6y ago
  In WW2 the attack on Pearl Harbor was a surprise ending to the dominance of the battleship, marking the first time that a power attempted to attack Battleship's by air. While this had been theorized for a few decades, all of the great powers continued to invest in battleships. No power has attempted to sink a carrier since 1945, there is ultimately limited data on how effective any anti-carrier weapon developed in the last 80 years would be in practice.
  - corty 6y ago
    Modern naval mines are torpedoes waiting on the sea floor for a carrier swimming by. Place a few where you know the carrier will drive over by sub, carrier sunk. Or just use the sub directly, modern small electric subs are undetectable in exercises, the sub will only be sunk when firing torpedoes. By then it is too late for the carrier. Saturation by long-range antiship missiles is also possible to work, if the Falkland War is any indication. And then there are the "deorbit a tungsten telephone pole" kind of ideas that just might work on a carrier, have no defense and are within the realm of possibility for both China, Russia and basically every state with the capability to get a few tons into some low orbit. Against sophisticated enemies, carriers are giant billboards with "shoot me" written on them.
  - m4rtink 6y ago
    The Battle of Taranto preceded Pearl Harbor and was a direct inspiration for it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Taranto https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Taranto Italian battleships were targeted & 3 were disabled. Also the British tried to sink the Argentinian aircraft carrier during the Falkland War and it escaped preatty much just due to luck.
- njarboe 6y ago
  I'm not sure how China sinks a US carrier killing thousands of US soldiers and the situation does not escalate to a nuclear exchange. Sometimes I think a whole generation has forgotten that we still live under the threat of global annihilation in under 15 minutes. The schools used to have duck and cover drills to prepare for nuclear attacks. This may have made people too afraid of the word nuclear and thus nuclear power is not possible in the US. Now there are "stranger on campus" drills instead. I wonder how that is warping the minds of the present generation.
  - LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
    Are you really sure about the global annihilation part? I'm not. The larger cities and anything near targets of strategic value will probably be gone. But otherwise? Think of all the atmospheric tests with large devices. And the "enrichment" all the coal fired power plants produce. There are people saying coal power amounts to about 50 Chernobyl EVERY FUCKING YEAR in released radioactivity into the environment! Not to speak of mercury, carbon dioxide and what not else. On average I feel rather unimpressed by that threat. It seems like a conditioning.
    - njarboe 6y ago
      There are over 13,000 nuclear weapons ready to deploed at a moments notice in the world [1]. I agree that humans would not likely go extinct, but a full exchange of all of these weapons would probably cause a global extinction event, less extreme than the one the killed off the dinosaurs, but a very serious one that would be easily seen in the geologic record. I think that global annihilation is a good descriptor of that scenario but I could use "kill off 99.9999% of living things and cause 20-50% of species to go extinct in a few years". I have a PhD in Earth Science and have studied this issue some, but atmospheric modeling is not my specialty. If you read my second statement, I do agree with you that great, unreasonable fear can be conditioned into people. This is what happened to the word "nuclear". The reasonable fear of nuclear weapons got put into children in the 1950's, but being children they just ended up fearing everything nuclear. And being normal humans almost all did not evaluate new evidence in adulthood and change their minds. These people are the Baby Boomers that have controlled society for a long time and have let coal plants exist for 50 years do huge environmental damage, while relatively clean nuclear power was abandoned. P.S: The radiation from these bombs are not the problem, it is the nuclear winter that is. [1] https://ploughshares.org/world-nuclear-stockpile-report https://ploughshares.org/world-nuclear-stockpile-report
adventured 6y ago
China wins in every military confrontation scenario. They don't have to immediately pull off an invasion. Tomorrow they could begin a draconian blockade, while strategically bombing the island and begin an assassination & disruption campaign by inserting special forces. They can do it (rather inexpensively) on an indefinite basis, as long as they care to. Nobody can stop that and they have zero concern for the humanitarian disaster it would cause, with their eye on the long-term goal. Taiwan wouldn't last very long in that simple and very obvious scenario, it would rapidly degrade their condition. The world (those standing opposed to China's move) would quickly capitulate, understanding full well that the alternative is all out war with China; the UN would be begging for a settlement peace within weeks (which would result in China de facto taking over Taiwan). Mostly all that would happen to China are some sanctions, which China would shrug off (along with some dramatic, harshly worded PR releases). At the end of it, China won't need to invade with a large amphibious assault, it'll enter Taiwan largely unopposed as part of the brokered peace settlement. China is very rapidly building up its naval capabilities. It will be able to invade Taiwan this decade. That isn't a maybe, it's a certainty.
- someperson 6y ago
  On China's (in)ability to successfully invade Taiwan, we can agree to disagree.
- jake_morrison 6y ago
  I agree. Something that would help would be focusing on dealign with saboteurs and small unit attacks, and making it difficult to hold the island thorough guerrilla warfare. There is no indication that they are doing that. Even more effective for China is to simply invest a few billion Dollars into bribing politicians. Some would argue that this has already been done with the KMT. They can also put pressure on the owners of the first generation of factories in China, which tend to be related to KMT. They will give up Taiwan in order to keep their business.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
sudosysgen 6y ago
Modern weapons make a successful amphibious invasion much easier. If the invading party can assert total air superiority, then the only bottleneck left is actually crossing the sea, which is not that big of an issue as long as the distance is low. The waters of the strait are also shallow enough that submarines are not that effective. Basically, it is certainly possible to pull of such an amphibious assault, and the US Navy's simulations recognize as much.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
  > If the invading party can assert total air superiority That is the hard part. Not only would you have to deal with US carrier based air assets, but also air assets from bases in Japan and South Korea. In addition, Aegis based cruisers also have a heavy anti-aircraft armament.
  - sudosysgen 6y ago
    Establishing air superiority and creating a beachhead would be a matter of one day or two, at most. It would be impossible for a US carrier strike group to intervene by then. Same for Aegis. As for Japan, it is much too far from Taiwan to contribute. South Korea will not get involved for obvious reasons.

