I'm there more for the cyberwarfare takes, but from what I understand nobody is seriously worried about a power imbalance between China and America regarding missile speed since interceptors aren't accurate enough, but that's just me regurgitating what I see tweeted around and talked about.

Edit: And don't be intimidated by people reverse engineering sidewinders in the Slack. The community is very open to humble, curious newcomers. They'll teach you how to analyze satellite imagery for free, haha.

This one?

https://www.patreon.com/acwpodcast

If China wants to start a nuclear exchange, sure. The US probably wouldn't go nuclear in response to an invasion of Taiwan, but it absolutely would in response to a nuclear attack on US forces.

Incorrect, the USA will probably just shrug, and call in the other 11 super-carriers and 9 amphibious assault ships.

At the same time they will invoke NATO article 5 and a few other Asian mutual-defence treaties. 2 UK, 1 Spanish, 1 French, and 2 Italian carriers will arrive soon afterwards.

As will 4 Japanese, 3 French, 2 Australian and 2 South Korean helicopter carriers.

The trick isn't to take out one aircraft carrier: its to to be able to take them all out.

For a missile going Mach 7 at 25km altitude, the carrier has no hope of moving enough in the 9 minutes it has to evade the missile.

So you only have to find the carrier once briefly, which is not so hard.

How is the final phase of flight and targeting going to work? How far away can on-board sensors detect the carrier, and does the missile have the maneuverability to steer towards the target in that timeframe?

US itself is likely to turn tail and run if attack in not nuclear. Nuclear attack might inject some spine into response.

Hypersonic missiles and nukes cost a lot less than a carrier. Assuming their surveillance doesn't get taken out, they can spam missiles.

China will have to have good signals intelligence for this to work, though.

Both game-theoretic calculus and political pressure at home would make nuclear retaliation unavoidable, and with the perspective of escalation China is firmly on the losing end.

If that's the case then I can't see how isolated tactical nukes against carriers makes sense for China. They might as well throw everything they have to begin with.

US/USSR were prepared for theatre level nuclear engagements, as long as not on USSR or US soil. I would not dismiss trading tactical nukes on third party soil if things get desperate. PRC SCS islands, US indo-pac bases, carrier groups are no brainers. Up to US bases in Japan and Australia. I think we dismiss low level nuke engagement at peril, any competent war planner will keep it in the repertoire.

PRC SCS islands are sand piles with a couple of barracks and a landing strip, that would not be an equal trade for a carrier group.

> US/USSR were prepared for theatre level nuclear engagements, as long as not on USSR or US soil.

I dunno what America was prepared for, but I was in USSR at the time and the public message was any nuclear confrontation will end up being a total one.

Otherwise, SCS bases are substantial forward deployment positions for PRC. Conventionally neutralizing SCS bases would require 100s of ordnance from naval platforms in a mostly secondary theatre - substantial amount of what US can concentrate in region. The bases serve missile sinks by design. So in a sense, taking them out via tactical nuke versus expending significant in theater munitions is an appropriate trade.

>public message

There's a lot of (declassified) literature on nonstrategic nuclear weapons and scenarios, war plans for theatre level use in Europe and Asia. Here's a report from this July.

https://sgp.fas.org/crs/nuke/RL32572.pdf

Public messaging is going to play up MAD, but nonstrategic nukes has never been off the table. PRC has no first use, but one never knows. Especially since the engagements are likely maritime over empty waters, which has different escalatory potential than scenarios of nuking NATO/USSR buffer countries during cold war. It's not that I think it's likely, just the chances are less non-zero than what's publically presented, i.e. the 2021 report exists in the first place because US wonks are at least discussing tactical nukes which are not subject to arms control agreements.

  > China knows the dynamic, the likely escalation route

If China nukes several thousand U.S. servicemen, your family (and probably you) would be on the streets demanding blood.

