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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.)
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.]
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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?
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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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