Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.
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An Iranian news service has published a clear photograph (Twitter link, possibly slower Iranian link) of a US gravity bomb hitting the B1 bridge in Karaj.
Twitter ID's the bomb as a GBU-31. It's definitely looks to be some sort of JDAM, and it does not appear to have a wing kit (such as in a JDAM-ER) which means it was dropped at a very short range, likely inside of 15 miles, and in broad daylight. Karaj is just outside Tehran, which means that either US forces flew several hundred miles over Iranian territory to drop gravity bombs, or, intriguingly, the US approached over the Caspian Sea, indicating an overflight route over, probably, Azerbaijan.
Either way, I am going to take a lil victory lap after my assessment a couple days ago that the US was, in fact, using gravity bombs inside of Iranian territory. This was very close to Tehran, suggesting that the US has a high degree of access even to areas one would expect to be highly defended.
Still here? Good, because I actually wanted to talk about China. Well, China and Iran. Or Iran, China, and the US.
Earlier this year, I read Strategy of Denial by Elbridge Colby. Colby makes a very concise argument for why the US should focus on countering China. Basically, Colby argues that Asia is the most significant part of the world, with the largest chunk of the global economy, and that it was essentially the area where the United States could be critically harmed by having someone else hegemonize the region. Colby dismisses the idea that the US' paramount security concerns are in Europe or the Middle East, and argues that it is important to prevent China from dominating Asia to avoid damaging US interests and the quality of life of American citizens. I highly recommend it, just as a read, specifically because Colby's writing style is extremely straightforward - I expected a much denser book.
Colby is now Under Secretary of Defense for Policy. Needless to say, some things have changed since Strategy of Denial was written in 2021. The security situation in Europe has arguably deteriorated significantly, and the war to defend those American interests in the Middle East that Colby said were not all that important is going strong. But the reason I want to revisit the book isn't to dunk on the fact that we're very clearly expending a lot of munitions that would be very relevant to a fight with China fighting Iran. It's because of the specific threat that Colby identifies from China. Colby's argument, hearkening back to the domino theory from the Cold War, is that Taiwan is specifically where the US and its regional Pacific partners should draw the line. If China starts taking territory it will be better positioned to add subsequent countries into its regional hegemony, either by force or coercive diplomacy. Colby identifies China starting from where it has the best relative strength (against Taiwan) and moving from there against other nations in the region, a tactic 4X players everywhere understand intuitively.
Is it just me, or does that seem familiar?
How about snatching Maduro (possibly the weakest American adversary), toppling the government of Cuba, and then moving to take out Iran? (a much stronger and more capable foe). Wait, that's not quite what happened - Cuba is still alive and kicking (for now). But if you squint, it almost looks like the Trump administration read Strategy of Denial and then...decided to ignore all of its recommendations for the US in lieu of pursuing its recommendations for China.
I don't know - I just thought it was an intriguing thought, but it's not clear to me that is what is going on. What is clear to me is that the US is probably now at the nadir of its strength relative to China in the Pacific. Over the next five years, US munitions production levels are slated to ramp up to extremely high numbers, but this will take time. If China wants to invade Taiwan (and I think that they would prefer not to, to be fair) the best time is probably while the US is stuck in the Middle East bombing stuff, the second-best time is as soon as you can afterwards.
How about it, China? How's it going?
Well...maybe not so great. The PLA has been gutted pretty badly by purges, which are also hitting high-level weapons engineers. I'm pretty skeptical of the theory that this is because recent US successes demonstrated that Chinese weapons were vaporware - it seems too neat, too America-centric.
But I do wonder if the US had some reason to believe that China was not going to move in 2027. Some reason to think they could mop up a few holdouts before beginning the real pivot to the Pacific?
Or maybe Hesgeth really was taken aback by Iran chimping out in retaliation for the decapitation strike, and maybe Xi is keeping all of his "purged" generals in a backroom somewhere waiting to spring them out as soon as he pushes the big button.
I too read and enjoyed Colby's book.
How much do purges hurt the PLA? The strength of the Chinese military is not in their professionalism or training or experience but in their numbers and the scale of the munitions and technology that Chinese industry can supply them with. They can learn how to fight as they go, adapt and improve in wartime. They can promote new, younger and more talented generals. They cannot make a new industrial base in wartime.
When we think about military purges, we all think back to the Soviet Union pre-WW2. Military purges reduced their combat effectiveness by some degree, sure. But the strength of the Red Army was not in fighting well. They improved over the war but never fought as well as Germany did. They didn't need to be especially competent to prevail. They had mass!
