Shrike
4hr ago
At worst they rot in prison like Jimmy Lai.
This isn't exactly an attractive outcome.
Americans surely love to imagine the Chinese as brutal and hard-willed as they are but we simply aren’t.
What's the per capita rate of execution in China compared to America?
Shrike
4hr ago
Have they displayed some record of competence that suggests I should and wait and see what strategic genius unfolds?
I think there's good evidence that a broad effort to strengthen America's hand relative to China is succeeding, rather slowly. I would count this as strategic competence at play. The counter-Trump view is that this is despite his efforts, not because of it.
I also think it's likely that the Trump administration is screwing with reporters on purpose ("lying") which is going to make things look very chaotic to external observers and provides little to no insight as to whether or not the administration actually knows what it is doing. (The counter-Trump view here, I think, would be "jokes on you, I'm only pretending to be retarded" is not very convincing.)
Shrike
4hr ago
The post I linked to is talking about JDAMs, which the US has hundreds of thousands of.
Although you have to be careful with public statements and photes, yes, there's reason to believe the US is using JDAMs in its Iran campaign. There's even signs that B-1s have switched to JDAMs from standoff munitions with strategic bombers, which indicates a willingness to commit very valuable assets to comparatively close-range work.
The way modern air warfare works is that you "kick in the door" with bespoke standoff munitions to degrade enemy C&C and surface-to-air weapons. Then you hit them with cheaper weapons, like JDAMs and SDBs (Small Diameter Bombs). This is why US officials have been talking about recently when they have been talking about switching to cheaper, more plentiful munitions.
Shrike
7hr ago
That scale simply isn't possible today.
This is not really true. US tactical strike aircraft can carry larger bomb loads than strategic bombers in World War Two, and they do so with much more efficient and effective weapons, of which the US has hundreds of thousands.
Shrike
7hr ago
What makes you think that it failing in Iran isn’t due to specific characteristics of Iran rather than some universal strategic truth?
I am open to the idea that Taiwan might be different, but traditionally coercive bombing campaigns by themselves have had limited success achieving regime change. Operation Allied Force is the typical example of a successful bombing campaign, but NATO was preparing for a potential ground campaign, and Yugoslavia threw in the towel on the same day as a JCOS meeting specifically about pivoting to a ground invasion, leading some to conclude that it was the preparations for a ground offensive that tipped the scales. But even this did not lead directly to regime change, although it set the stage: Milošević was overthrown by his own people at a later date.
You can even see similar arguments about Japan, even after nuclear weapons were used against them, there were those inside the Japanese government of the opinion that the Japanese should continue resisting, and some argue it was the Soviet success on the ground that ended up tipping the scales.
That's not to say that air operations never succeed - for instance, Operation Preying Mantis or Operation El Dorado Canyon. But these were retaliatory, punitive strikes, not regime change operations.
Furthermore (unlike Belgium) Taiwan is preparing for this sort of coercive action to be taken against them. I have real questions about the resiliency of the Taiwanese people in the face of adversity and the effectiveness of their efforts to prepare, but it's not as if they have not taken steps to harden themselves materially and psychologically against an attack by the mainland.
It is also worth noting that the parallels between Iran and Taiwan extend beyond just "might get bombed." Iran's mountainous terrain and underground fortifications are often cited as an advantage; Taiwan has both. And while Taiwan is isolated due to its status as an island nation, Iran is relatively isolated geographically as well (in the sense that they are not going to be receiving regular resupply from China or Russia, unlike, say, Ukraine) and more vulnerable to ground attack, since it shares a border with potential adversaries. Iran is much larger than Taiwan, and much more populated, which is a massive advantage, although their domestic military technology stack might lag Taiwan's.
It is also worth noting that "Epic Fury With Chinese Characteristics" might be less effective and face steeper resistance than Epic Fury. Because of the comparatively long flight time, Chinese ballistic missiles in particular will likely be inferior to American air-delivered guided munitions as a way to hit mobile targets (such as missile launchers) and Ukraine has been able to contest Russian air dominance with systems like the Patriot, which is also in Taiwan's inventory, although it is possible China might be more capable than Russia in performing SEAD/DEAD, and Taiwan less capable than Ukraine in preserving their assets. And unlike Iran, Taiwan has a superpower patron (the United States) that has deployed a tripwire force on the ground, enabling it to "wave the bloody flag" in the event of an attack. In the event of such an attack, if it has not already occurred, Taiwan will likely be able to follow the Ukraine model of integrating closely with US intelligence apparatus, while Iran's ability to integrate with China and Russia's inferior intelligence capabilities is likely less efficient.
