Fortification, Part V: The Age of Industrial Firepower

Why? I actually think nukes would be fairly unlikely. The American strategic nuclear arsenal is capable of utterly destroying China, while the Chinese one is only capable of hurting the USA. (Badly, yes, but there would be a viable state left over.)

This means that the Chinese will be very unlikely to want to escalate to a nuclear conflict, while for the US the damage that the Chinese can inflict is also a sufficient deterrent. This is reflected in the published policies of both countries: China has a strict, publicized no-first-use pledge. US frequently flirts with the concept and is generally only prevented from adopting it by NATO allies.

> Simulations suggest that drone guiding long range laser riding munitions are going to absolutely wreck anything not moving, and heavy artillery will be raining on all spotted convoys, heavy and otherwise, to disrupt movement.

IDK, various experts (real as well as armchair generals) have been predicting the end of heavy land units like tanks at the hand of various types of smart munitions for decades, whereas other experts have remained skeptical. We'll see, I guess.

> Countering aerial reconeissance is going to be key, and we're going to see shifts in the toe with a lot more light anti air assets being dispersed among troops.

Yes, I think so. So far drones have been used mostly in the context of a superpower (or a coalition including a superpower) fighting insurgents lacking any real AA capability. It'd be interesting to see [1] how it would all work out in a conflict between high-end peer adversaries.

EDIT: The 2020 Azerbaijan-Armenia conflict might be a template to study: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Nagorno-Karabakh_war

[1] Interesting in a technical sense, not that I'd wish war upon anyone.

I think countering aerial recon as you stated is going to be key, but so is maintaining a relative edge in all abilities robustly to call in long-range fires.

I think specifically with respect to this article and talking about defense vs offense, I think one interesting thing to consider is how this might interact with radio discipline/EW. Is you assume your opponent has very competent EW and monitoring equipment (all signs point to Russia being quite skilled here), then you definitely want to minimize how much you transmit.

But if you're in a defensive position and you are under attack, then your opponent already has that location information on you. Then suddenly transmitting isn't as much as a risk. It means that units on the defensive might be able to get off one last squeal of high bandwidth information into their command net (assuming that they have enough observation capabilities anyways) and steer in fires more effectively.

I get that this is hyperbole, but it's really, really dangerous. A good number of people care very much. Whether there are enough people in the right places for the U.S. to get involved is an open question. But it doesn't actually take that many people to commit a country to war. Thinking that the other side is definitely bluffing and there's no chance at all they'll do anything is how disastrous Great Power wars that no one really wanted happen.

I think the experience of “Hongkong vs. China” will make strategists in the West wonder how well those arrangements will be held twenty-ish years later.