PLA Strategy in a Taiwan Contingency

You contradict yourself immediately:

votran said:

US may run out of missile and ship quick

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So you agree US will run out of missiles quickly....

votran said:

meanwhile US have no problem putting missile all over philipines and south korea....putting all china east coast at risk

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Yea, and US will run out of missiles quickly no matter where they put it. You can put it on China's doorsteps but if you don't have a enough quantity and rate to suppress Chinese targets, it's good as useless in the long-term.

The logical inconsistency is evident.

I don't believe Americans will even have a chance to target the Chinese mainland deeper than single digit kilometers. The US might try to do their classic tomahawk bait to move SAM'S to allow B-21 to pass, but thats still very unlikely for chinese IADS to move their stuff with how dense it is. And China would happily wipe every military facility the US has on its own mainland off the charts, (theres only like 15 anyways.) Also most Chinese critical defense systems are mostly in Chinese focused production cities, easy to defend, and not dispersed. I think the Americans with how stupid their airforce is will still try though, with many happy rural chinese people taking selfie's infront of the wreakage.

votran said:

US may run out of missile and ship quick but the huge problem is : US shipyard and production facility still perfectly safe back home , no countries include china have balls to put missile on cuba to threaten them
(no some sneaky tiny drones raid from hidden containe aren't gonna cut it and do any significal damage)
meanwhile US have no problem putting missile all over philipines and south korea....putting all china east coast at risk

well i hope when shooting war start china will finally have the will to threaten US mainland

it gonna be fucking hilarious if war start : china ship sunk by US missile , china shipyard hit by tomahawk from philipines , US submarine attack china's cargo around malacca straits

and china's missile still nowhere to be seen on cuba ...or atleast venezuela soil

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China will hit or destroy most US military bases in the region. US production may not be as safe as they may think.

My guess is that as the threat of a nuclear exchange or even an attrition war becomes more apparent, I think that the party that have less to lose here, the US, will throw Taiwan DPP under the bus for a different approach.
The US could build the entire Taiwan semiconductor industry in Arizona and Texas in less than a decade. The issue now will be that the more China has to fight for Taiwan the more horrible the outcome will be for that island.

AndrewS said:

We're talking about TIG welding here, in submarines and civilian nuclear reactors.

Call it 60 hours of actual practice to gain "proficiency". A lesiurely formal course lasts 6+ months.
Hence I'm happy to go with a 6month figure.

Note that China has an extensive civilian nuclear industry (with associated TIG welders) who I also expect to be security-cleared.

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Another flaw of your thinking which is becoming clear — you treat security clearance and welding qualification as some sort of master key, where you just need one to do everything. Reality works more like a hotel with hundreds of rooms, each key only allows access to one room. You need a new key even if you just want to access the adjacent room — new qualification.

No, we are not talking about just TIG welding here, we are using welding to illlustrate one of many bottlenecks. The weldings on nuclear reactors are different to those on submarines and those on aircraft carriers because of difference in composition in the steel; they are not just "TIG welding".

You also can't just stuff people working on one project to another project and expect them to excel. Beside, they are already occupied, they are not free to work on another project. Doing what you proposed and everything is going to suffer.

If things were so simple, it wouldn't have taken China decades to reach today's industrial might, and more countries would have been involved in the heavy industry.

AndrewS said:

But at the same time, security clearances cannot become a major impediment to increased wartime production...


I agree, but I don't see much else that China can be doing.

The path has already been set to:

1. Secure the 1IC ~2030
2. Secure the 2IC ~2035

The next step (2040s onwards) would be a pre-eminent blue-water Navy, which becomes a nice-to-have, if the 1IC and 2IC can be secured.

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Wartime production for naval vessels is a thing of the past.

You can't just ramp up production at war time because the size of the skilled labour is inelastic. If you talk about needing 10+ years to ramp up production, then you aren't talking about war time, you are talking about peace time.