The Chinese need a full compliment of carriers to enforce a total blockade of the island and effective hypersonic anti-ship missiles to fend off US capital ships. The launch platform (H-6N) for the hypersonics is already in their arsenal. When the carriers and missiles are available it's all over for Taiwan. This is less than 4-5 years out as China is urgently working on both.
Meanwhile the US is developing LRASM, Rapid Dragon and others specifically for this scenario. The missing piece is a really long range anti-aircraft missile to threaten the H-6 fleet without exposing nuclear powered US capital ships to Chinese weapons. The F-14 would have been an ideal platform for this.
Ultimately though, unless the US is willing to go all-out kinetic with China over Taiwan there is no hope. It's a small island 100 miles off the coast of an enormous, powerful, wealthy enemy with an epic chip on its shoulder, and its key ally is on the wrong side of the Pacific.
Smart money can see this so advanced fabs are popping up all over the West.
That's what I mean by "bluster". China is publicly saying they can, but... what if they just miss the carriers in practice? What if USA can actually shoot them down and protect our carriers?
It very well could be that China is just pretending that their missiles work to extract concessions during peacetime, and never actually plans to go to war. Etc. etc. There's too many futures, and the particular knowledge (ie: How good the missiles really are) is going to be top secret on both sides. No reason for China to want to let USA know how good the missiles are... no reason for USA to want to let China know how good the AEGIS Missile shield is.
No one needs to. Just damaging a nuclear powered, nuclear armed carrier would be more than sufficient. Probably just making a splash near one. The design premise of these assets is fighting WW3 where the stakes are high enough to tolerate the risk, not a skirmish over a foreign island. Where they have been deployed since WW2 there was little to no risk or loss to enemy action. That is not operative with China.
Remember that Taiwan controls over 60% of the world's chip production, including every single iPhone, iPad, Nintendo Switch, PS5, XBox, AMD, and NVidia chip ever made (as well as a couple of Intel Xe GPUs)... and most of those car chips also come from Taiwan. It has been identified as a critical infrastructure for even US Weapons, which rely upon some of these chips.
If Taiwan is lost, that means for a few years (or more), USA can't get new military equipment... at least not with any of the fancy high tech computer parts. US Factories of all kinds, consumer electronics, car manufacturing (especially electronic critical safety equipment: antilock brakes, airbags, tire pressure monitors), most servers (AMD EPYC and NVidia A100s are Taiwan made) and even weapon manufacturing shuts down.
The supply chain risk is astronomical. Two carriers would be cheap compared to the loss of Taiwan.
A sincere question; what is "latest wargame?"
Does "latest wargame" compute the political equivalent of an extinction level bolide impact when a US Navy nuclear aircraft carrier gets destroyed, leaving propulsion reactors and nuclear warheads on the bottom of the Pacific, not to mention a few thousand men? I'm thinking you and I have different concepts of the stakes involved here. I believe the Western establishment will need far more at stake than a couple (more) years of supply chain troubles before it will put its capital military assets in the way of the Chinese military.
I suppose we'll find out. China will assert itself at some point and Taiwan is #1 on that bucket list.
You're severely underestimating the importance of Taiwan. 60% of every chip in the world, and 100% of the most advanced chips (ie: Apple iPhone, AMD EPYC, NVidia A100) comes from that island, and no one else in the world knows how to make those chips.
I don't know how the economy will reorganized if Taiwan is neutralized, but it won't be pretty. It'd be an extinction level event for entire industries.
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USA isn't even economically tied to Ukraine, and you can see our response to that. Taiwan on the other hand, has deep ties that underpin the largest sectors of the USA's economic wellbeing.
The chip issue over the past few years is nothing compared to what would happen if Taiwan were successfully blockaded by China.
> USA isn't even economically tied to Ukraine, and you can see our response to that.
There aren't any US nuclear assets at stake in Ukraine. No flag ships or other sovereign symbols. No body count of US servicemen. That's not a strong analogy.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/09/politics/taiwan-invasion-war-...
China will likely launch missiles and attempt to destroy Japanese, maybe even Philippine bases to hamper US supply lines. USA will be forced to forward deploy multiple Carriers into the risk zone, and roughly ~2 Carriers are expected to be killed. China probably can weaken the US Navy enough to attempt a landing, but no such landing seems like it'd be successful. US, Taiwan, and China take major losses, but the island likely will remain in Taiwan's control.
> There aren't any US nuclear assets at stake in Ukraine. No flag ships or other sovereign symbols. No body count of US servicemen. That's not a strong analogy.
Funny how you ignore my point and rather focus on the side-comments.
Losing Taiwan is an extinction level event for multiple, major US Industries and service sectors. Period. USA is too economically tied to that island.
Bonus points: a lot of these technology sectors (ex: Servers / AMD EPYC, and AI with NVidia A100 chips) are essential to US strategic level initiatives, like our supercomputer projects, DoD cloud initiatives, and the like. Losing Taiwan would be a direct blow to US Military and weaken us in the decades to come.
Its not "just" an economic problem, it is also a military and strength problem.
You only wrote "latest wargames" whatever that is. I'm not wading through the dreck of the interweb to figure out what you had in mind based on that. Thanks for pointing out specifically what you had in mind.
While interesting, it is as I imagined; there is no political calculation involved here. When the time comes to weigh supply chain problems (even if severe) against going kinetic with China and risk losing carriers, destroyers, etc. I believe the US will decline. We're talking about nuclear fallout here. Recovering damaged warheads from the seabed on the other end of the planet. Respectfully, I just don't see it.
> Funny how you ignore my point and rather focus on the side-comments.
I don't think I deserve this. For my part I've been respectful of your comments and I appreciate your time.
