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China to begin inspecting ships in the Taiwan Strait.
This is one of the most provocative moves China's made in living memory and a potential precursor to war. On the old site, I wrote:
It remains to be seen how committed to this move China is. As for now, it's comparatively limited, to last only a couple days and not covering the southern and eastern approaches to Taiwan. It's even possible that some ambitious regional authority is doing this on his own (see: possible explanations for the weather balloon). But it's absolutely an escalation, and it is as representative of China nibbling like a silkworm as anything.
The easy thing would be for Taiwan to offer vigorous protests and do nothing, which is China's expectation. Doing that simply encourages China to do this more and more, though; soon it becomes a regular occurrence, then just the reality on the ground.
Is this the time for China to make its move? Its vassalization of Russia continues. But other less-covered stories are in progress: it's peeling away Saudi Arabia from American influence and recently achieved a diplomatic coup in getting Saudi Arabia and Iran to restore relations.
On the other hand, it still seems too early to me. American forces can more likely than not win in a (costly) fight. China's hope is probably for Taiwan to acquiesce; if challenged, I think it would back down. But this is exactly the type of situation that could spiral out of control.
What is it about the 5 or 10 year timeline that swings the calculus in China’s favor? What are they gaining from the delay? I’m assuming any island-hopping airbases are more for SCS control and wouldn’t feature into an invasion.
The US navy is shrinking and China's navy is growing. The US has to get rid of its oldest Arleigh Burke's and Ticonderega's soon, new shipbuilding isn't up to the challenge of replacing these warships in the short term.
Also China will introduce modern ballistic missile submarines soon, subs that can hit the US from friendly waters. They'll have a secure nuclear triad and many more land-based launchers.
They have recently inducted the JL-3 ICBM on their ballistic subs, which means they could hit the US mainland pretty close to their waters. They lacked this ability until recently for their underwater fleet.
I hadn't heard about that. The JL-3 is combat ready? I thought it would only come when the new missile subs came, that you couldn't put new missile tubes on old subs. Shows how much I know, Bloomberg seems to confirm.
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Presumably, China's current odds of taking Taiwan are near zero. In five years the odds will either be the same (near zero) or higher. Waiting makes sense for that reason alone.
The question then becomes this: will China's odds increase? I say yes. For one, their economy is growing much faster than that of the U.S. Secondly, effective Chinese military spending (PPP adjusted) is probably at this point equal or greater than U.S. spending. The United States still has a large material advantage from decades of accumulation. But this gets reduced every day. In 5-10 years China will likely have missiles or other weapons systems capable of denying U.S. naval forces from the Taiwan Strait.
Of course, this all goes out the window with fast AI takeoff. But that's true of everything nowadays.
I’d be interested in seeing writeups on the military spending efficiency. We outspend them almost 3:1, or twice as much in %GDP. Maybe they really are getting that much more value; if so, I’d want to understand the mechanism.
The first adjustment we'd need to do is PPP (Purchasing Power Parity). This is an attempt to measure the actual production of an economy, not its market value. Things are cheaper in China. A meal costing $5 in the United States would cost $15 in the United States due to expensive labor and rent. China's PPP economy is already about 20% larger than the U.S. while its nominal economy is 28% smaller.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal)
This adjustment alone reduces the advantage from 3/1 to 2/1.
To go beyond that, we'd need a sort of "military PPP". I think we can get partway there. The U.S. military is a giant jobs program. The Chinese army probably is too. In the U.S. an E-2 (Private First Class) with less than 2 years experience earns over 50k in pay, housing credits, and food credits. Medical care, pension, and other costs probably double this.
https://militarypay.defense.gov/Calculators/RMC-Calculator/
How much does the Chinese equivalent make? I would be surprised if it was even 20% as much. And right there, we can see that a huge source of the disparity just vanishes into air.
Another factor is that Chinese manufacturing and large projects are much more efficient. Hangzhou started building its metro system in 2012. Today its metro system has 254 stations making it roughly the same size as London and greater than Chicago and DC combined. I've seen numbers thrown around that the Chinese are able to build large infrastructure 10 times cheaper than the U.S. Certainly they are able to do it much much faster.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metro_systems
So the U.S. spends 3 times as much as China?
Goods costs 60% more in the U.S. (PPP adjustment)
Military salaries are probably 400% higher or more in the U.S.
U.S. large projects could cost 1,000% as much.
It's likely that Chinese military spending already outstrips that of the United States in many ways that matter.
China has a huge corruption problem though (whereas the US has a smaller corruption problem). What China spends on paper is very different than what they are actually getting. They've spent multiple years (decades?) trying to get it under control (and largely failing).
There's a good chance a decent chunk of what China says it has either does not exist or is not up to the standards they think it is. Foreign penetration of Chinese military shipbuilding is also pretty good because you can slip it in with all the other corruption.
"The disgraced deputy head of the state-owned firm developing China’s first home-grown aircraft carrier may face the death penalty over his alleged involvement in passing its secrets to foreign intelligence agents."
They even had to arrest their own anti-corruption officer for...taking bribes.
