what most people fail to realise is that china doesnt have to make any sort of large scale moblisation to attack taiwan. not from the start anyways. why? because taiwan is on china’s doorstep, and all the forces the PLA is needs to deploy against is island are within striking range as soon as they take off from their bases.

Yes Taiwan is right on the PRCs doorstep however the PLANs Eastern and Southern fleets main bases are quite some distance from the action. Most of the vessels involved would either have fairly lenghty transits or need to be moved ahead of time.

the fighters needed could be feuled without being noticed or raising any alarm bells. so it would just be a matter of arming them. that would take a matter of minutes.

curise and ballistic missiles can be launched from their storage facilaties, and warships could attack with cruise missiles as soon as they leap port, or even when still in port (but any involvd warships would likely only be subs and air defence destroyers,and they dont have to get in firing position from the start).

paratroops can be deployed via transports ac, and would only need a few hours to moblise and get going. and its not like the paras will be going in from the word ‘go’. the PLAAF would likely only be able to clear an air corridoor after at least a day.

Maybe but the thing is professional soldiers tend to do things by the book. Major operation coming up, better put the troops through some extra training just to be safe. Ooops now they need to have some time to rest and conduct maintenance. These are patterns that the US intel community has been built to see for decades and I feel much more confident of their ability to get this stuff right than all the work they are being called on to do to fight terror and insurgency. Having all the planes down from flying for maintenance (after all if you’d like to have all your planes available for ops right?) tends to be noticible too. Even little things like reductions in mobile phone traffic because the troops have been told they can’t phone home anymore could trigger a response (a couple more SSNs moved in to listen in, a few more EP-3C flights, a bit more attention given to satellite recon) that could lead to the game being discovered or suspected. Maybe they would break with this mould and try to go from a cold start and maybe it would work. Who knows, maybe not the PRC leadership.

amph units will not be called upon until much later (somewhere around 3 days nd upwards of a week or two), so they can start mobilising after the first attacks and still be waiting around for orders.

Thats a pretty long timeline. Enough time to have those ports covered by subs and other recon assets and airstrikes worked out. SSN attack coordinated with a B-52 strike from CONUS with Harpoon ASMs and supported by fighters and SEAD (with tanker and AEW&C support) from Guam will mean a pretty rough time for the amphibs. As it is 3+ days for the paratroops you mentioned earlier to hold out on Taiwan is a long time. Arnhem in WWII is a good example of what can happen to unsupported/unrelieved light troops.

US subs are of little use in all honesty. they can only act when in the straits. no-one knows the waters around the straits better then the PLAN’s own sub commanders. any US subs that tries to attack landing ships would get bottle up in a very small area of water.

PLAN major fleet units are not based directly across the straight, they would have to transit. That would leave them open to attack, and having PLAN SSKs or SSNs escort the groups would make the sub rather vulnerable to detection themselves.

SSKs are almost impossible to detect when running on batteries. any USN SSN skipper that goes around shooting at the first target that presents itself when there are hostile SSKs (and lots of them) in the area deserves to get sunk.

Well given your proposed timeline of up to a week before the amphib units sortie I would expect that any SSKs operating nearby a US sub would have already revelaed themsleves by snorkelling and therefore switched from hunter to hunted.

then of course, there is the ‘small’ issue of the PLAN and its land based ASW units.

I agree that is only a small issue. I’d hate to be anyone trying to conduct surface or aerial ASW ops anywhere near Taiwan itself.

basically, no SSN can last very long against all that. and unless the US is willing to trade one SSN for one or two troop ships or escorts, they will not attack. even then, the US can deplete its whole SSN force and still not have stop enough troop ships.

Unless of course the US was the sort of force that practiced cooperative, all arms type warfare therefore blunting the ability of an enemy to react effectively due to overload and loss of situational awareness. Oh wait that is how the US fights.

as i have already said, this is just a pure hyperthetical scenario. that is why i find little issues with discussing it – because its just not going to happen.

and anyways. the US has made their wishes clear. no-one disturbs the status-quo. the ‘government’ of taiwan cant take a leak without permission form the US. and the US is never going to allow them to declear independence. or else the US would have done it already.

if taipai moves without consulting washington, chances are america will just leave them out of swing in the wind. america is not stupid, and will not get dupted into fighting someone else’s war.

as for the rest of your post. i feel that i have already addressed the points you made, so there is no point in my repeating myself.

Okie dokie then.

