[simonh]

There’s no real way to evaluate the effectiveness of the Chinese military because they’ve not seen significant action in several generations. However that itself is not a good sign.

As for their kit, Myanmar bought some of their planes but none of them are operational. The planes were a joint project by China and Pakistan, but 8 years after the deal was signed apparently have persistent unsolved technical and structural issues.

Meanwhile Thailand bought three of the new Yuan class subs from China, but they aren’t operational either. Problems with the engines so bad that they need replacing.

Meanwhile China now has two aircraft carriers, but still hasn’t committed either of them to long range operations. They have only conducted experimental night takeoffs and landings, their carrier assigned planes are still largely land based, and they have yet to operate the boats beyond range of land based airstrips. Modern carrier operations are as complex as it gets, and they seem to be struggling with it.

[klooney]

I'm not sure it makes much sense to worry about carriers for the war in Taiwan that everyone expects- their aircraft can use their airfields.

Peacetime armies are generally bad, but turnover tends to be high when the fighting starts, and the second or third set of generals is often much better.

The most important advantages China has are pretty overwhelming- a giant population, and they own the global supply chain for microchips and batteries, meaning they can replace smart munitions and systems while their opponents can't.

They also have the best setup for doing go it alone, vertical industrial production, much better than the US or Russia. They're fine in any scenario where they don't get totally blitzed in a week.

[simonh]

A few issues there.

For an invasion of Taiwan numbers are important, sure, but it's a wide channel and amphibious assaults are absolutely the hardest kind of operation an army can attempt. Technical competence, and I would also argue operational flexibility at every level, are absolutely crucial.

In terms of supply chains, that matters for an extended conflict, as we can see in Ukraine. However an invasion of Taiwan would either work in the first week or so, or it's over. I suppose they could try a long terms blockade, but that doesn't seem to be their strategy.

China is extremely vulnerable to a blockade themselves though. They have no control of their essential seaborn supply routes, and are highly dependent on external sources for energy, raw materials, high tech parts, and maybe most importantly food and fertilisers. The US can turn all of that off like a tap at a moment's notice.

The sorts of sanctions levelled at Russia since last year would have China on it's knees in months. The only way to mitigate that would be for the PLAN to go toe to toe gobally with the US, UK, French and Australian and Japanese Navys all at the same time. Also maybe India. The Indian Navy is small but it's no joke, and they have two fully operational carriers.

[nebula8804]

This is word for word regurgitated from Peter Zeihan. Is he your source?

[simonh]

Ive come across Zeihan and I know he talks about this stuff, but there are plenty of alternative sources for the same info.

He's too absolutist for my tastes, he talks about China 'going away' due to demographics. That's just silly, they'll suffer for sure but 1.4 billion people don't just disappear. Also his line about Russia needing to control geographic access points or 'they're finished' is equally silly. They have nukes.

[kjkjadksj]

The state of the peacetime supply chain hardly matters. In a major conflict it should be expected that western democracies revert to the centrally planned economic system they used to win the second world war.

[klooney]

The peacetime supply chain determines the possibilities of the wartime supply chain. You can't open a mine overnight, refineries are incredibly expensive and fiddly and require a lot of very specific knowledge, tool manufacturing capacity is incredibly difficult to bootstrap- you don't want to be like WWII Australia, digging up lathes out of junkyards.

[themadturk]

America doesn't have the manufacturing base it had in WWII. Then, it took months or even years to ramp up the existing manufacturing to wartime capacity. Now a lot of America's manufacturing has been outsourced to China and other far eastern/southern Asian countries. A modern war between superpowers is likely to be won or lost in a week or two at most even without involving nukes, long before major resupply of equipment is even needed.

[nradov]

The first few Chinese aircraft carriers were probably never intended to be fully combat effective and are mainly intended to develop an experienced cadre of naval aviators. The carriers lack catapults, which means they can't really launch tankers (or any heavy aircraft at all). US Navy carriers almost always have at least one tanker up while conducting flight operations. This makes a huge difference in safety because an aircraft that gets into any trouble has an option to conduct aerial refueling instead of having to rush a carrier landing, or divert to a distant land base. The next generation of Chinese carriers are expected to have catapults but those are technically challenging. I'm sure that this is a priority area for their spies.

