I was living in Shanghai in 2018 when the Chinese National People’s Congress lifted the two-term limit for Chinese presidents, effectively making Xi Jinping "dictator for life." My feeling at that time was that this is a sign not of strength, but of profound weakness. If Xi was so unconfident in his legacy that he could not find a worthy successor in the usual amount of time, what did that say about him? And about China after Xi?
In my 4.5 years in China (I left in Nov 2019) the country seemingly became more paranoid, with noticeable increases in internet censorship and street-level policing, as well as intensifying nationalist propaganda in everyday media.
We all saw what happened in Hong Kong in the past couple years. We know what has been happening in Xinjiang for longer. China is clearly at war with the "enemies within," and this article gives me an extremely similar vibe. To my mind, this all adds up to weakness, not strength. The Xi regime is trying to forestall dissent, fragmentation, and collapse. Will they succeed? Maybe. But at what cost? The brain drain on China is continuous, the capital flight steady. A "second cultural revolution" may strengthen and perpetuate the CPC's grip on the country, but it ultimately weakens China, and is hardly a threat at all to other countries.
> If Xi was so unconfident in his legacy that he could not find a worthy successor in the usual amount of time, what did that say about him?
It takes a long time to elaborately enshrine yourself into the history of a nation as old and massive as China. Xi - as with essentially all dictators - lies whenever he pretends it's not about him. He has persistently taken actions all along the path to glorify himself at the expense of others (including past Chinese leaders). Xi isn't interested in the sort of legacy you build in a mere two terms, that's why he was unwilling to give up power. It had nothing to do with being concerned about finding a worthy successor, that wasn't a consideration at the time (Xi had no intention to give up power at two terms, regardless of successors). I think ideally he'd like to surpass Mao in historical importance, although he'll settle for being perceived a peer. If Xi is assessing what that will take, there's little question in entails conquering Taiwan and overall it'll take decades of imprinting himself onto the nation. National cultural transformations derived from your vision of how things should be are long processes.
I admit that I am guessing, but it might be fear. Xi lived through the cultural revolution as the son of someone purged. He may be motivated by making sure that he is never able to be on the receiving end again.
> If Xi was so unconfident in his legacy that he could not find a worthy successor in the usual amount of time, what did that say about him? And about China after Xi?
It got me thinking: Here we have Angela Merkel, who was German Chancellor for 16 years in a democracy and is stepping down because she wants to do something else, vs Xi Jinping who has to maneuver to remain in power.
Well its a large cattle herd. So the amount of flight and drainage required to weaken it would probably require a new continent to appear out of the sea to absorb it all. Its basically unknown how much damage they can take.
History teaches us that things like that can be either a reaction to some growing internal tensions, or this is done in preparation for a war. (The latter, of course, would be to the huge detriment to China's economy, which, despite the burgeoning internal market, is deeply entangled with the international one.)
At a minimum, if you have to do this to prepare for war, then your country had a fairly powerful faction that didn't want war, that you have to suppress before you can get there. Which in fact means that you have internal tensions.
It was only a few years ago that I started digging deep and learning about China's dominance in almost every aspect of geopolitics (economy, military, supply chain, media influence, political influence, cultural influence, etc) and I wondered why the US seemingly did nothing to combat any of this. It was not too long ago when Xi promised Obama he wouldn't militarize islands in the South China Seas and then years later, bunkers and missile defenses started showing up in satellite imagery [1].
Then I learned that all of the world and US corporations, financial and political elite depended or were heavily invested in China. That was the moment I realized the US was dead and the next few decades of global dominance would belong to the Chinese.
>> Then I learned that all of the world and US corporations, financial and political elite depended or were heavily invested in China.
Yeah, the US essentially handed China a modern industrial economy. This was done by outsourcing production (viewed as menial labor) to lower cost countries and focusing on your "core business". The MBAs in the 90s actually believed it's possible to do that while limiting the suppliers technological capabilities. They were wrong. Even when it became more clear, they had to keep doing it because costs and competition meant death to companies that tried to reverse it. Then Trump came along with an IDGAF attitude and pointed out that we're getting "a raw deal". Not many in the business world disagreed, and now measures are being taken to undo it. It has to be undone at the national level so the playfield is even for everyone as it shifts. Biden has not reversed many Trump initiatives in this area but also doesn't talk about it because politics.