If the Islamic Revolution is overthrown then the IRGC are penniless and prosecuted at best and hunted and slaughtered at worst, probably the latter. If the Taiwanese elite accept Chinese rule relatively quickly…they get to go back to being rich in Taipei, or at worst exile themselves to America if they love democracy.
I don't actually think that the fate of Taiwanese leadership is all that rosy if China takes control of Taiwan. Presumably they noticed what happened to Hong Kong and will respond accordingly.
Shrike
7hr ago
Shrike
8hr ago
Launching an unprovoked nuclear attack and failing is something that I don't have much precedent to go on, but I doubt enamors one with any existing nuclear powers.
"What's the proportionate response here? Drop a box labeled 'this could have been a nuclear weapon' on them?"
Shrike
9hr ago
Missile defenses shredded by cheap drones that can be mass produced by the million by China will rightly create visions of entire hundred billion dollar carrier fleets destroyed by a hundred million dollars of Chinese drones in a massed attack.
I am begging you to think through the implications of "missile defense doesn't work" for China when their most obvious path to seizing Taiwan by force is "successfully defending a few hundred transports against tens of thousands of missiles and guided bombs."
Shrike
9hr ago
It doesn't need to be 100% effective, it needs to enable the campaign to achieve its key political goals. One of those goals is almost certainly to enable energy exports through the straits of Hormuz, it requires US Arab allies to not get punished by Iran and threatened with de-desalination, de-energization.
Perhaps. Perhaps it's something like a punitive expedition, aimed at reducing Iran's warfighting capability. This is basically what Senator Murphy is describing. Obviously he has an incentive here to attack the administration, and the administration may have an incentive to deceive him, so take this with a grain of salt. But if the goal of the administration is, basically, the blow up the Iranian military, then it might succeed.
I'm not sure this goal is incoherent. If the US has a relatively longer internal timeline for a Pacific war, removing Iran from the playing field will let us shift assets to the Pacific over the longer term. A defanged Iran will be easier for its neighbors to deal with over a longer period of time. However, this does not mean it is the optimal strategy, either.
The Trump administration and the strategic situation is imposing these excessively high standards with the choice of campaign. They did a really poor job justifying and explaining and gathering support for the war, so the standards for success are higher than they would've been.
This is almost certainly true - the Trump administration has spent less time, I think, this time around justifying almost anything they are doing. On the whole I don't think this is good!
Another strategic goal is 'regime change in Iran' which is clearly not going as planned.
Senator Murphy explicitly says this isn't a goal, interestingly enough.
Slapping them in the face with this war may well have really serious strategic effects if they perceive that the US is unreliable and considers them a second-rate ally.
So earlier you said it was foolish that the United States didn't relocate the THAAD assets earlier. Now you're saying they shouldn't relocate them at all? Which is it?
Depleting these stores of munitions while China is looming doesn't make much sense.
This is specifically the failure mode I suggested for this war.
10,000 cruise missiles is not that much.
A few different ways to look at this number are "100 missiles per Chinese large surface warfare vessel or amphibious warfare vessel" or "4 cruise missiles per Chinese combat aircraft" or "2 missiles per PLAN VLS cell" - it's a lot of missiles. Do I wish we had ten times as many? Sure.
Something that I think is somewhat poorly understood (when it comes to US magazine stockpiles) is that Chinese ships (especially on the low end: frigates, corvettes, missile boats) will likely be vulnerable to guided bombs. Glide bombs like the JDAM-ER in particular have pretty good range, and the Air Force has been rolling out a seekerhead for them specifically designed to hit ships. If the Chinese are unable to maintain air superiority, even higher end ships might be at risk from glide bombs because they can't see over the horizon, and that makes them potentially vulnerable to pop-up attacks from low-flying tactical aircraft. It's unclear to me, of course, to what degree the Chinese have integrated a cooperative engagement capability. If the Chinese can handoff tracks from airborne early warning aircraft to their ships, they'll have a much more mature air defense capability. If they can't, and the US is able to contest the air, then the ability for the US to tap their "six digit" stockpiles becomes a lot more relevant.
On the flip side, the anti-ship capability of a lot of the current US cruise missile inventory is pretty marginal. The JASSM can likely be used as one in a pinch, but a lot of these weapons were designed as ground-attack.
Shrike
1d ago
You brought up these lasers and cheap, effective anti-drone weapons. If these weapons are so great, why don't we see them in action?