caycep 6y ago

This. I think if China wanted to go all out, it could take Taiwan via massive force but it would be extremely costly for them and I don’t think the calculus of risk vs benefit adds up for them politically or practically. They certainly can maybe sink an American carrier, maybe, if their missiles are as good as they say, but that’s a big If.

lumost 6y ago
In WW2 the attack on Pearl Harbor was a surprise ending to the dominance of the battleship, marking the first time that a power attempted to attack Battleship's by air. While this had been theorized for a few decades, all of the great powers continued to invest in battleships. No power has attempted to sink a carrier since 1945, there is ultimately limited data on how effective any anti-carrier weapon developed in the last 80 years would be in practice.
- corty 6y ago
  Modern naval mines are torpedoes waiting on the sea floor for a carrier swimming by. Place a few where you know the carrier will drive over by sub, carrier sunk. Or just use the sub directly, modern small electric subs are undetectable in exercises, the sub will only be sunk when firing torpedoes. By then it is too late for the carrier. Saturation by long-range antiship missiles is also possible to work, if the Falkland War is any indication. And then there are the "deorbit a tungsten telephone pole" kind of ideas that just might work on a carrier, have no defense and are within the realm of possibility for both China, Russia and basically every state with the capability to get a few tons into some low orbit. Against sophisticated enemies, carriers are giant billboards with "shoot me" written on them.
- m4rtink 6y ago
  The Battle of Taranto preceded Pearl Harbor and was a direct inspiration for it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Taranto https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Taranto Italian battleships were targeted & 3 were disabled. Also the British tried to sink the Argentinian aircraft carrier during the Falkland War and it escaped preatty much just due to luck.
njarboe 6y ago
I'm not sure how China sinks a US carrier killing thousands of US soldiers and the situation does not escalate to a nuclear exchange. Sometimes I think a whole generation has forgotten that we still live under the threat of global annihilation in under 15 minutes. The schools used to have duck and cover drills to prepare for nuclear attacks. This may have made people too afraid of the word nuclear and thus nuclear power is not possible in the US. Now there are "stranger on campus" drills instead. I wonder how that is warping the minds of the present generation.
- LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
  Are you really sure about the global annihilation part? I'm not. The larger cities and anything near targets of strategic value will probably be gone. But otherwise? Think of all the atmospheric tests with large devices. And the "enrichment" all the coal fired power plants produce. There are people saying coal power amounts to about 50 Chernobyl EVERY FUCKING YEAR in released radioactivity into the environment! Not to speak of mercury, carbon dioxide and what not else. On average I feel rather unimpressed by that threat. It seems like a conditioning.
  - njarboe 6y ago
    There are over 13,000 nuclear weapons ready to deploed at a moments notice in the world [1]. I agree that humans would not likely go extinct, but a full exchange of all of these weapons would probably cause a global extinction event, less extreme than the one the killed off the dinosaurs, but a very serious one that would be easily seen in the geologic record. I think that global annihilation is a good descriptor of that scenario but I could use "kill off 99.9999% of living things and cause 20-50% of species to go extinct in a few years". I have a PhD in Earth Science and have studied this issue some, but atmospheric modeling is not my specialty. If you read my second statement, I do agree with you that great, unreasonable fear can be conditioned into people. This is what happened to the word "nuclear". The reasonable fear of nuclear weapons got put into children in the 1950's, but being children they just ended up fearing everything nuclear. And being normal humans almost all did not evaluate new evidence in adulthood and change their minds. These people are the Baby Boomers that have controlled society for a long time and have let coal plants exist for 50 years do huge environmental damage, while relatively clean nuclear power was abandoned. P.S: The radiation from these bombs are not the problem, it is the nuclear winter that is. [1] https://ploughshares.org/world-nuclear-stockpile-report https://ploughshares.org/world-nuclear-stockpile-report

