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I'm sorry, but it seems a bit of an unjustified update. Taiwan timeline likely didn't change a bit.
Right, the war with Iran has already wasted years' worth of production of interceptors, and you've even got a $1.1B radar and it seems multiple of those vaunted THAAD systems destroyed. This looks extemely bad for any future conflict with China but not because you'll take time to replenish this stuff. I've given to understand that Americans have a certain logarithmic sense for prowess of different adversary nations: Venezuela and Cuba are like "5-6", Iran and Russia are "7", China is maybe "8". In reality the differences are measured in the orders of magnitude. If Iran can exhaust these interceptors in a week, a massive Chinese strike would probably take hours to burn through Guam, Okinawa, and whatever is on Taiwan. They're making 31 million cars a year, just for example; mobilized, they can make not thousands but tens of millions of flying mopeds if they want. Interceptor-based defense is just inadequate against a superior industrial power; it barely works against an inferior one.
Yes, one can argue that this doctrine is getting obsolete if DEW-based defense advances, but similar logic applies to whatever comes next, and what's happening now isn't a case of getting caught by surprise – like a third of your naval power is in the theater, amid long-established bases, with local cooperation; and you've been watching the war in Ukraine for over 4 years, these are the same damn Shaheds (maybe with a few modifications) Russians had been using early on, from the OG Shahed maker. Where are Palmer Luckey's Roadrunners or Anvils knocking them out for cheaps? All these AI-driven turrets? Lasers, EW systems? The anti-ballistic front is less embarrassing but still economically sad. In light of all this, it's unclear to me why China would ever care about the "opportunity" presented by the US exhausting interceptors elsewhere.
This is a strange take too. Which observers believed that the US can't enjoy air superiority against Iran? Some doompillers who watched one too many recruitment ad with LGBT representation?
What actually matters is, for instance, whether they can detect and effectively engage your stealth aircraft. And this war is not teaching us much because Iranians don't have any modern Chinese assets or equivalents. I've been trying to find confirmations of hits of anything of that sort, because the entire internet is overflowing with claims how American-Israeli Power has proven inefficacy of Chinese temu radars/missiles. So far I've only learned that CENTCOM has taken out an HQ-2 SAM with something like a JDAM. It might be Sayyid 2, though. In any case both are close derivatives of the Soviet 75 Dvina, and 75 here is not for the year of commissioning, it actually dates back to 1957. It's probably the most widely deployed SAM in history, you've had trouble with it in Vietnam, and have learned a thing or two since then. There are some claims by pro-PRC third worldists and hawks alike that «China Arms Iran with 700km Anti-Stealth Radar Capable of Tracking F-35 and B-2 — YLC-8B» , and consequently now gloating that those radars have been destroyed. It's not impossible, after all having a long-range radar unit by itself doesn't imply you can react effectively, but I just hope that Americans and Israelis show photos of the wreckage. Same story with alleged Chinese missiles and everything else.
In Venezuela, it's not clear if any air defense systems were even operational, or stuck in half-disassembled mode. Looking up this stuff one is struck by the vast overrepresentation of American and Indian content, indeed Americans and Indians are becoming culturally indistinguishable.
This is just … I don't know how to describe it, some mix of naive idealism and narcissism. Is Xi a dictator or nah? Why would he need a "greenlight" in the form of example of belligerence from his main pacing threat? Where would he cash it in? Nobody important in, say, Europe will claim that whacking Iran is morally or legally equivalent to conquering Taiwan, so it changes nothing and is only good for domestic rhetoric about Western hypocrisy. I guess Americans are so powerful that they can afford to be solipsistic, and so might overrate the value of domestic moral rhetoric in the general case. But even on that front, China is quite unified in believing that reunification, including by violent means, is justified. United States is no standard or paragon. It's not making invasion more likely.
I think they've been quite sure they'll lose access to oil imports in the case of the full-scale war with the US, and will have to fight for it.
Basically I believe Americans strongly overrate how much their antics in random powerless Evil Nations affect Chinese plans one way or another way. They're just not informative.
If you think I'm a Chinese shill, here's a Chinese hawk with impeccable credentials: Tanner Greer.
The idea that the Iran operation was mostly about China, that it fundamentally changes Chinese perceptions of American strength, or that it has already altered the balance of power between China and America in any real way, is bizarre to me.
We know what metrics the Chinese judge their competition with the US by. We know the military measures they care about and we know the non-military elements of national power that they think are most important.
Very honestly: the upcoming war powers resolutions vote on Iran will likely matter more to Chinese perceptions of American capacity (if the admin fails to get the vote) than the actual military attacks on Iran. Not hard to predict the sort of analysis the Xie Tao types will write up.
