>How did this happen? It started with a Clinton era decision to focus on upgrading legacy platforms instead of developing or purchasing new ones:
>By the end of the Bill Clinton administration, the Pentagon had laid out a strategy to update and replace the Reagan-era fleets...
Strange not to mention the USSR collapsed two years before Clinton took office. Hard to justify new weapons systems when you're the global hegemon. Who were these new warships going to be used against, Serbia?
If China attacks Taiwan with its newly minted aircraft carriers and large fleets of smaller ships, who will defend them?
Now, I'm pretty sure the USA still beats China in a fair fight. But if the USA is playing defense with Taiwan, the picture is very different. China is far closer and therefore has more nearby support: in particular, air support and cruise missiles.
In a neutral fight, keeping our fleets outside of Chinese radar / aircraft range will be rather natural. But if we're talking about Taiwan specifically, its clearly a different picture: China can pretty much pepper any ship near Taiwan with its airforce and/or cruise missiles.
China invades Taiwan is probably one of the potential fights in this "Terrible 20s" period, where China has enough advantages to seriously consider the move. Not necessarily because of Chinese military spending (which has increased), or technology, but because of simple geographical advantages.
A proper invasion of Taiwan isn't even necessary. Chinese naval forces can start a blockade and really mess up international trade.
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China vs South Korea is a bit further out but still within a zone where the Chinese Mainland offers a strong advantage to a hypothetical Chinese attacking force.
> I'm pretty sure the USA still beats China in a fair fight. But if the USA is playing defense with Taiwan, the picture is very different.
The background is that this has been wargamed and the the US could "lose fast", although this is probably in a "defend Taiwan" scenario. I wouldn't assume anything about a hypothetical "fair fight".
> The background is that this has been wargamed and the the US could "lose fast", although this is probably in a "defend Taiwan" scenario. I wouldn't assume anything about a hypothetical "fair fight".
Taiwan is China's backyard. USA defending Taiwan requires significantly more resources than other locations.
China has absolutely no capability to attack say... California, outside of nuclear weapons (at which point, the wargame is simple. We retaliate with our superior strategic weapons and MAD).
A "Fair Fight" would be a hypothetical Antartica fight: far away from both countries, where the two navies meet on neutral grounds. China only has 2 carriers right now, and they're smaller 70,000 ton carriers. USA has multiple Gerald Ford super-carriers over 110,000 tons.
As far as projecting a shield or area-denial, those carriers are superior to what China can do. Its only within the "radar + missile area" where the USA loses.
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China has additional carriers on the way, but I'm not convinced that the carrier, nor the aircraft they're loading them with, can perform like a Gerald Ford Supercarrier or its loadout of aircraft.
Well, I would say that China knows exactly what they're gunning for, and it's not California or some hypothetical midpoint; it's what they regard as their own backyard.
Nuclear armed countries fighting direct hot wars will be decided in a few hours. It's astounding to think that some people still subscribe to this idea of a gentleman's battle with both sides agreeing to not use their full capability while the other is killing their own.
>Nuclear armed countries fighting direct hot wars will be decided in a few hours.
I think it's astounding that people still think nations will just hit the Doomsday Button willy nilly. Low yield tactical nukes were always a part of any response to a Russian invasion of Poland. And they will be again as well, in a hypothetical CCP invasion of Taiwan.
Nuclear weapons would probably be used in case of invasion of either nation's homeland, but lesser non-nuclear conflicts are possible. For example, both India and Pakistan have had nuclear weapons since at least 1998. Neither used them in the Kargil War in 1999 or any of the skirmishes they've had since.
Additionally, it kills me to see the Pentagon whining about not having enough money.
They have more money than the next several militaries combined, and every weapons program for 20 years has been a gigantic cluster-fuck. They got a blank check for the littoral combat vessel, the F-35 and these new ford-class carriers. If that stuff is worthless within 1,000 miles of China because it turns out missiles are a thing, that's on the Pentagon and they should own up to it.
It really has almost nothing to do with money, friend. It's about the direction the elite class and folks in government give to the military. Some people in the Pentagon will whine about money, I'll give you that, but the people that are whining about money are not serious about preparing for the next war. Those who are, are busy in the basement working with some engineers on trying to figure out what new technology beats what.
I'm disagreeing with that precise point, thank you for stating it so clearly :)
Hopefully no war happens of course, but being effective with resources is actually super important. If it turns out we've dumped 25 years of spending on hardware that makes no sense, and executed inefficiently on top of that... it's not good. That's a ton of wasted opportunity cost whatever your commitment level.