But for one thing, I wouldn't say that an authority that authorizes the destruction of three buildings would authorize a nuclear strike. For another, destroying three buildings in some village in Afghanistan does not sound like and "escalation" in response to the half dozen or so buildings destroyed in New York on the date you specify, and the damage to the Pentagon, and the loss of four aircraft and all souls on board, and I don't know how many more on the ground.

You might look into Russian missile work. Of course, as a land power (and not as invested in trade as China), their answers are different.

As far as I know, with existing known technology and defenses, there's probably a number n, such that if you launch more than n simultaneous non-hypersonic cruise missiles, an aircraft carrier is going to be unable to deal with them all. This of course assumes you can launch that many missiles, in range of the carrier, simultaneously, without advanced warning.

Now, the navy also isn't dumb, so I'd venture to guess they avoid parking their carriers within that range when possible, and that they probably have some other defenses like C-130's and other ships mounted with directed energy weapons and other missile defense and whatnot. I imagine they also aggressively pursue and maintain intelligence on the location, number, and readiness state of those missiles. This starts to get complicated because there's a complicated interplay of strategy and tactics related to the off-ship capabilities, and defenses have counter-strategies (such as launching a bunch of Surface-to-air missiles at those C-130's immediately prior to launching the cruise missles) and those counter-strategies have counter-strategies, etc. etc.

I also have no idea what that number n is. It could be infeasibly high.

If the battle group has one Gerald R. Ford class carrier, two Ticonderoga class cruisers, and three Arleigh Burke class destroyers, then it has up to 2 * 8 + 122 * 4 + 96 * 4 = 888 RIM-162 ESSM missiles and 2 * 21 = 42 RIM-116 RAM missiles, for 930 missiles total.

The carrier also has Phalanx. Three guns, 1550 rounds each, maybe ~100 rounds per kill, effective range just under 1.5 km - a distance which a missile doing Mach 0.7 will cross in under seven seconds. My vague impression is that these can't be relied on to make much difference to the numbers.

Maybe there are lasers and whatnot around now. Not enough to make a significant difference.

Note that these numbers assume that the escorts' VLSs are loaded entirely with ESSM, and that all the carrier's weapons can be brought to bear on the incoming missiles, neither of which are realistic assumptions. But it's also assuming the carrier's air wing doesn't get to do any air defence, which is probably also not realistic.

Anyway, given all those assumptions, 1000 missiles and you have a very strong chance of a kill. 2000 and the carrier is toast.

If cruise missiles cost 1.5 million dollars each (roughly what Harpoon and Tomahawk cost, although what things cost in defence budgeting is a bit of a metaphysical question), the toast option is 3 billion in ammunition, plus there will be costs for launchers and various other sundries. The carrier alone is 10+ billion, so that looks like decent value.

Also, you don't need to sink the carrier. Just prevent it from launching aircraft. Once that's done it's defenceless.

Carrier Groups still have an important role to play in lower-intensity conflicts, but in a Pacific war with China they'll be about as useful as Battleships were in WWII.

CSGs are defended by the entire system operating in layers. During conflict conditions they'll have airborne early warning radar flying to see threats coming a long way out. There's usually at least 4 AEGIS equipped ships. The carrier air wing will be doing patrols and intercepting threats at great distance. The carrier itself will be practicing emissions control and hiding within the sizable perimeter created by all of the above. And there's a lot of sophisticated EW decoys and such, that we don't know much about from open sources other than they're taken very seriously.

There's plenty of room for debate about just how effective this all is against a nation like China that has a lot of satellite intelligence/surveillance assets, but the simplistic "carriers have no defense" articles are just empty clickbait. These articles usually assert that there's no defense whatsoever against ballistic missiles, which ignores that 2 of those 4 AEGIS ships will be specialized to do exactly that, and have demonstrated it in testing.

One interesting tidbit is a few years back the US Navy submitted a request to do an exercise where they'd demonstrate taking down an inbound salvo of several 100 missiles simultaneously. Congress declined to allocate the budget for it.