[simonh]

I'm surprised they don't have them working yet. An Australian carrier was decommed a few decades ago and went to China for scrap. The Australians stripped most of it but left the steam catapults intact, and I know the Chinese were using them for land based experiments.

[nradov]

The Chinese probably intend to skip steam catapults and go straight to electromagnetic (like on the new Ford class carriers). I don't think they want to deal with steam generation and plumbing.

[_lvbh]

> Chinese military because they’ve not seen significant action in several generations. However that itself is not a good sign.

I see that as a good sign. Why fight wars if there is no need to. I hope they stay that way and don’t get themselves involved in Taiwan

[WeylandYutani]

The US hasn't seen action against a peer since 1945. Ofcourse there's a reason for that: nuclear weapons.

[simonh]

I think what matters is generational experience, so there are always officers on duty that have combat experience. Since WW2 they've had the Korean and Vietnam wars, both Gulf wars and Afghanistan, plus numerous smaller operations. All of those except Afghanistan involved significant naval support. That's kept the ball moving forward in terms of real world experience.

I am a bit worried about naval officer training though, there have been damaging cutbacks and compromises made on that front. Nothing that's likely to have long term consequences yet, but they need to fix that before it gets worse.

[kjkjadksj]

Just look at the evolution of the standard issue kit over the vietnam or the iraq wars to see how the US has been able to use first hand combat experience to rapidly iterate on new paradigms.

[dirtyid]

>Myanmar

Pretty much all negative coverage of JF17 (joint PRC+PK manufacturing but so far SOLD by PK) are sourced from Indian tabloid rags with no credibility. Myanmar airforce has 100+ PRC airframes, variety of models in the last 30 years with little issue. Pretty much the only useful piece of info so far is Myanmar doesn't have adequate experience operating tech in 4th gen fighters, most of their fleet is 3rd gen. IIRC Myanmar got the jets before they even got simluators, and then bought 4th gen trainers (JL9) from PRC.

>Thailand

Yuan subs aren't operational because PRC couldn't acquire original specified German engines after EU sanctions. There's a period where Thai Navy was deciding whether to accept PRC engines, which they did. Some analysts implied if Thai did not accept PRC engines it would imply they were unsuitable, even more retarded media then spung that as technical issues with PRC engines. Both complete misinformation narratives since there's no basis for evaluating those unintegrated PRC engines at all.

>aircraft carriers

Training carriers based off RU design that analysis suggest PLAN has more or less maximized sortie potential vs when USSR was running carrier ops on similar flight deck. Late 2022 USNI analysis on PLAN carrier ops is they're basically reached "true" blue water deployment, i.e. a few hundred nms near Guam, 1000nm+ from mainland, with no divert airfrields or aerial refueling as backup. Which is about as far as PRC none nuke carriers need to deploy given strategic considerations. Caveate being conservative sorties and pretty clean (light) load outs to compensate for lack of divertion and ski jump. The struggle with PLAN carriers is they won't have catapults and capabilites that brings until 003 and training was hectic because they only had 1-2 carriers training 3-4 crew rotations, somewhat alleviated by converted cruise/barrack ships. TLDR is I would not characterize as overall carrier ops capabilities as struggling as limited by hardware, which TBH is expected since carriers does not seem particularly high priority outside of prestige - given PRC ship building capacity, they could have rushed 10 carriers like US did Forrestal class. Basically most US analysis of various PRC military modernization is they're lacking and focusing on XYZ, but should get there in a few years. Occasionally throw in the word struggle because they watch CCTV7 where miltiary propaganda talks about how hard they work. A few years later, new analysis that they got there (i.e. asw, jointness), something something evolving, modernizing at astonishing rate, but here's the new struggle. Rinse and repeat. Combined with customary but no real combat experience (which no one has in modern peer warfare). But the underlying pattern if you look at meat of improvements year by year is PLA modernizing fast.

[themadturk]

I wonder if PRC really sees using a navy as a means of force projection as important. They could have a world-spanning navy like the U.S. has, but haven't made it a priority. No one has done it as well for as long as the U.S., but it's also something that could be erased in a few minutes by some well-placed Long Swords.

