Can China win a war vs America over Taiwan and the tactics involved v2.0

Okay seeing as how there is 113 or so pages and having speand an hour going over the first 12 I gave up and starting a new thread.

Here's my opinion.

Technically, while you can't just judge a war just from the paper strength of its armed forces, since a resourceful military can bring about astounding victories through the focused and efficient usage of overwhelming force at the tactical and strategic points of concentration or swerpunkt(sp?). Next, the ability to acheive such victories can best come about through a resourceful chain of command where information from the bottom can easiely reach the top and orders just as easiely and swiftly reach the lowest squad commander.

Next, other attributes towards determining victory is moral, whether your people are willing to throw 120% into acheiving ultimate victory for as long as they can keep up the effort year after year your nation's determination to carry on the war will never waver.

Military Prepardness and logistics: if your nation has the ability to carry on the war with a careful buildup of forces prior to the outbreak of hostilities without attracting the ire of your enemies then complete surprise will be yours and it is possible to subdue the enemy before it has time to react, also remember a military staff should be able to adapt quickly to changing circumstances and fully grasp new concepts of war and be able to learn from past mistakes, one must never lose the initiative in warfare and any outbreak of hostilities in the Taiwan straight is no exception.

Military Production is nolonger quite beating stick it once was, in WWI/II the brute force industries of the world could and would fight wars inorder to achieve self sufficiency to keep up what could possibly be a long war of attrition inorder to maintain their fullest Industrial Capacity, nowadays MegaCorporate and State-Owned enterprises make up more of the Military Industrial-Complex then ever before and the ability to outproduce your opponent is nolonger as important, the ability for your arms dealers to produce QUALITY arms capable to give as good as it gets is far more important then being able to produce 3 inferior T-90's to his 1 M1A2 but rather to build 1-2 T-101's to his 1-2 M1A3's.

Now I know what you must be thinking "what does this have to do with Taiwan" Everything.

The ability of a nation to project overwhelmign force in a given area and to do so successfuly hinges on various factors in Military Science or more accuratly, it's dependent on those who master (mind the pun) "The Art of War" also refering to the book authored by the brilliant military observer Sun-Tzu. In a Taiwan Incident while military force spreads over 4 branches air, navy, gorund, and strategic (Nukes and WMD's) the war should only involve the first 2 with only a slight need of the 3rd and hopefully ignoring the last.

Airwars are fought with the first and foremost priority of gaining air supremecy. To do this one must not only wipe out the initial enemy assets in the air (to the best of their ability) but also to exterminate all inrange airfields and keep survieliance on any area that small easily errected fields might be built.

To achieve this AAA and SAM missiles will nodoubt be used, the standard would be to have say a squardron of jets engage with AWAC guidance to knock out or heavily damage the enemy squadron, and also with AWAC's guide longer range missiles to their targets. Medium to long range missiles would nodoubt be used against with AV and AP mines to hinder the repair of air facilities.

The quality of the airforce in their planes and electronics as well as sheer numbers, training, and quality of the command staff and officer corps will decide the issue and when one side gains air supremecy how long will navak supremecy follow?

I have nodoubt that the Aegis cruiser and other variant AA escourts have excellent AA capabilities, but isn't it all theotical? Has their once been a true combat situation where say 6-8 ATS missiles all came in all aiming to sink your ship? Does the Aegis truly have the capability to to shoot down those missiles and all missiles after it? Don't say that they're other ships, those ships could just as easily have 1-20 missiles heading for them as well.

A Naval war essentially is fought by using at least partial air supremecy to knock out or damage port facilities, other then that it's mostly using hunt-and-seek tactics to lure small enemy task forces into traps where a screen of ATS missiles will soften up the fleet and then use subs and fast attack craft to start confusing the enemy fleet and keeping loses expendible. Then larger battlewagon Cruiser/Battleship class ships with escourts will enter the scene and will use overwhelming force to decimate the enemy fleet. Thus the goal is to maul the enemy force so that normal productions runs won't keep up with their loses while minimizing yours allowing you to fight a naval war of attrition and with the point of Taiwan to keep US naval forces out of the theatre of priority.

