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What I find most interesting about the current Israel - Iran conflict isn't necessarily a lot of the geopolitical implications / consequences (although of course they are important), but instead the way the war is being waged. It seems, so far as I can tell, that they are almost entirely "trading missile strikes" and that no boots are on the ground, there isn't even really much of a naval component. Just missile centers in cities or in the desert shooting at one another, causing damage that, from a citizen's POV, is essentially random.
I know that the World Wars were considered horrible because death in combat felt so random due to bombings, machine guns, etc. Are we now entering a new stage of warfare where soldiers are barely even involved, and we just shoot missiles at each others population centers, trying to decapitate the enemy leadership?
On the one hand, it's certainly... cleaner, I suppose? Much better than the horrid conditions of trench warfare during the World Wars, at least based on what I've read about it. Still though, it feels extremely cold and random, disconnected from the perspective of the average person.
Then again, the whole war in the Ukraine is very much boots on the ground, even if drones are heavily involved. I'm not sure (obviously) exactly how the future of war will develop, but we are certainly seeing interesting new innovations as of late. And we have barely even scratched the surface of using AI in warfare!
What are your best predictions for how future warfare will develop?
No, strategic bombing has a mediocre track record and in most of those cases it was accompanied by full scale land invasions. Strategic bombing alone just makes the bombee really really mad at you. Israel is knocking the Iranians a few years back along the nuclear "tech tree". Regime change is a stupid goal if that's their goal, but who knows (they'd need a strong rebel group to arm at the very least).
I actually wonder if I'd rather be in a WW1 trench or Ukranian one. It's insane it's even a question. I think you have to pick Ukranian ultimately because of the advances in medical technology. But the technology isn't worth shit if you get droned while evac-ing, which is all too common...
Fiber optic FPVs have high quality and don't have LOS signal issues which means skilled operators can fly them into buildings and around inside them. This means they can even navigate them around say, the tarp you hung up on the front of the dugout, which used to do a pretty good job of stopping FPVs.
Getting hunted by robots is a nightmare, and they're only getting better and more capable.
Each war is different. USA v China would be all air and sea assets. We will probably see almost no footage aside from explosions in or around cities very occasionally.
Iran/Israel can't invade each other so all they can do is lob things back and forth. Note that Israel has a ton of air assets all over Iran though, it's not just missile bases firing at each other. USA/China also cant invade each other, so it would be a similar situation of plinking at each other. Although unlike Iran/Israel, there is actually ownership of Pacific islands (incl but not limited to Taiwan) who would change ownership depending on outcome.
Ukraine/Russia is what not winning the air looks like for sure. Although caveat that with the fact they're post-soviet armies with absolutely awful generals (and politicians making bad military choices) at the strategic levels so this was is significantly more sloppy and gruesome than if France and Germany suddenly decided to run it back for old times' sake.
Land: Defence is so strong right now with drone-spam. The effectiveness/cost of Class 1/2 drones vs their countermeasures is really hard to predict (lasers, AI targeting, cost of everything, reusable interceptors) and shapes land battles heavily so hard to say.
Right now class 1 and 2 drones are cheaper to make than to stop, so defence is really strong at the moment. The longer your attack takes and the further into my lines you get, the more drones I can vector onto your attacking troops. And it's hard to suppress my drones (unless you have air superiority).
Sea: I assume drone boats are the future. Carriers always/forever useful, but their fragility depends on the missile vs countermeasure balance, which we can't predict.
I think the meta stays the same, survivability onion doesn't change. Find the enemy and blow them up from far away.
AI allows you to spread out more and extend the reach of your eyes and weapons. So more smaller drone ships. Stealth and Zumwalt shaped, maybe semi submersible. Don't know enough about submarines but presumably similar.
Air: similar to sea. 6th gen fighters are shaping up to be bigger, for longer range and bigger/more ordinance. Also bigger engine = more electricity = more compute, if your 6th gen isn't also a drone C&C it's already obsolete. It'll be handfuls of 6th gen fighters commanding swarms of class 2 and 3 drones (which in turn, may deploy class 1 drones? Yikes). They'll have radar, missiles so the 6th gen doesn't need to give itself away doing these things.
