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Ranger has already corrected your overall rosy outlook on our munitions production - we're very behind right now and totally unprepared for a major conflict. But clause here is pretty damning. Even in a drone-driven future, it's laughable to think that standard artillery won't be relevant.
Ranger shifted goalposts. Munitions production and munitions expenditures are two different things.
"Drones" as most people commonly think of them will barely be relevant in a war with China, and that's for the same reason that 155mm shells will barely be relevant in a war with China: they don't have any range to speak of. As the Japanese learned, the Pacific is very big.
The exception for both 155mm and drones in a war with China is for Taiwan because they will plausibly be fighting at the very short ranges that 155mm and FPV drones are relevant for if they get invaded.
Otherwise I invite you to take a look at a map and tell me exactly where the US Army will be shelling China from. The only plausible way to do that would be if the US conducts a REFORGER-style surge of troops to Taiwan. It's not impossible but for reasons I am happy to elaborate on I think it is fairly unlikely.
500 tomahawks a year is terrible too. That’s five months of Russian-level Ukraine war expenditure or about four hours of a war with China.
If they all hit, then the war will be over in four hours. (But note that Raytheon says they intend to scale up to 1,000/year.)
It's hard to tell how much is enough because a lot of it is about the timeframe (1/year is fine if you started building around the Jurassic period, for instance), effectiveness, intended target, delivery vehicle...much of which isn't know.
My thinking is that China's window is closing, but they have a respite with the Iran war. Right now it looks to me like that window is about five years, but that's a guesstimate and could change due to further actions by the United States or China or third parties.
China wants to LARP as Burgerland in WWII, and enter the war after everyone is already exhausted from fighting each other for years. Iran isn’t even going to really get started until after midterms in November.
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I'm not a military historian, but looking at the blue parts of the globe and saying "Oop! Well, artillery won't be involved!" doesn't make sense.
If we're talking a month-long, high-tech fight that ends decisively? Sure. How many wars, not games, work that way? We're discussing in this thread only one of the more recent quagmires we've gotten into, and one that stretched for 2 decades.
I think the general implicit argument for this is that a Taiwan conflict either (1) doesn't result in land battle (invasion), in which case large tube artillery is not tremendously useful, or (2) does have land combat, indicating a degradation of naval/air forces to the point where supply lines for artillery aren't necessarily available.
By the pound, anti-ship and anti-air weapons are probably more useful up front. There could be some role for tube artillery as anti-ship, but I'm not familiar with options there. Or that some weird middle ground appears where supply lines are still functional and there is a land war.
It'd be incredibly useful for Taiwan during the defense, but as you said, if it drags on long enough for production and resupply, it'd be because the war has taken on a different shape wherein tube artillery is useless.
One way of looking at it: I believe the Marines are no longer interested in tanks, but are very interested in being able to get missile batteries set up on islands/launch them from the amphib assault decks. Should tell you the sort of ranges/capabilities they expect to deal with.
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I really do see the point, and of course logistically a tomahawk missile is nicer to have than an artillery shell for a given weight and volume.
I just think the chance of the war degrading into a sloshy grind where we're attempting to subjugate China and the difference in cost and un-jam-ability of traditional shells becomes more valuable than most people expect. Even America would have to start making choices based on effectiveness per dollar in that scenario.
A great historical analogue here is that the Gatling Gun, much like the drone, was going to end protracted conflict and supplant the infantryman's rifle. That didn't happen.
To be clear here - you're suggesting that a Taiwan conflict could end in a land invasion of Mainland China?
I believe a conflict with China - Taiwan or no - would eventually involve terrestrial warfare, yes.
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There’s a good chance you would see significant ground combat in Vietnam, Korea, or any of the island nations of Southeast Asia, plus your regular island-hopping to secure supply lines and airfields. Probably would be a lot of ground fighting with India too, but I imagine the Indians could mostly handle that themselves.
The indian military has not acquitted itself well recently.
Is there any good understanding of how the recent dust-up with Pakistan went?
The sort of muddy impression that I have right now is that Pakistan gave India a bloody nose and India turned around and drop-kicked Pakistan across the ring. But finding objective Western documentation of the conflict seems difficult.
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I suppose it is true that a war with China could in theory last until continental drift made 155mm relevant again, yes, but if that happens I think we will have plenty of time to spin up production lines. Otherwise, the amount of time the war drags on doesn't really change the basic dynamics involved with the tyranny of distance, does it?
