PLA Strategy in a Taiwan Contingency

[Neurosmith]

Are they? 093Bs are still only as good as 688is in most speed regime and the US has extensive sensor networks all around from their coasts to continental shelf and even in open ocean.

Also, I somehow doubt 093Bs have 24 VLS. The most we've seen is 12 in the open, there isn't really enough space forward of that section to contain another 12 without being right against the sail and the panel aft isn't long enough to fit another 12 VLS unit. IMO, at most It's 12+9 and worst It's 12.

The 09IIIBs would still be more survivable than fixed bases - which would be under continuous opposing fire and surveillance - and surface warships (which require ancillary supporting vessels and still prone to enemy satellites & radars), not to mention that they could operate independently and with essentially unlimited range.

The latest satellite image, courtesy of Tom Shugart, indicates that the 09IIIB has at least 21 VLS, which more or less confirms the 24 VLS count unless they added 3/4th of a VLS module in addition to the aft one for some reason.

 

[latenlazy]

PLAAF planes will just sit in their hangars and do nothing?

Hangar Queen (no point resisting)
Hangar Queen (no need to participate)

 

[Engineer]

It's the same principle. Throw enough people at a task, and you can expect them to obtain the expertise, given time. If you know what production level you're aiming for, you train enough people for the tasks.

Remember we're talking about mass-production now, where individuals specialise on the same task (eg. a specific type of weld between different materials)

What principle? You presented none at all. You couldn't even explain how to dramatically expand the skilled labour of one trade. Not only does hand waving "throw enough people at a task" not going to make the issues go away, it makes things worse: New people need supervision, and when they screwed up, experienced people have to go in to undo all the mess then redo everything again. That's 2X-3X the amount of work.

You have no clue how real-life works!

The fact that you're talking about a 10 year timeframe to ramp up military warship production is a gross exaggeration.

For warships, I do think it is 6-24 month timeframe to transition to wartime production levels, depending on the ship type.
Then you have the actual construction, fitout and commissioning times.

The fact that you think 10-year timeframe is an exaggeration shows you are in fantasy land, and you need to get yourself back into reality.

China's current production capacity is at best two carriers simultaneously, at the expense of most destroyers production. It will be a huge problem just to add one more carrier to that production capacity, forget about your proposed fifteen simultaneous carriers construction.

 

[AndrewS]

You don’t only launch salvos of high value missiles when you do your strike campaigns. You start with low value missiles first to exhaust interceptor capacity, and then when you launch your high value salvos you include more complementary lower value missiles to exhaust simultaneous engagement bandwidths. Lower value missiles being intercepted is the whole point because interceptor volumes are not infinite.

Iran’s salvo volumes were suppressed by Israeli air superiority and Iran still managed to both erase Israel’s air defenses into a nub in a week as well as deplete a notable share of the US’s own interceptor stock. That’s why the US had to step in when they did, because if they didn’t Iran was about to go open season on Israel, even with maybe half to 2/3rd of their strike complex being disabled or suppressed.

Russia meanwhile doesn’t have the same volume strike complex that Iran has (or at least they didn’t at the start of the war), and are actually not as well trained for mass strike warfare (though that might be changing), and has to expend their strike capacity across a much wider geography, while Ukraine can get constant replenishment of air defense capacity via its western land link with the rest of Europe.

China has a significantly larger and more diverse strike complex than either Iran or Russia, that are far better protected and thus less exposed to suppression or attrition, all concentrated on a significantly smaller set of target areas than Ukraine. Meanwhile, neither the US nor Taiwan can replenish their interceptor capacity at rates that can resist rapid attrition like Ukraine can because their air defense positions are all either stuck on islands or floating at sea.

In short, there is a hard math between defensive salvo volumes vs offensive salvo volumes. That’s what determines the results of engagements in modern strike warfare.

The other (and I think main scenario) is that those high-value PLARF salvoes provide very little warning time from decision to launch.

So they can catch out the air defences and hit critical targets, such as the air defences themselves.