Closing thoughts on USA vs China: it's the USA's game to lose. They're still ahead but the trend lines SUCK, and nothing about the current state of US governance indicates that's going to change dramatically. They shouldn't bail on the first island chain yet, but as someone who enjoys Pax Americana, I'm not feeling optimistic for my team's odds in 10 years. China can project force in its backyard even if it's never the #1 big dog.
See acoup on strategic airpower.
In general, strategic bombing can mean different things:
The first one works somewhat, but historically not very well. It is debatable if better intelligence today might mean that it is more effective today.
Terror bombing, besides being a crime against humanity, is actively counterproductive. It actively strengthens the bond between the government and the civilians who feel that they are all in it together. It worked like that for the Brits and the Nazis. Arguably, a very similar effect could be observed after 9/11 in the US. Ordinary Americans who were leaning Democrat or dovish found themselves supporting Bush's hawkish adventures. (Coming to think of it, rocket attacks might also explain why the Israeli population is voting for right wing parties supporting goals far beyond what is considered normal in other Western countries.)
Targeting the leadership seems like a less bad option. But here the strategic effect is obviously quite limited. The US blew up a lot of weddings in drone strikes in an effort to curb the Taliban. It did little to prevent their rapid rise back to power the minute they left. And the IDF has bombing the shit out of Hamas, accepting high civilian casualties to take out their commanders. So far, this has not caused Hamas to fall apart. In an environment where IDF bombs have deprived most Gazans of homes and extended family members, and where the families of Hamas members are the ones whose food supply is secure, Hamas does not have a recruiting problem.
I will say that targeting the leadership worked better against Hezbollah. The pager bombing allowed them to take out a lot of the mid level management without Gaza-level collateral damage.
The power of the Iranian regime ultimately comes from the military and revolutionary guards. Sure, murdering a general or politician here and there might make it harder for the regime to pursue their objectives, but at the end of the day it is not enough to force a regime change.
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Yeah Isreal is doing an amazing job shitting all over their military and nuclear programs.
It's just very unlikely to cause a regime change or cause Iran significant long term harm. They'll be neutered for the next few years for sure though.
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I’m not even sure they’re ahead now. If you compare the US and Chinese Navies as a whole the US Navy looks better, but the US Navy is spread across at least four different oceans and seas, most of the Chinese navy is right there. And maneuverable re-entry vehicles and constant satellite surveillance make giant aircraft carriers a lot less practical. Recent war games have indicated that getting carrier groups further west than Hawaii would be extremely risky. And that’s just the large extremely long range ballistic missiles, most of the fight for Taiwan would have to be within 100 miles of the Chinese coast. And that’s not even getting into the string of pretty worrying incidents lately that show a dramatic loss of basic seamanship skills in the US Navy (like accidentally scuttling the John Paul Jones).
Also for some reason it seems like most people picture a Chinese invasion of Taiwan like it’s Omaha beach in 1944 with Higgins boats full of Chinese soldiers getting mowed down on the beach, it wouldn’t be like that at all. It would be 2000 cruise missiles a day for three weeks before there was any kind of landing attempt.
The reasons why are threefold (or more).
First, if the Chinese used their cruise missile potential like that, they'd have blown through most of their stocks in those three weeks, with relatively few left for the landing. (They'd have some, but proportionally). The nature of a missile that you can launch from long range is that throughput is high (you can fire them faster), and the diminishing returns of bombardment over time is low (you get less value per cruise missile on week three than on week one, and on week one than on day one, because everything easily killable either dies or becomes less-killable with time). It doesn't really matter what the specific number is, the nature of the munition is that you can shoot your stockpile far faster than you can sustain it, and your incentives are to do so early when it's most effective. If you're going to wait three weeks regardless, you'd might as well just hold fire, so those munitions could paralyze the Taiwanese ground force when you do move.
Second, the opening weeks of that sort uber-overt conquest scenario is a race against time, with the time being the ability of the US navy from the rest of the world's oceans to relocate to the Pacific. This is measured in weeks. Add however long you expect you ground force to take onto that. In a sustained offensive, the Chinese want their bridgehead established and expanding before American carrier airpower can bring, lest the reinforced carriers start cutting the sea lanes supporting the attack. That doesn't mean a day-0 landing attempt, but it does mean there's an optimal point before the island is bombarded into dust, but more importantly before the US carrier airpower in the pacific quadruples, to land.