The US seems to be purging generals right now, during a major conflict. The Army Chief of Staff is a fairly high profile role. Furthermore, it's significant in that the US doesn't have a China-tier industrial base, totalitarian-state casualty tolerance or that gigantic recruiting pool. The US needs to be fundamentally more capable and competent to prevail against a much bigger country.
Extremely high... by US standards. Annual production of 400 THAAD interceptors in 7 years? The Chinese will burn through that in a week, probably on day 1. If the THAAD batteries are even there, they might be sent off to the Middle East by then.
There is currently no TNT production in the US. That's part of the 'munitions buildup' - restarting TNT production from zero.
Does anyone know how much TNT China produces? Probably a lot more than 0 tonnes a year, maybe 30,000 to 60,000 tonnes. 2000 tonnes a year, all things considered, won't make much difference. If the US is aiming to match Russia in munitions production, there's no chance of beating China.
How is the US supposed to outrace China in scaling munitions production? The Chinese industrial base has cheaper components, cheaper energy, an ocean of engineers and machine tools frothing about.
If the generals being purged are incompetent, the purges will help the PLA, at least over the medium-long term. If the generals being purged are competent, presumably it will hurt them. It is unclear to me which of the purged generals fall into which category. In the short term, because it does not appear that Xi has yet filled all of the purged positions, it will likely hurt simply because it is hard to execute in a major war without a clear chain of command. (China already has enough of a problem with the "clear chain of command" because they have a dual-track military authority.)
One area where I expect the US purges to be different than the Chinese ones is that I expect the Americans will have another ACOS quickly. The Chinese Central Military Commission still has not been re-staffed after Xi's purges – although perhaps Xi discovered that too many cooks were in the kitchen. There can be a certain virtue to keeping staffing lean.
THAAD, Patriot PAC-3 MSE (supposed to increase to 2000/year), SM-3 (set to increase to 100/year) SM-6 (set to increase to 500/year) and probably the AIM-174 are all anti-ballistic missile interceptors. The Taiwanese also have domestic production of the TK-3 ABM, and (if it becomes relevant) South Korea has their own domestic analogues to the Patriot and THAAD.
On a quick Google, DoD estimated last year that China has around 1,300 MRBMs and 300 launchers and only about 550 IRBMs and 300 IRBM launchers, adding 50 of each since 2024. China's more numerous SRBMs won't range Guam and most of Japan, and the MRBMs will only range Japan. So the US pre-ramp-up produces more ballistic missile interceptors with THAAD systems alone (nearly 100/year) than China produces ballistic missiles that could range Guam (if DoD estimates are even ballpark accurate). Maybe the question we should be asking is "How is China supposed to outrace the US in scaling munitions production?" And indeed, the Chinese are reportedly asking this themselves.
And ballistic missiles will be spread pretty thin in a war – for instance, there are probably around 80 airports in Japan along with airstrips relevant for tactical aviation that aircraft could in theory disperse to in an emergency. Even if the US and Japan had zero interceptors, China could easily spend 400 missiles just to crater each runway for...as little as 4 hours.
I don't think TNT is used for most of the high-end weapons systems – I think that would RDX (of which we have a domestic supply). I believe the Army wants TNT for arty shells, which will not be the most relevant in a Pacific conflict.
As I've discussed in here before, for a Taiwan contingency the US needs to stop an amphibious invasion and/or a blockade, which is very different from fighting a set-piece battle on the open sea, or something.
I don't believe these estimates. A country that produces vastly more steel, chemicals, cars, electronics and drones than the US can logically also produce far more ballistic missiles than the US can produce missile interceptors. It's reasonable to expect that China has an advantage in missile production, even before considering that missile defence is inherently more complicated than missile offence.
Ballistic missiles aren't easily countable, they're concealed in depots deep underground. Even the launchers are concealed and camouflaged.
China conducts more missile tests than the rest of the world combined. Per CNN, they've added 2 million square meters of floor space (including research) in missile facilities. The US is adding nowhere near that much.
https://us.cnn.com/2025/11/07/world/china-missile-production-expansion-revealed-satellite-images-intl-invs
Furthermore, we should be considering protracted warfare. Even if the stockpile is 1800 missiles, what matters is production rates 1 year in, 2 years into the war. Major wars often take longer than expected, stockpiles are expended and what matters is the scaling of production. Ukraine is a good example.
That's right but it's significant in showing where the US MIC is. They aren't remotely near China in terms of production. The US also seem to have fallen behind in high-end explosives like CL-20, which America invented but seems to struggle in deploying.