 

[AndrewS]

TELs move, so using cruise missiles to hit them is no effective. So it will have to be fighter jets that most would not survive. Drones are not as effective. There is also the issue of decoys, like the Iranians did with the Israelis. Sending troops into China to take them out is a one way ticket to a life in the middle of the Gobi desert with luck.
There is the option of using anti-satellite weapons against spy satellites or blind them which is less escalatory.

US doctrine is to use broadband stealth aircraft (such as the B-2, B-21 and the RQ-180)

How successful this would be, is another question.

 

[AndrewS]

What principle? You presented none at all. You couldn't even explain how to dramatically expand the skilled labour of one trade. Not only does hand waving "throw enough people at a task" not going to make the issues go away, it makes things worse: New people need supervision, and when they screwed up, experienced people have to go in to undo all the mess then redo everything again. That's 2X-3X the amount of work.

You have no clue how real-life works!

In a long stalemated conventional war with the US, there is no alternative but for China to build a much larger Navy, and I don't see any way around a requirement to build many more carriers.

Yes, new people need supervision. But it's the same principle everywhere. So I'll give you an example. During WW2, the US undertook a massive expansion in aircraft carrier production, which is what I've modelled this hypothetical Chinese requirement on. The principle was take the best people from each crew (whether ship or air), and use them as the training nucleus for a new class. Then repeat this again and again, which results in exponential growth in skilled personnel. And come to think of it, this happened with the WW2 US Army as well.

I would also add that 1. supervision requirements are a lot less now, because you have machines which can measure quality, rather than a supervisor and 2. with larger production numbers, it's worth automating the task and we have robots which can do this now.

Two additional points:
1. I have actually spent time inside a heavy engineering factory, albeit many years ago, and seen what nuclear component production actually looks like.
2. What we saw Chinese factories do during the COVID emergency was amazing

The fact that you think 10-year timeframe is an exaggeration shows you are in fantasy land, and you need to get yourself back into reality.

China's current production capacity is at best two carriers simultaneously, at the expense of most destroyers production. It will be a huge problem just to add one more carrier to that production capacity, forget about your proposed fifteen simultaneous carriers construction.

Nope. Simply put, to expand any sort of capacity (whether mines, factories, skilled labour etc) is an absolute maximum of 5years in China. In a wartime scenario, I expect timelines to be far shorter.

But in the US, yes, I could easily see elements taking 10 years. For example, the latest estimates for the US on rare earths look like 3 years for military-specific rare earths and 5-10 years for the other rare earths.

So your timeframe of 10 years to build up capacity in China is not realistic.

 

[tokenanalyst]

US doctrine is to use broadband stealth aircraft (such as the B-2, B-21 and the RQ-180)

How successful this would be, is another question.

One of the reasons China is building stealth aircraft is to deal with stealth aircraft.

 

[AndrewS]

I do have a question about this. If you look at the DF-15/16/17 batteries deployed against Taiwan and Okinawa and the DF-26s against Guam and the 2nd Island Chain, the number of missiles is in the low thousands. There are also only 200+ DF-26s that could be launched in one salvo (don’t know how many is storage and ready to reload). Wouldn’t China also be a huge risk of running out of missiles critical in sustaining fire after the initial few waves of strikes? This is not countering how many BMs would be lost to interceptors and malfunction under realistic scenarios. But if you look at Iranian strikes against Israel, most SRBMs simply don’t make it to their targets. MRBMs and BMs with penetration aid have higher chances, but only higher chances. That is to say most older BMs like DF-15s and DF-11s will likely be intercepted.

Sorry no expert here on missile salvos, but the Iranian strikes against Israel and Russian strikes against Ukraine seem pretty futile when. The defending side has advanced air defense.

Remember that in Ukraine, the primary Russian long-range strike missile is the low-cost Shaheed/Geran/Gerbera, and the last production estimate was 5K per month.

China has 10x the population and 16x the overall manufacturing capacity, If China was to scale to Russian levels, that implies 50-80K munitions per month.

Then you've got all the Chinese aircraft launching glide bombs, which are roughly the same cost as a Shaheed.