adventured 6y ago

China wins in every military confrontation scenario. They don't have to immediately pull off an invasion. Tomorrow they could begin a draconian blockade, while strategically bombing the island and begin an assassination & disruption campaign by inserting special forces. They can do it (rather inexpensively) on an indefinite basis, as long as they care to. Nobody can stop that and they have zero concern for the humanitarian disaster it would cause, with their eye on the long-term goal. Taiwan wouldn't last very long in that simple and very obvious scenario, it would rapidly degrade their condition. The world (those standing opposed to China's move) would quickly capitulate, understanding full well that the alternative is all out war with China; the UN would be begging for a settlement peace within weeks (which would result in China de facto taking over Taiwan). Mostly all that would happen to China are some sanctions, which China would shrug off (along with some dramatic, harshly worded PR releases). At the end of it, China won't need to invade with a large amphibious assault, it'll enter Taiwan largely unopposed as part of the brokered peace settlement. China is very rapidly building up its naval capabilities. It will be able to invade Taiwan this decade. That isn't a maybe, it's a certainty.

someperson 6y ago
On China's (in)ability to successfully invade Taiwan, we can agree to disagree.
jake_morrison 6y ago
I agree. Something that would help would be focusing on dealign with saboteurs and small unit attacks, and making it difficult to hold the island thorough guerrilla warfare. There is no indication that they are doing that. Even more effective for China is to simply invest a few billion Dollars into bribing politicians. Some would argue that this has already been done with the KMT. They can also put pressure on the owners of the first generation of factories in China, which tend to be related to KMT. They will give up Taiwan in order to keep their business.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

sudosysgen 6y ago

Modern weapons make a successful amphibious invasion much easier. If the invading party can assert total air superiority, then the only bottleneck left is actually crossing the sea, which is not that big of an issue as long as the distance is low. The waters of the strait are also shallow enough that submarines are not that effective. Basically, it is certainly possible to pull of such an amphibious assault, and the US Navy's simulations recognize as much.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
> If the invading party can assert total air superiority That is the hard part. Not only would you have to deal with US carrier based air assets, but also air assets from bases in Japan and South Korea. In addition, Aegis based cruisers also have a heavy anti-aircraft armament.
- sudosysgen 6y ago
  Establishing air superiority and creating a beachhead would be a matter of one day or two, at most. It would be impossible for a US carrier strike group to intervene by then. Same for Aegis. As for Japan, it is much too far from Taiwan to contribute. South Korea will not get involved for obvious reasons.