PLA strike strategies in westpac HIC

ZeEa5KPul said:

The fact that America can outproduce China in anything should be a mark of shame. There are cases where China doesn't have the technology yet and more worked is needed to bring it to sufficient maturity, but that isn't the case here. There's no excuse for China not to procure PGMs and missiles at this rate.

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Better to leave emotional words like "shame" out of it.

Production and procurement scale costs money -- as already discussed, buying things needs money to have the factories but also the support/storage/sustainment for the military. For the PLA and the Chinese MIC which has only fairly recently been able to modernize the other aspects of their military that are antecedent capabilities that are needed to enable certain types of munitions to be viable in the first place (like direct attack PGMs), assuming that China should be able to match or exceed US production is over simplistic.

If anything, it should be expected that the US is able to outproduce China in certain things given long term existing demand, existing industry and accumulation of human resources etc (commercial airliners, rockets in providing annual throw weight to orbit, guided munitions, among other things), and it is not "easy" nor should it be "expected" that China should naturally be able to match or exceed the US in producing everything. Even possessing the technology, actually having operationalized the technology is something else.

Opportunity cost is something that everyone faces, including China.

Even for the US, production scale and actual annual procurement is also dependent on demand, for example, see here between the differences in requested munitions of various types across two successive years:

Sorry to barge in here but I think this issue relates to a more fundamental question on how China should balance the competing resource requirements of the civilian and military sector. Specifically, it is pretty clear that successive generations of Chinese leadership since the Deng admin have taken a very conservative approach towards military spending, on grounds that such spending acts to siphon away national resources away from development. Even now, China's military expenditure as percent GDP is only 1.7%. This mindset was formed both from observing the developmental failures of the later Mao era and also how the Soviet economy was suffocated by its bloated military machine. A particularly striking demonstration of this was shown by SCMP when they quoted a Chinese nuclear weapon scientist as saying that China avoids manufacturing a large arsenal to save on the high maintenance costs, with the caveat that they have the capability to produce hundreds of warheads in a matter of weeks if war is imminent. I believe this attitude as broadly applicable to the Chinese MIC as a whole. For instance, China has the shipbuilding capacity to expand its navy so, so much faster than the current rate if Beijing would provide the money, but they do not. In my view this is based on similar reasoning: in a war scenario, they could quickly rev up this capacity such that producing a huge navy pre-emptively is a waste of resources. Do I agree with this mindset? Well that depends. I think it was right earlier in the reform period when China had much fewer resources to devote towards weapons, but now it strikes me as unnecessarily stingy and risky. Maybe the relatively old members of the PSC are just stuck in their ways, or maybe they know better, I don't know.

All of this is to say that China's relative underproduction of standoffs is most likely not reflective of technological and organizational bottlenecks but a result of a highly conservative attitude by the Chinese leadership on military spending.

Boltzmann said:

Sorry to barge in here but I think this issue relates to a more fundamental question on how China should balance the competing resource requirements of the civilian and military sector. Specifically, it is pretty clear that successive generations of Chinese leadership since the Deng admin have taken a very conservative approach towards military spending, on grounds that such spending acts to siphon away national resources away from development. Even now, China's military expenditure as percent GDP is only 1.7%. This mindset was formed both from observing the developmental failures of the later Mao era and also how the Soviet economy was suffocated by its bloated military machine. A particularly striking demonstration of this was shown by SCMP when they quoted a Chinese nuclear weapon scientist as saying that China avoids manufacturing a large arsenal to save on the high maintenance costs, with the caveat that they have the capability to produce hundreds of warheads in a matter of weeks if war is imminent. I believe this attitude as broadly applicable to the Chinese MIC as a whole. For instance, China has the shipbuilding capacity to expand its navy so, so much faster than the current rate if Beijing would provide the money, but they do not. In my view this is based on similar reasoning: in a war scenario, they could quickly rev up this capacity such that producing a huge navy pre-emptively is a waste of resources. Do I agree with this mindset? Well that depends. I think it was right earlier in the reform period when China had much fewer resources to devote towards weapons, but now it strikes me as unnecessarily stingy and risky. Maybe the relatively old members of the PSC are just stuck in their ways, or maybe they know better, I don't know.

