A national security official under Joe Biden who reviewed the document is said to have turned pale on realising Beijing had “redundancy after redundancy” for “every trick we had up our sleeve”, The New York Times reported.
Last year, Pete Hegseth, the defence secretary, said that “we lose every time” in the Pentagon’s war games against China, and predicted the Asian country’s hypersonic missiles could destroy aircraft carriers within minutes.
Well, it does make some sense that China’s plan’s to counter the US during an invasion of Taiwan would focus on nullifying America’s main far-from-home force projection method, which has for decades been fighter planes and cruise missiles launched from naval assets 1000km plus off the coast of the target nation.
Since the US has been using the same overall strategy again and again for decades now, China would have had lots of time to develop counters for it, and it’s not as if Chinese Engineering is any less than Western Engineering.
I mean, Russia too developed hypersonic missiles exactly to counter that very same American strategy. Now, Russia is well in range of lots of land-based assets of America’s allies in Europe so it could be targeted by those, but that’s not at all the case for China which America has to approach by sea, and that will be done with the usual Aircraft Carrier Group and hence that’s exactly what China would have set itself up to counter.
I don’t like giving US credit… But all of that means nothing and is all speculative.
If US does one thing well? It’s invent shit so advanced, even when captured it can’t be reproduced. Russia has fallen flat on its face, where’s all that military might? You want me to believe China is that different? I’m having major doubts there. Hopefully I’m never proven wrong. Hopefully we never find out. But this sort of shit was said before Ukraine invasion yet here we are…
The US became a military industrial complex state built upon military keynseianism during WW2. This worked well for them because of their unique advantages in the war, specifically being able to stay relatively disengaged while Europe burned, whilst also making immense profits selling weapons fo the allies.
Essentially all of the European spoils of colonialism, the Atlantic slave trade and other economies of dispossession that made Europe rich went to the US as Europe self destructed. It was not unexpected either, the destruction of cultures, societies and peoples with a worldview of white supremacy was bound to bite back at them at some point (all conservative/purity politics eventually do).
There was also a massive brain drain with scientists escaping to the US for safety.
The US has managed to leverage that with 75 years of prominence as the global hegimon (some will argue it only became unipolar with the fall of the USSR) but that was never going to last forever. I wouldn’t underestimate China. America, like all empires do eventually, has become fat and lazy. China is hungry to reestablish itself.
Now, the US and NATO makes up up 80% of global military expenditure so they aren’t going to just fade away but I would look at the US’ massive bet on AGI as a negative sign. If they accomplish it then great, that’s probably another 50 to 100 years of US dominace but the approach reeks of desperation. China has had a much more measured and pragmatic approach to AI. If the bubble pops and the US takes too long to pick up the pieces, China will race ahead. China is already ahead on AI implementation in robotics which will have important military applications in the future as well.
The cope “muh budget” is batshit insane. The US is a dictatorship and the military budget has always gone up without needing subterfuge. Why now, that there’s a military police rounding up people in the streets randomly? Truth is, China has the manpower and tech not to fear the US, and also the natural resources…
America has long wasted tons of its military budget in things with tiny or even no Return On Investment in terms of additional effectiveness for every extra dollar spent.
In a sense the greatest enemy of the US is itself, in the form of the MIL and Corruption from the lowest levels to the highest.
I mean, notice the recent change in the budget for the military which this year removed the Right To Repair for the Military, something which does nothing other than hinder Military effectiveness whilst further enriching military hardware suppliers.
The way the money is misused and redirected to feather the nests of large military companies’ shareholders and CxOs, as well retired Procurement Generals who move to cushy jobs in the very companies they bought overpriced items from and MIL-friendly politicians in subcommittees approving white elephant military projects, is sort of a twisted mirror version of what happened in Russia were everybody in positions of power was on the take and their military when finally faced with a proper adversary at the same technological level - in the form of Ukraine - turned out to be a lot less than it seemed on paper.
