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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.
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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