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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.
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"?
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.
But over a couple thousand US sailors/airmen/whatever on the bottom of the China Sea? I wouldn't be so sure. Targeted strikes on relevant military bases would be something I could imagine as a strong message -- and if I can imagine it you bet American generals (and their Chinese counterparts, perhaps even moreso) can.
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