To fundamentally change Chinese perceptions (or for that matter, realities, as IMHO the Chinese are largely looking at the right metrics) the Iran operation would have to change one’s answer to any of the following questions:
Anyways you get the idea. The Party leadership sees geopolitical competition between the United States and China as a contest of technological supremacy. The long run weaknesses they see in the United States are political and cultural; in turn, the thing they fear most is ideological subversion of their own regime. Militarily they prepare for a no-holds barred fight over the waters of the west Pacific —the key factors there are the willingness of US, Japan, and Taiwan to be a part of that fight and then our ability to sustain it in the face of great losses in both men and machinery. The Iran stuff is orthogonal to almost all of that.
Good post and good quoted post too.
I think the way his X post framed the question makes it a mismatch for the argument I was advancing. I agree that militarily the conflict doesn't change the calculus that much but if it does it's in the direction of "China would win". Maybe I wasn't clear enough about that. Or maybe it's that I think his "political" bullets are missing a bullet or two.
What it changes is how threats are communicated and how those threats can evolve into action. And it does in a big way. First of all, China must be realizing around now that they have no meaningful way of communicating their military capability to the world, but especially to US and regional allies, in a way they will respect and find authentic. Simply because China's military basically doesn't get used for anything and hasn't for decades (and no, building artificial reefs in the SCS doesn't count). So no proof of concept demonstrations. And they've been loud and annoying for decades about Taiwan so leaders are desensitized. Now, as a world citizen that's awesome and cool but it doesn't help them in the sense that a big stick doesn't work as a threat if people don't see its size correctly. (By the way, I also don't believe for a second that China's relative noninterventionism would or will continue, because the rhetoric around 'self-determinism' is not only just as fake as say America's in the Mexican-American war, but also because Exhibit A about ignoring self determination is literally the topic of this discussion.)
In Kissinger's setup, China has the capacity to inflict damage, probably has (internally) resolve and willingness to follow through, but cannot meaningfully communicate this resolve nor this capacity, at least not at scale. That's a crucial missing piece of the trifecta, which means that China's deterrence power is fundamentally flawed. The contrast is obvious: America not only makes threats but makes good on them and other countries fully recognize those threats, even more so after events of the last year.
Why, might you ask, does deterrence even matter? Overall, China patently still prefers (and prefers strongly) peaceful reunification for, I think, super obvious reasons, and prefers a military takeover without fighting anyone besides Taiwan equally as strongly over igniting a regional war with US or Japanese involvement (or even worse, Philippines and SK and Australia or something too). That is: political takeover >> military takeover >> military takeover and a fight with the US >> military takeover and a fight with the US and a fight with multiple regional allies of theirs, all separated by significant gaps. If you're proposing that they'd actually prefer a fight, or feels ambivalent about if the US or other allies intervene, or some other way I have that list of preferences wrong, I'm all ears to that argument but I don't think that's what you are saying? Because that changes the discussion considerably, if so.
Even if you're an internal, hawkish CCP member in the PLA, a war is risky as fuck even in optimistic scenarios, and the global fallout is probably even more unpredictable than that. So yeah, if I'm China I'm much more concerned about our chances of pulling off a Taiwanese takeover without anyone else intervening because that's the preferred solution anyways. ALL of that is downstream from deterrence (i.e. how much respect and fear you generate), and if China's deterrence has a problem the whole strategy has a problem. Thus, the second quote in the OP.
Briefly, btw, I think if we do use his list: 2, 3, and to a lesser extent 4 (base hardening, air power, space/cyber power) are a bit TBD, but maybe. 6 (casualty tolerance) might come into play but I think it's a useless data point. 7 (worth a war) probably nudges them a bit towards yes. 8 (war fever) is almost hilariously irrelevant, because Trump didn't even try to whip any up. 9 (ally commitment), the Pacific allies might get a low-scale idea how local populations might react or how their US bases would be exposed. 14 (economic damage to China) will be a very interesting data point to look at, TBD right now. 17 (deindustrialization) could go either way, but this conflict will probably have a minor impact. 18 (American innovation) works slightly against China here: the saying is that the military always prepares to fight "the last war" and the "last war" is increasingly looking more similar to China than it did 10 or 15 years ago. 19 (China's foreign influence) also works against China in a bigger way: they seem to be entirely impotent to affect this conflict in any meaningful way, even diplomatically. I think that's a bit of a reality check moment for them. Unrelated technically, but for 20 (counterintel) China just hacked the FBI pretty bad, as far as I can tell they are dominating there.