We...do? Here's Falco, and here's a picture of HELIOS in action, and, as a bonus, here's footage of the UAE shooting down drones with the 30mm on an Apache.
Obviously the Apache is not new technology at all and 30mm is pretty cheap, which goes to show you how meh drones can be against an enemy whose ability to fly defensive counter-air isn't really in question. I believe Ukraine has been shooting them down with cropdusters and machine-guns.
He said the Iranians Tomahawked their own school, he's not capable of gauging what might even be believable as a lie, let alone what is actually going on in the real world.
Munitions fail all the time, and sometimes in really nasty ways. You can get on YouTube and watch videos of airplanes shooting themselves down and interceptor missiles falling back on the launch vehicle. It seems pretty plausible to me because of the specific circumstances of the strike that it was a US weapon, but "military accidentally shoots their own side" incidents do happen.
Losses is one thing, bases and strategic radars being destroyed is another.
Bases being "destroyed" (hit by missiles) isn't really a big deal in and of itself; troops can sleep in tents. In terms of high-value targets being hit, I've seen basically solid evidence of a single fixed strategic radar being destroyed (it's always very difficult to protect fixed targets) as well as a satcom array. It's unclear to me if any THAADs actually got tagged - I'm not convinced the circulating picture of the damaged THAAD radar is accurate and the satellite photos don't confirm the batteries actually got hit - but if they are, it's hardly surprising that Iran (with hundreds or thousands of ballistic missiles) could hit some strategic targets. That's what happens in war: you take losses. The US military lost eight attack aircraft in 2012 to an attack by the Taliban on Camp Bastion, and the Taliban were a much less well-equipped threat than the Iranians.
But why aren't these systems you brought up deployed and defending? If they're worth bringing up, then they ought to be adding value.
Why do you keep saying this? The USAF is almost certainly using Falco right now, it was operationally deployed and successfully used on wartime targets in the same theater last year!
You seem to have this idea that a countermeasure is magically 100% effective against all threats of that type and lets you operate with impunity against enemies armed with that weapon. But no countermeasure is 100% effective. Even if they were, the truth is that if you have 20 rockets and your enemy has 21, you are going to get hit regardless of how good your tech works. It also does not mean the tech is useless (the enemy hit you once instead of 21 times!)
The first thing that should've been considered in a regime change operation in Iran is what the actual goal is.
Maybe, or maybe the US plays coy about their real goals for a number of reasons and they are succeeding despite what Trump's habit of indulging in rambling tangents would get you to think, or perhaps the war is going much more poorly than is actually known. Who can say? The people who can can't be trusted to speak truthfully.
The second thing that should've been considered is preventing Iran closing the straits of Hormuz. There should've been US ships actually there, physically escorting freighters. They should be using these cheap effective anti-drone and anti-missile weapons to great effect. Not sitting back hundreds of kilometres, implicitly showing the straits of Hormuz aren't under US control. But that hasn't been done because the US navy is rightly concerned about air and missile attack sinking their ships.
"Preventing Iran from closing the straits of Hormuz" is not something you do in an afternoon. Air and missile attack are obviously a serious concern, but mine and torpedo attack is perhaps an even more serious one. US doctrine in these scenarios is going to be to degrade the Iranian defensive network with airstrikes over time, not rush a convoy through.
If China goes to war with Taiwan, you almost certainly won't see them escorting neutral shipping through the strait, either, and that implies nothing about how poorly or how well China is doing.
An administration whose military strategy and political ideology explicitly called for a refocus away from Middle Eastern wars shouldn't be sacrificing more important theaters for the sake of a Middle East war.
Yes, maybe not. I'm not sure this is the best course of action.
I also do think it's not exactly right to assess the progress of the war, as a war, by looking only at the losses of one side. You've been stacking up US losses to indicate that the US is doing poorly. But the (lack of) US losses indicate that the air campaign is going well. If we compare this to the Persian Gulf War, the US bombing campaign began January 17. Over the next ten days, though January 27, the US lost 11 aircraft, 10 of them to enemy fire, and had 10 pilots captured. (I assume there were other non-American coalition air losses but I can't find a decent source for it.) Where are the American pilots captured by Iran? So far it appears that that Iranian air defenses are performing much more poorly than the Iraqi air defenses in the Persian Gulf War, despite Iran having a much larger population than Iraq and also having decades to prepare against a US air war. The US could certainly still take losses, but it's notable that the Iranians haven't been able to parade any US pilots on TV yet.