Military planners certainly aren't omniscient or infallible, but they're a lot more sophisticated than the content free contrarian takes you see thrown around on the internet a lot. It ends up being a doomsayer about military technology is a pretty easy grift as nationalists on various sides drink it up uncritically and people with authoritative knowledge on the topic are constrained from openly rebutting it. All that said you do see some pretty in depth open info from GAO reports, stuff from CSBA, etc.

Not since WW2.....but the US Navy built up a LOT of invaluable experience on damage control practices and ship design based on the pounding our carriers took fighting the Japanese. Our current Ford and Nimitz CVNs are the refined iterations of a design lineage going back to the very durable Essex class. That said, the recent destruction of the Bonhomme Richard amphibious assault ship, which sustained cost-prohibitive damage in port due to a single arsonist, is disturbing.

There are wargames where we lose carriers against China.....and there are wargames where we don't. They're not invulnerable, but they never have been against a true peer anyway. Often it boils down to the CSG Commander not being overly cocky in terms of how he maneuvers his force.

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/34832/veteran-sailor-o...

The Navy does do large scale wargaming exercises of course, though any of the interesting details aren't going to be public so that doesn't really help shed any light on it.

So, their plan in the event of war is to make space inaccessible for all of humanity, by filling it with debris from killed satellites?

War is hell. A peer level shooting war would suck hard in many painfull different ways to almost everyone. Let’s try to avoid it.

The absolute trump card though is that they are preparing hypersonic intelligence drones. If those work out, they're going to be impossible to stop and there's no hiding a carrier from a plane flying past with line of sight.

I wonder if the future will be just a cheap ship with a large number of single-use missile launchers.

So you have to use a higher frequency radar and make sure the temperature of the plasma is not too high in front of the radar. You don't have to put the radar on the nose.

For optical sensors you would be imaging off-axis. So you can put the sensors pointing, say, 30 degrees below forwards relatively far back and there will not be much plasma in front of the sensors as it comes from compression and not friction.

There's a NASA PDF floating around that cites ~7000 K as the temperature of a plasma in front of hypersonic aircraft and concludes that radar is feasible then.

[/] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprint_(missile)

Problem was it needed many of these

[\] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safeguard_Program#/media/File:...

for support. (see caption)

https://gjia.georgetown.edu/2021/01/27/chinas-hypersonic-wea...

Of cuz, that's known everywhere. Chinese netizens are ecstatic about this ingenious move that fenced off SEA countries from meddling the water area in any way that could affect China's claim over them.

> They routinely send their fishing fleets into the legitimate territorial waters of other nations

They are just self directed business man. Just like the numerous business man who invaded almost every Asian countries in the early 1900s. These fisherman would have been invading all-over the places if they were in 1900 as well.

Of cuz, not like the 1900s, these fisherman are not going to be protected (very strongly) by their home country when they were caught.

> they are starting to struggle again with the size of their population, expansion will seem like a natural solution.

Well, almost everyone is expecting the population to be dwindling from now on. A lot have calling the recent census fake, because they all expect a population drop.

Not sure why this population driven expansnism holds itself...

Personal attacks are against site rules, and you've been here long enough that you should know that.

> China had no ambition for territorial expansion other than defending herself. That's the pattern for 2 thousands years.

China occupied Tibet. China invaded Vietnam twice. The first time, they stayed for a thousand years. "China has no ambition for territorial expansion" only if you accept China's definition of what is rightfully China. A bunch of us don't, though. For that matter, a bunch of nations don't.

Specifically with regard to Taiwan: Yes, China has a historical claim on Taiwan. (And, yes, Taiwan has a historical claim on the mainland.) Technically, as you say it is a civil war.

Practically, it's two countries. They have two militaries, issue two different passports, have two different currencies, etc. Neither one wants to admit this, but de facto they are two separate countries. (So are North and South Korea, even though that civil war legally isn't over either.)

So, legal fictions aside, for China to conquer Taiwan would be a dramatic increase of their actual territory. (That's kind of implied in the word "conquer".)

