I can’t see that.
If it’s going to kick off it will either be when they try something with Taiwan or another India incident. Though I don’t think Modi has the stomach for a fight with China given his current words.
China and war
- Thread starter Mrwong
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If it’s going to kick off it will either be when they try something with Taiwan or another India incident. Though I don’t think Modi has the stomach for a fight with China given his current words.
I think the US will double down on numbers of navy vessels in the area and that in itself will raise tensions. If China takes the first shot the US will justify their presence as having every right to protect their interests in the region. It could be a double win for Trump as the weakness of some EU nations with Nato will see them paying up their dues pretty quick as they'll be feeling pretty exposed otherwise.
That never worked with the USSR, why would it work here?
China is never going to shoot first on this issue, otherwise they'd have done it already with the constant probes of the Paracels.
Yeah gonna take something exceptional for any war of this context to go hot. Or a long long escalation to a position that no side can compromise on.
I don't see why, war is bad for business and that's the one thing you can count on from the plutocrat party. That said, raising the heat over the issue justifies an impressive amount of pork in their defence budget, I doubt they actually want a war though, not unless it's by proxy.
Not necessarily in the longer term if it rides back China's reach. The US war machine will make money making more arms.
Soldato
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I think in some ways, were already at war with China, as are a lot of countries. Weapons are computers these days.
Very much this, cyberspace is the battlefield between major players now.
Can easily spill over into real world tensions and even war though.
I think people have this idea that China is roughly on par with America when it come's to the military, maybe just a little behind, where as that's not at all correct. America is so far ahead that in a conventional war they could fight China and Russia at the same time. China isn't in the same league as America militarily, America is in a league of it's own. That shouldn't be surprising considered they spend 4 times as much on their military every year, and have done for many decades. They also have a lot of experience in fighting wars, they have people at all levels in their military who have fought wars. China would be so far out of their depth in a war with America that in reality they want NO part of that fight. They can just about protect their local sphere of influence by digging in and building lots of missiles, but if push came to shove America would win in a war.
We are, public have not been told yet.
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Some pretty impressive armchairs in this thread, it's enough to put DFS to shame.
Problem with the US is that money isn't spent well and overall they are complacent and not in optimal shape - i.e. look at some of the reports about how a lot of their navy ships are run. In a real war they will take a lot of easily avoidable losses in the early stages that might prove costly in the longer run.
On a side note something that Russia actually finds more concern about the UK than our nuclear weapons is our experience and capabilities (sadly let slide a lot these days which is incredibly short sighted) to rapidly logistic and fight effectively half-way across the globe and through much of the 80s onwards they had real concerns we could outmanoeuvre them strategically if it ever came to it - one of the reasons they are so involved in Syria was to gain experience and build up their capabilities in operations in this manner.
Correct on the first count, completely wrong on the second. Within the next 15-20 years China are going to become the dominant naval force on the planet, this is something warhawks in Washington and Moscow are aware of and in the case of the former they are attempting to do as much as they can to mitigate/prolong it as much as possible (in the case of the latter they know there is nothing they can do about it). The reason for this, is like always, HMS Dreadnought.
To explain (mainly for those with limited knowledge of/interest in naval combat, but it's probably interesting nonetheless), HMS Dreadnought was a battleship launched by the Royal Navy in 1906, it was the most powerful most advanced battleship ever constructed and it spelled the death of the British Empire. You see, for the majority of the 19th century the British Navy had been practically unchallenged as the worlds most dominant naval power, and for good reason. The RN wasn't just bigger and more power than the number two navy, it was bigger and more powerful than the number two and number three navies combined! And this wasn't an accident, UK law dictated that naval spending must ensure so. So how did it go wrong? And what relevance is this to the rise of China? Simply put, HMS Dreadnought was so ground-breaking that it made all previous battleships obsolete, battleships are generally categorised as pre-Dreadnought battleships or dreadnoughts and nobody had more pre-dreadnought battleships than the RN. This resetting of the board caused all navies to essentially start from scratch and this allowed countries with comparable (or even superior) economies to Britain's to close the gap on the RN.
Then came WW2, and the rise of the US navy. I'm sure most of us have heard how at the height of the battle of Britain the Luftwaffe were shooting down our aircraft faster than we could build them. But another less known (on this side of the pond) feat is that at the height to the war in the pacific the US shipyards were churning out vessels faster than the Japanese could build the planes/ordinance required to sink them. Then towards the end of the war there was a Dreadnought moment once again as aircraft carriers replaced battleships as the alpha weapon. After WW2 the US Navy was number one and over the next few years the Soviet navy followed it into second place, the Royal Navy would never again reach it's pre-dreadnought heights.
And this is where China's ace comes into play, over the next decade or two the aircraft carrier is going to be rendered obsolete by the drone carrier, once again resetting the board, and China as the planets most industrious nation is going to be able to construct and launch drone carriers faster than any other nation on Earth. That's why the warhawks in Washington are calling for major spending increases to try and prolong the inevitable.
Drone carrier, that’s a new one. So, subsonic vehicles that are still vulnerable to being shot down by conventional arms, then. Don’t you think drones could be carried on the US’s current carriers (not that drones are particularly critical for combat when they have 5th gen fighters)?
Personally I'm not so convinced drone carriers and hypersonic weapons (despite the US's sudden about turn on that one) are the future benchmarks - destroyers are very very adept at shooting down drone type aircraft and if they start to change the balance we'll probably see the development of Type 45s on steroids that have vast area control dominance and large enough arsenals they can deal with all but the most insane of drone swarms (the UK has quite a good track record of developing weapons that can be used against swarming targets). Eventually direct energy weapons are going to obsolete hypersonic weapons.