 

[RoastGooseHKer]

In addition to what others have said, at this stage I don't think the PLARF will have much of a role against Taiwan except in unique minor roles. Bulk of ground to ground fires versus Taiwan could be achieved by PLAGF with PCH-191/PHL-191 with a combination of 750mm ballistic missiles (dual tube) or 370mm long range rockets (8 tube).

Overall, the answer to your question is broadly along these lines:
- You somewhat underestimate the size of PLARF fires (both TELs and reloads)
- You misconstrue the manner in which they would be used (in any sort of contingency they would be part of a joint domain fires campaign including aircraft launched weapons, naval weapons, as well as supporting EW/ECM, decoys, and finally the role of followup strikes/re-attack after initial higher performance weapons target perishable HVTs)
- Part of this question depends on density of salvos versus density of defenses (linking back to the first point)
- At a system of systems level, you have to balance the totality (quality and quantity) of each sides offensive fires, defensive capabilities, available aerial forces and basing and survivability, naval forces, EW/ECM, ISR, in context of the geography that they're based in (which determines their mobility, ability to evade), and availability to resupply. Then tie all of that together with how jointly they are able to prosecute the mission.

Thanks for the detailed explanation.

Just a follow-up with regard to the 370mm and 300mm MRLS. I don’t recall the PLA having a large enough number of these long-range artillery pieces, yet. I could be wrong. Do you think it would be realistic to use these long-range MRLS to provide covering and suppressing fire to prevent airfields and bases from being repaired, destroy time sensitive targets in conjunction with loiter drones, etc.? The Russians could fire 30,000 rounds per day (152mm, 122mm) to suppress Ukrainian lines. I wonder if it would be realistic for the PLA to do that using PHL-191s regarding Taiwan to keep the ROC forces suppressed (think Kinmen 8.13.1958, but this time across the entire Taiwan Strait), whilst covering amphibious forces.

 

[Engineer]

In a long stalemated conventional war with the US, there is no alternative but for China to build a much larger Navy, and I don't see any way around a requirement to build many more carriers.

You have been conflating peace time with war time. There isn't going to be any chance to complete large naval vessels in modern war environment, as they will be the first to get bombed. If you couldn't see alternatives other than a futile exercise, then you should broaden your horizon.

Yes, new people need supervision. But it's the same principle everywhere. So I'll give you an example. During WW2, the US undertook a massive expansion in aircraft carrier production, which is what I've modelled this hypothetical Chinese requirement on. The principle was take the best people from each crew (whether ship or air), and use them as the training nucleus for a new class. Then repeat this again and again, which results in exponential growth in skilled personnel. And come to think of it, this happened with the WW2 US Army as well.

WWII is irrelevant, which is why your hypothese make no sense. Manufacturing process today is magnitudes with an "S" more complex than back then.

I would also add that 1. supervision requirements are a lot less now, because you have machines which can measure quality, rather than a supervisor and 2. with larger production numbers, it's worth automating the task and we have robots which can do this now.

Point 1 is complete nonsense. Having machines for quality assurance doesn't magically improve people's abilities. When skills of the labour are not up to par, all the machines will do is say the work have failed qualtiy checks, which means no actual work got done. Furthermore, the machines themselves add another layer of complexity as the operators need to be trained as well to be able to identify false positives and false negatives.

As for point 2, automation can't keep up with manufacturing complexity. That's why things take longer to built despite advancement in automation.

Two additional points:
1. I have actually spent time inside a heavy engineering factory, albeit many years ago, and seen what nuclear component production actually looks like.
2. What we saw Chinese factories do during the COVID emergency was amazing

Nope. Simply put, to expand any sort of capacity (whether mines, factories, skilled labour etc) is an absolute maximum of 5years in China. In a wartime scenario, I expect timelines to be far shorter.

But in the US, yes, I could easily see elements taking 10 years. For example, the latest estimates for the US on rare earths look like 3 years for military-specific rare earths and 5-10 years for the other rare earths.

So your timeframe of 10 years to build up capacity in China is not realistic.

Nope. An aircraft carrier is not a facemask. The bottlenecks lie with people and there is no way to get around other than slow grind of 10 years, even at China speed. 10 years estimate is actually optimistic, because it didn't factor in social factors.