Well, the elite made out like bandits. Could one argue the more recent wealth inequality of the last three decades can be tied to essentially outsourced/arbitraged near-slave-labor/globalization/"free trade".
It was sold to the policymakers as good for America, and would moderate China.
But it was probably always about corporations making money.
So why did we hand them a modern economy? Because the rich would get richer.
I think Xi is making a big mistake: the global elite will not like this. It's not like they can depose him, but ... well, look at Russia. Putin is rich and powerful, but it is a failed state essentially. China could easily turn into that.
China had basically won the modern economy: modernize almost two billion people and use soft power to control the world. All they had to do is continue, but I guess CCP politics would eventually reward a totalitarian power hungry madman without any checks and balances.
“The US has also launched biological warfare, cyber warfare and public opinion against China."
Amazing they are still pushing the "COVID-19 originated in a U.S. lab" propaganda. Do they think anyone on Earth outside of China finds this plausible or is it purely for domestic consumption?
The power of official lies comes not from the people who accept the lie wholeheartedly, but from the people who knowingly suppress their instincts and perception in service of public harmony. Here, it doesn't matter how preposterous the proposition is, so long as everyone knows the authorized explanation and the consequences for claiming anything else.
> Do they think anyone on Earth outside of China finds this plausible or is it purely for domestic consumption?
FWIW, I made an effort to get outside my bubble recently and talked to a right-leaning acquaintance, who as it turns out happened to be somewhat conspiracy-minded (which from what I gather isn't uncommon these days).
They were into this theory. So the answer to (the first part of your question) is, surprisingly, yes. This conspiracy theory apparently has some traction in (at least some subset) of the US, although probably not the subset that visits HN regularly.
For an explanation of why he believes this, he pointed me to a series of articles by a guy named Ron Unz. I won't link to his site here since it is a far-right site that contains a variety of objectionable (anti-Semitic etc) content, although at a glance mainly from other authors.
Skimming it, it was actually more highbrow than I was expecting, drawing on books on US bioweapons programs during the Korean War (real programs, at least according to Wikipedia), and how, at the time, such secret programs weren't reported by the media and how easily the public dismissed their existence as simply foreign propaganda.
Which is a fair enough point, I guess. I'm not saying I buy it (I'm doubtful I even have the motivation to go through a book-length series on the topic and do enough fact checking to measure how credible it is). But adding this historical context, it made people paranoid enough to consider such things seem a little less totally crazy than my initial impression of the matter before talking to them.
Very much the latter. Another comparable example is the accidental US bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade[0] - almost no one in the US (or much of the rest of the world) even remembers this incident, but to this day China still treats it as an example of US imperialism/hostility.
I can believe the bombing of the Chinese embassy was intentional. The story I have read:
Approximately 1 month prior an F-117 stealth was shot down and the USAF did not attempt to further destroy the wreckage, considering that the technology would not be of any great advantage to Russia, However, when it became clear through intelligence, that sensitive bits of the wreckage had been sold to China, for whom it would be a great advantage there was a bit of flustered panic which resulted in the bombing of the Chinese embassy and the subsequent claim it was a mistake.
To be fair, if China spent several weeks bombing a country that the US did not want it to bomb and, as part of that bombing, China bombed the US embassy there and then said that it had been an accident, I think that this incident would be well remembered in the US 20 years later and many people in the US would doubt whether it had really been an accident.
My (young, bald, very white) professor in college was in China when that happened. He got a call while in his hotel room from a friend telling him to stay inside, so naturally he ran outside to see what was going on. As soon as he got out the door and found out from a very large crowd of very angry people, he said he threw his hands up in the air and yelled "I'm Canadian!" and promptly returned to his room as quickly as he could.
I always get a bit of a sad chuckle that we Americans tend to default to that whenever confronted abroad.
I had a similar experience in Salzburg in the first few days after the first Iraq War started.
Lots an anti-American banners, a few even hung on churches. Couldn't get a table at a restaurant anywhere, tipped off by my accent, I expect. Lots of ugly talk from the tour guide before he finally decided he didn't want to take money from Americans anymore and kicked me and my wife out of the tour group.
Took my wife and my money back to Vienna, flew out, and never went to Austria again.
“The US has also launched biological warfare, cyber warfare and public opinion against China.”
This is quite some projection. China's role in the virus/biowarfare will never be affirmed with certainty due to their information suppression; however their cyber warfare and public opinion efforts are at full throttle.
