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The House Select Committee on the CCP has been publishing the results of war games with China over Taiwan and the results are pretty dismaying.[0] They show th

by Teever 1y ago

The House Select Committee on the CCP has been publishing the results of war games with China over Taiwan and the results are pretty dismaying.[0] They show the US narrowly holding Taiwan at the cost of dozens of ship, hundreds of planes and the depletion of missile stockpiles that have lead times measured in months to years. China dominates the shipbuilding industry[1] and can easily rebuild whatever ships they lose while the US will be dependent on South Korea and Japan to rebuild whatever they lose. At the same time China is stockpiling commodities[2] and has come to dominate the solar and battery manufacturing industry[3] by building a tightly integrated and automated supply chain which will greatly reduce their dependency on imported hydrocarbons should war break out. America can't even muster up enough artillery shells to fight a proxy war with Russia right now and is in complete and utter disarray politically. You should be paying attention to these kinds of articles instead of dismissing them. The next few years are not going to be very kind to America. [0] https://selectcommitteeontheccp.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/selectcommitteeontheccp.house.gov/files/evo-media-document/CSIS%20Simulation%20Results.pdf https://selectcommitteeontheccp.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites... [1] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/countries-dominate-global-shipbuilding/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/countries-dominate-global-s... [2] https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2024/07/23/why-is-xi-jinping-building-secret-commodity-stockpiles https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2024/07/23/w... [3] https://apnews.com/article/china-climate-solar-wind-carbon-emissions-ab119c39f226cfbeb2f5c1449747cae9 https://apnews.com/article/china-climate-solar-wind-carbon-e...

riku_iki 1y ago
> China dominates the shipbuilding industry[1] and can easily rebuild whatever ships they lose while the US will be dependent on South Korea and Japan to rebuild whatever they lose. US builds military ships themself. Also, this will be very asymmetrical war: missiles which can destroy ship costs XM vs XXXM for military ship cost.
- klooney 1y ago
  > US builds military ships themself. Not recently...
  - riku_iki 1y ago
    Why do you think so? AFAIK, all navy ships are build in USA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Arleigh_Burke-class_destroyers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Arleigh_Burke-class_de...
  - chrisco255 1y ago
    Military ships are still built here. However, our loss of the commercial sector here means there's less talent and factories to tap into in the event of a total war scenario.
- Teever 1y ago
  I get the impression from your comment that you did not read the first source that I linked above. If you only read one of the many links that I provided please read this one: https://selectcommitteeontheccp.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/selectcommitteeontheccp.house.gov/files/evo-media-document/CSIS%20Simulation%20Results.pdf https://selectcommitteeontheccp.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites... The key takeaway is that the United States does not have the stockpiles of munitions necessary to engage in a long-term conflict with China nor does it have the industrial capacity to scale up production in a timely fashion. Additionally, American shipbuilding capacity has completely atrophied both from a decline of infrastructure and even worse a startling decline in blue-collar institutional knowledge. It has become so dire that the US Navy is looking to outsource ship production to South Korea. It should be obvious at this point that China dominates in mass-production and they'll absolutely be able to out-produce the US in both ships and missiles in a long term conflict.
  - riku_iki 1y ago
    > The key takeaway is that the United States does not have the stockpiles of munitions necessary to engage in a long-term conflict with China I think this is missleading conclusion, my reading of the link is that it says that in 4 week of active phase, US stockpile will deplete, it doesn't assess what damage China will receive, will it have enough ships/airplanes after US activated thousands of munitions, and will it rebuild them faster than US will restock missiles inventory (99% not). > US Navy is looking to outsource ship production to South Korea. could you provide citation?
    - Teever 1y ago