(And it's also worth noting that Iraq managed to hit Israel and Saudi Arabia with ballistic missiles! But this did not change the outcome of the war.)
If the US can't manage to decentralize and safely store munitions (or produce munitions at scale) then it has no business launching a massive bombing offensive.
One cool way to decentralize munitions, if you have the world's largest strategic airlift fleet, is to leave them in other theaters and tap those reserves when needed. It's certainly possible that the US burn rate of interceptors was more than calculated, but also the US shifting munitions from theater to theater isn't particularly unusual, I don't think.
I also did a little write up some time ago explaining that the US is actually capable of producing munitions at scale. US munitions shortages revolve around bespoke interceptors. But if you look at guided bombs, US stockpiles are likely at six-digits. Cruise missiles? Four, maybe five digits. Air-to-air missiles? Likely five digits.
Even in surface-to-air missiles, the US has five-digit numbers, it's just that there are a lot of ballistic missiles out there and many of our lower-performance missiles are optimized for air targets, not ballistic missiles.
Thus it may attempt to besiege the island via airpower, targeting food and energy imports to secure submission.
Yes.
They'd do just what Putin did, double down if the blitz fails.
As I've discussed before on here, a decadal land war and sea war are very different things. As Elbridge Colby put it, "[t]he maritime domain's relative lack of concealment and cover matters because human beings are not, it hardly needs to be stressed, built to swim long distances, let alone fly." Certainly China could attempt this, but I think if they fail in their blitz their odds for winning an overall conflict are much lower than if they succeed.
Shrike
1d ago
Correct, and in fact I believe they have started testing those types of weapons.
Shrike
2d ago
Unfortunately screwups are common enough in large war as to be unavoidable. The lesson I take from these sorts of things is "if it's not worth killing a bunch of schoolkids, don't go to war."
Shrike
2d ago
Ukrainians don't bomb their own schools
They probably do garrison troops there. (IIRC, Amnesty International caught them dispersing vehicles in civilian areas).
false flag is the standard excuse
I don't really think you can rule false flags out, they are a pretty obvious part of a covert services toolkit with a long known history (and presumably every so often they work so well they are never detected).
I do think it's stupid to blame every single thing on a false flag - there has to be a rationale for it. As you point out below, Iran stands to asymmetrically gain from attacking desalination plants. Has there been any satellite confirmation such an attack even occurred? Because the Iranians might also just be lying or mistaken.
(inviting symmetrical retaliation that's way way worse for them because they demand more on desalinated water, it can get literally existential)
Right, so...why would the US do this? Presumably this would alienate its regional allies!
Probably they decided to err on the side of caution (ie not allowing IRGC adjacent facilities to survive).
My understanding is that the building was initially part of (within the walls of) the IRGC compound. It seems likely to me that the US used an old target set list. Probably what happened is something like this:
- There is a list of assessed-to-be-active IRGC facilities
- There is a list of GPS coordinates associated with those facilities
- These lists are being reviewed and updated periodically. They were first compiled before the school perimeter change (in the 2000s or 2010s)
- The team tasked with reviewing the first list (correctly) determined the IRGC facilities was still active
- The team (or I might even guess at this point image-matching software) looking at the imagery to see if anything changed confirmed the relevant IRGC facility still had the same buildings at the same coordinates
- The detail that the perimeter had changed was not noticed or taken into account
- The US triple-tapped a girl's school
Shrike
2d ago
They are not visibly defending key installations in the Middle East where they're actually needed, substituting for expensive ballistic missile interceptors.
You're shifting the goalpost from claiming that "the message hasn't filtered through" to claiming that things have not been moving fast enough for your liking (which is a fine criticism, but not the same thing.) It's worth noting that current known operational lasers in the US inventory are going to be either dazzlers or targeted mostly at subsonic weapons, not ballistic missiles. Nevertheless, on a quick Google, it looks at least one ship with an ODIN dazzler (USS Spruance), deployed with the Lincoln as we speak.
If the US military had all their ducks in a row, we wouldn't be seeing videos from soldiers of drones and missiles coming down on their bases, this stuff should have been sorted out before starting a war of choice.
"If they had all their ducks in a row, we wouldn't be seeing any videos of them taking losses during a major regional war" is not a reasonable criticism of any military in the world. It wasn't reasonable when people made this criticism of Russia, and it's not reasonable when they make it of the United States, and it won't be if they make it of China.
