Replies

One is the rapid advance in missle technology vs carriers. Just like WWII put an end to the battleship as king I'm estimating (guessing?) that the emerging generations of anti-ship missles may make the era of the carrier end. The tools for finding and destroying a carrier are growing much much faster than those for defending it.

Missile technology, for all practical purposes, has reached the absolute limits of destructiveness. If you're willing to use nuclear weapons, you can destroy any target. I don't think that anyone is crazy enough to use nukes, as any use raises an unfortunate precedent that will rebound to the initiator's detriment.

The problem is finding what you want to destroy, and it is a HUGE problem. There is exactly ONE country with a reasonably robust ocean surveillance network, and that's America. China may have missiles, but they do not have the sensors needed to use them to full effect.

The other is the simple size of the population of China; 1,400 million. That size makes me feel on a purely intuitive level (I can't defend the point) that they will find a way. Like the movie Jurrasic Park said "Life finds a way." I just feel that that many people, focused on the task, will find a way to conquer Taiwan. Especially if our carriers are no longer in the picture.

If our carriers are no longer in the picture, it will be because some other means of sea control and power projection will replace them. (I can think of about four different concepts right off the top of my head.)

Numbers are useless without context. 900 million of those 1.4 billion people live in conditions not significantly removed from the first agricultural villages of 6-7,000 years ago. China as a whole has a serious problem: it isn't a single country. It's actually three. The first is the China I've discussed. The second is the Manchurian industrial heartland. They'd probably support Pat Buchanan for Premeir if he went over there and started talking in Cantonese about how the WTO is a raw deal for China. The third is the Shanghai/Hong Kong region (I call it "Shang Kong"), which is a Third Wave post-mass-industrialization economy.

One interesting thing about secessionist movements in the past couple of decades is this: the rich want to secede from the poor. Basically, the rich are tired of carrying the poor along via confiscatory taxation. The poor want the goodies to keep on coming, so they support central governments. The Shanghai/Hong Kong region holds the prospect of seceding from the rest of China--and Chinese efforts to modernize their military are only likely to exacerbate the trend, because the folks who can run a post-modern military force able to take on US forces are all from that region.