[dirtyid]

Navy + carrier good for peacetime "diplomacy" via show of force / presence. Hence worth pursuing in some capacity. But ultimately PRC can't have world spanning navy because geopolitical conditions to replicate US global basing not present anymore - would take status quo / order changing conflict. And it would still take decades to train for 10+ carrier groups for parity. Therefore (IMO) PRC doubling down on long range (even global) fires, advanced rocketry that can be acquired and deployed at scale, in relatively short time, to destroy prestige platform from PRC mainland basing, without complex forward deployment or doctorine considerations. Basically make sure you have more missiles and ISR with sufficient CEP than enemies can defend/degrade. Hit aircraft carriers, subs, when they're in port, or the 10 fast combat support ships that sustains most of USN critical deployement options. For as large USN is, the system that sustains fleet is extremely brittle (same with PLAN) - carrier escorts have days of endurance on aggressive tasking. Would take PRC rocketry _minutes_ to take out replenishment ship restocking at port and carriers become single deployment assets. This kind of capability was not technically feasible 10-20 years ago - none of US adversaries could disrupt USN logistics. But now is.

IMO US pretty much understands this as well, for as much reporting there is on dysfunction of navy and urgent need to fix, there hasn't been much actions instead we see doubling down on distributed land based fires and increasing aviation standoff range, and ultimately long range bombers strait from CONUS to reduce basing dependencies abroad.

[themadturk]

I think you've got a point on strategy and standoff weapons, but I'd question whether anyone thinks a strike on support craft (or even combat vessels) while they're sitting in either U.S. or allied ports isn't an even more serious provocation than hitting our ships at sea. A forward deployed carrier strike group has, as you say, supplies for several days (at least) of unsupported operations, and (as long as the carriers aren't sunk) could carry an impressive punch during that time. I don't know how PLAN anti-submarine capabilities are, but fast attack submarines can carry a heavy conventional punch via cruise missiles. I think it's possible attacks on American soil could result in similar retaliation on enemy soil, such as direct strikes on Chinese naval bases and even political targets.

[dirtyid]

PRC already assumes mainland strikes, and TBH this has been default assumption for any US adversaries because US has projection capabilities and therefore homeland attacks must be accounted for. US warplanners and politicians haven't been shy about talking up striking PRC mainland, whether they seriously believe so, or whether it's all security theatre to create security delimma for PRC. Never the less, it's baked into the consideration for PRC - what hasn't been considered by US planners and populus are substantial CONUS attacks, because up until now geography has shielded US, but long range strikes / advanced rocketry makes it possible, and adversaries will match escalation when they can. It's only up until recently, US adversaries technically couldn't strike CONUS even if they wanted to, barring desperate propaganda measures like fugo balloons. And it makes escalatory sense since so much of US power/influence depends on CONUS serenity. A world where CONUS is vunerable is a world where others forced to "derisk" from US and reevaluate viability of US security commitment.

As for allied ports and rear support, US basing that enables operations against PRC in theatre, which basically US force structure requires at this point (hence all the wargames trying to convince JP to distributed basing), is IMO even more forgone. Various US partners signalled they wouldn't directly contribute to TW war but will provide rear support, but that's enabling US war regardless, so very likely they're going to get glassed. PRC systems confrontation and system destruction warfare is structured around destroying the softer/easier targets like support ships, tankers, ISR infra etc. Hitting them is doctrine. And ultimately, it's in PRC's long term interest to destroy as much US forward presence as possible, because that's historically how outside hegemons get kicked out, through sufficient force to demonstrate their strategic posture is no longer viable. And US having decades of build up abroad has more dependencies and more to lose if their security architecture becomes unsustainable.

As for unsupported carrier operations, IMO if you consider the sorties numbers their effects are close to negligible. Boat might be nuke powered, but there's only enough supplies (fuel/ordnance) for low hundreds of sorties, 50%+ of which will be buddy tanking / support due to how far PRC A2D2 has pushed standoff range, which leaves a even lower 100s of actual hitters. Assuming no interceptions. Barely enough to dent the 100,000s of targets from mainland. It's not that US CVGs are weak, just PRC operates on another scale, more targets, more concrete, more counter measures etc. Without constant replenishment carriers become single deployment assets with limited use and cost:vunerablity ratio not in their favour. And even then nuke propulsion need to return to dock, where they can be promptly hit with global strike.