Meta comment: Scholar's Stage is the most interesting blog I've encountered in years and its RSS feed is worth subscribing to.
One hopes China doesn't invade Taiwan, as one hopes a pandemic doesn't happen; if China does, a lot of the general audience, accessible material about what is likely to occur will have been published at Scholar's Stage.
Greer writes well on variety of topics and well worth sub/reading. But I would not rely on him for current developments for US/TW/CN topics. He was one of the last holdouts along with Ian Easton of TW can triumph alone crowd, changing his position only recently, years after general consensus from credible thinktanks suggested otherwise. I think he lives in TW and has blinders on - having held his positions so far past expiration date. His writing on the subject since, rather his recent regurgitation of US thinktanks and opinion pieces are more in line with reality. It's nice to see him sober up, but never know when his opinions will drift back into wish fulfilment.
With respect to TW, he changed when his position became far past untenable. It's like someone flipping from being climate denialist in 2020 instead of 2010. Being proximate to TW should make their poor military preparedness more, not less apparent for those that follow the subject matter. The response shouldn't be, what a serious mind, but what took so long?
Overall he's well worth reading, keeps up to date with literature, does good summaries. But his analysis on TW has been more outlier than consensus. And up until recently, stubbornly so.
I have no knowledge of this field. Certainly not enough to know if the article is accurate (haven't ever heard of this blog till now). But many of the claims seem well cited.
If this is true...how maddening. How can you spend more than the next 10 countries combined and still mismanage your way into this predicament? Is there anything lumbering bureaucracy cannot destroy?
There's a dead reply to this original comment that reads:
"I also liked this article but then remembered the F-35 and have a super hard time thinking we need more investment. Blame the bureaucrats all you want (I'm with you), but I'm no longer sure we even know how make the right things."
I think he makes a fair point. It's not just the bureaucrats. At least in the civilian space, we don't know how to make the right things any more. The ambitiousness of new projects as well as the quality of consumer goods have both been in decline for decades.
In the military space, the deliberate undermining of field serviceability in order to secure more profitable maintenance contracts is a genuine security risk to the entire democratic world.
Given the amount of blatant corruption in the industry (look at the Halliburton contracts in Iraq for a recent example), it is more complex than simply "increase the budget".
The fact that private industry in China serves the interest of the government (and not vice-versa) is a massive advantage they hold over us.
> I think he makes a fair point. It's not just the bureaucrats. At least in the civilian space, we don't know how to make the right things any more. The ambitiousness of new projects as well as the quality of consumer goods have both been in decline for decades.
I don’t think it’s something that was lost. Rather, as time went one, more and more focus went into financialization of these firms to the detriment of providing people with actual stable jobs and growth. Every industry other than software is pretty much unattractive for anyone talented. Why would you slave away at Boeing making maybe 75k when you can make almost triple that at Facebook?
I make the comparison to software because even though we, the hacker news reader & software guru, complain about boneheaded product decisions from Google; American software is just a leagues better than the rest of world (even if it’s in ways we don’t like, like Surveillance). This level of quality is driven by motivated individuals with great incentives, respected by peers and somewhat clear career paths driven by launching great products.
Contrast that with the 737MAX, which engineers knew they were building a clown car and felt powerless to do anything about it. Not to say that FAANG doesn’t have internal power struggles, but the 737 is Boeing’s baby at the largest aeronautics company in the world. I doubt you would see similar dysfunction on Google’s AdWords team.
While the CCP is able to completely bend private industry, I don’t think it requires an authoritarian government, but I have no solutions. In the case of Halliburton, it’s unsurprising that when you focus on figuring out how siphon government funds into the pockets of executives while doing the bare minimum to deliver on product you end up with crippled infrastructure 20 years later. It’s not that we forgot how to make things right, we simply never invested the resources to do things right at all
I'm not going to claim that everything in the DoD is well-managed, but don't discount the advantages China has in gaining more advantages. The PLA never has to cut its budget due to a lack of political will, and China has no qualms about riskier espionage that may get more agents killed or captured but results in being able to steal more advancements in military tech.
That is objectively and obviously false. Why would you say something you know (assuming you read the OP) to be untrue?
Military spending has gone from 4.89% of GDP in the first year of the Obama Administration to ~3.3-3.4% of GDP in recent years. That's a huge decrease.
