PLA strike strategies in westpac HIC

[FairAndUnbiased]

This has been address by Blizto. What I would add is that as long as the U.S. is able to cut off China's trade and not vice versa, the fact will be used to extract concessions from the PRC in any negotiated settlement. Or, perhaps this very point alone would be enough for the West to never come to the negotiating table. The west has the capital stock, and more importantly, the space and markets they have cordoned off from the PRC, to reconfigure their industrial base.

As to Europe and Japan getting rekt, I like to joke that in scenarios in which U.S. prevails, its allies will join her in triumph of course, but theirs is through the path of sacrifice.

No, getting cut off from China is fatal to their economies. They can't even cut off Russia completely. Reconfiguration is a joke, do you know that reconfiguring away from Chinese suppliers still requires the cooperation of Chinese suppliers??

@visitor123 said it best. You can walk off a 100 story building easily but if you get kicked off you're dead. No trade cooperation with China immediately, means that not only does the parts for something like a truck stop coming, so do the parts for the machine tools used to make the truck parts, and without trucks, you can't ship the machine tools to make more truck parts anyways. And all for the lack of a single truck part, imagine every single product in existence now having that happen. It's a total paralysis. Even for IP, many western brands don't just use OEMs in China, they use ODMs who keep part of the IP. That IP isn't replaceable.

They talk about how Vietnam is a substitute for China. No, they aren't. High IP parts are flown in from China to Vietnam for assembly.

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[sunnymaxi]

"Factories are waiting for parts from China" was AND STILL is a common saying in the US and EU in past years.

"Factories are waiting for parts from the US" is LMAO. Never heard of that.
Fact is: iff tomorrow the US and EU are nuked The rest of the world will go on as usual. Without China, the rest of the world is fucked. Don't give me the "oh they will EVENTUALLY..." You can EVENTUALLY walk down from floor 100 to the ground without a scratch but if I kick you off floor 100 you will die. Or do you want to fast for 2 years? I will pay you back 4 years worth of food? Deal?

LAMO. typical western mind.

German industrial base is on knees without Russian gas. imagine China cut off German supply chain. Italian economy drained. Germany struggling. lets not even talk about French economy. LOL and these delusional people still thinks, EU has economic capacity to cut China off from global supply chain.

USA growth in 2022 -

first quarter GDP = -1.5%
second quarter GDP = -1.6%

China basically runs the global economy.

 

[tphuang]

Shoot down cruise missiles from American bombers fly from bases in Japan, Hawaii, CONUS and Australia.

Have you looked at bomber range, cruise missiles range and number and availability. B1b has notoriously low availability. B2 is pretty low too iirc. B52 is the only one that USAF can probably operate in number but they can be tracked pretty far out. B21s would be a lot harder to deal with. Which goes back to the other question of how many h20s are in service vs b21s?

They are going to make Japanese air fields basically inoperable. So, the main threats will come from Alaska and Australia. Australia and Diego Garcia could target spratleys. Alaska could target more places.

Then, the question is whether or not china has h20s and can target Alaska and Australia.

None of which really are reasons against occupying Okinawa for the duration of the conflict. It would give them a defendable base 700 km off mainland that is very strategically located and one that they should be able to defend.

If they have 6 weeks from initially degrading us and Japan assets within second island chain, what should they be doing during that time aside from preparing for a Taiwan invasion?

LAMO. typical western mind.

German industrial base is on knees without Russian gas. imagine China cut off German supply chain. Italian economy drained. Germany struggling. lets not even talk about French economy. LOL and these delusional people still thinks, EU has economic capacity to cut China off from global supply chain.

USA growth in 2022 -

first quarter GDP = -1.5%
second quarter GDP = -1.6%

China basically runs the global economy.

Alright, let's have some humility here. China's economy is struggling along too. Let's not be like certain economists that only focus on Chinese struggles and not the struggles of their own economy.

 

[AndrewS]

No, getting cut off from China is fatal to their economies. They can't even cut off Russia completely. Reconfiguration is a joke, do you know that reconfiguring away from Chinese suppliers still requires the cooperation of Chinese suppliers??

@visitor123 said it best. You can walk off a 100 story building easily but if you get kicked off you're dead. No trade cooperation with China immediately, means that not only does the parts for something like a truck stop coming, so do the parts for the machine tools used to make the truck parts, and without trucks, you can't ship the machine tools to make more truck parts anyways. And all for the lack of a single truck part, imagine every single product in existence now having that happen. It's a total paralysis. Even for IP, many western brands don't just use OEMs in China, they use ODMs who keep part of the IP. That IP isn't replaceable.

