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That's true, I meant 'scale up production enough to counter' but if you interpret it literally, then sure.
I would be very interested to read your topline on that.
I don't understand what you mean by topline, so maybe this comment is not a good response.
Anyway, China is going to be making a lot more missiles and drones than Iran, surely. Iran seems to have burned through much of the remaining US stockpile in a short conflict. US munitions production doesn't seem adequate for great power wars - see all these issues with shells.
(Also I conceptualize Korea getting dragged into a US-China war one way or another, so there would be a major ground element where shell production is significant)
I don't see what cause there is for optimism there is in waging a war of attrition against China. The US needs a cost-efficiency/qualitative advantage that existing weapons don't seem to provide. Otherwise it's folly to take on a power with 4x US population and many more engineers. A Chinese engineer is no worse than an American engineer, as time passes they'll have more breakthroughs in military or economic spheres. I don't think their political system limits Chinese competitiveness like the Soviets (see Lada vs BYD).
The US needs some offsetting advantage that can sustainably counter a fundamentally stronger opponent. I think AI/Space is the strongest option here. Turn the tables on engineer count/quality. Or lock down space, dominate the highest ground. Exploit a temporary lead to secure a permanent advantage.
You raised some qualitative edges in weapons systems but the Chinese already have similar systems in development. If America can make a missile, so can China but China will have more engineers to juice them up and more production capacity to produce them at scale, just by virtue of this huge industrial base and economies of scale. Unless the missile-edge enables the US to win in a pre-empting war then what good is it, it's only moving the goalposts. China can then jog closer and score, they're faster at running than the US is at moving goalposts (with the exception of space and AI).
It seems fairly plausible that South Korea will get dragged in to some degree or another (possibly below the level of kinetic action), but it's unclear to me what advantage it would be to North Korea to get involved kinetically. South Korean doctrine at the moment is built around "KILL KIM JONG UN" if the balloon goes up and I think the rational move from Kim is to try to extract concessions from both sides and basically nothing else. I am certainly open to alternative takes, but it seems common in Western thinking to assume that if China suggests North Korea jump, the North Koreans will ask "how high?" because they wear the designated villain hat, and I don't think actual North Korean decision-makers have any emotional attachment to being committed to being part of the Axis of Evil. I do think they have emotional attachment to not ending up as paste at the pointy end of a South Korean ballistic missile.
Again, you're sort of missing the main point here. The USA does not need to match China to win; it already has the "offsetting advantage" which is the status quo (and geography). China needs to overmatch the US of A because it is starting from a geographically disadvantaged position. I think that there is a good chance that China does nothing while the US painfully rectifies its munitions production and stockpiles issues over the next 5 - 10 years precisely because the risks of acting even when China is at the apex of its power relative to its potential enemies are still extremely high, and Xi does not want to gamble with his empire.
North Korea did send troops to help Russia, if anyone's part of an axis of evil it's them. They might not be eager to join such a risky war but the regime seems quite serious about warfare, especially shell production.
Also, North Korea can wreck Seoul with artillery or just nuke it. A South Korean decapitation strike on the absolute monarch of an insecure nuclear power seems like a very risky ploy. Apparently a first-use doctrine has been signed off per NK's 2022 law, attacks on North Korean leadership will be met with nuclear counterattack. But who can say what will happen?
I'm more concerned about the PLA rolling in and slowly but surely crushing South Korea.
Well they do have more manufacturing capacity than the next three countries combined. Facing a country with 80% of the world's drone production in the Drone Age should be an intimidating prospect. If swarms of relatively cheap Shaheds and FPV drones are the way of the future, then it plays into China's biggest strengths in industrial scale.
Certainly, there are issues with offensive warfare. I doubt China will perform very well at the start of a war if they're launching a big amphibious operation, the signs of war will be clear, not much chance of strategic surprise. But if there are reverses, if they lose a battle or ten, they still have the option to double down. China's leaders have 20 million men reaching military age every single year. They have vast quantities of industry, construction capacity, engineering talent.
The Chinese economy grows faster than the US, they're breaking into more and more markets globally, everyone started bitching about overproduction. Who heard of Deepseek or BYD a few years ago?
Even their geography has its advantages, they're right next to the places they'd be fighting, whereas America is on the other side of the world.
Well, tell it to the South Koreans. I don't think that North Korea and China are joined at the hip the way you seem to think they are (ditto for South Korea and the United States), nor do I think sending some guys to Ukraine, at roughly zero risk to the North Korean regime, is any indicator of how they will behave in a potentially existential situation.
Now you're just taunting me. You know that FPVs are not the future of naval warfare.