If that's not the scenario you are envisioning, please explain to me the scenario you envision US forces using 155mm against China in. If you're trying to get me to concede that my I was overstating the degree of unimportance of 155mm (which I agree can plausibly be used by forces on Taiwan in an invasion scenario – and indeed the US and Taiwan are working on joint 155mm production, I assume with this in mind – or obviously if the Korean peninsula heats up – which is not a foregone conclusion in the case of a war with China) then I will happily concede that may have very slightly overstated the irrelevance of 155mm. But if you think that it is an important production item for the US military in a China contingency specifically, I would very much like to know how you think it will be used.
It's not particularly unusual for the course of a naval war to be essentially decided in a single battle – this happened during both World Wars. This does not mean that the war is over after the battle, but the destruction of the Japanese carriers at Midway and the inability of the Germans to break out into the Atlantic at Jutland set the stage for the conclusion of the war. It's quite possible that any war over Taiwan would be decided in the course of 48 hours or so (if it is not, it's probably good for the US, as it means that the US qualitative advantage in submarines will likely become increasingly relevant.)
What is particularly weird is that the surface navy theatre of WW1 (the U-boat war was separate) was decided by a single battle that was a tactical draw.
More common than you might expect.
The Japanese learned this the hard way over WW2. Coral Sea, maybe Leyte Gulf—tactical draws and even victories are disastrous if the initial conditions are stacked against you.
Since the RN had such a numeric advantage over the Hochseeflotte, a status quo with everyone held up for repairs favored them.
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If we want to be pedantic- the destruction of the German overseas-deployed squadron earlier in the war decided the outcome of the battle of Jutland, which changed the conclusion of the war from 'draw' to 'decisive central powers defeat'.
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Well, for example, going to war against Japan (an island!) involved heavy ground battle all through Burma.
Imagine, if you will, America objects to a Chinese blockade of Taiwan, or some other inciting incident. First, there is the problem of preventing the larger, closer power simply out producing you. Yes, you can bomb and so forth to some degree, but that requires resupply and avoiding AA defences and at some point I think it's likely that you're going to want to take and hold ground within China. If you can't, there is really only so much you can do. You don't necessarily get to say if you want to have a land war or not. Russia didn't want to need artillery in Ukraine.
Furthermore, not even credibly being able to do it then constrains all your options if you were ever to escalate, and both parties know it, so even capabilities that you never intend to deploy can be relevant.
I do not think that the United States would ever attempt to take and hold ground within China, both because China has effectively unlimited warm bodies to throw at the problem along interior lines and the United States does not have either of those things, and because if the war was going so badly that China was in serious danger of being occupied it would resort to nuclear weapons to prevent regime change.
The US cannot credibly threaten to seize and hold territory inside of China (raids might be another thing, but realistically if attempted I expect that would look like DEVGRU derping around in the bushes with a laser designator or something, not anything kinetic) and procuring more 155mm shells does not change that. Furthermore, because the United States is in this dynamic attempting to preserve the status quo, it has no real need to take and hold territory. The US can credibly threaten to use nuclear weapons, and that's about it.
[Edit to add: I think that some of the militarized reefs and such are potentially open to ground assault. But that's very different from mainland China.]
This is the original meaning of "Never get involved in a land war in Asia".
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Awkward counter-argument. The allied strategic interest in the Burma campaign wasn't to try and out-produce and then out-shoot Japan shell for shell, but to maximize the Japanese logistic costs as Japan's over-expansion made it vulnerable. If, say, the Americans had reallocated naval production to artillery shell production in order to bask in artillery overmatch, it would have been a really dunderheaded move.
Russia did, however, want to have a war against a contiguous neighbor in artillery range, which in turn gave artillery a ready application and logistical tail.
If you wanted to escalate a war against China, artillery would be pretty marginal. Before you could mass artillery in range, you'd have to overcome the Chinese investments in anti-access into the theater in the first place. If you could do that, then you could just shut down China's import routes, which artillery wouldn't be particularly relevant in doing.
This seems overly optimistic about the power of sea- and air-based warfare. I'm far from the first person to note that America is fundamentally a sea power and struggles to prevent sanction-busting on land. China is a land power. I'm not saying that America couldn't make life very annoying with a sea-based blockade, but as a guy on the far left of those bell curve memes, it seems to me that war often doesn't end up going the way you think it's going to go, and confidently saying you aren't going to need something is rarely a wise move.