And it's clearly China that's the aggressor here. Nobody's talking about Taiwan invading and conquering the mainland. But China talks about invading if Taiwan even dares to say that they're a separate country. They act like, if we all play pretend with them, it makes their claim more legitimate or something.

Speaking of legitimacy, let's note that Taiwan is the legitimate government of China. The mainland is held by the rebels.

  > only if you accept China's definition of what is rightfully China.

In the same way, when the bank robber says that he was just withdrawing his own money, we do not accept that the bank robber has authority to declare "what is rightfully his money".

But the practical answer is, under Westphalian order whose principles are enshrined in UN Charter (again the organizing order post war), PRC has authority to declare whatever she wants within her domestic jurisdiction, of which Tibet and Taiwan is formally recognized to be part of. UN has no position on legal/procedural merits PCA/UNCLOS ruling for SCS. That's a messy situation that gets resolved same way all territorial problems in Westphalian order gets resolved in lieu of treaty/accord that formally assigns ownership, territorial control with lots of force. So Chinese authority is derived from the same post war order as everyone else.

And private persons with human rights have the authority to name territorial conquest by its rightful name.

You might assume that I sided with China mainland. Well, that not where I stand. Neither do I side with Taiwan, nor US.

I stand with the safety and prosperity of people.

"Shut up, Y is bad."

Uh.

I think you are projecting the warlike tendencies of the US onto China.

No one is saying something like that is likely. We are discussing hypotheticals. There's no need to be so upset.

I believe that GP is trying to generalize that question to "what is the proper response to any hyper aggressive nation". And the fact that the answer to that question will have more profound effects on responses to the US than to China.

In fact, I think that the question is valid. Limiting the discussion to China is blatant anti-Chinese propaganda. Broadening the discussion to "hyper aggressive nations" is fair and legitimate.

I assume your reading list is approved in Langley

I'll also remind you Tiananmen was internal, whereas all of our wars are just that - wars. Directed against other nations.

edit: to clarify, I don't see how Tiananmen suggests China will go to war, but I do see how a sordid history of spurring violence across the globe suggests the US will go to war again.

Japan didn't have a nuclear second-strike capability with the range to hit the US. (Or, literally, any part of that taken independently.)

The US leadership can't even make a remotely plausible argument, after emerging from their bunkers after the exchange is done, to have “saved lives” by nuking China.

Not even close. It carries about 200 low yield warheads. Not even enough for 1 each for 1/3rd of the cities in China if you could spread them out that far. There have been over 500 atmospheric tests, many with vastly higher yield and fallout, the biggest tests had yields equivalent to all 200 warheads combined.

One could strike a huge blow to China's capability to carry on war by destroying many of its large ports.

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/41181/shocking-images-...

That link was more in response to the assertion "The modern one probably won't survive a drop less than 1 meter.", suggesting that warship-grade computer and electronic systems are vulnerable to mild shock damage.

And the Navy has, in fact, done a SINKEX on a carrier: https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/22639/this-is-the-only...

The results are classified. Considering how the flight deck and upper works look pretty much intact, they probably hit it with multiple torpedoes rather than anti-ship missiles.

In WW2 ships were built to remain operational after multiple direct strikes. Nowadays ships are built to not sink after a single direct strike at the most like carriers, or only mildly though against such a hit because actually dealing with it would make them orders of magnitude more expensive and so heavy they'd be useless.

While a WW2 battleship could survive multiple direct hits and still fulfill its mission, a modern carrier would be lucky not to sink, and definitely won't be launching and recovering aircraft.

If a carrier in a war against a major power can't launch any aircraft anymore it's as good as dead, once it's off the AA ships will be targeted and sunk as they won't have AWACS and fighters to defend them and the carrier itself will be destroyed by enemy air power.

But the commenter is absolutely correct, ships are not expected to remain operable after a direct strike anymore. Weapons have gotten so good that defending credibly against them is not practical, so it's not really worth it to protect them nearly as much as it used to be.