Why does this matter? The big geopolitical question in 2027 isn't going to be China's capacity to deter America - it will be America (plus some bit player allies)'s capacity to deter China from invading Taiwan. If China wants to attack Taiwan and thinks they can win, they just do it. The act is self-communicating.
The core point that Tanner Greer is making is that America curb-stomping a weak enemy in days rather than the expected weeks* doesn't change the credibility in Chinese eyes of American deterrence very much.
* No, there isn't a huge body of establishment Iran doves claiming that Iran could beat America. The standard Iran dove argument was (and is) that
I addressed this:
I stated right at the top that in terms of an actual conflict, I think China would win relatively decisively. But even if you think you will probably win, that's not the only option on the table. I think that on balance, military options should be downweighted because of pre-existing preferences to take it over without US intervention. Why?
To oversimplify, to take Taiwan without a major intervention, you're counting on one of these:
Here's my logic. Since China has realized that it's bad at meaningfully bluffing, this makes the relative chances of pulling off a non-intervention takeover much lower in relation to the risk of an intervention. The risk shifts to military conflict. And of course in all of this, there's the "nothing happens/waiting" scenario. Since China's "utility function" is afraid of risk, and weights a nonintervention so much higher than a risky direct conflict, the overall effect of this risk shift is, somewhat counterintuitively but valid mathematically, towards "nothing happens". That's what I'm trying to get across: not all these options are of equal desirability, and this new reality where Chinese deterrence is ineffective means the most desirable options are less likely to work.
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If China wanted to demonstrate their military prowess, they could simply march over their border with Burma and put an end to the civil war there. No one would care enough to stop them and they have a reasonable enough humanitarian justification for intervening. For whatever reason, they seem content to operate through proxies and occasional arms sales for now.
Burma does not impress anyone -- wake me when they head into India...
Why would China want to do that? It's not like the US ever fought a nuclear power and for good reason.
Doing easy things is not a good demonstration of military prowess -- that doesn't make the hard things smart to do, but it would be impressive if China could take territory from India. (preferrably without getting nuked, but AIUI there's not a real MAD situation in play with India -- so I'd still be impressed if the Chinese got their hair mussed a little)
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I think the reason is looking at the shitshow of American and Russian interventions across the world and deciding do nothing and win is a pretty good ethos.
Yeah unless the USA start directly hitting China or maybe some crazy AGI situation it seems pretty clear they'll overtake sooner or later economically on the current trend. Why spazz and complicate things
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I don't think air superiority is the right term for what the US enjoys above iran... What's above air supremacy? air superlativity?
The Coalition lost 70 planes in the first gulf war. Are there any confirmed plane losses, aside from the three who fell to Kuwaiti friendly fire? Or is this propaganda?
And the entire leadership was wiped out, that's new too. I thought the iranians had a chance to damage an american warship, since the ukrainians and argentinians managed to sink russian and english boats. It's a complete massacre, come on.
Firstly the US lost another F-15 to Iran, apparently they rescued the pilot, also lost a bunch of drones...
Secondly, air superiority in NATO parlance means 'the degree of dominance in the air battle of one force over another that permits the conduct of operations by the former and its related land, sea, and air forces at a given time and place without prohibitive interference by the opposing force.' It is not derived from calculating losses of aircraft.
Thirdly, there is nothing above air supremacy. If the US possessed air supremacy US forces would not be under air attack.
The US doesn't actually have air superiority, partially on a definitional level because this is a weird air-only conflict... Both sides are just bombing eachother. Also, the US doesn't have air superiority because Iran is also launching their own air attacks against US forces and Israel, at times and places of Iran's choosing. This is why the US is launching all these standoff attacks and long in-air refuelling chains to bomb Iran, why even Hegseth is saying it will take some time to achieve air superiority. If the US held air superiority they could move closer in, secure the straits of Hormuz against air attack and focus on bombing Iran.
Yeah, I believe the paradigm was mostly invented as a complement to combined arms warfare, and as you point out since this isn't traditional combined arms warfare (no ground troops) it doesn't really apply.
However I think it's too early to really say definitively how close to air supremacy they are, insofar as that makes sense to say. They're being careful, but clearly have a desire to start using more guided bombs than missiles (or even gravity bombs). Looking at the news, as of one or two days ago the US started using its nonstealth bombers: B-52's and B-1B's in Iran. That sort of hints toward yes, but IMO true air supremacy these days at least implies that you can use helicopters more or less freely as well, which is plainly not the case right now.
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The war's not over, there's still going to be plenty of time for Iran to damage an American warship or shoot down American aircraft at this rate.
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What is the evidence that it was friendly fire, by the way?
The fact that the video was taken in Kuwait makes it highly likely that it was.
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