They talk about how Vietnam is a substitute for China. No, they aren't. High IP parts are flown in from China to Vietnam for assembly.

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The West being cut off from China won't be fatal for the West.

Very painful yes with depression-era levels of economic decline, but I reckon 5 years is enough for them to rebuild a non-Chinese supply chain.

 

[FairAndUnbiased]

The West being cut off from China won't be fatal for the West.

Very painful yes with depression-era levels of economic decline, but I reckon 5 years is enough for them to rebuild a non-Chinese supply chain.

5 years isn't enough to even fully catalog the parts they're missing.

 

[siegecrossbow]

5 years isn't enough to even fully catalog the parts they're missing.

If everyone pursued Amish style living for one to two years this may just be crazy enough to pull off. It also has the added benefit of reducing environmental pollution and energy usage, not to mention virtual elimination of obesity and other health problems.

 

[AndrewS]

5 years isn't enough to even fully catalog the parts they're missing.

Now you know you are exaggerating.

Cataloguing missing parts might take a few months at most, due to delays in the supply chain taking that long to surface.

 

[AndrewS]

Blitzo said:
The US does not require victory to be one where China undergoes "regime change" -- the outcome of a war, whereby China does not have the ability to geoeconomically or militarily challenge the US outside of China's immediate periphery and territorial airspace and waters, for multiple decades going into the future, would likely be seen as satisfactory.

Just expanding on the response below.

---

China's immediate periphery does include South Korea and Japan (including the Okinawa Islands)

So no matter what the US does, China can always build sufficient military forces (low-cost mines and missiles at a minimum) to credibly threaten a blockade of Korea or Japan. This will always challenge the credibility of any US security guarantee.

EDIT

On missiles, remember that China is "standardising around the DF-16/17 platform as an MRBM system, DF-26 as an IRBM system, and are procuring DF-100s as their GLCM system". China has a demonstrated ability to mass-produce these missiles at low-cost as per USAF statements below. Whilst the US could conceivably destroy China's missile production facilities, it should take less than 5 years to rebuild everything that was destroyed. And given the nature of missile production which is fairly straightforward, I would expect China to have rebuilt its missile forces in 5 years or so. The economy should easily be able to support this, which means China rebuilds a credible first-strike capability against airbases in Korea and Japan - like which exists today.

The US keeping China down so that it cannot geoeconomically or militarily challenge the US for multiple decades is not feasible, unless the US continually wages war to keep China poor. And that is a recipe for disaster.

---

And consider the following thought experiment.
It would take less than 5 years for China to rebuild everything destroyed in a war.
But currently only 1.7% of China's GDP is devoted to the military.
In the aftermath of any US-China war, we could expect Chinese military spending to double to 3.4% of GDP, which is still slightly less than the US today.

So at that point, China has an economy the same size and which is spending twice as much on the military as compared to today.

If we look at destroyers, China currently has about 40 modern AEGIS-type destroyers in service and has demonstrated an ability to launch 10 destroyers in a single year back 2019 during peacetime. So China has recently demonstrated the capacity to build a replacement Destroyer fleet in as little as 4 years.

We see something similar with Chinese Frigates. I call it about 50 vessels with Frigate-level capability and missions.
In the year of 2021, 8 Type-054 Frigates were launched by a different set of shipbuilders.
So the Chinese Navy could receive a replacement Frigate fleet in as little as 6 years.

But remember that the Chinese military is spending twice as much as today, so they could actually sustain a destroyer and frigate fleet which is twice the size of todays. So in the following years, the Chinese Navy could trend to 80 Destroyers and 100 Frigates.

You can continue doing these sorts of analyses for the rest of the Chinese military and get similar conclusions.

So to repeat myself, the US keeping China down so that it cannot geoeconomically or militarily challenge the US for multiple decades is not feasible, unless the US continually wages war to keep China poor. And that is a recipe for disaster.

Chilled_k6 said:

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Pulled the parts I thought were most relevant to the PLA with some big claims made by this American Air Force officer.

As well as the sheer speed with which Beijing is able to acquire new weapons, Holt contends, the Chinese are also operating far more efficiently. “In purchasing power parity, they spend about one dollar to our 20 dollars to get to the same capability,” he told his audience. “We are going to lose if we can’t figure out how to drop the cost and increase the speed in our defense supply chains,” Holt added.