The large-scale ramp up doesn't just need to be 'underway', it needs to be yielding results.
It is - the US has successfully used the Falco laser-guided rocket, as I mentioned earlier, against "one-way attack drones" (slow cruise missiles). We also reverse-engineered the Shahed and shot it back at Iran. It's unclear to me how it's coming on the more bespoke ammunition (as far as I know the exact numbers there are classified).
A few days into a war, there should be absolutely no talk about rebasing THAAD from Korea because there should already be enough munitions to fight that war.
Really? Have you done any baseline research to see if the US has, in the past, moved any munitions from different theaters before to fight in a war after the war started? Have you considered that if the US prepositioned all of its valuable THAAD ammunition in the theatre prior to the initiation of hostilities and it got destroyed during the Iranian's large opening salvo people would be using that as evidence of US stupidity and incompetence instead?
The US should also be able to outproduce Russia in shells outright, that is a baseline expectation for industrial warfare given the size of the US economy.
I agree with this, with the caveat that I don't actually care about shells quite as much as I care about cruise missiles.
Even if Chinese shipbuilding is suppressed, they can still drown Taiwan with their own missiles and drones. To win the US would need to suppress all of China's war industry, including arms production well inland.
This is a really cool vision for a novel. Imagine trying to navigate the hellscape that remains of Taiwan in 2081, as PLA missiles, rockets, and killdrones rain down over the island, fired at random after the US destruction of the Chinese satellite ISR network. The Chinese have been issuing demands to surrender for the past 50 years, unaware that there is no government left to speak for the island. The only justice is death, the only law is the sword!
But I have to ask: why would China bother to do that? It has old liquid-fueled silo-based nuclear weapons with marginal deterrence value, it could just use those instead. In fact, it could probably do that tomorrow, skip the entire risk of regional war. Just obliterate the major cities and helicopter in some guys in MOPP gear to plant the flag.
only the civilian sector takes a hit.
"China chooses to crash their economy during the critical period of their transition to a greyer society, permanently altering their progress curve for the worse, to take Taiwan, the economic value of which they utterly destroyed with a period of prolonged bombardment after it refused to surrender" does not exactly sound like a win for China. I suppose it is possible that this is what happens anyway, but this is very obviously not ideal for them.
Shrike
2d ago
instead of trying to exhaust all reasonable options first
It's probably worth noting that South Carolina pretty much yoloed themselves into it face first. Some of the other states (I don't recall the breakdown off the top of my head) did not secede until after it was very clear that Lincoln was actually going to march an army to take them back.
whether you think the OG Founders were exaggerating when they claimed that their revolution was the only, reluctantly embraced option or not is a separate issue :)
I think there's decent evidence they overfit a pattern of British conduct and attributed it to malice. Something like a sincere but perhaps not fully rational belief.
Shrike
2d ago
Re: #1, the link you had includes something like a denial by Trump. I would not be surprised if the desalination plants were hit, but the neighboring states seem like more likely culprits than the United States to me. Iran claiming such a strike falsely, or using it on themselves, and then using it as a justification to strike said states desalination plants also seems quite conceivable. The targets I would expect the US to hit first if they were settling in for a longer phase of the war would be related to power generation.
Re: #2, it is possible the building was struck intentionally due to being misclassified as a target, or that the coordinates for the target strike were entered incorrectly (the school was near an IRGC facility, IIRC). Even a tenth of a percent of error makes a mistake likely over the course of thousands of target sets. That seems much more likely to me than a coordinated decision to strike a children's school.
Shrike
3d ago
On the one hand, I tend to agree with this.
On the other hand, it seems plausible that Congress would have signed off on the war, since the Senate declined to do anything about it under the War Powers Act.
On the gripping hand, the first undeclared* war waged by the United States was in 1798(!) by John Adams(!!) against the French(!!!) and the second was in 1801 by noted hawk** Thomas Jefferson against Algiers. A series of Supreme Court rulings essentially signed off on the use of military force without an explicit declaration of war, although it's important to note that Congress favored and at least to some degree authorized both actions, as I understand it.
I wonder if part of the reason Congress is so lackadaisical about using or tightening up the War Powers Act is because they are afraid the Supreme Court would rule against any really meaningful preemptive restrictions on Presidential use of military force, potentially even weakening their power to conduct oversight of executive action relative to the current status quo.
*at least by the United States
** this is sarcasm
Shrike
3d ago
destroying their desalination facilities
Is there evidence beyond the words of the Iranian regime that you support removing that the US has targeted Iranian desalination facilities?
