We Are Going To Lose The Coming War With China

Townhall.com ^ | March 21, 2019 | Kurt Schlichter

[central_va]

The US navy doesn’t even load tactical nukes on warships anymore. Tactical nukes will not be used by the US Navy unless the Chinese threaten us with a SSBN or ICBM attack. I do not see that as happening.

[Rummyfan]

...if you go to one of the service branches’ War Colleges and poll the faculty and students about America’s greatest strategic threat, as many as 50% of the respondents will tell you it is “climate change.”

That is truly frightening.

[central_va]

losing carriers

How do you mean "losing"? Sinking, damaging, what?

[Rummyfan]

Take aircraft carriers. I have a sentimental attachment to those potent floating fortresses – the Schlichters are usually Navy officers and I’m the random green sheep who went Army. There was a picture of my dad’s carrier (the U.S.S. Lake Champlain) hanging in my house as a kid. I love them – but in 2019 they’re a trap.

There is still nothing like a carrier for projecting power.

[Rummyfan]

China has quietly established strings of bases all over the world - the latest, a navy base in Italy...

The Chinese have a naval base in Italy?! WTF?

[Alberta's Child]

I am far lee concerned about the enemy in Beijing than I am about the enemy in Washington.

[servantboy777]

Even if they were to each our lunch and pop the bag, we'd take a big ol bite out of their sandwich. Any country that comes against us will suffer great loss. Perhaps a loss they'd not anticipated....and this is speaking in conventional warfare.

With that said, folks here in the U.S. better know, war with adversaries such as China/Russia won't just be on foreign soil. They will bring the battle to our homeland.

They know, the last war on our soil was in 1884. Great loss of life on OUR soil would likely shape opinions here at home. The Chi-coms would test the countries resolve.

It will be ugly.

[nathanbedford]

A few months ago I put some earnest questions to a retired naval officer, an Annapolis graduate, a nuclear scientist, a man smart enough to be recruited into Rickover's Navy, which should be all you need to know about his credentials and candlepower.

The question I put to him was concerning recent news that the Navy was planning on building two Ford class carriers at the same time. I put the question this way: "15 min. after they're built will be obsolete?" His reply: "and 20 min. after they are built they will be sunk!" You might dismiss is assessment as the typical view of a submariner. I do not. Perhaps you'll like this reply which incorporates a reply from may 2016 on this subject, so that you will leave it unfixed. It contains an anecdote related to me by another Annapolis graduate, an officer of the World War II USS Enterprise which you might find amusing:

Here we have yet another article which over the years have come dribbling in which cumulatively raise the question whether the romantic age of the aircraft carrier, with whom the man in my tagline below is so intimately associated, is drawing to a close. Is the age in which the United States can resort at will to super carriers to project power around the world coming to a close, forcing us to other platforms, other tactics and other strategies?

We have previously been reading that the Chinese are developing missiles intended to strike carriers from a distance while the American Navy has been transitioning to planes with shorter range creating an obvious vulnerability to the skin of the carrier despite undoubted multiplicity of defensive weapons. It is the old problem of cost vs. gain and it will take an intrepid president indeed to send the carrier into harm's way where it can be taken out by the odd missile. It would be politically disastrous to lose a carrier and it would be disastrous to America's image as a superpower to do so.

One then begins to think that the application of carriers will resemble 19th century British gunboats patrolling colonial waters showing the flag and offering a whiff of grape if required to intimidate the native populations. It is one thing to send a supercarrier against the Third World country and quite another to risk it against the missiles soon to be produced in staggering quantities by the world's second (or perhaps even first) economy.

So the first question is whether we need 13 carriers if within a reasonable timeframe they cannot be deployed except with extreme risk? Should we not be diverting precious defense funds to other platforms such as submarines or satellites? In any event, how do we maintain American power in places like the South China Sea if our carriers are in fact exposed?

The questions get worse: with the advent of this gunboat missile technology are we not in the foreseeable future facing an imbalance or asymmetrical naval battlescape in which we will be risking multi-billion dollar carriers against cheap but lethal and, more importantly, multiple missile capable gunboats? A retired naval captain once described the war in Korea to me as follows: we loaded a very expensive bomb onto a very expensive airplane whereupon a very expensively trained pilot flies it off the deck of an extremely expensive aircraft carrier and seeks a target in North Korea. They find an oxcart, fire the missile, consume expensive fuel and return to the carrier having successfully completed their mission. Two North Koreans climb out of the ditch observe their dead ox, gather the splinter wood from the cart with which to build a fire and eat the ox. Who won?

We have to run a cost-benefit analyses and we have to decide whether we have the right tools for the theater. We have to know this 30 years in advance. And we have to do it with defense in mind and not politics, with a concern only for the security of the nation and not the pork at home, with a scrupulous regard for the precious nature of our Armed Forces and a rigid indifference to the temptations of social engineering such a top-down organization as the American military represents to God playing leftists.

[Hot Tabasco]

I don’t think the situation is as serious as the writer makes it sound. The Chinese rely on satellites too.........

[Buckeye McFrog]

How to win a war with China.

Inform them politely that they have just made their LAST shipment to Walmart.

The ensuing civil unrest will tear them apart from inside within the following ninety days.

[Alberta's Child]

Schlichter describes his observations from Iraq in Desert Storm and then complains about the U.S. always prepraring to “fight the last war” without seeing the irony. Desert Storm was a conflict where the U.S. employed a 1980s-era military against a 1960s-era adversary. That’s the way it was DESIGNED to be fought.

[an amused spectator]

The Chinese are the only ones in the world who are dealing with the Musloids like they should be dealt with.

Let that sink in.

[Hot Tabasco]

Kinda like going to war with your neighbor who owes you $10,000

[Psalm 73]

"Sinking"

I think that's the term Schlichter used.

[Alas Babylon!]

No. They don’t.

The Chinese have a company that manages shipping ports, that competes globally, even here in the USA.

But it isn’t the PLAN... Yet...

[central_va]

Um, actually sinking an aircraft carrier is almost impossible. They. like all large warships, are design to be damaged and repaired over and over again. Even DD's, FF's and DE's can be repaired and returned to service in most cases.

The biggest threat to the Navy is the ongoing de industrialization of the USA. A powerful navy needs ship yards, dry docks and workers to make and repair warships. That is the weak link. Thank you Free Traitors™ for ruining the USA.

[servantboy777]

>>And thanks to the free traitors, they're paying for them with our money.<<

Not my money. I've had a personal boycott on Chinese goods for a couple of decades now. I realize some things ya just can't help, like electronics components within certain devices and so forth, but we can ALL make a dent and if we all cut what we can see, that dent will show up in the bottom line of the Chi-coms balance sheet.

Check your labels folks...check your labels. Buy anywhere but China. Wanna cut the head off the snake...check your labels.

[central_va]

recruited into Rickover's Navy

Don't ask a bubble head about aircraft carries.

You might dismiss is assessment as the typical view of a submariner. I do not.

Naval doctrine is such that aircraft carriers do not generally go where the sub threat has not been neutralized to the point where the BG has a great chance of success.. So how would they "sink" a carrier?

Submariners are mostly ignorant about surface, amphibious and air warfare. The have a very mypoic view of the world and warfare.

[nathanbedford]

rubbish!

[central_va]

Funny thing about bubble heads. The surface fleet relies on them to find and track enemy ssns. Their goal is to prevent the sinking of friendly surface ships and warships, yet they disparage the ones that justify their existence. For the most part they are not team players and as such I have very little respect for them, though their life can be hard. They are VERY strange people those submariners. A necessary evil.