It's completely plausible for the Korean peninsula to see large ground battles requiring huge quantities of TNT. The South Koreans may be serious and proficient but there is only a certain amount that South Korea can do against a gigantic country like China.
Well sure. I could produce more ballistic "missiles" than the US can produce missile interceptors. A ballistic missile is just a rocket that goes up and comes down again. But I think the Chinese have higher standards for their ballistic missiles than that.
This depends on what you are trying to hit. The kill chain for an interceptor is much simpler than the kill chain for an anti-ship ballistic missile of the kind that China has invested in.
There are a number of ways to keep an eye on these sorts of things if you really want to. For instance, you can likely estimate the number of missiles and launchers from the volume of the excavation, which you can observe from orbit. You can count the launchers deployed in snap drills, or estimate the number of launchers from the size of Chinese units, which you can determine with some degree of precision by sneaking a look at their housing allocations or catering or cell phone mapping or boot procurement or the number of porta-potties they use.
Whether or not the US actually bothers to do these things, I have no idea.
This is true, although I would argue that naval-centric wars tend to be more decisive. But I could be wrong.
Do you know what is directly analogous to a ballistic missile? Space launch vehicles. And space launches are relatively hard to hide, so we can use that as a relatively objective measure of US/China prowess. As it turns out, the US had about twice as many space launches as China. Since we're now estimating stockpiles by analogous goods instead of intelligence estimates, and since orbital rocket launches are much more analogous to ballistic missiles than steel, chemicals, cars, electronics and drones, we can agree that the US has a considerable edge in manufacturing ballistic missiles over China. Right?
No, the actual truth is that China outproduces the US in production in a great many areas (such a ballistic missiles and surface ships) and that there are several areas (such as submarines and orbital launch capability) where the US is ahead of China (both in quality and in scale.) Keep in mind that US has been attempting ballistic missile defense for more than three decades; the first Chinese conventional IRBM, the DF-26, became operational about a decade ago. It's not surprising that the US might have an edge in producing ABMs relative to Chinese IRBMs, particularly if the Chinese are (intelligently, in my mind) iterating their weapons design before committing to mass production. An antiship ballistic missile with a maneuvering warhead and glide vehicle is a very exquisite weapon!
Lucky South Korea is a major manufacturer of TNT. I would be surprised if China decided to escalate horizontally against South Korea instead of attempting to deter them, but what do I know.
Does China produce infinitely more TNT than the US? Factcheck: True. This says something important about the state of the US MIC. Chemical precursors, machine tools, component parts for what the US does produce, magnets, electronics - many of these are derived from China. What American production there is of important munitions and explosives is too small-scale.
OK... So how is US ABM production supposed to outscale Chinese missile production?
Firstly, you assume or bring up the idea that the US will hit or exceed its production targets in 7 years. The US routinely, almost constantly, misses munitions production targets because of industrial weakness, shortages of engineers and skilled workers, a lack of proficiency in quickly establishing factories and a poor regulatory environment. China doesn't have these problems.
Secondly, China's (much larger by floorspace!) expansion of missile production has to be outpaced by this US expansion. Maybe they'll add a few million more m^2 of production capacity in the next seven years. Or maybe they intensify their efforts further. If the US can intensify their efforts, why can't China?
Thirdly, the ABMs have to be actually accurate and performant. THAAD right now has been tested and found wanting against Iranian missile and drone attacks, of which China can surely launch at a much greater scale. It would be bizarre for a mid-size country, under severe sanctions, with 1/10th the engineers and 1/100th the money of China to outperform China quantitatively or qualitatively. Realistically THAAD will need to fire several interceptors against inbound missiles to achieve a good probability of a kill. It's an inherently uphill battle. Even with Chinese anti-ship ballistic missiles (which do have internal terminal guidance), judging by anti-ship missile history it's always been harder to defend than attack.
Finally, THAAD and the rest of the munitions scaling needs to meet US strategic goals in a war with China. The victory condition for America is not simply 'defend Guam from being bombed to unusability' or 'defend airbases in Japan' but also to defend Taiwan's independence, which requires somehow securing long shipping lanes of food, fertilizer and LNG to a small island off the coast of China. It would require not only destroying the PLAN but also the bulk of the Chinese air force and missile (including SRBMs) and drone forces, depriving China of their coercive abilities. It's an incredibly difficult task. It would be much easier to secure the straits of Hormuz. And yet the US has shown no sign of being able to do that, thus far.
The US has been attempting ballistic missile defence since the 1950s and at no point has it been cost-efficient against a strong power. It isn't cost-efficient today against Iran and I can't see why it would be against China.
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