It seems that even the attack on that girls' school was deliberate
Just to be clear, is your position that the US used a Tomahawk mission on a girls' school intentionally, knowing that is was a girls' school?
Shrike
3d ago
You already see "traditional marriage" or the even-more-unwieldy "marriage between a man and a woman" so there's clearly at least some demand.
Shrike
3d ago
any idiot on the street would tell you they'd threaten Hormuz
It's probably worth noting that not attacking Iran doesn't guarantee they won't threaten Hormuz. In fact the last time an Iran was involved in shutting down an international waterway was...2025.
Furthermore, if Iran develops a nuclear weapon (and allegedly their opening stance in negotiations with the US was "we're sitting on 11 bombs worth of uranium right now" then its ability to close the strait will arguably be enhanced, since they will be a nuclear-armed state.
I think it's all right to be skeptical of this action – I've argued against past proposals for intervention in Iran – and, well, we'll see how this one turns out. I think the points you raise here are fair. I just want to flag the counterpoint is that "Iran doing this but with nukes" is worse. And while Americans often flatter ourselves that just leaving everyone the heck alone would remove the incentive for people to do things that hurt us, the truth is that Iran might very well close the strait in a regional tiff with its neighbors that has nothing to do with us.
I'm not necessarily a huge fan of the US-as-global-hegemon. I think it corrupts our incentives and our institutions. But the benefits of someone saying "I will explode you if you touch the global trade routes" are greater than zero.
Shrike
3d ago
Is there reason to think the Iranians have procured tactical antipersonnel drones in large numbers? It would make sense for them to do that, it's just that most of the media I've seen covering Iranian done procurement has been about Shaheds.
Obviously they are trivially easy to make, but I'm not sure if Iran is in a position to procure them quickly in large numbers if they don't have them stockpiled.
Shrike
3d ago
It's kind of incoherent for an American to criticize treason.
Not really. A traitor breaks the social compact/sacred bond that binds countrymen.
And a big grievance of the American revolutionaries was that (from their perspective) the British government broke that social compact/sacred bond first.
Shrike
3d ago
But is the US military actually involved in decision-making
Yes.
The serious strategists have been saying for years that the US needs more cost-efficient SHORAD and anti-drone weapons and large-scale production of munitions yet the message doesn't seem to have filtered through.
This isn't true at all, as you'd know if you've been reading my posts - the Navy's been testing improved ammo for the 5-inch gun, we've deployed lasers and we've used laser-guided rockets (which pretty much fix the cost curve for Shahed-type weapons). Similarly the large-scale production ramp up is (at least supposedly) underway.
If the US and Chinese Navies sink eachother in a Taiwan fight, the Chinese build a new navy much faster and win.
If the US ramps up said production to 1,000 Tomahawks a year (stated goal) then it can just blow up their port infrastructure and call it a day.
That's where I disagree with the CSIS wargames, they assume a very rosy picture
Possibly! But it's not exactly an EZ win for the United States, either, which means people are paying attention.
They also bomb Taiwan's ports and energy infrastructure to threaten or actually inflict intolerable suffering on the island.
We'll see how this works on Iran. So far it hasn't worked on Ukraine.
And what are the chances this conflict is over within nine months?
A war with China over Taiwan? If they launch an invasion and the war is still going on after nine months, it means the invasion failed. I would say it depends on a lot of factors, as a flat-out invasion is not the only outcome, nor does its failure terminate the war, but consider that if it lasts over a longer term the Chinese inability to sustain their domestic consumption of oil will start to increasingly hurt them, and all of the stuff you've said about inflicting hurt on Taiwan will start to work against China writ large.
This is all irrelevant to the technical point I am making about mass bombardment capabilities. If you're following this thread as a whole you will see that I am skeptical about the efficacy of using mass bombardment by itself for regime change. That's a separate question from whether or not the USAF can still manage "WWII scale" bombing.
Why does this matter? If you get the facts wrong on little things like "US offensive munitions stockpiles" you can more easily misunderstand how a tactical situation will play out, which can cause you to misunderstand a strategic situation, which can cause you to misapprehend the geopolitical situation.
These things are hard enough to understand even if you do have a security clearance and are kinda autistic about them (I don't have a security clearance and uhhhh I throw myself at the mercy of the Motte on the second question) and one of the things I appreciate about the Motte is that people on here are willing to correct me or call me out if I am getting something wrong. Please forgive me if I come across as pedantic, but I find this stuff interesting.
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