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This is a pointless exercise in creating the think tank equivalent of click bait. So China could wipe out America’s military presence in Asia. What then? Do we assume that somehow the rest of America’s military back home and abroad doesn’t respond? That this inevitable retaliation does not weigh into a decision to “wipe out” Asian-deployed forces? American forces deployed overseas are nothing more than “ambassadors” for its military, mere pawns on the chessboard. Imagine a newspaper headline “black queen could wipe out white pawns” and realize how ridiculous this is.

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> So China could wipe out America’s military presence in Asia. What then? Do we assume that somehow the rest of America’s military back home and abroad doesn’t respond?

Yes, consider the following scenario, Using some political pretence, China invade Taiwan in a blitzkrieg which is over in a few days. All US communications and GPS are wiped out before the attack begins. Total chaos. Allies are blind. Any US forces in the vicinity trying to prevent the attack are obliterated. Next days China issue the following decree, Taiwan has joined the motherland and all regrettable attacks on US forces have stopped and a ceasefire is in effect. Any attack on China and Taiwan will be meet with nuclear forces. What will US and Nato do? What did they do when Russia elbowed itself into the Syrian conflict? That's right, nothing.

The point is, any serious attack done by China will be over before US an allies can stop it or reply properly, unless there is a believable rapid response force on location.

A bunch of jerks flew planes in a building at killed ~3k people and look how we reacted? The blood of Americans as you described would result in the same reaction as WW2, full stop. It is the way we wired.

As an aside, the PLA trying to capture Taiwan will be a huge bloody mess. Any attack plan would be known as the build up would be seen by everyone. The Taiwan military is not a push over and has dug hole in every mountain. This is a pretty realistic view here - https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/09/25/taiwan-can-win-a-war-wi...

All of that being said, we should all work to find a solution that does not involved killing lots of people. China is still trying to find its place in the world and has a bit of a chip on its shoulder about how it was treated in the past. I have to believe there is a path in which we are all better off.

This is no less naive than the Japanese plan to make America concede the Pacific by killing two and and a half thousand Americans. The Chinese are not stupid enough to think that would work, rather than having the opposite effect of enraging Americans.

So, in your hypothetical, China is making a _massive_ bluff because they know the US would wipe them out as well as soon as the first nuke launched, not to mention the loss of nearly all their largest trading partners. Seems unlikely.

Huge difference is this implies a Chinese attack on US forces, you think they could allow that to go unchallenged?

Russia didn't attack US forces in Syria or the rest of the middle east, so the US could ignore it. It might work if there was no attack on US military, but any attack, significant enough to disable the US military for a few days, would almost certainly be responded to with force.

By the time reserve US forces arrive in theatre, China has troops on Taiwan. How well situated is the US to do a cross-Pacific amphibious invasion of Taiwan? How likely is the US political system to be willing to take on that project?

The US has a base on Okinawa which is less than 800km away: https://www.distancefromto.net/between/Taiwan/Okinawa+Prefec...

Your point about the political system is valid, but if the USA was behind the invasion of Iraq, I imagine watching another great power chew up an ally would unite the country as well. Times do change, though, and I could be wrong.

>How well situated is the US to do a cross-Pacific amphibious invasion of Taiwan?

Parking an invasion+battle fleet off of Taiwan's coast would probably lead to huge US ship losses to Chinese missiles.

However, island hopping campaign is a thing. Islands make for good unsinkable carriers.

Assuming war isn't concluded permanently in a couple months[1], the real advantage is self-sufficiency in regards to raw materials (especially oil[2]) and ability to ramp up and then build out military production. High tech is secondary issue, and would be only slightly on the US' side. Probably the most important advantage would be in submarines and to extent in carriers, again as it was historically. Lastly, the presumable advantage in comms crypto protection, and codebreaking/backdooring could make or break any long term war, by repeatedly giving better starting positions before each battle or campaign; again to historical precedent.

All in all, US would do just fine, however the local allies would suffer a lot.

[1] i.e. excluding an overwhelmingly effective ABC attack on mainland China or US

[2] both previous and current administration helped ramp it up

Weapons to defeat US' carrier advantage have been long developed and deployed in the field.

