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That was literally Nazi Germany's strategy for defeating Britain. Use advanced submarines to stop trade cutting off supplies of food and fuel from abroad. The A

by jjk166 7mo ago

That was literally Nazi Germany's strategy for defeating Britain. Use advanced submarines to stop trade cutting off supplies of food and fuel from abroad. The Allies just made ships faster than they could be sunk. Today the US has 55 fast attack submarines, each of which can carry about 50 torpedos at a time. So with 100% of your subs deployed you can sink maybe 250 ships. The US has an inventory of about 1000 torpedos so you can do that about 4 times. Shanghai alone receives 230 ships per day. So The US submarine force is roughly capable of shutting down the equivalent of 1 chinese port for a few days. Realistically, your not even going to get anywhere near that. 30% of your subs are going to be out of service at any given time, more will be transiting between service bases and the war theater, only a portion of those can be spare for commerce raiding, it takes time to locate targets, and you will suffer attrition to ASW. After those first few days it becomes a race between US torpedo production and Chinese ship building. The US can produce 10 torpedos per month; China produces 15 ships per day. Of course China isn't an island - it can import food from its neighbors by land connections. Nor is it even deficient in domestic food production capability. It grows 700 million tons of grain per year which is enough to sustain 3.8 billion adults. It imports a lot of food in peacetime because people want more than bare subsistence, and certainly interdicting trade will piss them off quite a bit, but it's not going to bring them to their knees. The idea that in a peer war it will only be them suffering - their trade will be interdicted, their industrial centers will be bombed - and they won't have any means to strike back is exactly the complacency I was referring to. Maybe if war broke out tomorrow it would go that way, but that's merely an argument that China is not yet truly our peer. We must plan under the assumption that somebody, and it might not be China, will in the coming decades reach the point where they can tank a hit from us and hit back.

15155 7mo ago
> That was literally Nazi Germany's strategy for defeating Britain. And this strategy was enormously effective. Absent U.S. intervention, Europe was fucked. > The Allies just made ships faster than they could be sunk. Not "the Allies" - just one Ally, separated by an entire ocean. No such separation exists today. > Today the US has 55 fast attack submarines, each of which can carry about 50 torpedos at a time. So with 100% of your subs deployed you can sink maybe 250 ships We had torpedo bombers in 1940, as well, submarines aren't the only ASW mechanism that exists. How many sunken ships in each port will bring them to a grinding halt? Are they magically going to tug millions of tons of steel out of these harbors? > China produces 15 ships per day When their shipbuilding operations aren't strategically bombed into oblivion, sure. > it can import food from its neighbors by land connections Now it's a World War - why would this be allowed? > grows 700 million tons of grain per year With several hundred million of those tons of grain (along with vast amounts of other relevant food calories - livestock, etc.) being grown in the Yangtze basin, courtesy of the fact that the Three Gorges Dam is allowed to exist. Why would the U.S. allow that dam to remain intact? This one structure is a cheat code: knock out 50% of enemy food production, displace or kill hundreds of millions of people creating a mass humanitarian crisis and subsequent Cultural Revolution, and hobble huge amounts of industrial production. Short of theoretical attacks like EMP, no such non-WMD single-point-of-failure exists anywhere in the United States. Nuclear response is truly the only thing keeping the peace.
- maxglute 7mo ago
  PRC has CONUS conventional strikes now, bump 20 refineries and US lose 50% of oil, everything down stream from transportation to industry to agriculture, comparable to to hypothetical three gorges. Hypothetical because US doesn't have munitions to penetrate gravity damn as thick as three gorges (gbu57 included), nor any survivable platforms that can deliver fires at scale to PRC. Ultimately, US MIC not remotely calibrated for PRC sized adversary. So the real answer is now that PRC can conventionally hit US, given PRC have 4x more concrete to crack, varied energy mix vs CONUS dependence on oil, US more strategically vulnerable (from energy to input for calories). At peer war scale, 1 dam might as well as be 20-30 refineries. Extrapolate to other CONUS targets, boeing, f35, spacex manufacturing, data centeres, payment processors... i.e. strategic infra US spent 50 years to sustain hegemony. US more to lose from less set targets and less ability to reconstitute. PRC loses most of PLAN they can rebuild in a few years, US loses most of USN and it will take decades. PRC has 4x more nodes for same relative level of homeland disruption, arguably has better fire projection than US in actual shooting war, as in none of US projection assets can likely survive to deliver fires at scale, vs sheltered PRC global strike missile complex that skips middle men delivery platforms. TLDR global strike = CONUS is Japan now. PRC is also Japan, but PRC is 4 Japans.

by jjk166 7mo ago

15155 7mo ago

> That was literally Nazi Germany's strategy for defeating Britain. And this strategy was enormously effective. Absent U.S. intervention, Europe was fucked. > The Allies just made ships faster than they could be sunk. Not "the Allies" - just one Ally, separated by an entire ocean. No such separation exists today. > Today the US has 55 fast attack submarines, each of which can carry about 50 torpedos at a time. So with 100% of your subs deployed you can sink maybe 250 ships We had torpedo bombers in 1940, as well, submarines aren't the only ASW mechanism that exists. How many sunken ships in each port will bring them to a grinding halt? Are they magically going to tug millions of tons of steel out of these harbors? > China produces 15 ships per day When their shipbuilding operations aren't strategically bombed into oblivion, sure. > it can import food from its neighbors by land connections Now it's a World War - why would this be allowed? > grows 700 million tons of grain per year With several hundred million of those tons of grain (along with vast amounts of other relevant food calories - livestock, etc.) being grown in the Yangtze basin, courtesy of the fact that the Three Gorges Dam is allowed to exist. Why would the U.S. allow that dam to remain intact? This one structure is a cheat code: knock out 50% of enemy food production, displace or kill hundreds of millions of people creating a mass humanitarian crisis and subsequent Cultural Revolution, and hobble huge amounts of industrial production. Short of theoretical attacks like EMP, no such non-WMD single-point-of-failure exists anywhere in the United States. Nuclear response is truly the only thing keeping the peace.

maxglute 7mo ago
PRC has CONUS conventional strikes now, bump 20 refineries and US lose 50% of oil, everything down stream from transportation to industry to agriculture, comparable to to hypothetical three gorges. Hypothetical because US doesn't have munitions to penetrate gravity damn as thick as three gorges (gbu57 included), nor any survivable platforms that can deliver fires at scale to PRC. Ultimately, US MIC not remotely calibrated for PRC sized adversary. So the real answer is now that PRC can conventionally hit US, given PRC have 4x more concrete to crack, varied energy mix vs CONUS dependence on oil, US more strategically vulnerable (from energy to input for calories). At peer war scale, 1 dam might as well as be 20-30 refineries. Extrapolate to other CONUS targets, boeing, f35, spacex manufacturing, data centeres, payment processors... i.e. strategic infra US spent 50 years to sustain hegemony. US more to lose from less set targets and less ability to reconstitute. PRC loses most of PLAN they can rebuild in a few years, US loses most of USN and it will take decades. PRC has 4x more nodes for same relative level of homeland disruption, arguably has better fire projection than US in actual shooting war, as in none of US projection assets can likely survive to deliver fires at scale, vs sheltered PRC global strike missile complex that skips middle men delivery platforms. TLDR global strike = CONUS is Japan now. PRC is also Japan, but PRC is 4 Japans.