      Here's a recent story about the outsourcing of ship production to South Korea[0] I recommend that you take a look at this document[1] to get a better picture of the shortcomings of US munitions stockpiles and manufacturing capacity. I'm not sure why you think that China, a nation renowned for their mass manufacturing capacity would be unable to rebuild equipment lost in a war over Taiwan. China absolutely dominates in steel production[2] and aluminum production[3] and no one compares to them in electronics manufacturing and assembly. They completely own the solar panel and battery markets and it seems that no one can compete with their electric cars. While America keeps chipping away at its own soft power, institutions and manufacturing capacity China is building the juggernaut industrial capacity necessary to dominate their region. [0] https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/08/business/us-south-korea-military-shipbuilding-deal-intl-hnk-ml https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/08/business/us-south-korea-milit... [1] https://www.csis.org/analysis/empty-bins-wartime-environment-challenge-us-defense-industrial-base https://www.csis.org/analysis/empty-bins-wartime-environment... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_steel_production https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_steel_pro... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_aluminium_production https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_aluminium...
NitpickLawyer 1y ago
I think after the russian invasion we can kinda throw these kinds of simulations in the trash. They're not reliable and are published just to score brownie points by the parties that need them at that time. Russia was supposed to be the 2nd military power in the world, and they couldn't do in 3 years what they thought they'd do in 3 days. A much smaller country, with a much smaller army, with surplus 90s western tech (at least in the first year) held against them. They didn't get air superiority at any point. Their navy was taken out of the warzone by a country with no navy of their own! And so on, and so forth. China being a military superpower isn't credible. It sure wants to be seen as one, but an army is more than numbers on a pps presentation. They build tons of ships but do they have trained people to man them? (recent incident with PH coast guard making the cn navy have a kiss should be a hint) Total displacement is meaningless when you put in conscripted, untrained people, no matter how motivated and patriotic they are (and I don't doubt they'd be). Or their rockets that were found to have subpar prop mixtures. Or.. or.. or... --- I say this as an european: the US isn't the best because they have big number goes up in military power. They do, of course, but it's much more than that. They have been actively involved in a conflict since the 2nd ww, with only a few years breaks. They have good training, practice in real world scenarios, and more importantly practice and are actively working with lots of allied forces. Militarily, desert storm, iraq, syria and all the other coalition actions were "done" in 3 days. With air supremacy in 24 hours, usually. Watching the reports on how those operations unfolded always seems like a game of starcraft with cheating AI. You build turrets and cannons in your base, and the enemy brings stealth banshees and blink stalkers. It's not fair.
- Fricken 1y ago
  The US won WWII because of it's industrial dominance, they didn't even have much of a military before the war, they built it when it was needed. Since WWII the US war machine has been used primarily for bullying much weaker powers. Meanwhile China has risen to become the dominant industrial superpower. So I don't even care much what China's military looks like at the moment. If they see fit to switch to a wartime economy, they will, and woe be the nation that thought it would be a good idea to pick a fight with them.
- Teever 1y ago
wing-_-nuts 1y ago
It's not whether China has the ability to do so. It's at what cost. Any invasion of Taiwan would require an invasion fleet so large there is simply no way they would be able to hide it. The entire world would know about it well before it happened. The costs of invasion would be absolutely staggering, with little to no benefits. The CCP values the stability of their regime above all else. They're rattling sabers and trying to win concessions.
msabalau 1y ago
The point of wargames and the work of the committee is to find issues and address them, not so that one can panic about nonsense like China building ships faster than we can build missiles. As noted, the result of the wargames was that China lost. That's not really the sort of result that the CCP would be looking for. They want stability. Losing a war, and a whole a bunch of young men, in a patrilineal society demographically warped by the CCPs one child policies ain't a recipe for stability. China hasn't fought a war since '79. They probably shouldn't start learning how to fight again by trying an amphibious assault on an island that is mostly mountains, jungles, and cities. The US in '45 had more material advantages than the PRC ever will, and a lot of experience with amphibious assault, and they turned away from invading Taiwan to go to the incredibly costly invasions of the Philippines, Iwo Jima and Okinawa, because as bad as that was, it was so much less difficult. Note further that the wargames assumes that the fight is only between the US forces in theater vs a massed Chinese attack, because all the rest of the US military is dealing with "some other crisis". America doesn't have great supply chains for building artillery shells, because they aren't important for our strategic focus China, and they weren't needed in quantity for our last military conflict, which was evidently about spending trillions of dollars ensuring that Afghanistan could have a woman's soccer team for a few years. Just because the US can be more thoughtfully prepared doesn't that China is some unstoppable giant.