There's also alllll the times that military appropriations have been a political football. A lot of DoD folks have had to report to work unpaid multiple times over the past couple years. Many of them later got backpay when a budget was passed, but not all.
You may not care about the morale and dedication of those people, but this isn't a values-based or tribal-loyalties based discussion. It is an objective fact that China doesn't have to deal with this process and the resulting inefficiencies.
It's gone way, way up in dollar terms over that time frame, in a low-inflation economy. Abrams tanks aren't billed by '% of GDP'.
I'm not questioning anyone's morale or dedication, but I AM questioning competence at the top levels when it comes to spending all that money wisely. You can blame 'political footballs' for some of that but there are plenty of failures where the military and their contractors have straight squandered fortunes. And it's not because of "too much democracy", it was after the money was allocated to a purely military-contractor relationship where nobody's voting on anything.
Within a decade, the budget varied so greatly that there was a 22% difference between the high and the low in real terms. When you have drastic budget cuts, you have to cut projects. Those projects can't just be picked up again where you left off when you get more money - contractors will have moved on, and in most cases the new contracts need to be re-competed.
These are structural disadvantages we as Americans place on our own military, and from which the PLA does not suffer.
I appreciate the data, especially the real $ pulled forward from 2009.
My impression was the drop-off from 2009-2013 was all about reducing investment in Iraq and Afghanistan rather than cancelling super promising projects. Do you have an example of a great project that was cancelled? I know we reduced our order of F-22s but that was concurrent with a way bigger, splashier investment in F-35s so I'd call that 'bad priorities' rather than 'lack of resources'.
I'd say that the PLA's big advantage was not invading Iraq. I almost added something about a lot of our defense spending being glorified jobs programs but I'm pretty sure that's also true over there too, just with a differently-shaped politics driving it.
The EFV was supposed to replace the AAV but ended up canceled in the 2011-2013 crunch. $3bn reset. However, this can't be blamed entirely on the budget crunch - there were reliability issues with the platform, which, given the budget crunch, the Marine Corps did not feel it could adequately address. The threshold for when you stop throwing good money after bad depends in part on how much margin of error you have in your budget of good money.
Things like building aircraft carriers and training 100s of thousands of people in a non-flat leadership structure aren't processes that can turn on a dime. The joint chiefs testimony on the effects of budget predictability on readiness is certain to be more articulate than anything I can say. Brief overview here: https://www.defense.gov/Explore/News/Article/Article/945964/...
I see that you're a Marine on your bio, so I guess we are just not going to see eye to eye on how important/relevant amphibious landing capabilities are :) I actually remember hearing about that EFV and thinking 'what a waste of money' at the time.
Respect for acknowledging the reliability issues.
I think another elephant in the room is the bifurcated (or trifurcated) nature of things the armed forces are expected to do. Occupying countries with large goat-herding sectors is totally different from sci-fi peer military conflict planning.
Meanwhile, most of the brass just wants to re-enact WWII, which serves neither mission. Everyone loves the idea of carriers or a d-day landing, when "large # of cheap, expendable drones and missiles" completely obliterates both of those strategies.
Did you ever read about Millenium Challenge 2002? Marine general plays red team, sinks entire US fleet with the realization that if you launch a lot of missiles at once at a carrier group, the anti-missile batteries can't stop them all. They decide on a do-over with a new rule that he can't do that anymore, and run the exercise to the predetermined conclusion that validates their doctrine.
Your point would stand on its own just fine without the accusation. Even if your data is correct, refenestrator may not know that data. Don't make accusations like that unless you know (like, provably) that he knows it.
> There's also alllll the times that military appropriations have been a political football. A lot of DoD folks have had to report to work unpaid multiple times over the past couple years. Many of them later got backpay when a budget was passed, but not all.
GEFTA (signed into law in 2019) guarantees retroactive pay for furloughs due to lapses in appropriations. Before that, anyone exempted who still had to show up was guaranteed pay, and Congress would virtually always still backpay the people who were furloughed. It wasn't legally guaranteed, but I can't think of any cases in the last 10-20 years where retroactive pay didn't happen.
It's still pretty disruptive though, and it definitely sucks for contractors if they get sent home, as they don't get retroactive pay.
I also liked this article but then remembered the F-35 and have a super hard time thinking we need more investment. Blame the bureaucrats all you want (I'm with you), but I'm no longer sure we even know how make the right things.
There have been unsubstantiated rumors for years that the Taiwanese military has outfitted TSMC fabs with explosives that can be rigged to go off in the event of a mainland invasion in order to deny China access to TSMC capabilities.