"First to fall was Liu Changhong, the CSIC anti-corruption czar. Fired, expelled from the party, and arrested in September 2017, Liu was accused of accepting bribes and using the convenience of his position to “seek benefits for others in business operations as well as personnel selection and appointment.” "
Their research division was being investigated every two years and each report basically said, "Yup, still highly corrupt" no matter how many people they fired or imprisoned.
"CCDI inspectors again found little improvement when they returned for the third time in March 2019. Despite warnings, there were continued violations of Central Committee regulations on proper official conduct. Corruption was still ongoing and laws were regularly broken. "
And there is a reason for that:
If you haven't been in touch with Chinese bureaucracy directly (or Pakistani bureaucracy, my other area of experience) it is difficult to understate just how much graft and falsification goes on and how it is basically just part of the system. Fire someone and replace them and the chances are the replacements are just as corrupt. It's endemic.
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I think PPP adjustment for judging military might makes no sense at all. It should probably go the other way: take nominal, and give a bonus to the highest gdp/cap. The richer country has access to technology and intelligence the poorer country cannot buy no matter how cheap the haircuts are. That's where the battle is won. My hypothesis is, highest gdp/cap country wins. e.g. , england's military history. I'd welcome some examples of PPP adjustments more accurately predicting the outcome of a conflict.
I take your point. Certainly China's larger GDP than England in 1700 didn't help them.
I don't think it applies to our current situation. China is the manufacturer of the world. Bringing up haircuts again... Those $80 haircuts in the U.S. might artificially inflate GDP, but it doesn't change the fact that China is making more stuff, and increasingly high quality stuff as well. How sure are you that the U.S. has a major technological advantage (outside of AI).
Are China's planes and missiles at U.S. levels? I think that is the question. U.S. military spending is a red herring. As you implied, it matters which country is producing more and better material. And spending doesn't tell us that. China is capable of making more weapons with their limited spending than we are with our massive spending.
Naturally the only way to tell if China is up to snuff is with a conflict. Let's hope we never find out.
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I’ll tell you right now. The mechanism is that our $10 billion dollar aircraft carriers can be taken out by a few $10 million dollar missiles.
We won WWII with aircraft carriers, so obviously this means we’ve been spending massively on bigger and better aircraft carriers ever since, not learning the general lesson that large warships are vulnerable to fast, agile, compact firepower.
Sure, but why does that take 5-10 years? If China can hypersonic a CVN to the bottom of the Pacific, what have they got to fear?
Is it that they can’t, but will be able to Soon^TM?
My guess? Better air defense. I suspect that Chinese missile installations are still susceptible to a first strike by air-launched standoff-munitions. Also the risk of nuclear escalation.
That risk seems unlikely to go away anytime soon?
China could probably nuke a carrier group RFN -- if they somehow improve their missiles to the point where they can take out a carrier (and probably some of the other ships) with conventional missiles, that doesn't seem much safer in terms of "you blew up a bunch of our guys, we are going to respond in the strongest possible terms"?
Could it be that China wants to build up its nuclear capabilities to be a more credible deterrent/expects it to take 5-10 years for the US intelligence to realize they have more impressive strategic capacities than in 1970?
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A carrier group getting nuked is a lot more likely to provoke nuclear war than a carrier group getting rekt by conventional missiles because our admirals thought it was still 1943. We aren't going to nuke China over Taiwan.
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There are all kinds of problems with guiding hypersonic glide vehicles to hit moving targets. There's a lot of plasma around the missile that complicates guidance, a lot of electronic interference and countermeasures from the US. Nobody can know that they'd get through, nobody can quite be confident about this.
In principle you could obliterate the US's advantage in stealth aircraft by having satellites watch the whole area, physically picking out the aircraft in real-time, as they fly (let alone big slow warships). But doing that and acting on the results is a huge software and communications challenge, getting through cloud cover and whatever fighting is going on in space.
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A couple reasons to delay:
Closer to military parity with the US. It doesn't need full military parity, just enough to deny access to its regional waters. Even now the US would be wary of sending a CSG within easy range of the PLARF, but each year of delay means more and better missiles.
Securing energy resources. Pipelines from Russia and Central Asia are being built and enhanced, and China has been building up its strategic reserves. Ensuring a constant supply of oil is pretty key to executing a war, as China will be under blockade via chokepoints outside its sphere of influence shortly after hostilities begin. (Its forays into Middle Eastern politics play a bit part here; the US isn't going to care too much about Iranian and Saudi whining in the case of an actual war.)
US politics. China may believe US politics might be more conciliatory after the 2024 election.
On the other hand, reasons not to delay:
Demographic pyramid. China isn't in a great demographic position. Better than Japan/Taiwan/SK, but worse than the US and India. Not too relevant but headwinds.
Countries are shifting supply chains away from China. Those supply chains are going to be extremely powerful in the case of war. They'd be shut down, which hurts China, but also hurts the entire world, which would generate strong domestic pressures to find some understanding with China. The more those supply chains have been shifted to other countries, the less powerful those pressures would be.