Also America went down a route similar to Germany in WWII when they went for tanks like the Tiger Panzer which were peak-tech and very costly to manufacture, which the Allies countered by just throwing lots and lots of not-quite-as-perfect yet much cheaper and faster to manufacture tanks like the Sherman at it.
America has the biggest military budget in the World by a large margin, but also outright wastes a huge fraction of it and pays top premium for small incremental improvements, so the results aren’t as impressive as one would expect from just looking at money spent.
If you want to see efficient use of a military budget, look at Ukraine.
The US seems the only vountry with more corruption in military procurement than China.
Russia had whole warehouses in its inventory that only existed on paper. When they started their war they quickly found out.
Don’t suppose there was a similar report about the strength of Russia’s army before we found out the reality of it in Ukraine?
I think that underestimating China in current year is one of the most disatrous things you could possibly do.
Underestimating China isn’t wise, but always using China as the new Boogeyman to get even more trillions invested in “national security” is getting old fast. “Secret reports” my ass. If you’re reading it on the internet it’s most likely plain old FUD.
Yeah, but we all know that Russia is a country run by slovenly drunken morons with institutional ignorance, while China is country who has its shit totally together. I’m not that afraid of Russia, but China is terrifying.
After MAGA, China will be the dominant world power, and we will find out what it feels like to be a country who has to sit back and hope the machinations of other governments are good for us, and accept whatever we get.
China has huge problems domestically. They still haven’t climbed out of the hole they dug with their real estate scams.
they also have massive corruption, which is the biggest problem the russians have.
the russian military was massively undertrained, underequipped, and underexperienced. all of their ‘stats’ were massively inflated due to the instiutional corruoption rampant form bottom to top that inflated everything.
Their demographic problem is even worse thanks to years of the one child policy.
Whatever problems they’ve got, they can’t come close to ours. Our society is literally on the verge of collapse, and the entire world sees it. China is totally ready to take over the global hegemony.
Nah.
Russia had prepared itself for the usual American strategy of a Carrier Group sitting out far way from the coast and throwing long range cruise missiles and fighter jets at it whilst too far away to be hit by return fire - as used for decades now, for example in the Gulf War - by developing hypersonic missiles and advanced AA capable of shooting down those fighter jets and cruise missiles.
Then they went and started a land war with their next door neighbor - which is almost the opposite military scenario of that which they prepare themselves for - plus on top of it it turned out EVERYBODY was on the take in their Military so it was a hollowed out shell far lesser than it seemed on paper and finally, to add insult to injury, the era of the drone was upon us changing the nature of land warfare as well as on the long range side making mass attacks with cheap quasi-cruise missiles possible.
Given the geography of it if they attack Taiwan, China is - unlike Russia - almost certainly going to be facing the decades old way of American sea-based force projection in the form of the Carrier Group, which is the one they’ve prepared themselves to counter.
If the Biden admin was the first time the seriously looked at and understood that threat… well, that’s a bit insane, because the PRC has had that capability since the mid 2010s, and it’s only gotten more effective.
It’s fascinating because both the US and China have major corruption in the higher echelons of their respective militaries that put both at a great disadvantage.
One country has recognized the ill effects of corruption and the other hasn’t.
As a DEI hire of the pedo-shield con-artist regime, Pete Hegseth is about as credible as a meth-addled mynah bird trained on a dramatic reading of the complete works of James Joyce
That has to be the most random string of words that actually works ever constructed.
Ukraine is proving cheap and plentiful is the new version of superiority, like the aircraft carrier supplanted the battleships, so too does the missile
Quantity has a quality of its own
This is a lesson America knew back in the WWII days when they countered the superior Tiger and Leopard Panzers with Sherman tanks, but seems to have forgotten in recent times with its multitude of white elephant projects for “superior systems” which are much more expensive whilst yielding tiny improvements over existing systems.
Meanwhile the era of the drone is upon us, and that’s all about using said “quality of its own” of masses of cheap and easy to make drones.
Eh, a carrier is a whole nother thing.
