[Teever]

We already know where the bottlenecks are[0] -- it's in production of anti-ship missiles and then ships.

The lead-time in producing missiles is measured in months and years and war games predict that the supply of most of them will be depleted in an initial engagement with China over Taiwan that sees Japan/Taiwan/US win but lose many ships.

After it's anybody's guess but China has 260x the naval production capacity of America so they'll be able to come back faster than the US can.

[0] https://www.csis.org/analysis/first-battle-next-war-wargamin...

[weard_beard]

Does it account for commandeering spacex and corresponding space armament? Naval projection vs orbital projection seems like a good thing to measure.

[Teever]

As I understand it SpaceX has launched 500 rockets and many of these rockets were reusable so the number of rockets that they've manufactured over the 25 years that they've been in business is far less than 500.

If you take a look at page 8 of this pdf[0] you'll see that the wargames predict that hundreds of missiles will be used in the first few weeks of an engagement between China and the US over Taiwan. Page 10 will curdle your blood as you'll see that they anticipate to lose dozens of ships including two(!) aircraft carriers. Page 11 shows hundreds of losses of various aircraft.

SpaceX will not save those lives and they will not be able to replace the equipment in time for a second engagement with China.

Take a look at a previous comment that I wrote about this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42391816

[0] https://selectcommitteeontheccp.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites...

[weard_beard]

I read your comment and the pdf and I guess my question is answered. “No, we did not consider asymmetric and possibly massively impactful scenarios like control of low earth orbit munitions deployed on a massive scale.”

[Teever]

I interpreted your question as asking if the US could use SpaceX's rocket manufacturing capacity to produce ICBMs that could be used to hit Chinese ships.

Now that I see that this was not what you're suggesting I don't think that two years is a sufficient time frame to build, test, and deploy the kinds of weapons that you're suggesting.

It seems like America is sleep walking into a horrible conflict with China and this combined with all of the soft power that America is losing in the past few months doesn't bode well for the outcome of this conflict.

[weard_beard]

That’s where I’d start looking for advantage.

[hedora]

It’s not particularly asymmetric. China has ICBMS and is upwind from the US. It’s hard to imagine non-civilization-ending conflicts where dropping space rocks on China comes into play.

[weard_beard]

Imagine harder.

[Teever]

Can you describe in greater detail what you're imagining?