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Given that all military funding is related to the opportunity cost of civil expenditure vs military expenditure, I do agree to an extent, but also this can be framed as a question of how should the existing budget be divided up between various demands, of which munitions production is one of them.

Boltzmann said:

All of this is to say that China's relative underproduction of standoffs is most likely not reflective of technological and organizational bottlenecks but a result of a highly conservative attitude by the Chinese leadership on military spending.

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To be clear, we do not know what the actual China's production scale of various munitions types are.

Also, in terms of the various types of munitions that exist (AAMs, ballistic missiles, long range rocket artillery, cruise missiles, air launched standoff weapons/missiles, and air launched direct attack PGMs), I think the relative lack of air launched direct attack PGM focus is probably the most apparent in terms of the PLA as a whole based on the (admittedly limited and likely non-representative) evidence we have of the various types of weapons that are released to us in use by the PLA.


No one is necessarily saying that we know what China's production scale is, or whether it is sufficient for the kind of contingencies China may be preparing for, but rather that this Israeli experience with Gaza is just a reminder that procurement scale and munitions scale matters.

When talking about PGM deficeit of PLA we need to account for delivery methods. US likes the air dropped guided bombs. China likes ballistic missiles and MLRS. We should compare the tonage of total precision weapons instead. We know US is not using as much artillery relative to China, so China's precision weapon elsewhere make up for it. US heavily rely on air force, so it makes sense to carry more PGM all else equal.

Just to remind everyone we have no idea what the size of PLA’s air-to-ground guided munition arsenal is.

IIRC, shilao podcast talked about attending PLA sessions on lessons from ukraine conflict (very early on). And the lesson was that you need to have enough ammunition. And that was with Russians going at much smaller rate of fire than Israelis here.

If you are PLA, you do not want to be out of PGMs and stand off missiles after a week of very intensity conflict that involves attacking everything with 2IC.

Sure, PLA is unlikely to resort to Israeli tactic off flattening every building. On the other hand, it has to cover a much larger area. Taiwan itself has hundreds of military targets let along grid, refineries and whatever else you want hit. Same with Okinawa, Guam & military bases in Japan. And even with Darwin, Alaska and Diego Garcia.

I don't know how much it costs to store munitions, but they need to store in the high end of what they think they need rather than low end, because the cost of storing munitions is nothing vs losing a peer conflict

And of course, they need to build up supply chain to be able to supply battlefield adequately or at least ramped up adequately during war time. That goes beyond missiles obviously. You'd want enough factory space in CAC & supply chain to be able to produce 300 J-20s a year during emergency time (just to give an example)

T

TK3600 said:

When talking about PGM deficeit of PLA we need to account for delivery methods. US likes the air dropped guided bombs. China likes ballistic missiles and MLRS. We should compare the tonage of total precision weapons instead. We know US is not using as much artillery relative to China, so China's precision weapon elsewhere make up for it. US heavily rely on air force, so it makes sense to carry more PGM all else equal.

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The MLRS ammunition, by cost, TNT content, PSI generated, assured delivery, wider area dispersion, better tactical mobility, actually comes way ahead on most accounts.

PLAGF has thus focused on transformation of its Group Army Artillery Brigades with rapid induction of PCL191s to beef up PHL03

There has been aversion to GPS (Beidou) guided munition in the past by PLA top brass for the fear that they could be easily spoofed during high intensity warfare. I wonder if the attitude has changed in recent times.

vincent said:

Just to remind everyone we have no idea what the size of PLA’s air-to-ground guided munition arsenal is.

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This.

Since when was it said China doesn't make more than 30 000 PGMs a year? In fact, that number seems laughably low.

In the absolute worst case scenarios, for example where Taiwan is totally infiltrated and the evacuation followed by destruction of all infrastructure inside the province must be achieved, China still has a lot of Flankers which should be able to mount SVP24 style trajectory calculators for dumb bombs.

Manufacturing enough unguided bombs to commit scorched earth inside China (as well as for some close by foreign targets like South Korea) should not be a challenge.

It depends on what counts as PGM. Technically speaking guided artillery rounds also count as PGMs, and China experienced shortage during the Doklam crisis since the UAE and Saudi used up the stockpile. And Zhang Youxia said never again afterwards so the rest is history.