> Losing Taiwan is an extinction level event for multiple, major US Industries and service sectors. Period.
As we've seen with COVID-19 the Western establishment is capable of causing great harm to private sector interests when, right or wrong, they've deemed it necessary. The US military hasn't been so irresponsible that it can't function without a continuous supply of 3nm GPUs. I'll grant you there will be great disruption, but it's neither fatal nor permanent.
You've grossly underestimated USA's military dependence on TSMC.
Case in point: swaths of the F35 Fighter is reliant upon TSMC semiconductors. Advanced FPGAs (AMD, previously known as Xilinx) are TSMC. That's the key to our RADAR systems. Not just F35 (and other electronic warfare platforms), but also our satellite / space systems.
I'm not talking GPUs here. I'm talking literally our military components are entirely dependent on that island.
On the one hand, TSMC isn't the only supplier. On the other hand, the other supplier is United Microelectronics Co, which is also based in Taiwan. So we have a problem here.
https://hothardware.com/news/tsmc-under-pressure-to-build-ch...
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If TSMC goes kaput, kiss the F35 project goodbye.
https://www.militaryaerospace.com/commercial-aerospace/artic...
> The Lockheed Martin Aeronautics segment in Fort Worth, Texas will provide 83,169 field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) from Xilinx Inc. in San Jose, Calif., under terms of a $104.7 million contract modification.
> The communication, navigation, and identification friend or foe (IFF) avionics of the F-35 relies on Xilinx FPGAs, as do other critical electronic subsystems aboard the advanced jet. fighter-bomber. FPGAs enable Lockheed Martin to add new waveforms to embedded software radio systems in the F-35, as well as for real-time digital signal processing.
Those Xilinx chips (now AMD) are made in TSMC.
I look to history for this question. Time and time again the navies of advanced nations have been caught off guard by anti-ship missiles. The US, UK, Israel and Russia have all had ships hit by anti-ship missiles, despite their supposed defenses. Some of those missiles were Chinese in origin.
Given the record I'll take China at its word. Their missiles will likely work.
Number of ships is very misleading (though popular among American reactionaries). I could buy 1,000 canoes and have more 'ships' than the US Navy.
Is there a particular metric you'd rather use? In both number of ships, and tons, China leads over us. US only wins in capital ships now.
But you are using number of ships and tonnage, not me, and need to establish what they mean.
Modern ship battles aren't fought with guns. The fight is with missiles, or airplanes that shoot missiles. Having more tons (aka: missiles) than the other side is a huge advantage.
Capital ships have some benefit of efficiency. But China has the benefit of only being a few hundred miles away from Taiwan, and also their Airforce (Its US Aircraft Carriers vs mostly ground-aircraft), and also Chinese Missle Force, which can use the entire Chinese Highway system to reposition themselves.
And unless the US Marines decide to make a landing in China to attack the Chinese Missile and/or Chinese Air Force, they can fire upon the US Navy with impunity.
That's not my undertanding. Again, freighters, or if you like, WWII warships could easily provide more tonnage, but not have even close to the firepower (or protection or mobility). Could you provide something to support your claim about tonnage and firepower?
Chinese Navy has more Destroyers (by weight) than the US Navy has ships (by weight).
Also, because the Chinese strategy is a mass of smaller ships, they also outnumber us on a ship by ship basis. USA strategy is around capital ships like Carriers.
There hasn't been a large scale sea battle since WW2. No one really knows how these two contrasting strategies will end, or who has the advantage.
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I think the combined US Navy + Taiwan Navy still outnumbers China though (both by weight and by ships). It's still a difficult road for China, but they are making more ships than us and will outnumber the combined fleets over the next few years.
I've given examples of warships with tonnage but not power. I don't see any support for your claim.
> USA strategy is around capital ships like Carriers.
The US explicitly left this strategy behind, several years ago.
> dude
Not me.
What claims exactly? That the Chinese Navy outnumbers us by significant margins now?
https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/RL/RL33153
Don't forget, USA has lots of missions around the world. China on the other hand, can basically solely focus on Taiwan. Fortunately, Taiwan isn't exactly a pushover (they've got some pretty nice defenses), but Taiwan will absolutely be reliant upon USA (especially our Navy) for defense.
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As far as "capabilities", you know that the USA has no stealth destroyers, or ship-based hypersonic missiles. Remember that Chinese hypersonics can be launched on mobile platforms, meaning every single highway in China within 3000km of Taiwan is a potential hypersonic launch point. And remember that every single Chinese Air Force base will also be in play.
I don't think China will be able to take, say... Hawaii or Guam. My discussion points are hyper-focused upon Taiwan, a particular geographical region that China has _HUGE_ advantages in... while the USA has many disadvantages. Our Navy will only be supplied from Japanese / Philippines (reasonably close, but also small islands that just don't have the capability like Chinese rail or Chinese Highways / Docks will have).
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Worst: USA's "disadvantage" position will only be for a short timeframe. Our upgrade schedule for our ships is public. The world knows that USA's next generation ships / Navy is coming in the years 2030+ or so, which means China has a short... few year window... where they will be stronger / more capable than us.
The political implications are obvious. It is in the best interest of China to strike when their advantage is maximized. IE: Chinese latest-generation ships roll off their dry-docks into service... but before the USA upgrades our Navy in 2030s.
If China chooses peace (and I hope they do), they will lose the opportunity of a lifetime. US Navy obviously will outmatch the Chinese Navy in 2030s and onwards.
I don't expect that China will make a move yet though, they also are building capital ships, like Aircraft Carriers, and also producing ship killing Hypersonic Missiles.
So the nature is that China is preparing for a fight. Hopefully it's just bluster.