In the News/Activism forum, on a thread titled TO TAKE TAIWAN, FIRST KILL A CARRIER, virgil wrote: If the Chinese attacked Taiwan and sunk a US carrier, how do you think Japan would react? Or all of the Pacific rim countries? China would be isolated. And they could just kiss the Panama Canal privleges good bye. We won't stand for that. America will protect its interests. Don't expect Europe to help though. They may sink the carrier with a lot of expenditure and a few lies, but we will hurt them where it counts. We'll send them back to the stone age from whence they recently came. Wal-Mart might have a problem though. Actually I think this article is floating about because there is also a big defense bill floating about in Congress right now.
Personally, I think that a war between China and the United States will go our way for one simple reason: they have to come and get us.
The hinge on which any Chinese invasion plan for Taiwan moves is the number of troopships and assault boats that can be sent across the Taiwan Strait. John Pike posted this to FAS back when he was with that outfit:
If you look real close, you'll find that it's an overlay of Operation NEPTUNE, the invasion of Normandy, on a map of the Taiwan Strait. The big mistake that Pike made was that he believes that there would be a landing in the North, while I suspect that the Chicoms would land in the southern lowlands to build up for the slog up the mountainous spine of the island.
There's a problem. The ROC's are a fairly well trained defense force of some 220,000 men on active duty. God knows how many can be called up on short notice. 21st Army Group was able to achieve local superiority in the decisive first hours of D-Day before OBWest could commit its infantry reserves to the battle. At present, I don't see the Chinese being able to master the Taiwan Strait until they really expand their navy. Otherwise, how can they get the bodies they need ashore to master the Taiwanese defense?
Look what the Chinese have to really do. They have to get about 300,000 infantry and support personnel from Fujian province well over 100 miles of water. This may include an airborne division landing, probably as a feint, up north or against Taiwanese communications nodes. To do that, they can't do it in junks. They need normal, real, honest-to-God transports and amphibious assault craft. They need tons o' Higgins Boats to make a forced assault against defended beaches.
Now then, all this doesn't happen in a vaccuum. China has to deal with the wider strategic problem of the Pacific theater. The Chinese are falling into the trap that the Japanese did of thinking in terms of the Decisive Battle. Americans thought in terms of a Decisive series of Campaigns. Allow me to illustrate.
If you look at the map, please notice the small chain of islands south of the Marianas called the Carolines. Japanese doctrine called for a decisive battleship gun duel in the region of the Carolines after the opening of hostilities. They wanted to draw the Americans out. The Americans, on the other hand, thought in terms of a multi-year campaign that would stretch from Pearl Harbor to the China coast.
One side was thinking in terms of one battle, while ignoring larger strategic and political questions that might have kept them from going to war in the first place. The other side was thinking in terms of a series of battles that would eventually lead to Tokyo Bay.
This is exactly what the Chinese are doing now. They are building themselves up for a decisive battle in the hopes that that a smashing victory can cow the Americans into submission. And that's just the political assumption that they have made.
Here is the dunderheaded military assumption: Japan will stay neutral and the United States will come charging into a Chinese missile trap like a wild bull. It won't happen that way. On the contrary, the Chinese will find, to their horror, that the U.S. Navy and the Combined Fleet will be working as allies in this war. After all, Japan cannot afford to allow China to control the sea lanes leading to the Home Islands.
The IJN is a formidable fighting force. Other than the United States and the Royal Navies, it is probably the best in the world.
I mentioned the need for the Chicoms to get 300,000 guys across by hook or by crook. Well, most of them are going in transports. We will have a war warning. You have to gather troops at Fujian province to load them onto the boats.
Now if you're Admiral Yang or somesutch, you have to look forward to a cruise missile curtain as your troopships are going accross the Strait. That's what the Americans are going to do to the fleet. The Chinese are thinking in terms of the naval battle. The Americans, thinking in several layers, are going to use bombers as cruise missile platforms with hunter/killer guidance, probably supplemented by orbiting drones, GPS systems, and attack submarines.
Some Chicoms will get ashore. Perhaps 25-75 thousand. That's not enough to take on a Taiwanese army desperate to defend the only homeland they've ever known (and probably defending a government that has just declared independence, as well...). But the pressure on the PLAN to go out and kill carriers will become immense, and that's when they'll do something really stupid.
Remember during the Falklands War when the General Belgrano came out to fight and perhaps kill the Invincible and the Hermes? Belgrano got a couple of fish amidships for its troubles and lost a couple of hundred guys. Think of the same thing on a massive scale. Only we will let the Chinese come out to play. Go back and look at the map. Imagine an American/Japanese task force of four to five carriers, plus innumerable destroyers, frigates, subs, support vessels, and hundreds of aircraft.
The "Combined Fleet" will be lined up in an arc from Pelielu in the south to the Bonins and the Home Islands in the North. We want them to go into that big void east of the Philippines! It's the Carolines in reverse from WWII. Only the Chinese must come to us to have a chance to win the war! I mean, this whole area is made for us. The pressure on our friend Admiral Yang to start bagging carriers will come right from the CCP's Military Committee itself. He doesn't attack, he goes in disgrace. And his family's political prospects go with it. You know, the cushy job his eldest son has in Beijing?
And the Chinese People's Liberation Army Navy will go out into the Pacific. Past its mainland aircover. That's when we will see the biggest slaughter since the Great Marianas Turkey Shoot of 1944. Submarines, frigates. Air strike packages that would warm the cockles of the heart of any former FR aviator. The Imperial Japanese Navy will get its first surface kills since Leyte Gulf.
Sometime, as the Chinese troopships are picked off by cruise missiles, they won't be able to make it halfway across, and they'll stop coming. Meanwhile, the airborne division and the first wave that landed will be marooned. They will "cease resistance", so to speak, so that they can return to China with "face" intact. It will all be handled in a very Chinese fashion, so to speak, so that business interests will not be harmed in the long run.
This is how I know it's going to happen. I just don't see the Chinese being able to hold back from the need to kill a carrier. If we are successful in attritting their assault craft, and if that puts the whole campaign in jeopardy, then the Chinese have to come out to Play. That's when we win the war. We will not do things by the Chinese playbook.
And it will happen because the Chinese will be thinking in terms of a decisive naval action, while we will be thinking in terms of a decisive naval campaign.
Be Seeing You,
Chris