“The cost in human lives is appalling,” writes Molan. Xi Jinping has delivered his message even as the world still struggles to restore communications. Xi’s message to America, as Molan puts it:
“You are out of the Western Pacific and we will not let you re-establish your bases in Japan, South Korea or even Guam. From Japan to Australia and out to Hawaii, the Western Pacific is now a Chinese sphere of influence.”
It’s merely a scenario, but is it plausible? Molan argues that we’re preparing for the wrong war. He thinks that we’re all standing around waiting for a limited Chinese attack on Taiwan. And while he says that’s possible, it would only happen if China’s strategists are silly.
If Xi struck Taiwan, his attacking forces would be vulnerable to a hammering from the US. Why would he accept that pain when he has the option of pushing America out of the hemisphere altogether, forcing it back to the region east of Hawaii?
Then he can take Taiwan at his leisure, probably without the use of force. And dictate terms to US allies including Australia, now cut off from its great ally.
And Xi can luxuriate in history’s acclaim as the ruler who ended half a millennium of Western dominance of the Pacific.
angloid military strategists always make reality sound 10000x cooler than reality
Naval drones aren’t the proven weapons that land drones are, in part because if you’re fighting in the middle of an ocean you still need a platform to launch drones from, which brings you back to some sort of carrier.
There are also other factors, like the ranges involved being much larger so your drone has to carry more fuel than a land drone. You also have to get your your enemy in a reasonable amount of time and not hang around too long in your enemy’s kill zone, so a naval drone has to be faster than a land drone. You then have to carry enough ordinance to theoretically cripple a ship, which means more payload weight than a land drone. All that means that a naval drone is much larger than a land drone and is basically a fighter jet without the cockpit: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hongdu_GJ-11
Guided missile swarms are a much more dangerous threat to carriers, along with long range ballistic anti-ship missiles. However, nobody has ever actually tested modern versions of those in real combat so we essentially won’t know what modern naval combat looks like until it happens.
I still don’t understand how hypersonic anti-ship missiles don’t just immediately end the viability of all surface ships. I mean even against regular subsonic missiles, anti-missile systems seemed very sketchy to me. CIWS is a security blanket that would get torn to shreds in actual combat with a peer that could overwhelm it. Intercepting with missiles of your own is really difficult and unreliable- even shooting down missiles on perfectly predictable ballistic trajectories with generous advance notice is fearsomely hard and US systems don’t exactly have a flawless test record. And sure enough that Russian cruiser went down in the Black Sea to just a couple of Ukrainian ASMs despite being packed to the gills with supposedly state-of-the-art tech. And hypersonics? As far as I know the US doesn’t even have radar that can track those. So how is the entire US pacific fleet not headed straight for the bottom on day one of a hot war?
The only answers I’ve ever seen for this are:
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“It’s hard to find and target a ship in the wide open ocean if we shoot down their satellites first.” Um okay I guess, but it still can’t be great to just sink immediately if an enemy ship or recon drone ever spots you, ever.
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“Lazerzzzzz! Maybe? Someday? Idk.” Wow so how many percentage points of GDP do you need for building useless ships until this speculative directed energy tech someday materializes?
Am I missing something? Cause I’m unqualified too and it seems like I must be missing something. If surface ships are donezo then why is the PLAN still building carriers?
Mostly because only China really has hypersonic ballistic anti ship missiles, many of which are still in testing, and none of which have ever been fired at an enemy ship in combat. That means that it’s absolutely possible that said missiles don’t work as intended, or flat out don’t work.
However, because military planning proceeds on the basis of assuming the best for your enemy and the worst for yourself, China still has to build a surface navy because it needs to prepare for the eventuality that it’s ballistic missiles turn out to be V-2 rocket level wunderwaffles.
The ship itself was like Brezhnev-era old but I thought that it was nevertheless loaded with fully modern anti-air anti-missile tech :vivian-shrug:
