Posted on 06/09/2024 8:20:05 PM PDT by hardspunned
“It is called the “Home on Jam” option
We designed the GPS antennas on the Excaliber and ERGM projectiles to do that over 30 years ago.”
What kind of war are you going to fight with 3 shots per day ?
Meanwhile, in the Chinese littoral, US submarines and airpower could make life difficult and costly for China's naval vessels and trade. And China's endemic corruption has sapped the vitality of their military. Taking Taiwan would be difficult, and China could not sustain air and naval superiority there due to a lack of spare parts and trained personnel.
Bits and pieces of these issues appear in the Chinese press and on social media, often as explanations why additional preparation is needed by China before they try to grab Taiwan. These preparations are said to include stockpiling essential imported raw materials, greater patriotism and discipline, and further development of Chinese military power.
They don’t need to do a D-Day type of invasion. they just need to impose a blockade like the Houthis have done with the Suez Canal.
The US Navy can’t do anything to stop the Houthis after 6 months. How do you think they will do against a PRC blockade ?
Not sure what the big deal is with spoofing. So we encrypt our signal and we get a jammed encrypted signal, rather than a jammed non-encryped signal. Big deal, we miss either way, which is EXACTLY what the Washington Post is now reporting.
As to whether you want to believe them, that’s your choice, but unless you can give me a GOOD REASON to think they’re lying here, when everything else they write is PRO-UKRAINIAN, I will believe this article...rather than some FReeper that I know something about.
In response to the declaration of a Chinese blockade of Taiwan, the US could announce a counter-blockade of China and quickly sever her trade ties and seize her overseas assets.
If necessary, after several months of preparation, the US could then break the blockade and send a naval relief force to Taiwan's aid. My surmise is that China would back down rather than risk a naval engagement.
A blockade of Taiwan would be difficult for the Chinese to sustain due to operational weaknesses in the Chinese military, lack of training, lack of spare parts, and massive corruption” . “
You have got to be kidding !
China has 10,000 times the resources of the Houthis who have successfully blockaded the Suez Canal for 6 months !
It is actually alarming to read this stuff from what is a reasonably well informed person. And I think this thinking is very representative of the conventional wisdom in Repub circles in Washington.
Which means the USA will continue to stumble to more foreign policy and military disasters which are orders of magnitude larger than Ukraine or the Afghanistan collapse.
The key passage:
Chinese military corruption is so bad that China is presently incapable of invading Taiwan. President Xi made the appalling discovery last year that China’s navy and air force were so bereft of spare parts as to be mission incapable, and particularly so for several months of constant combat. Plus most of the several hundred newly constructed ICBMs and silos of its Strategic Missile Force had missile fuel tanks filled with water rather than fuel, silo lids that couldn’t open and silo concrete not much more protective than beach sandcastles.
It will take years to produce the aircraft and ship spare parts necessary to make China’s existing armed forces capable of even an attempted an invasion of Taiwan, and longer to produce the additional combat forces capable of winning (assuming the required spare parts for those are produced). The earliest China might mount an invasion is probably about 2026 – 2027. Even then there will be major uncertainties about the serviceability, reliability and effectiveness of China’s military hardware plus the operational capability of its senior officers to conduct a corps level amphibious assault with no combat experience in any of its military services. And the inherent Chinese culture of corruption. Military incompetence and military corruption go hand in hand.
The article goes on to discuss a blockade, so I urge you to read the whole thing. Keep in mind that Putin's troubles in Ukraine are a chastening example for China of the damage that corruption can do to subvert the nominal military power of an autocratic state.
“
So a US blockade means the Chinese Communist Party will suffer its most feared calamity – mass unemployment for the duration of the blockade. The CCP has acted as though that would be a regime-ending event, and we’ll find out if they’re right.
China’s loss of the imported 35 percent of its food supply will not be immediately calamitous as most of that is used to improve their peoples’ diets, not to keep them alive. But loss of their entire meat supply, especially their treasured pork, will make them very unhappy.”
This is absolutely delusional !
You can’t bet the future of the United States that things will play out like this.
The reaction of the populations of the UK and Germany Japan to food rationing and food shortages in WW1 and WW2 was not bugman surrender and complaining, but rage against an enemy which created “Total War” economies where “mass unemployment” was the least of the worries.
