Welcome to the Decade of Concern

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.

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.

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.

> Meta comment: Scholar's Stage is the most interesting blog I've encountered in years and its RSS feed is worth subscribing to.

thanks for the rec... after poking around for 30m, i have to agree that it's worth subbing to. :)

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'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.

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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurting_the_feelings_of_the_Ch...

Even if the US doesn't really care, SEA will perceive it as a huge threat. Of course, not much we can do, since China's the only one with nukes...

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.

As many or even more wars, since public opinions are easily swayed through appropriate news/meme campaigns.

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.

If war were subject to referendum, only autocracies would wage war. Such a world is not worth living in.

Maybe more. Depends on the country.