this post was submitted on 07 Sep 2023
154 points (98.7% liked)
technology
23182 readers
348 users here now
On the road to fully automated luxury gay space communism.
Spreading Linux propaganda since 2020
- Ways to run Microsoft/Adobe and more on Linux
- The Ultimate FOSS Guide For Android
- Great libre software on Windows
- Hey you, the lib still using Chrome. Read this post!
Rules:
- 1. Obviously abide by the sitewide code of conduct. Bigotry will be met with an immediate ban
- 2. This community is about technology. Offtopic is permitted as long as it is kept in the comment sections
- 3. Although this is not /c/libre, FOSS related posting is tolerated, and even welcome in the case of effort posts
- 4. We believe technology should be liberating. As such, avoid promoting proprietary and/or bourgeois technology
- 5. Explanatory posts to correct the potential mistakes a comrade made in a post of their own are allowed, as long as they remain respectful
- 6. No crypto (Bitcoin, NFT, etc.) speculation, unless it is purely informative and not too cringe
- 7. Absolutely no tech bro shit. If you have a good opinion of Silicon Valley billionaires please manifest yourself so we can ban you.
founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
US is already unable to defeat China in a war. hypersonic missiles are one thing, but China has several other advantages. the PLA Navy has more ships than the US Navy (they are smaller ships, which could be an advantage in modern peer war— smaller target, harder to detect, better maneuverability). manufacturing is a huge advantage China has— even in domestic arms manufacturing, which the US didn’t deindustrialize as drastically as other industries, the US is severely lacking and is dwarfed even by Russia’s production. US is just not ready for a peer war. you could argue that China’s soldiers are untested in battle, and you would be correct, but US tactics and operations are well known and are being studied by PLA personnel. the US strategy doesnt even work well, as evidenced by the horrible performance against countries 10% of their size.
nuclear war is a very real fear, but that would mean mutual destruction or complete destruction of the US with heavy but sustainable damage to China. China has enough of a nuclear arsenal to perform second-strike and even third-strike nuclear attacks. we are also unaware of the efficacy of China’s missile defense systems (they may not be able to defend against nuclear warheads, but i wouldn’t put it past them). also the US nuclear arsenal is old and could have problems that prevent launch
The last thing even vaguely resembling a battle the us miliary was involved in was Fallujah in 2004, 20 years ago, and that was mostly the us encircling the city with heavy weapons then flattening it, not any kind of fight.
my point exactly, they only engage in fighting where they vastly outnumber the enemy. this was even true in the european front of WW2
Kind of true in the European setting and not to defend the US here, but there were a few moments in the Pacific where things were quite balanced against Japan, at least until 1943.
true, i edited my comment to reflect this
picking your fights and only engaging when you have an advantage is just basic strategy though. if they had the sense to do this on the geopolitical level as well then they wouldn't be an empire in decline but here we are.
they are only able to do so bc they engage in colonial warfare. fighting the nazis WW2 wasnt a colonial war, but they were only able to fight inferior forces bc the nazis were busy fighting the Soviets. and they are only able to avoid peer wars w Russia bc Ukraine is ruled by compradors who act in the service of amerikan empire. look at the horrible advice US military command is giving Ukraine, having them throw themselves at defensive lines that have materiel and personnel superiority
In WW2 they had general's like Patton chomping at the bit to continue the war with an invasion of the Soviet Union and ofc MacAuthor wanting to escalate the Korean War into a full scale invasion of China. There has always been the opportunity to conduct a peer war but always someone with a cooler head to prevail. The great threat to humanity is that we may have passed the threshold where the tragedy of competent anti-communists building a global hegemony will be replaced with the farce of true believers who don't know their propaganda is propaganda having inherited an empire which their ideological lens will not allow them to accurately understand or assess the strength of itself or it's enemies and plunge it into an unwinnable war with a nuclear superpower.
uhhhh the US's soldiers are also untested in battle. None of the soldiers on the fighting lines will have ever been in a war before, all the Iraq war vets are like 40 years old.
and all their generals are untested in battle excepting against goat herders in a flat floodplain desert river valley
this is a moot point and a cope that proamericans fall on, it literally isn't even true.
yeah but i didnt say US soldiers were “battle-hardened”, just that PLA soldiers aren’t. in the same sentence i say the US warfare techniques are well known, which they are (reliance on bombing and drone warfare)
US soldiers aren't either. The way you wrote it clearly implies that they have some kind of experience that Chinese soldiers don't. This is false.
they have experience using drones and bombs to kill ppl. unless PLA soldiers are out there bombing weddings, that is experience US soldiers have that PLA soldiers dont
further, my comment doesnt “clearly imply” that. stop being pedantic, if you have a problem with anything i actually said, criticize that instead of taking the least charitable interpretation of my comment. PLA soldiers don’t have experience with warfare, this is true. i said this bc its a possible rebuttal to my stance on PLA superiority, not as some implied praise of US military efficacy
Isn't modern US doctrine that aircraft carriers are the dominant force in the navy? China has limited aircraft carrier capability and lacks the self-sufficiency of nuclear-powered aircraft carriers.
The War Nerd: This Is How the Carriers Will Die (2009)
hypersonic missile tech has only become more asymmetric since then
Amen
If someone can build a hypersonic missile, someone can also build a hypersonic missile interceptor missile... And you can fit a lot of missiles in a CVBG.
Sure, the CVBG doctrine only really works against the Japanese (where both babies are fighting over small islands that are far from their respective homelands)... But I don't think that hypersonic missiles obsolete carriers in that role.
I do think that that role is useless against China or Russia given that they aren't really colonial imperial powers with territory around the world, but...
IIRC the US' missile interception system has a 40% success rate when the ballistic missile has a known origin and a normal parabolic trajectory
so yea, that nuke is hitting whether ppl like it or not, even if we went back in time 50 years people would still be able to nuke today's US, only half as effectively
Hey it's the they missed the point meme
The whole point of hypersonic cruise missiles is that they don’t have a fixed flight path while also moving 10 times the speed of sound.
Intercepting such a target is physically impossible.
I know
I'm just saying that even 1970s China could still nuke 100 US cities (assuming the US knows the exact origin point of each Chinese nuke, if they don't then it goes up to 200)
What even is the turning radius of an HGV? Sure, you're not constrained by silly things like pilot blackout and whatever, but that doesn't mean it can zig zag at will.
I don't think hypersonic missile interception is possible, unless the US gets laser weapons working or something like that. Hypersonics are incredibly fast, and Russia's fighter jet launched hypersonics easily defeated the Patriot air defense systems in Ukraine, when they targeted them. Even intercepting normal supersonic and subsonic cruise missiles is a crapshoot, the iron Dome in Israel gets defeated by homemade rockets at times. Interception technology is very overrated currently.
Interceptors are more difficult to make than the missiles themselves, and often are more expensive. They also don't have 100% interception chance so you need to fire 2-4 just to be sure.
Aircraft carriers are only good for shows of force against vastly inferior militaries where the US can easily enforce complete air superiority
Otherwise, they're just a massive sitting defenseless duck against modern anti-ship missiles