A USA attempted blockade doesn’t do anything but create a fanatical nationalistic reaction. Think Japan in WW2 with 10 times the population and the industrial capacity of WW2 USA !
https://www.strategypage.com/htmw/htlog/articles/2024061002057.aspx#startofcomments
In addition, communist China's internal weaknesses are similar to those of the USSR and her Warsaw Pact allies in their late stage, with riots and much popular discontent due to misrule, poor quality food, and lack of consumer goods. As it was, the leaders of the USSR did not provoke a war because they realized they would lose and would suffer furious discontent from their own people. China's leadership today is in a similar bad position and they seem to know it.
I’ll stand on what I said.
Anyone still reading this can make their own assessment of some supposed “expert” who is projecting peacetime population behaviors onto a wartime situation where a hostile foreign power is attempting a starvation by blockade to effect a Regime collapse / Regime change.
The natural reaction is going to be extreme nationalism and extreme support for Total War, as well as a willingness to volunteer for combat units as well as sacrifice for the war effort.
And it doesn’t fade after a year or two, either.
For example, look at German industrial production for 1944, despite raw materials shortages, and massive bombing the previous three years.
Without food scarcity and high prices, there probably would not have been a French Revolution and the radicalism of the Left, Germany could well have won WW I, and she might not have invaded the Soviet Union in WW II. With a bitter memory of Stalin's deliberate use of famine to kill millions of Ukrainians, most of them today are determined not to be ruled by Russia if at all possible.
China's reliance on foreign food and fertilizer to feed her massive population is a well-known strategic vulnerability. Throughout Chinese history, famine and economic collapse tend to lead to regime change. Widespread food riots and civil disorder and cannibalism occurred in China even in the last hundred years. In 1958, Mao's collectivization drive caused a mass famine that remains a sensitive issue for the CCP.
The Chinese government today prioritizes food security and stockpiles food and raw materials. There are hard limits though to such a strategy as a remedy against a blockade. Most notably, the loss of foreign export markets would devastate China's economy and deprive the CCP of its main source of legitimacy.
Meanwhile, China's current position of increased power in alliance with Russia would be reversed and make China a supplicant for Russian potash fertilizer that could be essential to her survival. Might a Trump II administration settle the Ukraine war and require Russia to align against China in return for sanctions relief? It is hard to imagine that Chairman Xi has not been briefed on that possibility.
As for arms production, if you dig deeper, you will find that Nazi Germany's seeming production miracle in the latter phase of WW II is less impressive than touted by Albert Speer in his massive, best-selling memoir. Here's a hint: treat exculpatory memoirs by Nazis with skepticism.
As Hitler's minister for armament, Speer ordered German factories to shove new aircraft, tanks, and weapons and munitions out the door for delivery in spite of defects and a lack of spare parts. At the end of the war, Germany was littered with thousands of derelict but factory new tanks and aircraft that could not be made operable.
Hitler of course saw the factory production numbers and took them at face value, so Speer kept his neck and survived the war. Goering, who knew better about the hollowness of Speer's methods, did not press the issue because of his own vulnerability over massive bribe-taking and his maladministration and failures as head of the Luftwaffe and the German economy.
Even Himmler kept quiet because his power and wealth was on the rise as an ally of Speer. As Hitler took heart at Speer's impressive tallies, Himmler chimed in that his slave labor force was essential to that spot of bright news. In the end, even Nazi Germany's genuine advances in jet aircraft and long range rockets proved to be of little effect on the war because they were technologically immature and limited in numbers and in operational use.
Postwar, Speer claimed that he made the factory production lines under his control generate massive output -- but without controlling the work force and its large component of brutally exploited concentration camp labor from Himmler. Historians grit their teeth at public credulity for obvious lies by Speer that are so carefully tailored to fit a phony historical narrative that eases German guilt and subtly massages German pride.
Germans like to whisper to themselves that Hitler was not so bad because he rebuilt the economy, put people to work, conquered France and Poland, expanded the Reich -- and got rid of nasty Jews. Who could have imagined though that the Nazis also sent their grandmother's nice Jewish doctor and his family into the extermination camps when they were arrested by the Gestapo? Why even someone as close to Hitler as Speer did not know what was going on, so ordinary Germans cannot fairly be accused of guilty knowledge.
Moreover, as Speer and other former Nazis suggest, with good generals in charge and Speer's production methods, Germany might have won the war. Yet this is a fantasy in that as in WW I, a land power with limited resources like Germany was fundamentally unable to win WW II against Allied control of the seas and far more of the world's economy and resources.
The CCP regime in China today has parallels with that of Nazi Germany. China is run by an ideological political party that celebrates force and has a powerful economy and military at its disposal. China though also has massive corruption, prison labor camps, and phony accounting, even as to her military forces.
