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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 16, 2024

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all they need to do is bomb Taiwanese ports to prevent resupply.

Destroying an enemy's economy qpurely through air and missile strikes is much harder than it sounds at first. Most notably, in ww2 the battle for britain and later allied mass strategic bombing failed to cripple enemy war production. German production actually inncreased year over year despite daily strategic bombing raids.

Israel russia and ukraine have shown that modern air defense is effective against current threats. Short of a full scale desert storm style air war, air defenses will remain intact and the vast majority of long range missiles will be intercepted and destroyed.

Taiwan will be forced to capitulate. You can't run a country with no food and no power.

Carrying out an actual blockade of Taiwan would likely require winning a head on engagement against US naval forces. This might be plausible, but if China chooses this it would be a direct act of war against the US.

China isn’t Russia though. China is probably the only other country in the world besides the United States that could do 2000+ PGM strikes per day for the first two weeks of the conflict. The most Russia has ever fired in a single day strike is around a tenth of that, and they can only do that about once a month at best.

Also, American naval war simulations have shown that in the event of a war, it would be extremely dangerous to move carrier groups any further west than Hawaii. The Chinese have spent a huge amount of effort and money developing long range area denial weapons like the Dongfeng-21 to keep US carrier groups far away from China or Taiwan. The Houthis only had a small fraction of that capability and they were able to drive US carriers out of the Red Sea.

That was 70 years ago, with dumb bombs and a partial blockade. Germany had overland trade with Europe, Britain had its empire and considerable domestic energy and agriculture. They were both much more self-sufficient than Taiwan is today. German war production only started mobilizing seriously in 1943 and 1944, that's what the Sportspalast speech was all about.

Smart missiles and modern sensors make it much much harder for big, slow freighters to reach ports. Satellites, radar and sonar systems are far more advanced, they'd be like sitting ducks. And ports are big, stationary targets. China can hit them with relatively simple land-based MLRS systems, let alone their huge ballistic missile arsenal. How can you offload food and fuel while being bombed and shelled?

Missile defence on the necessary scale is impractical right now. Firstly, the Russian (and Iranian) missile arsenal pales in comparison to the Chinese arsenal. The latter has immense industrial capacity and can surely churn out ludicrous numbers of missiles. There are rumours going around that they have single factories that can produce 1000 missiles a day at full capacity (though precisely what kind of missile they're talking about is unclear, China tends to be secretive about these things).

Regardless, Desert Storm will immediately be eclipsed.

Furthermore, Ukraine's power grid has been put under a great deal of pressure by the Russian missile barrage. They are heavily reliant upon European energy imports to stabilize what remains of their grid (which was overbuilt for Soviet industrial needs, so there was lots of surplus capacity). Ukraine also has a number of nuclear reactors that Russia understandably doesn't want to cause great damage to, so they have to take care in their targeting. Taiwan doesn't have these factors. Taiwan can't import power. They have no coal mines or gas fields. Nobody can send over a bunch of transformers and power equipment to make up for what's lost.

And finally my point is that China doesn't need to defeat the US navy, they only need to avoid defeat. I can envision a scenario where China loses its carriers and much of its surface fleet but still wins the war. As long as they can prevent the US getting sufficient control of the seas to resupply Taiwan, the latter will have to capitulate. It's easy to deny, harder to defeat. The US is moving towards a strategy of denial, the victory plan is 'sink the Chinese invasion fleet and win the war'. My point is that sinking the invasion fleet is necessary but not sufficient.