 

[ZeEa5KPul]

I feel like with a majority of the world's wealth currently residing with NATO based countries

It's an interesting philosophical question to examine exactly in what sense NATO countries are "wealthy". GDP, after all, is a fairly arbitrary measure. I would argue that a lot of the economic activity that takes place in this country is ultimately worthless. I'll use America to illustrate my point since that's the country in that group I understand best, but the arguments apply to other OECD/NATO countries as well.

• A lot of the activity that takes place in the tertiary sectors of these economies isn't wealth-creating. In what way does the "work" a lawyer does create wealth? Certainly any society must have some way of resolving disputes, but any fair observer must concede that these sectors in the West are bloated far beyond any utility. Legal "services" isn't the only field in which this applies. I haven't quantified it, but I hypothesise that most of the tertiary sector in the West has this parasitic quality.
  
  Of course, this doesn't apply to all activity in the tertiary sector. Research and development is part of the tertiary sector and is the sine qua non of wealth creation. A distinct advantage of the Chinese economic system is the ability of the government to curtail the growth of wasteful parts of this sector while fostering the growth of productive ones.
• A lot of the economic activity in the West is consumption, and consumption by definition depletes wealth. Not only that, but a lot of the cases are wasteful consumption. Suppose there were two cars A and C in America and China, respectively, identical in every way except A is an inefficient ICE car while B is an electric car. The performance, appearance, styling, etc. are identical except for the drivetrain and price. A is twice as expensive as C. By standard GDP considerations, the owner of A would have twice the "wealth" as the owner of C because his car is twice as expensive (considering only the ownership of the respective cars). Is that truly the case? What about the environmental, societal, and geopolitical benefits of owning C as opposed to A?
• Much of the wealth in Western societies is paper "wealth". This applies much more to a country like the US which runs chronic trade deficits than, say, Germany which (until recently) is a net exporter. We are at a peculiar moment of history where people the world over are prepared to give Americans goods and services they toiled to produce in exchange for (metaphorical) pieces of paper with historical American figures drawn on them. We should ask why this is.
  
  My answer is that in the post-WWII period, America was the only functional industrial society left standing and if anyone in the world wanted advanced technology, they got it from America. America had a monopoly - an extension of the monopoly the West more broadly had since the Industrial Revolution - on technology. As other Western societies rose from the ashes, America made sure to ensnare them in its financial system and perpetuate its exploitative arrangements.
  
  As should be clear, the situation today is markedly different from what it was then. Today China competes with the West in almost all areas of technology and will offer competition in the coming decade in the areas where it doesn't. The ultimate strength of a currency is what it can buy you, and when Chinese technology develops to the point where China is a one-stop-shop for everything, the dollar system will lose its hegemony.

These are just some musings off the top of my head. I'm sure other and deeper observations in this vein can be made.

China will struggle to find enough customers for it's high end value added goods

China's primary market will always be itself. The idea that China is an "export" economy is an obsolete holdover from the years when it actually did export much of its output to the West as it accumulated capital. As this demonstrates, those days are long past:

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China can also export its high end value added goods for actual wealth, not the West's paper wealth. China can export technology to Russia in exchange for oil and gas and to Latin America in exchange for lithium. The one thing China still finds useful in the West - the pieces of technology it hasn't yet mastered - is the one thing the West will never willingly hand over. Rightly so, as what would the West have if not for these technologies?

They talk about how Vietnam is a substitute for China. No, they aren't. High IP parts are flown in from China to Vietnam for assembly.

I calculated an interesting figure a while ago and I'm fairly sure it still holds true: China's GDP expands by the size of Vietnam's entire economy in fewer than four months. Caveats about the limitations of GDP noted, this is still an astounding fact.

 

[FairAndUnbiased]

Now you know you are exaggerating.

Cataloguing missing parts might take a few months at most, due to delays in the supply chain taking that long to surface.

If you have ever done an electronics project before, I hope you remember the bullshit of finding compatible connectors. Or for mechanical projects the specific fastener types which are often not interchangeable. And much of this is ODM tribal knowledge.

To make matters worse sometimes you buy an assembly of parts and you don't know what goes into that either. For example a low noise DC power supply. Not final product but also not a single chip.

It took YMTC a year to do a similar supply chain audit for a single company producing a single product.

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