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It's exactly the operative dynamic. China has been working on a huge arsenal of anti-access area denial weapons for over a decade now. The US, burdened by its gigantic array of global missions, cottoned on just a few years ago. Now the newcomer is going to out-deny the Chinese in China's home waters, from the other side of the world?
Russia makes about 5000 Gerans a month. China should be capable of at least 10x that, considering the general gap in industrial capabilities/scale. And maybe 3x more than in cheaper decoys.
Making Shahed-136 types is well within China's abilities, there are multiple types offered for export. Feilong-300Ds for instance. Maybe the Chinese military don't feel like they need them, who knows. I expect them to perform poorly in the first stages of a war before learning from their mistakes and mobilizing production capacity.
China blots out the sky with cheap drones. The cheap drones destroy or threaten to destroy military targets, ports, radars, fuel storage, power plants... Taiwan capitulates. Many of these targets don't even need a killchain, ports are immobile. Ships full of LNG, fertilizer or food are useless if the port infrastructure is bombed out. If they'd even enter the warzone, which is unlikely.
The US didn't have PGMs or advanced sensors and the blockade lobotomized Japanese wartime industry by depriving it of fuel and raw materials, necessitating enormous investment in transport ships, which mostly ended up sunk. Container ships are slow and extremely unstealthy. Ports are more easily mined and bombed than before. Plus Taiwan's ports are in rocket-artillery range from the mainland, not to mention drones. The whole of Taiwan is within Chinese SAM range, whatever issues China has in the killchain are going to be dwarfed by the struggles the US will be having.
Taiwan is also more vulnerable than any country that was blockaded in history. They are totally dependent on energy imports and more dependent than Japan ever was for food imports (totally dependent upon imported fertilizer). Imperial Japan was at about 70% self-sufficiency on rice in the Home Islands, 70% on energy (with a gaping hole of 10% in fuel). Taiwan is at 30% and 4% on energy. Imperial Japan was also one of the most militaristic and stubborn countries of all time, whereas Taiwan is not.
Taiwan's strategy is to appear like they're trying to be a good ally, importing US weapons, appear like they're taking defence seriously with exercises and drills to avoid abandonment. But they have not even the slightest chance.
The US has a grand total of 4 minesweepers deployed in Japan. I do not understand how 4 Avenger minesweepers are supposed to get close to a Taiwanese and Korean port for an extended minesweeping mission when US doctrine is 'stay as far from Chinese shores as possible' with well-defended carrier groups. The Japanese minesweepers face similar issues.
You talk about various US lasers but why can't we actually see them doing anything? If US lasers actually worked (to an extent still not reaching the demands of a war with China), the 5th fleet's base wouldn't be ruins. Soldiers wouldn't have been hiding in hotels. There wouldn't be a drought of Patriots and THAAD because the cheap lasers would be shooting down these drones and missiles instead. US lasers are marginal at best. I haven't heard anyone but you even raise them.
The US navy struggled with Yemen's missiles. They struggle with Iran's missiles and drones. China is a much bigger threat.
What's the plan here? Taiwan has capitulated, Korea has been mauled? The US Marines are going to land and retake Taiwan against the PLA garrison and a rain of drones and missiles? Then onto Beijing like Macarthur wanted? Against 20 million men entering recruitment age every year?
I can only imagine you're implying a nuclear exchange, which might've made sense 25 years ago with Russia sidelined. Too late now.
No, the US has been concerned about this for a very long time, publicly so since the Obama administration.
If China could succeed at their goals by keeping their fleet in their home waters, why would they need a blue water navy at all? (Or really a navy at all period?)
The answer is that a blue water navy, at a minimum, lets them credibly threaten things they cannot otherwise credibly threaten. But to do at least some of those things, they will need to leave their home waters.
Either this is true and the US can credibly threaten to conduct area denial in China's home waters, or it isn't and it's a nuisance at best to the US coalition, pick one.
In real life, SAM ranges aren't little circles on a map that let you just delete anything in that range. Maneuvering fighter aircraft over Taiwan can probably kinematically defeat Chinese ground-based SAMS, but even if they can't Taiwan's mountains makes terrain masking trivial. There's a reason China is investing in an air force.
If China intends this strategy, why are they bothering to procure a credible blue-water navy, complete with carriers? Actually, why bother with drones at all? A few nuclear weapons would also achieve this end, probably more cheaply.
US tactics will always be shaped by what their enemy does. If their enemy is buying a navy instead of cheap drones (which as you've said yourself there's no evidence either of us are aware of that China is pumping out massive amounts of cheap drones for their own military, and there is definitely evidence they are doing this with ships) then of course the US is going to optimize to defeat that threat. Of course, the US is also ramping up their counter-drone efforts as well, but you go to war with what you have, and that is as true in China's case as everyone else's.
Either your plan isn't as good as you think it is, or you're smarter than the Chinese, who are wasting their money building aircraft carriers when they could be pumping out Shaheds, or some combination of the two. Either way, the US will need to deal with a large conventional surface fleet fighting China.
The Avengers probably aren't supposed to do that, since most US minesweeping these days seems to be done with helicopters and USVs (which I think are pretty small). Note how the US swept the Gulf recently without redeploying minesweeping ships there.
I linked a US laser system being demonstrated to you less than six months ago.
Your argument is that if US lasers – which so far have been deployed in limited numbers, mostly as sea-based point-defense weapons – actually worked, then they would be acting as area-defense weapons to protect mostly inland targets?
It's true that the US has not procured laser weapons on a large scale yet. It's also true that it's logically possible for US laser weapons to be effective but not yet deployed in sufficient numbers. It is additionally true that it's logically possible for US laser weapons to be extremely effective but not perfectly so, so that assets protected by them could still be damaged for any number of reasons despite a high rate of success. And, finally, it's extremely true that point defense weapons mounted on ships are not area defense weapons. Thus, even if the US had successfully used laser weapons against Iran (which quite possibly we haven't, the DoW has been coy about it), we would still expect to see the bad effects of Iranian drones on US installations ashore.
Yemen never hit a US ship, and Iran killed about a dozen American servicemen despite firing more than 1,500 ballistic missiles and around 4,000 drones. The US "struggles" because their standards are extremely high, but despite some high-profile (and bad!) equipment losses, they are actually extremely good at preventing service casualties to Iranian attacks.
Nah, I mean more blockading China which can be done at standoff distance without getting anywhere near most of China's anti-access denial weapons. Since about half of China's trade and nearly all of its physical goods are moved by sea, this plus the contraction from the loss of oil (about 20% of China's energy) would kneecap the Chinese economy. The US could sustain a sanctions-and-surface-raiding program for a very long time, probably indefinitely, and use that window to shift worldwide industrial dependency to it and its allies. It's true that eventually China would route around the damage, but it would be both systematic and severe and quite plausibly permanent in the sense that China might never recover entirely. China's options if the US decides to do this are "suck it up," "try to use soft-power to change the facts on the ground," or "sally from Chinese territorial waters with that blue water navy we talked about" which would almost certainly end poorly for them.
Would the US do this? I don't know. I don't know if China will try to invade Taiwan. But I am pretty sure the US can do this.
I think former CNO Richardson put it best:
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