I wouldn't be so confident about the Chinese economy if I was you – but this is a positive reason why China may decide to sit around and do nothing. And yet if they do that, I think there is a good chance that the US is actually able to procure enough missiles, mines and torpedoes to make shutting down the strait a ~foregone conclusion. China can try to build more ships than LRASMs, more interceptors than the cheap hypersonic and LUCAS cruise missiles the US is producing, but they will be on the wrong side of the cost curve in doing so.
Sort of - in some ways, the US has the best of both worlds here. Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines host US bases, and if a war kicks off, the entire Chinese navy will be ranged by missiles based there, while portions of the US Navy will be safely out of range of conventional Chinese missiles. China does have strategic depth, but it is mostly for their land and air forces.
So the US plans to shut down the strait with 1100 km range F-35Cs firing 370 km range anti-ship missiles. Plus B-21s and subs.
A Shahed-136 has 2500 km range. Some of them get through, even against high-end US air defence. And they're cheap. LUCAS or 'cheap hypersonics' are fields China's going to be ahead in. LUCAS is just a smaller Shahed-136 copy.
No matter how many LUCAS's America makes, China will make a lot more more. The LUCAS range and payload itself seems pretty low, not the most impressive weapon especially for Pacific warfare.
If the West Pacific becomes an impassable no man's land, then Taiwan and South Korea will capitulate eventually due to their total reliance on seaborne imports, lack of domestic energy/food supply or import-substitution capability. Japan is also in some danger. Shutting down the strait only removes China's preferred victory condition of a quick win, it's insufficient.
The US is the side that needs some kind of laser to shoot down Shaheds, not China. The US victory condition is preventing Taiwanese and Korean subjugation.
And land-based mines and surface-to-surface cruise/ballistic/hypersonic missiles.
The United States actually has fielded LUCAS in combat. China has not. While I know Chinese companies have put together Shahed clones, it's unclear to me if the Chinese military has even procured any of them, while the US is actively procuring and integrating LUCAS into its order of battle.
And while China likely has a current edge in air-launched hypersonic weapons, the US has a "cheap" hypersonic missile (Blackbeard) in flight testing now, and it seems quite plausible to me that the US is ahead of China in relevant areas (particularly sensor and propulsion technology) that will allow them to bend the cost curve down in their favor.
Again, this is not the operative dynamic that matters here.
Setting aside that, first of all, it's a violation of international law to shut off food supplies, and that it would likely be pretty foolish for China to pick a fight with South Korea too, how has this worked for everyone else that has tried it? Iran has no shortage of ballistic missiles and drones, but they have not been able to shut down the strait of Hormuz, which is a much more constrained location than the Philippine Sea and the Sea of Japan. Ukraine, as far as I can tell, has not managed to shut down the Black Sea for Russia (or vice-versa). The Houthis had mixed results. It did not work for Germany in World War One or Two. I think the US versus Japan was probably the most successful submarine warfare campaign in the world, and the US still did not defeat Japan through starvation.
Secondly, how are you supposed to turn the entire West Pacific into a no-man's land? You've got a few options:
Mines – but there's not enough mines to do this to the entire West Pacific. You can use mines to shut down chokepoints, not the entire ocean. And the US has recently demonstrated the ability to clear mines pretty quickly (although Iran did not deploy large numbers in the strait at all – something like a dozen real mines and a couple hundred decoys). Might work against Taiwan, or temporarily against ports elsewhere. You're not going to starve out Japan or South Korea with mines, or turn the entire West Pacific into a no-go zone.
I don't think China has enough good submarines to shut down traffic to South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan.
You can use radar to try to detect anything that moves in the entire West Pacific, but ground-based radars don't have the range (barring OTH radars, which from what I understand are finicky and may not have the resolution to complete a kill chain). Air-based radars have better range, but AWACS flying over Chinese soil probably don't have the radar range to detect and track ships traveling to South Korea, let alone Japan, just due to the curvature of the earth. AWACS are also very big, slow, juicy targets, so pushing them out further is very dangerous, and it's possible to jam them.
Satellites are the best option, but they will likely be slated for deception, destruction, or defeat early on in a conflict. Satellites also have limitations due to weather or inclination; the Soviet Union had RORSAT deployed during the Cold War, but that did not stop them from losing track of NATO carrier groups operating near their shores in the 1980s.
High-speed reconnaissance aircraft are an interesting possibility that China has invested in, but you they are not invincible.
I guess it's good that the US has this, then!
Or perhaps, if China actually decides to conduct aggressive action, the United States will decide that its victory condition is crushing China, and would gladly trade Taiwan and Korea to do so.
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