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Comment by goodooojas | Hacker News Reader

Maybe I'm a fool, but what is the point in things like this anymore, like post nuclear do fancy missiles really make that much difference, as in if china for whatever reason sent a hypersonic missile at the US and blew up a city, couldnt the US just do the same in return but slower? I guess I'm asking why is there investment in stuff like this when we know we have far more powerful things already.

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These weapons are intended to eliminate or greatly reduce the main strength of the US which is it’s power projection.

These won’t be used against cities but they can take out naval groups and any regional bases the US has.

If China gets to the point where they can effectively contain US power projection they would be able to operate in their region and much of the Asia Pacific without much of a challenge.

Challenging the US blue water capability and thus its power projection with symmetric means is a near fools errand.

This is why China is focusing heavily on “carrier killers” and on slow creep of artificial islands that would allow them to project their own power without matching the US in terms of naval assets not to mention naval experience.

Do Chinese planners expect to destroy a carrier group (~7000 soldiers) and not trigger a nuclear war?

If China can take out CSGs with pretty much no effective counter measures, will the US be willing to send carriers to support Taiwan during/after a Chinese invasion? It's all a game of brinkmanship - might be time for US/China to dig out the old Cold War doctrines on how to win a conventional war without winning so hard the other side feels the need to start slinging nukes.

I wouldn't expect an attack on a carrier group to necessarily lead to all out nuclear War. Seems more likely it would lead to a similar response, to a similarly sized and themed target, if only to save face and demonstrate that an equal response to such attacks will happen.

What's the US going to do? Attack Chinese cities? And then watch their own cities burn?

The US isn’t insane, it pretty much wrote the book on proportional response there is no way that they would escalate from an attack on a military target to glassing civilian population centers.

No US president would issue such an order and even if they would the chiefs of staff would almost most likely disobey it.

> No US president would issue such an order

I might have believed you some years ago.

If the US can elect Trump, it can definitely elect someone who would do that.

These aren’t “anti-city” but anti-naval. The point is defanging US maritime power projection by targeting its carrier strike group formations.

Anti-ship missiles that are harder to shoot down.

Also, possibly missile defense.

The TLDR is MAD equilibrium is being upset by US building out missile defense. US who has 20X more nukes than PRC is eroding PRC minimum deterrence doctrine via improving missile defense. This is destabilizing. Politically, PRC won't discuss arms control unless US willing to discuss missile defense (scaling back), which US can't due to domestic politics. So to reestablish MAD balance PRC has to build more nukes and fractional orbital bombardment capability to circumvent US missile defense. It's attempt to rebalance not destabilize. This is also just default arms race behavior. Pour 100s of billions on missile defense and PRC (and Russia, and even North Korea) has to respond in kind. The other driving factor is nuclear proliferation, US missile defense was developed for states like NK with limited strike capabilities, but the end result is everyone else has to rebalance.

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