Geographic constraints also make for serious vulnerabilities for China that have no sure remedies. Chairman Xi and his circle want Taiwan, but, for now, and perhaps forever, it remains beyond China's grasp if the US and her allies play their cards well.
Most of all, we have to know China's weaknesses and politely make clear to China that we can put the screws to them if we have to. And, to get back to my original point, control of the world's financial system and of sea lanes by the US Navy and those of our allies make it possible to do that without extensive fighting in the seas near China.
“...reliance on foreign food and fertilizer to feed her massive population is a well-known strategic vulnerability. “
Is this about the UK during WW2 ?
Again, it is simply absurd to project peacetime political responses onto a wartime response when a hostile foreign power is trying to destroy the country and starve it into submission.
“As Hitler’s minister for armament, Speer ordered German factories to shove new aircraft, tanks, and weapons and munitions out the door for delivery in spite of defects and a lack of spare parts. At the end of the war, Germany was littered with thousands of derelict but factory new tanks and aircraft that could not be made operable. “
Well, maybe someone should have told the US Air Force that they were mistaken, and they were imagining large German fighter production.
The investigation of how large numbers of German fighters were being produced was the origin of the US Air Force “Heavy Press” program of the 1950’s.
starts at relevant section.
https://youtu.be/iZ50nZU3oG8?t=58
Not every missile needs GPS. A jammer is putting out a strong EMR field, in order to cover/mask actual GPS signals. We have stuff that specifically goes for anything outputting tons of EMR. GPS and/or inertial systems get it in the vicinity, and the EMR seeker directs from there. The jamming antenna is essentially a big neon sign saying ‘come here!’.
No one has taken those terrorists seriously, at all. It’d be relatively easy for us to take them out, if we actually tried to do so. China putting a blockade on Taiwan isn’t going to be effective if they avoid a hot war.
Unless China is willing to start a full fight with us, they aren’t going to be able to just deter anyone from visiting. A drone wall only works if it’s actually war, and Taiwan certainly wouldn’t be the only spot if we did start fighting,
” No one has taken those terrorists seriously, at all. It’d be relatively easy for us to take them out, if we actually tried to do so. “
USA can’t deal with the Houthis but can take out China no problem.
The only other place I see this Leftist-stype doublethink is Ukraine - where Russia is on the verge of defeat and collapse, but is also a threat to invade and occupy the whole of Europe !
Jamming makes the missile somewhat less accurate. If it can’t lock enough satellites to get a GPS reading, missiles generally rely on inertial systems for guidance instead. So you get, say, 10m accuracy instead of 1m.
Spoofing fakes a satellite signal, in order to change the coordinates the missile thinks it’s at. So while the missile aims at your house, it’s location is offset and it actually lands in your neighbor’s yard down the street.
You don’t spoof and jam a missile at the same time, jamming defeats the point of spoofing, you’ll just jam the spoofed GPS also. However, Russia is likely using both in different locations. Jamming is easy but less effective, and also lets the world know where you are. Spoofing is safer and more effective, but much more difficult.
The expansion of production achieved in 1944 did not at any time lead to a significant increase in Luftwaffe frontline strength. No fully satisfactory answer has yet been produced for this problem. A large number of Luftwaffe records were destroyed and many of the surviving ones have been difficult to decipher. With confidence, one can say that a significant proportion of the expanded production that did not turn up in frontline strength was destroyed at the factory, in transit, on operational airfields, or in combat. The sources agree, however, that attrition did not account for the whole of the problem. The balance might be accounted for, in part, by declining standards of record-keeping in the last year of the war. Another explanation favored by USSBS investigators was that certain officials, chiefly Karl-Otto Saur, the head of the special Fighter Staff under Albert Speer, were not above altering the books to make their production efforts look better than they really were.
The US Air Force noticed DURING THE WAR that they were shooting down large numbers of fighters, but the Germans were replacing them, and they didn’t know how they were doing it.
The US airforce was examining shot down German fighters DURING THE WAR to see how they were made. And that is when they discovered the gigantic forgings, motly magnesium, which made rapid manufacturing easier and cheaper.
Then they went into the captured factories DURING THE WAR looking for the forging presses that could produce such parts.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZ50nZU3oG8
This was engineering analysis, not some after the war legalistic stupidity on whose recoreds were accurate.
Where I think we agree is that while Trump would put the screws to China, there can be little confidence that Biden the Bribed would do so.
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