The rumor doesn't actually need to be true in order to act as a deterrent -- it just needs to be leaked to Chinese officials and considered credible. It also assumes that access to TSMC is a strong motivation for an invasion, which may or may not be true.
In any case, the answer to your question depends on whether this is true, and whether the explosives are actually used. If the fabs are destroyed, it'll set the world back by at least a decade.
So if you thought the chip shortage was bad today...
On the other hand, if it's not true (or if it is, but the fabs aren't destroyed for whatever reason), and operations continue despite an invasion, I can definitely imagine a scenario where the rest of the world just sort of shrugs and goes with it. Kind of a horrifying thought, but what are the alternatives? Attack China? They have nukes. Everyone will condemn China, sure. Then China will get upset and claim that we're all "hurting the feelings of the Chinese people" [1], and that'll be the end of it.
The chinese leadership/official position is that Taiwan is part of China. They don't want to invade and retake it because they want TSMC's chips, they want to retake it because they think it's a rebellious province that needs to be brought to heel.
The dynamic between China and Taiwan is complex, with TSMC being only one factor. China has its hands in many pies, and it spans the economic, historical, cultural, and military.
The best metaphor I have heard that sums this up was that if this were a Go game, Taiwan is a Ko fight between China and US.
Right, which may mean that this threat is meaningless, but the rumors are still there, and the outcome is probably what the rest of the world actually cares about when considering the situation.
TSMC still requires inputs from global supply chains to function, so doesn't matter of PRC captures it intact, disassembles fabs and reshores on mainland. US can sanction down the supply chain to kill fabs anyway. In the meantime, it's a source for uncomfortable détente between US/CN/TW.
If CN were forced to move in 10/15 year timescale is "quarantining" Taiwan as summarized in another recent Greer article: All Measures Short of a Cross Straits Invasion [0], and hold access to TSMC hostage. Essentially PRC can blockade TW ports and airspace and exploit period where TSMC production still has substantial leverage, and I can see uncomfortable détente continuing to ensure continued supply of chips.
You're downvoted, but it has been postulated that no democracy has ever waged war against another democracy, and that this is a consequence of democratic governance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_peace_theory
As far as I can tell, the observation is historically true. The few possible exceptions are pre-modern, very minor, or are debatable whether the societies involved were in fact democratic -- the first war in the Balkans, 19th century border skirmishes in South America, the Western Allies against Finland in WW II, and Iceland's conflict with the UK over fishing, are some of the stronger counter-examples.
The effect seems real enough, but I'm not sure if it actually means anything deeper, given the cultural similarity and degree of trade among most democracies.
Iceland vs. the UK over fishing - how many shots were fired in that? I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that it might have been a skirmish, but it wasn't a war...
Mostly just coast guard and fishing ships ramming each other, with a decent bit of the British navy tossed in the fray at one point too. The Icelanders did manage to damage multiple British frigates in the last round of conflict.
Probably doesn't count as a war. But it is still one of the more notable examples of direct conflict between democratic states.
Wars are strategic but motivated by emotional propaganda. In this case, American news is full of discussion about genocide in China. China will use it's incredibly effective propaganda machine to promote theories about heinous American acts (about Covid, Taiwan, anything).
(Just to clarify I am not saying there aren't heinous acts going on anywhere. But what I will say is that there are actually horrific circumstances in many parts of the world (such as for example, where wars were already "successfully" initiated). It just so happens that the press and the moral outrage coincidentally tend to be extremely ramped up when and where they are needed to motivate war.)
It's not possible for military or economic planners to say "look, we need to go to war or else we will no longer be able to get computers" or "our money will disintegrate" or "we need to access this area to maintain strategic dominance" or whatever it is. So whatever type of moral story is necessary to justify mass killing is propagated. Not because those people are evil liars, but because without the stories there would be no war, and the strategic objectives would fail and have very real consequences.
And it's not hard for a human to rationalize anything really. People are happy to have a moral reason to defend their ability to procure the next gadget or whatever threat there may be to their standard of living. Which often those are actually very real threats and not just about trivial things like gadgets.
>By the end of the Bill Clinton administration, the Pentagon had laid out a strategy to update and replace the Reagan-era fleets...
Strange not to mention the USSR collapsed two years before Clinton took office. Hard to justify new weapons systems when you're the global hegemon. Who were these new warships going to be used against, Serbia?