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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
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.
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