Now for Taiwan itself taiwan is an island well within range of even short range missiles, all aircraft and even artillery supposedly, the plan in my view would be to gain naval and air supremacy over the Taiwan straight, Taiwan itself it about 300 miles beyond would be nice. Once established air drops on strategic zones accompanied with simultanious amphib landings inorder to sieze moderatly undamaged ports and from their to establish a defence perimeter, once the port is online land forces to consolidate Taiwan can be ferried across and the defenders while attecipating a brave defence will nodoubt fall not nessasarily because of numbers but because of the skill and efficincy of the command staff and the determination of the average PLA soldier to unify the motherland.

However it is of my opinion the the PLAAF and the PLAN is in no position at this time to accomplish this, in 5-10 years time then I'll have no doubt of the outcome, currently the PLA, PLAN, and PLAAF and Strategic Rocket Forces are in a period of reorganization during the shift to a faster, more efficient Brigade-High Tech style army organization to take advantage of the "fighting an intense short war under high tech conditions" doctrine.

That post deserves as WATS.

The way I see it, China can win a war only as long as their People's War doctrine is carried out. But that requires the U.S. to go all-out, including an invasion, on China.

I don't think defeating China is gonna be that easy. First of all, they are 1.2 billion people...that means they can fight with guerilla tactics almost for ever. Imagine a 20 year world between USA and China, in which China does not fight normally but plays 'hide-and-seek' with US armed forces. In 20 years, the Chinese will easily double or triple their armed forces, due to the sheer number of people they have.

What I want to get at is that it's not only technology that counts. Tactics still play a major role. A war with China would most probably have no winner, since it's gonna end up as WWIII.

I tried my best to remain neutral by simply giving out what I consider some of the fundamentals of military strategy and doctrine, but as for the Chinese armed forces tripling no. In fact www.sinodefence.com you'll notice that the PLA is actually getting SMALLER, they're downsizing inorder to be faster (as in less sluggish as common with hord type forces), more efficient, and better utilize more advanced hardware, as it is the recent T-96/98 will become the PLA MBT (the 96' for regular forces the 98 for leet forces), and also the 98 utilizes a new kind of laser defence to fool around with incoming AT missiles.

But I digress, a tripling of the PLA won't happen, as it is strict population control measures have been for a long time in place to ensure that China can raise the standard of living and catch up with the west.

And *gasp* you've escalated the conflict! NOOO! The USA is coming!

In the event the USA invades China... yeah USA will lose, with as both of you said 1.4 billion people the People's war doctrine will be invoked in which geurilla forces easily "become a fish among water" the USAF even their their current high tech state can't hope to occupie a nation as large and as China, especally since even if invaded with even the smallest possibility of success the PLA is unlikely to have been beaten enough and will nodoubt keep the fight going.

If the war is defencive China will win. its only an offencive war where it's necasary for the Chinese to project force beyond their border that thing get iffy.

They're are some who seem to think that any recent saber rattling means that China plans to invade Japan/ reoccupie Taiwan but as I said above, not for another 5-10 years as it is with the current political climate (the Politburo is very cautious and slightly bereaucratic wars don't come easily or for that matter cheaply) and the current structural changes there won't be a war until A Taiwan tries to make a bid for independence (unlikely given their own political climate) or some incident happans and neither side backs down (could be anything).

Why do people always bring out a full invasion of china scenario? This the least likely thing to happen because its the only way the US could loose.

War against China:

Intense bombing campaigns with 10s of millions of deaths to civilians and a near anhilation of their infrastructure and war machine must be achieved before a full scale invasion could be launched. Nuclear weapons facilities would need to be carpet bombed repeatedly as well as an oil stockade and missile facility.

There is no doubt if an invasion occured their would be bombing campaigns, but in this case the PC crap would have to be thrown out about civlian deaths. No whining or bitching from the press, let the generals do their job so they can save as many of our boys as possible.

This is the only way I see fit.

Suggest forget China as the USA will pull out it's super-out-of-this-world delivery system and put an end to any Country providing that Country does'nt launch first. That would be the only all dead stalemate.

Dallas

Another way for US to loose is sending their army into China sea, especially into the Taiwan strait, which can be easily attacked by the thousands of missiles from land and hundreds of China submarine.

In such case, the death number of US army will be much bigger than that in current Iraq...maybe 10 times or even 100 times.
The worest result is that the whole US carrier groups are destroied.

Originally posted by WestPoint23
Why do people always bring out a full invasion of china scenario? This the least likely thing to happen because its the only way the US could loose.

Please lets add any further comments to the following ongoing thread.

www.abovetopsecret.com...

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