Third, there is a non-trivial chance that Xi or whomever gives the go-ahead convinces themselves that the Taiwanese would collapse / surrender promptly once landed, whether because they convince themselves there won't be any resistance, that the resistance they will face will be brittle and easily crushed, or that once a landing is made the authorities will surrender, especially if if they believe their agents will defect. This is the sort of belief that leads to judgements that prioritize speed and audacity over preparation. Remember- in the 'don't screw up like this' invasion of Ukraine, the Russians did make the vast majority of their gains in those opening days and weeks, even when the ran into a wall, and a lot of that was because there was a bunch of actually-worked preparartions of corrupted government types who were bought off in advance. If that sort of optimism seems unreasonable, consider what level of default optimism you'd need to approve a landing in the first place, and then consider the system and identify who will tell Xi the optimist 'no.'
It also helps to remember that Omaha Beach 1944 was... not actually that well fortified, in the grand scheme of things. As much as it's been valorized / dramatized in the decades sense, even at the time it was attacked because it was a less fortified part of the coast, with the closest German reserve further away. It was not exactly held by the German best (or most). That D-Day remains (for now) the greatest amphibious invasion in history is a testament to how hard the logistics of amphibious warfare is, not the combat-intensity at the point.
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Agree with everything you've said.
I'm slightly more optimistic on the USA. China might be as well drilled, which negates this, but the USA is so dialled. Their institutional culture in the military works damn well. It's full of infinite flaws I'm sure you can name, but they make everything they do look so easy, and then you see any other nation on earth (Israeli airforce is the rare exception) struggle to do what the US does on a regular Tuesday.
You are right though, even that is showing signs of rot.
Total war is "a factory fight" and I think it's going more that way thanks to the increasing sophistication of drones/missiles/interceptors. Also scary when we think about who has the most and the best factories. Yikes!
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There is absolutely no reason to do a direct assault of a small hilly island. The only sensible way to take Taiwan is a siege which the Chinese could even conduct from their homeland with anti ship missiles launched from the shores. Taiwan isn't going to last that long without international trade.
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And the presumed response looks like 2000 anti-ship missiles (or pre-placed torpedos) denying navigation to the entire strait, plus long-range anti-ship missiles used to declare a blockade of Chinese ports (see the Black Sea, but with potentially less regard for continued commercial traffic). Which isn't to say that would work out either, but the idea that Taiwan's defenses would crumble immediately like Iran's have isn't a guarantee either.
The bombardment Iran is getting isn’t even close to what Taiwan would get. It would look more like Iraq or Kosovo, but in a much smaller area.
OK, so China flattens the island (incidentally destroying any facilities of value they might want, or they're destroyed deliberately to deny them to the invaders), but hasn't at all harmed the ability of the US to deny landings or blockade China.
The main strategic value of taking Taiwan is removing the threat to China. Taiwan is in a position where they can easily bottle up Chinese naval traffic from getting into the South China Sea, and yeet missiles into strategic military and economic targets in the Chinese mainland. The chip fabs and any other economic value are a distant second. Ideally China would like to get those, which is probably why they haven’t invaded yet in the first place. China has its own chip fabs, so everyone else would be in a much worse position than China if they got destroyed.
Regarding your second point, for the US to blockade China, the United States would need to:
Taiwan would have to be really suicidal to do that. At the end of the day, Mainland China can bring missiles into range a lot more easily than the US can transport them to Taiwan.
I think that the more serious long term threat for the CCP is that Taiwan is a state which has Chinese culture and is not under their control. A successful, capitalist, proof-of-concept minimal version of China could really be a thorn in their side during an economic downturn. If it was just some expats in the West, that would be much easier to downplay. If it was really a distinct nationality, like Koreans, that would also be easier to tolerate.
But a world in which the pinnacle of technological progress, the most advanced microchips in the world, are produced by Chinese but the Chinese who produce them are not actually from the PRC but the descendants of the side which lost the civil war and retreated to Taiwan must be really painful for the CCP narrative.
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The American economy is not dependent on imports from China, and neither does it rely on exports to it. All it needs to do to blockade China is block the straits of Malacca and Tiran.
Massive immediate shortage of consumer goods, industrial parts and equipment, some kinds of food (which isn’t grown in China but is often shipped there to be packed or processed or canned), and basic military equipment (boots, uniforms, etc).
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