One carrier with a flight detail would be in the top ten most powerful Air Force’s on the planet, and we’ve got like 7 of them?
And that’s not counting all the support in a carrier group.
There are certain types of drone attacks that might have some effect on a carrier, but it would take an insane amount of preparation and be inconceivably expensive.
At most theyd have 1-2 attempts, it would be the modern equivalent of the WW2 nukes if someone could sink a modern US carrier, even in a surprise attack to start a war.
Please read the article. The government and Pentagon themselves are saying they will lose.
From a different comment in this thread:
The big country always wants to make it look plausible they’d lose to justify the budget, and every other country wants to do well out of genuine pride or propaganda that their military is strong and not to be fucked with.
Why are you taking trump and kegsworth word?
They’re fear mongering
It’s not fear mongering. It’s a real area-denial weapons system capability that the PRC initially deployed in 1991, and upgraded the terminal weapon into a hypersonic glide body in 2015. Lob a few of those at a CVN and it’s probably going to the bottom of the ocean.
Yup, there is no good counter apart from simply not being there. And CVNs aren’t known for their agility.
I don’t mean to belittle the force projection that a super carrier can bring to bear, but these hypersonic missiles are pretty scary, if they work
An Aegis missle can knock it down tho…
They cost 4.7 mil a pop, which isn’t much to the US military. And don’t even need launched by the carrier, it’d be launched by ships between the middle and the carrier.
Apparently China claims they have hypersonic rockets made out of concrete for the low low price of 99k each, but that’s not exactly believable. Especially since they’re claiming 99k and not 100k. I mean, even that they’re using “round” US dollars.
That’s pretty common propaganda to claim something is cheaper and more widely available than it really is. It’s why we split our uranium into two bombs in WW2. Because a country might use all of it at once as a bluff. But only idiot would make just two and then use them both days apart. It made it look like we could have a bunch. Not enough to keep up the pace, but how many? 5, 12?
It was more psychological warfare than anything. So is China claiming these are so cheap and mass producible when if that was true we’d see the same cost savings in commercial spaces.
No other country would be able to compete
We split our PLUTONIUM into 2 bombs because one was gadget, the test. Little boy (Hiroshima) was a uranium gun design and fat man (Nagasaki) was plutonium implosion.
Edit: To be clear your point about our bluff absolutely stands. It would likely be months at best before we would be able to drop another fission weapon of any design
Huh TIL the nuclear bombs used two different technologies
Lol like a few months back. Fucking could hardly keep a bunch of “pirate boys” in bathtubs with Detroits held down with a ratchet strap and klashnikovs away from the all majestic aircraft carriers.
These war games are bullshit and the US and other powerful countries intentionally tie one hand behind our backs as a reason to increase the defense budget.
Like, US subs will have a bunch of people literally banging on the inside of the hull so enemy radar picks them up and “destroys” them too.
The big country always wants to make it look plausible they’d lose to justify the budget, and every other country wants to do well out of genuine pride or propaganda that their military is strong and not to be fucked with.
At the end of the day no country can counter our nuclear powered subs with nuclear interballistic missiles. Sinking a carrier would be responded to like attacking a US city, it’s just not a risk China would take.
Like, US subs will have a bunch of people literally banging on the inside of the hull so enemy radar picks them up and “destroys” them too.
I’m not a radar operator but I’m pretty sure that’s not how it works. Banging on the hull doesn’t produce radar emissions.
I assume they meant sonar
well actually…
leaks top secret specs all over war thunder forums
War Thunder devs refusing to look at 50 year old NATOPS manuals because of “confidentiality” and then proceeding to buff Russian slop has me convinced Putin plays the game to cope with his losses in Ukraine.
we should just give nukes to everyone, then whoevers dumb enough to use em will wipe themselves out in short order
drone fleet can do wonders on “superior force”. Luckily China is still stuck in bigger-meaner-better mentality so pivoting to more agile warfare methodology would work… except most drone components are made in china
