| If a carrier is willing to shoot at Chinese ships and close enough to reliably do so, then the Chinese are willing to shoot at it and are close enough to reliably do so. Chinese antiship weapons are significantly better than the US. Without immediately inducing Kessler syndrome and still being very lucky, I don't see how a US carrier is going to survive two dozen DF-21 missiles simultaneously, a couple hundred supersonic cruise missiles, and whatever submarines or UUVs the Chinese have got lurking there. The US fleets most advanced weapon, SM-6, still can't reliably intercept MRBMs or SRBMs(https://www.defensedaily.com/mda-conducts-sm-6-missile-raid-..., https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/us-fails-...) and has never intercepted a single IRBM. I struggle to see how it can possibly defend against dozens of IRBMs with advanced countermeasures that aren't on a predefined trajectory if it can't even hit a single one with no countermeasures. And by the way, they're building over 100 missiles a year. They could realistically have 1000 antiship IRBMs in a few year - more antiship IRBMs alone than the combined amount of interceptors of all carriers the US could hope to deploy within 8000km of Taiwan. Right now the best the US can do is try to jam the missiles and deploy smoke, and hope they miss, which they probably won't. A US carrier group in Taiwan's territorial waters is 100% getting absolutely wiped. The US will never risk getting their carriers that close to Chinese weapons, they'll stay thousands of kilometers away and hope for the best. The US's best hope is to keep its assets far away from the theater and cooperate with Taiwan to try to whittle away the Chinese fleet and prevent them from setting up a beachhead, and hope the Chinese air defences, low-frequency radars, and signals intelligence platforms can't stop the counterattack. The Chinese also won't need a million soldiers. They just need to get a few dozen thousand on the shores with air superiority and disable the Taiwanese military then take as much time as they want pacifying the island. |