All depends on the situation. It seems that Taiwan has less and less of a chance of independance as time pass on and the only time frame for a independance is rather now. Before 2008 olympics to discourage a chinese invasion. But international consesis and that includes the view of US is that if Taiwan declare independance they they are on their own… as Bush said “we have no obligations to fight for Taiwan” But if China single sidely invaded Taiwan there would be US intervention. The question is to what magnitude? I don’t think US would deploy troops but rather send weapons and supplies aid. To actively oraganize a concensis in the senate for a War with china would take weeks if not months of debating. A counter offensive would be organized too late. I don’t know if you people realize that to mobilize or for a order to be carried out in a division level takes 72 hours minimum. A naval battle group takes ~ 7 days to prepare.
so no matter what Chinese have a huge lead in the war.

Well the US style of government gives the President executive power and so he can order the military to move straight away if that is his (political) will. This is of course rather different to the power exercised by a Prime Minister (or other leader) from parlimentary system of govrnment as practiced in the UK, Australia, Canada etc.

The US does have forces that are constantly at a higher readiness level. RRF for instance, most active Air Force units and ships at sea already for example. Of course the US would not be putting troops on the ground in Taiwan, the ROC already has plenty of those and the US probably couldn’t support any it sent in. Rather they would use available naval units to strengthen the defences and could supplement these with Air Force assets flying directly from CONUS or Guam without invloving bases in Okinawa or South Korea.

Daniel

Don’t try to be clever! Even much less complex cars, tanks and fighters are not designed by CAD alone.
It is testing and testing to get true datas.
You are in need of raw data to feed your program. That program have to cover all important parameters.
In never heard that such one excists already. Otherwise you get the predicted results and are no longer in need of expensive testing.
China does not have first hand datas of their own carrier to start with.
Welcome back in the real world.

Hmm chinken and the egg problem. Hmm we can’t build a carrier because we don’t have any empirical data, but we can’t get any empirical data unless we build a carrier. 😀 So in short IF China seeks to have aircraft carriers they are going to have to build one first to perfect thier own unique Chinese take on on the art. The first one will almost certainly be less than perfect from the operators point of view but well you have to start somewhere.

Daniel

Both Ships in the current RAN fleet can only refuel two ships at once, this is ok but when acting in a fleet support role, wouldn’t more be better? RNZN’s HMNZS Endeavour can refuel three ships at once, one on each side and one aft- in which they trail a hose attached to floatation bouys and the aft ships scoops it up, places it and takes on the fuel.

I have at times wondered about the usefulness of this multiple refueling capability. I mean if you are the commander of a task force are you going to pull more than one ship at a time out of the screen to refuel?

Daniel

Chinese can design their own CV? Maybe they can ‘build’ CV but designing it is different story.

I sure China could design a CV from scratch if they had to. I reckon if could do it if I had too 😀 Need a flight deck, hangar spaces, fuel and ammo storage, crew spaces, engineering spaces etc. All fairly basic is theory. Yeah I could design one, couln’t vouch for its operational effectiveness. A from scratch Chinese design would probably have a better chance for success than my backof the the envelope design but it would probably still have bugs to iron out. Luckily there is no need for the Chinese to design anything in a vacuum. Other nations have spent decades developing various ideas on the CV and the Chinese have positioned themselves to absorb these lessons learned.

Daniel

Dated? How?

Probably refering to things like the single arm launcher for shtil instead of the VLS for later vessels etc.

Daniel

The preferred designerfor the AWD program has been chosen

AWD Preferred Tender – Gibbs and Cox

“The Gibbs & Cox evolved design will now compete with an Australianised version of Spain’s existing F100 ship design, and will be further considered by the Government as part of the next phase of the project.

Daniel

The ability to threaten the CONUS with a TACTICAL aircraft, either in Chinese or Russian service, is effectively zero. Where would they forward base out of? You can be pretty sure that the US will fight tooth and nail to prevent forward bases being established in the Western hemisphere. Certainly not to the degree that the US is in Asia and the Pacific. Plus I think anybody with any sense at all would think REALLY hard before dropping a bomb with a return address on the US.

Much as this pains me 🙂 but Garry was suggesting that rather than spending all the money to develop a new aircraft the Russians should rather sink it into improving and deploying more BMs of the mobile kind that are hard to locate and can strike the CONUS. Personally I think the Russians need to bring new products into production across the board (ships, subs, MBTs, fighters etc). As I’ve said the current range is still potent but the opposition is on the cusp of a generational leap and the main customers are building thier own industries up to near parity with the Russian. The problem is that faced with this need the Russian armed forces can’t afford to support all these new platforms and export customers are typically leary of buying “off the drawing board”. The Russian arms industry could be heading into a period where rather than supplying whole finished products (Sov DDGs, Su-27/30, T-90 MBTs etc) it is only a supplier of components (AL-31 engines, SAMs and radars for fitting to indigenous ships, engines or armour packages for tanks etc).

Daniel