by Teever 1y ago

riku_iki 1y ago

> China dominates the shipbuilding industry[1] and can easily rebuild whatever ships they lose while the US will be dependent on South Korea and Japan to rebuild whatever they lose. US builds military ships themself. Also, this will be very asymmetrical war: missiles which can destroy ship costs XM vs XXXM for military ship cost.

klooney 1y ago
> US builds military ships themself. Not recently...
- riku_iki 1y ago
  Why do you think so? AFAIK, all navy ships are build in USA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Arleigh_Burke-class_destroyers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Arleigh_Burke-class_de...
- chrisco255 1y ago
  Military ships are still built here. However, our loss of the commercial sector here means there's less talent and factories to tap into in the event of a total war scenario.
Teever 1y ago
I get the impression from your comment that you did not read the first source that I linked above. If you only read one of the many links that I provided please read this one: https://selectcommitteeontheccp.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/selectcommitteeontheccp.house.gov/files/evo-media-document/CSIS%20Simulation%20Results.pdf https://selectcommitteeontheccp.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites... The key takeaway is that the United States does not have the stockpiles of munitions necessary to engage in a long-term conflict with China nor does it have the industrial capacity to scale up production in a timely fashion. Additionally, American shipbuilding capacity has completely atrophied both from a decline of infrastructure and even worse a startling decline in blue-collar institutional knowledge. It has become so dire that the US Navy is looking to outsource ship production to South Korea. It should be obvious at this point that China dominates in mass-production and they'll absolutely be able to out-produce the US in both ships and missiles in a long term conflict.
- riku_iki 1y ago
  > The key takeaway is that the United States does not have the stockpiles of munitions necessary to engage in a long-term conflict with China I think this is missleading conclusion, my reading of the link is that it says that in 4 week of active phase, US stockpile will deplete, it doesn't assess what damage China will receive, will it have enough ships/airplanes after US activated thousands of munitions, and will it rebuild them faster than US will restock missiles inventory (99% not). > US Navy is looking to outsource ship production to South Korea. could you provide citation?
  - Teever 1y ago
    Here's a recent story about the outsourcing of ship production to South Korea[0] I recommend that you take a look at this document[1] to get a better picture of the shortcomings of US munitions stockpiles and manufacturing capacity. I'm not sure why you think that China, a nation renowned for their mass manufacturing capacity would be unable to rebuild equipment lost in a war over Taiwan. China absolutely dominates in steel production[2] and aluminum production[3] and no one compares to them in electronics manufacturing and assembly. They completely own the solar panel and battery markets and it seems that no one can compete with their electric cars. While America keeps chipping away at its own soft power, institutions and manufacturing capacity China is building the juggernaut industrial capacity necessary to dominate their region. [0] https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/08/business/us-south-korea-military-shipbuilding-deal-intl-hnk-ml https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/08/business/us-south-korea-milit... [1] https://www.csis.org/analysis/empty-bins-wartime-environment-challenge-us-defense-industrial-base https://www.csis.org/analysis/empty-bins-wartime-environment... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_steel_production https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_steel_pro... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_aluminium_production https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_aluminium...

NitpickLawyer 1y ago

I think after the russian invasion we can kinda throw these kinds of simulations in the trash. They're not reliable and are published just to score brownie points by the parties that need them at that time. Russia was supposed to be the 2nd military power in the world, and they couldn't do in 3 years what they thought they'd do in 3 days. A much smaller country, with a much smaller army, with surplus 90s western tech (at least in the first year) held against them. They didn't get air superiority at any point. Their navy was taken out of the warzone by a country with no navy of their own! And so on, and so forth. China being a military superpower isn't credible. It sure wants to be seen as one, but an army is more than numbers on a pps presentation. They build tons of ships but do they have trained people to man them? (recent incident with PH coast guard making the cn navy have a kiss should be a hint) Total displacement is meaningless when you put in conscripted, untrained people, no matter how motivated and patriotic they are (and I don't doubt they'd be). Or their rockets that were found to have subpar prop mixtures. Or.. or.. or... --- I say this as an european: the US isn't the best because they have big number goes up in military power. They do, of course, but it's much more than that. They have been actively involved in a conflict since the 2nd ww, with only a few years breaks. They have good training, practice in real world scenarios, and more importantly practice and are actively working with lots of allied forces. Militarily, desert storm, iraq, syria and all the other coalition actions were "done" in 3 days. With air supremacy in 24 hours, usually. Watching the reports on how those operations unfolded always seems like a game of starcraft with cheating AI. You build turrets and cannons in your base, and the enemy brings stealth banshees and blink stalkers. It's not fair.

Fricken 1y ago
The US won WWII because of it's industrial dominance, they didn't even have much of a military before the war, they built it when it was needed. Since WWII the US war machine has been used primarily for bullying much weaker powers. Meanwhile China has risen to become the dominant industrial superpower. So I don't even care much what China's military looks like at the moment. If they see fit to switch to a wartime economy, they will, and woe be the nation that thought it would be a good idea to pick a fight with them.
Teever 1y ago

wing-_-nuts 1y ago

It's not whether China has the ability to do so. It's at what cost. Any invasion of Taiwan would require an invasion fleet so large there is simply no way they would be able to hide it. The entire world would know about it well before it happened. The costs of invasion would be absolutely staggering, with little to no benefits. The CCP values the stability of their regime above all else. They're rattling sabers and trying to win concessions.

msabalau 1y ago

The point of wargames and the work of the committee is to find issues and address them, not so that one can panic about nonsense like China building ships faster than we can build missiles. As noted, the result of the wargames was that China lost. That's not really the sort of result that the CCP would be looking for. They want stability. Losing a war, and a whole a bunch of young men, in a patrilineal society demographically warped by the CCPs one child policies ain't a recipe for stability. China hasn't fought a war since '79. They probably shouldn't start learning how to fight again by trying an amphibious assault on an island that is mostly mountains, jungles, and cities. The US in '45 had more material advantages than the PRC ever will, and a lot of experience with amphibious assault, and they turned away from invading Taiwan to go to the incredibly costly invasions of the Philippines, Iwo Jima and Okinawa, because as bad as that was, it was so much less difficult. Note further that the wargames assumes that the fight is only between the US forces in theater vs a massed Chinese attack, because all the rest of the US military is dealing with "some other crisis". America doesn't have great supply chains for building artillery shells, because they aren't important for our strategic focus China, and they weren't needed in quantity for our last military conflict, which was evidently about spending trillions of dollars ensuring that Afghanistan could have a woman's soccer team for a few years. Just because the US can be more thoughtfully prepared doesn't that China is some unstoppable giant.