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| Trying to avoid this. |
Actually, it isn't that simple. That's just the RAND Corporation's scenario if the America's stick to old Cold War tactics. If they adopt to 21st century conditions, the Chinese get their heads handed to them. Of course, Popular Science keeps mum about this until they've frightened the reader half to death.
I'm a bit sanguine about the idea of the US going to war with China. My opinion is that the Chinese aren't nearly as formidable as many people imagine and that while it's dangerous to underestimate your enemy, it's equally as dangerous to overestimate him. Hitler would have been a weird footnote in history if Britain and France had called his bluff over the Rhineland. In fact, the Wehrmacht was so weak then that the French could have sent a policeman to arrest them. The same goes for the Communists. It amazes me with what we know now that the Soviets were often so weak that there were times when we could have shattered the Warsaw Pact like an old Coke bottle. In both cases, it was our overestimates that kept the monsters in power. And then there's Saddam Hussein whose mighty Republican Guard went to pieces so fast that people kept getting hit by the shrapnel. Red China? They're ambitious and talk a lot about what they want and what they're going to do, but talking and doing are two different things.
9 comments:
It must be remembered that China is the nation which gave us Sun Tzu.
[And was a pushover against the Mongols.]
Ironmistress;
Proving the old saw about a prophet only being without honor in his own country.
The Mongols conquered China in spite of the Great Wall, by simply bribing the gatekeepers of same to let them in. Since the Imperial bureaucracy used The Wall as exile for those who were out of favor, this wasn't hard.
China has a long history of autocratic rule, enforced by its armies. (It's a typical "hydraulic state".) The only thing which changes is the excuse for same.
When, not if, China decides to go empire-building, I predict it will come apart at the seams. The leaders' biggest problem won't be us- it will be their own provinces, just as it was in 1925. Except this time, with nukes in the equation.
/Just thinking out loud.
Happy New Year. ;-)
cheers
eon
Saddam Hussein was a joke (and he fought Iran to a standstill, so I think we have an idea of the People's Islamic People's Democratic People's Republic's strength if we were to grow the necessary parts and decide to steamroll them). However, it does not follow that China will work the same way.
As I see it, the US has a vast technological advantage over the Chinese, but they have numbers, and a willingness to take casualties. The situation was similar when Korea was a hot place, and that ended (or rather, didn't) in a stalemate. If it were the case that we were similarly armed and had similarly sized forces, it would be clear that open war would be costly to both sides---and who wants to bloody his head against a wall? But this asymmetrical situation is almost a temptation to find out what is better than which.
My prediction if China decided to reunify with her brothers in Taiwan: not enough information. The US could have something fun up its sleeves, as we saw a couple of years ago when we both rattled our sabres about shooting down satellites; and then a war would be very short and sharp. Or less likely, China may have compromised vital computers or found a weakness to stick an EMP weapon into, with similar but less happy results. Or if the situation is like that in Korea in the 50s, and we have complementary strengths and weaknesses, it could come down to resolve. Which by the way, I think is our greatest weakness these days.
Anyway, at a billion (nine zeros) raw population, China should not be dismissed. Not surrendered to preemptively, of course, but even Joe Biden will tell you that it's not a small country. Probably.
All of this talk about cool weapons depends on the U.S. being able to afford to develop them and deploy them. Guess what's likely to be first on the budget cutting list as the Democrats realize they've bankrupted the country?
Plus, our debt payments to China will soon exceed our own defense budget, so we're paying for their army AND our own.
Sensible middleweight Asian nations should be looking at developing their own nuclear forces, because the current Administration (which is likely to last through 2016) isn't going to honor our alliances.
There is also one variable in the equation which needs to be taken into account.
Ability to stand losses.
Conscript armies, like People's Liberation Army, are usually good in this respect. Human life is cheap in conscription armies and they have a good ability on standing losses which would devastate and cripple professional armies.
That may be the Achilles heel of the Western armies. They are notoriously poor on standing losses; even losing a squad or platoon raises quite a fuss in the Western media, while losing an army corps couldn't be of less interest in the conscript armies.
God is on the side of bigger guns, but Devil is on the side of bigger reserves.
I'm not so sure that China's large population means much unless it's backed by superior firepower. If it isn't, then modern weapons just turn even the largest armies into targets to be picked off at will. Since the goal of the United States re Red China is defensive and not conquest, there's no need to worry about dealing with guerrillas or quelling an occupied Middle Kingdom (though both were done successfully by small Western forces only a century ago).
All the Americans have to do is take out the standing forces, smash their weapons and C3 systems, and the remaining 998,000,000 potential conscripts will be reduced to throwing rocks at Predator drones.
Also, bear in mind that the Reds have only 13 ICBMs capable of reaching US soil and they're all dismantled and in storage. Not very good odds even against an Obamafied arsenal.
Oh, one last point (sorry, forgot to add it). True, Ironmistress, large armies can take massive losses and keep coming provided they have competent officers and a trained, experienced core fighting force. Lose either of those and they become a mob. The Afghans learned that during the Soviet invasion. All they had to do was kill the officer and sergeants and the conscripts (who were barely trained) ran around like headless chickens
*smile* We have in Finland this phrase Russia is never as strong as it appears to be and neither it is as weak as it seems.
The Russian conscripts are a joke, but their contract soldiers aren't. The problem is that instead of decent military training, the Russian conscripts are used as an unpaid slave work force. While the tour of duty in Russia has been two years, after the boot camp only some two months of it has traditionally been actual military training; rest of that time has been assignment to work, such as construction of railroad tracks, collecting harvest, cleaning pollution etc manpower intensive tasks.
In Finland, the tour of duty is 12 months for those to be trained into reserve officers and NCOs, 9 months for those enlisted to be trained into special tasks (engineers, signal corps, rangers, assault troops, sharpshooters etc) and 6 months for the enlisted in general duties (infantry, artillery, logistics etc). It is all military training - a small nation cannot afford inferior soldiers.
Another problem with the Soviet - and Russian - army is that after the WWII they haven't had decent NCOs.
If the officers are the brain of the army, the NCOs - sergeants and petty officers - are its backbone. The USSR decommissioned its professional NCO forces in the 1960s, instead training the NCOs from conscripts and officers being their only professional soldiers.
The result was the rise of dedovschina - a mindless and insane bullying and hazing tradition as the demotivated NCO conscripts began to abuse their power - and the older conscripts "dripped the s*t downwards", harassing the younger. It is claimed that Russian prisons are more preferable places than its army.
The result is exactly what happened in Afghanistan and Chechnya - a horde of headless chickens with no motivation to fight whatsoever except the fear of the firing squad and which will break at the first setback.
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