Were China to reorient all of its maritime imports and exports to overland traffic through the Siberian Steppe, over the Hindu Kush, or across the jungles of South Asia to bypass an American naval blockade, that would be one of the most fortuitous self-destructions of a national economic model in modern history.
It would also be really, really vulnerable to the sort of low-cost/highly-transportable small precision munitions that would be getting a lot, lot more attack vectors to target Chinese commerce than are available within China itself.
In the defense-industrial sense? Heavens no.
China is a maritime-dependent mercantilist. It economic capital is built upon the cost-efficiencies of maritime traffic for both imports to feed its factories and exports to generate the commercial surpluses to pay for the imports to feed said factories, including things like artillery shell factories. For all that China makes its rail investments a matter of national pride, it has not come close to making it competitive at scale with maritime shipping.
If you want to have any sort of economies of scale competition with China, the first and most important thing is to cut off its most efficient economic import and processing capabilities, not to shell its factories with artillery.
Does it also seem to you a wise idea to confidently insistent you need more of a weapon system without looking at a map of where it might be employed?
If not, would you consider reconsidering about whether some things about wars are actually consistently predictable, not least of which is the impacts of geography and range?
Not who you're responding to, but this isn't the argument. The "most powerful military in the world" should be able to produce common weaponry at meaningful scale, and I'll repeat that there being an ocean between us and China is not the nail in the coffin you believe it to be. Most of our wars have crossed water.
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Ultimately we're at the point of a differing opinion. I apologize for using "laughable" in my original response to you, and see valid points here.
I think that, classically, even professional strategists tend to repeatedly underestimate certain components of warfare. Snipers are a good example, and artillery is another.
I'm fine with a differing opinion, and I 100% agree that artillery is under-appreciated. It's not glamorous and (ironically) is not expensive, but it remains extremely deadly.
However that doesn't get me to thinking it will be particularly important in a naval war.
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If you cram a 100000 geran jet class drones in a carrier with proper starlink overlords you can totally turn off Shanghai. Or Taipei. Or LA.
Most people think of FPV drones (or maybe, like, Predator drones) in the military context nowadays, I think. I agree that "drones" (low-cost cruise missiles) like LUCAS/Geran are likely to be relevant.
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The sorts of surveillance and missile drones (though likely not the particular model) we're using in Iran will definitely be relevant. So will a lot of "one-way attack drones". If the sort of anti-personnel drones used in Ukraine become relevant, we're already in deep trouble.
Yes, I agree. LUCAS seems relevant, for instance.
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I get it, but standard artillery is essentially only relevant to a land war in Europe. We're already ~fighting a land war in Europe, and as much as I'd love to liberate Sweden, that's the only one happening in the theatre for the foreseeable future. Latam/Middle East/Africa, the opposing forces will not be competent/coherent enough for you to need conventional artillery (with the exception of Iran, which is geographically un-invadable anyway), and any China conflict is a purely air/naval one, unless you're expecting trench warfare in Taipei. The shell shortage is damning not because shells are universally critical munitions, but because of what it says about the rest of our military supply chain.
Aren’t 90% of casualties now from drones. Artillery is only relevant for exceptional expensive rounds and systems because they are otherwise stationary targets to drones that are way cheaper, more accurate, and longer range?
Not necessarily. Artillery is relevant when there are bigger things you want to explode, like proper infantry columns, tanks, and whatnot. That said, the cutting-edge of anti-tank artillery rounds is itself a drone. If you're dug in, shelling the area is a lot less effective.
In this context, drones are very sophisticated anti-personnel cruise missiles that operate in the same effective range as a mortar (that have some anti-tank usage as well; it's not hard to imagine sticking a Bonus "warhead" onto a drone, but it would be quite inefficient to do that because AI targeting and spotting is good enough and you have much better effective range with that).
That's fantastic for dug in positions and trench warfare, because you can just crash the explosive right into/on top of the enemy (and perhaps the only scenario in which a shotgun could be effective against such a weapon)- it just takes time and effort to do that right now because you have to have your guy sitting there driving the thing, and you have to spend money and drones to train him too.
I think that drone response is itself mostly going to be automated, but building those kinds of things takes time. Micro-caliber CIWS systems, EW systems listening for a drone lifting off prompting immediate and automated counterbattery fire, etc. They'll get there, they just aren't there now.
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