[Teever]

That's not enough.

What happens if a long conflict breaks out between China and the US can't rebuild capacity lost in the initial phase of the war because China takes out that Korean ship building capacity?

With a capacity 260x times that of America the Chinese will be able to rebuild an overwhelming naval capacity, especially if the war technology turns to cheap, mass produced (semi)autonomous machines as seems to be happening in Ukraine?

Ships are one thing but really matters is the industrial capacity to build missiles that will be the immediate bottleneck. Many American missiles have a lead time measured in months to years and wargames scenarios for a conflict over Taiwan show the US exhausting most of their antiship missiles within weeks.

Once that happens the US will need to retreat from the area and the Chinese will be able to mass produce ships and probably missiles to hunt down any lingering American ships.

America will effectively lose their dominance of the seas and certainly the region.

[Spooky23]

> What happens if a long conflict breaks out between China and the US can't rebuild capacity lost in the initial phase of the war because China takes out that Korean ship building capacity?

We launch ballistic missiles at each other. Probably kill 500-800M Chinese and 100-175M Americans.

China hawks love fantasizing about this stuff. Reality is the as Ukraine demonstrates, direct conflict between reasonably advanced states is a tarpit. A hot war between the top tier states is armageddon.

[pc86]

Even the question assumes that because the answer is "a few billion people die" it's not possible, and because of that (false) assumption, the first thing isn't possible.

If China starts sinking US ships half the people reading this thread will die before ever hearing about it. That doesn't mean China would never sink a US ship.

[Spooky23]

We remain alive today after decades of nuclear brinksmanship, because in general, people don’t want to die.

The longer term strategic outlook for the US is… not great. Why would China poke the bear when the bear has teeth? Wait for America’s internal instability to escalate, then roll into Taipei without a shot fired.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

Why aren't we trying to come up with something simpler, cheaper, and quicker to manufacture? We had this problem with bombs back before the JDAM was developed, and basically they just stuck an off-the-shelf guidance system onto a dumb bomb.

For that matter, why aren't we spinning up a few factories to build artillery shells?

[phil21]

> For that matter, why aren't we spinning up a few factories to build artillery shells?

As with most problems in the US today - short term thinking and seemingly lack of any sort of long-term strategic planning whatsoever.

I was a teenager when they were shutting down the (mostly mothballed, but still kept in enough working order to spin back up) ammunition factories in my state. I thought even then it was a stupid short-sighted move, and it's only proven worse since then.

Not only do we not have any production capacity to speak of - we also are now completely reliant on a handful of plants that are vulnerable to two or three well-executed attacks to take them completely offline. We entirely lack geographic diversity when before our arms manufacturing was spread throughout the country and fairly resilient.

As a nation we completely forgot the lessons learned in WWII. Production capacity is almost all that matters so long as you can hold the front long enough to spin it up. China is quite obviously orders of magnitude better positioned for this in the modern era. Perhaps even moreso than the US was in the 1940's given the types of arms that are expected to win future wars.