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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   36602 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 3, 2023

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China to begin inspecting ships in the Taiwan Strait.

China's Fujian maritime safety administration launched a three-day special joint patrol and inspection operation in the central and northern parts of the Taiwan Strait that includes moves to board ships...The fleet, a joint special operation with East China Sea Rescue Bureau and the East China Sea Navigation Support Center, will continue to carry out cruise inspections in the central and northern parts of the Taiwan Strait over the next two days.

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:

But what will happen is a comparably light touch approach: the PRC will begin a blockade (an act of war, to be clear) in the guise of enforcing customs and immigration controls on Taiwan and interdict ships and planes going to Taiwan. And, as a key point, it will allow those vessels that capitulate to continue on to Taiwan. And so you have the Chinese Coast Guard doing all the heavy lifting, with PLAN and the PLARF standing guard at a distance.

Private entities will quickly resign themselves to the state of affairs: they have no choice. Which leaves Taiwan and its allies in a quandary, as they have to respond (giving China authority over all imports and exports is as good as having the PLA marching down the streets of Taipei). And so Taiwan will escalate, and in doing so make its forces vulnerable to low level harassment from the Coast Guard and paramilitary vessels. Sooner rather than later shots will be fired and ships sunk, but with far from the full force of the PLA bearing down on the situation.

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.

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.

If so, I’d want to understand the mechanism.

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.

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?

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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