Yes, but China's share of world's manufacturing output keeps increasing anyway. This merely tells us that they are no longer as dependent on foreign suppliers as in the past and the domestic champions are outgrowing them.
The point there wasn't about China's overall manufacturing but about the pain a blockade would inflict on the rest of the world. As supply chains shift away from China, the pain the rest of the world would experience from a blockade decreases. If there were extraordinary pain, the world would quickly sue for peace; if there were no pain at all, the blockade could continue indefinitely. Time is shifting the dynamic from the former to the latter.
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I think 2 is probably a big one, honestly- isn’t china working on a set of pipelines from Iran through Afghanistan? 5-10 years seems like a very realistic good case timeframe to complete a major infrastructure project through a 3rd world country with difficult terrain.
Pipelines are ultra-vulerable. In the event of war every relevant pipeline will be blown apart at some point along its length.
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There are some plans for an oil pipeline from Gwadar to Xinjiang, and IIRC a gas pipeline from Iran to Pakistan. The former, though, is pretty impractical and likely uneconomic. Pumping millions of barrels of oil per day over the Himalayas is... questionable, and aside from the elevation, rough terrain, and weather, there's just too much political disorder up around the Hindu Kush for it to be considered a reliable backstop. (The US wouldn't be above working with the Taliban and various terrorist groups in Pakistan if it would help kneecap the CCP. Call it a jihad to help free Muslim Uyghurs from atheist oppression.)
Or just ignoring the Taliban and blowing up pipelines through Afghanistan anyway. What are they going to do about it? The US may not have been able to create a stable secular government in Afghanistan, but it's perfectly capable of taking any given facility long enough to wreck it.
I don't think the path for any planned pipelines go through Afghanistan, though I admit I don't follow it too closely. Your point stands anyway though: the US would have the ability and the will to destroy whatever sites it wants in Pakistan.
It probably wouldn't even come to that, though: if Gwadar was sending oil to China, the US would just add it to the blockade. Same reason the Myanmar pipeline is worthless when it comes to Chinese energy security.
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America might well tire of war as well. After X years of propping up Ukrainian military forces against Russia, as well as the billions in aide given, eventually the desire to enter yet another proxy war in Taiwan sending money and planes and ships will be unpopular. Already seeing people on Twitter showing homeless people on the streets, broken buildings, and objecting that we need the money at home.
The homeless industrial complex is a bottomless pit for tax dollars. I'd frankly rather spend the money on weapons and then give the weapons to (sort of) friendly governments.
I’m not saying that homelessness can be solved by merely diverting funds. But I think it’s a shift in sentiment from “rah rah, whatever it takes to free Ukraine from Russians!” Ukrainian flags all over Facebook, and so on, to a “look at all the problems we have at home that we could be spending our taxpayer dollars on. Whether or not the redirection of those funds would make a difference in those specific issues isn’t really the point. The point is waning support for the spending on Ukrainian infrastructure and defense.
If we end up trying to do the same on two fronts, Taiwan and Ukraine, with waning support for any level of involvement, I don’t see it being publicly supported. And with the 2024 election coming, I think war is going to be a major campaign issue. If sentiment is moving against our involvement in these wars, then we can’t keep going.
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Homelessness is a political problem, specifically relating to local politics, not a money problem. An extra $100 billion in the federal budget wouldn't do anything.
I'm not sure what you mean by "broken buildings". You could photograph cherry-picked decrepit buildings at any point in US history. It doesn't mean anything.
Wait until they see Sherman’s March to the Sea.
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If the State Department's ostensible idea of exhausting Russia by funding endless war ends up costing America one of its major strategic goals instead, it'll have to be remembered as one of the most idiotic stratagems of history.
I'm not counting on it, but it wouldn't surprise me. It's commonly pointed out that despite being extremely enthusiastic about war, Americans can hardly sustain their interest in it, which is what cost them Vietnam and Afghanistan.
Playing for attrition when you're famous for losing against weak opponents that just waited you out didn't sound like the greatest of ideas in the first place.
Who knows what's gonna happen though.
But the Ukraine-Russia war is more analogous to the USSR vs. the Mujahideen, in that the US is not the one sending its troops. The differences are that the Ukrainians are fighting on worse terrain, but with better equipment, and against a relatively weaker power (Russia is a faint shadow of the USSR).
All true statements.
Although I must say my original pronostic back at the old place was that Ukraine would certainly lose precisely because wins in this kind of configuration are historically very reliant on terrain advantage.
We'll see if the West can compensate with matériel and intelligence, but since this has turned into world war style static fronts and artillery battles it's really manpower that's going to be the deciding factor and I don't see how Ukraine has a possible win on that.
I would agree, but for the fact that the conventional gap between Russia and Ukraine is relatively small.
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I'm not sure how analogous the situations are. The Ukraine War is essentially a freebie for the United States: throw a pittance at Ukraine and watch Russia's soldiers get tossed into a meat grinder. A war over Taiwan would be far costlier both economically (which would increase domestic pressures to give up) and in terms of human life (which would increase domestic pressures to fight to the bitter end; tens of thousands of dead soldiers is a rallying cry). It wouldn't be a proxy war.
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