The US' carriers would be sunk in the first few minutes of open warfare.

They are useless in case of open war - and only of use as a threat of war/policing device. All-out war means the carriers get sunk, first.

>Weapons to defeat US' carrier advantage

Snark first: weapons[1] to defeat rockets and free-falling bombs have been operational for quite a while now. Next gen (laser) is being made operational; both shipboard versions and air versions for the CAP. Next next gen (railgun) is on the horizon, but still uncertain.

Serious reply: a carrier is a highly mobile, flexible airport. Like any other major fleet element, it's a threat in being, and best used that way. Might even be best used by always being held beyond radar horizon, to keep the opposing forces spread thin and deployed overtime, preventing any transports from resupplying the enemy troops deployed to Taiwan.

A carrier is also by its nature an anchor point for a whole battle group, with flexible capabilities of long range detection, jamming, attack, and defense, including major ASW threat. It can also make a 300 mile dash at 30kn to deliver several dozen F35 to an island. An overnight miracle.

[1] anti-rockets and CIWS

Feast your eyes on the Carrier Killer:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DF-26

There is no known defense yet fielded against this missile.

Lasers might do it, but those aren't going to be ready for deployment for a few years yet .. none of your "rocket/free-falling bomb" defenses are relevant against this thing.

And, then there's this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3M22_Zircon

https://www.newsweek.com/russia-tests-missiles-us-no-defense...

This is why the US desperately needs to complete its laser program ... until then, the Carriers are a complete and utter liability in all-out-war ..

I'm definitely not a military analyst, but I haven't seen anything indicating that the Chinese are capable of employing the DF-26 as you describe. If anything, it is a deterrent against nuclear first strike which is how it's currently deployed.

https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/10/asia/china-missiles-south-chi... 'According to a report from the Missile Defense Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, China may have an anti-ship version of the DF-26 under development -- and may have even tested it in 2017. However military analyst Carl Schuster, a former director of operations at the US Pacific Command's Joint Intelligence Center, cast doubt on whether the DF-26 was workable as an anti-ship weapon. Using one effectively would require practicing procedures and tactics that China had not yet shown, he said. "Remember, the Soviet Union never successfully developed an ASBM (anti-ship ballistic missile) and no country in the West has one," Schuster said.'

Do you have some information to the contrary?

First, this is false: "Remember, the Soviet Union never successfully developed an ASBM (anti-ship ballistic missile) and no country in the West has one" and is clearly fog of war propaganda.

Second, DF26 is all over the South China Sea. You think they'd be deploying them if they didn't have confidence in their efficacy?

Forget building any more carriers.

Carriers in today's world are as obsolete as the battleships that the carriers displaced 80 years ago.

Mind you, the fact that battleships were obsolete did not stop the US from building quite a few more in the 1940s before the penny finally dropped.

ROC has 300K active and 3.9M reserve forces according to Wikipedia. Moreover, the Taiwanese people like the US much more than the Chinese. China putting troops in Taiwan would be very hard to accomplish before the US could retaliate. Even if they succeeded, hold the island would be difficult when faced with internal sabotage and a US threat to reclaim the island.

One of the first political acts of the US would undoubtedly be to officially recognize the state of Taiwan. Given how much of the world relies on Taiwan's manufacturing output, other countries would be close behind and China would be looking at a joint liberation force rather than China vs the US.

This is a completely different scenario from the op, but I don't think anyone projects Taiwan lasting more than a couple of hours if China decides to invade.

Their only hope is that there would be a multinational response. The US certainly wouldn't go it alone against China on their own doorstep.

Right. Tawain is not Crimea.

On the other hand Vietnam could be summarised as black spends 5 pawns a rook and a knight to take out 1 pawn.

It isn't necessarily a question of who would win a fight to the death, and more a question of how big a bloody nose the US would accept. My guess is China would be willing to accept a much bigger bloody nose, who reaches their limit first?

Of course theres a fine balance here. Vietnam was never an existential threat to the US, could China be/ portrayed to be? That obviously changes the calculation.

Ironically the US has recently been courting Vietnam as a potential local ally to counterbalance China.

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