If you look at any major news website, YouTube, Reddit, Slashdot, Facebook, Twitter, etc, the paid "shills" and "useful idiots" touting pro-Chinese, anti-America propaganda are everywhere. If you don't think you see it, the common talking points repeated are:
1) Amerikkka is full of white supremacists - this is an effort to change public opinion and have people believe that everyone in America is racist and hates Chinese people.
2) Nothing is happening in Xinjiang.
3) COVID disinformation in the forms of 'it started in Fort Detrick', disparaging Pfizer/Moderna/vaccines, etc.
4) The Imperialist/Colonial America is responsible for all the bad things.
5) Without Capitalism, the world would be a perfect place.
It makes sense from their point of view. They think they are headed for troubled times, and thus want to promote traditional masculinity, which is at odds with feminine-looking male celebrities. They want their youth to have examples closer to Stakhanov than to kpop idols.
>> What kind of insanity is this? This is beyond stupid
That depends entirely on his goals. OTOH it's all over tiktok so my guess is that he views it not only as harmful to their "social order" whatever that is, but also as harmful to the west.
I am assuming that this, along with the elimination of earlier one-child policy, is a part of a response to the demographic time bomb China is facing. The most important question they have faced for the past thirty or so years is whether China would grow rich before it grew old.
I think we now see that the answer is that they are, at best, going to be middle class when the demographics of the country turn against them. If you look at a population pyramid of China you will see two things that should be worrisome: the male/female ratio for 30 and under is heavily skewed towards surplus males, and there are not enough children under 30 to support the two big population bulges who were born just after the cultural revolution and another born in the early 90s.
Given these demographic realities they need to do anything they can to prop up the birth rate, and I am sure someone thought that attacking 'girly men' was a worthwhile effort. (If you want to see some really wacky responses to this sort of demographic scare, check out the things Russia has been trying to do for the past couple of decades to increase its birth rate.)
On the surface, standing alone, its not at all clear that that’s the intended implication (reading more of the posters comment history, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was, though); it’s also the kind of thing the strident voices on the US Right with little self-awareness might say with a straight face about a Chinese official making that statement, though.
> To be fair, that’s a frequent complaint from the US Right, too.
How is that being fair?
In the US it's a meaningless opinion and doesn't represent the cultural beliefs of an all-powerful dictatorship that has ruled the nation for multiple generations.
Coming from the CCP or its cultural proxies it's a de facto cultural dictate. A US conservative might think children shouldn't be playing video games for more than three hours per week, and that's largely an opinion without any consequential power behind it (no matter who holds the opinion). In China, if Xi or the CCP proclaims they think something is bad or XYZ should be, it's a specific threat/warning about what's going to happen, it's a roadmap of how they plan to forcibly mold the society.
A common opinion of a broad and disproportionately (because of systematically unequal representation) politically powerful faction is not “a meaningless opinion”.
But, more to the point, in the mix of pro-authoritarian cheerleading and anti-Communist denigration directed at China from the US Right, the accusation that China has a “dying culture” and grabbing on to any possible grounds to support this is a recurring part of the latter. So when the utterance to which that import is being ascribed is one about Chinese culture that is also a frequent refrain about US culture from the US Right...
I wouldn't put the US in the same category at China, but the US is not that far ahead either. Take a quick look at the attitude to gay rights for a start.
Maybe they want youth that aren't distracted by sex and pop culture. Youth that aren't lazy / lying flat. That study, are productive, work out enough to serve in the military, and that focus on duty to country rather than video games?
That all sounds good on paper, but it sounds like very few people in China actually care. As you've alluded to, Chinese youth are literally so disconnected from their nationalist rhetoric that they choose to lay down, doing nothing as opposed to anything culturally enriching. It's a symbol that their culture is approaching a boiling point, perhaps one where the aging population is drastically more nationalist than their younger replacements.
China returning to the Cultural Revolution, or hard-line Maoism, bodes poorly for foreign entrepreneurs seeking to participate in the advanced manufacturing and hardware industries there, but also poorly for the citizens of PRC in general. Communist extremism is usually advantageous for the Communist party, and disastrous for everyone else.
Except this has nothing to do with communism, which is an economic and political theory. This is just social conservatism being implememted in a totalitarian state, clouded in the language of a past communist uprising.
Similarly, US conservatism is clouded in Christian language even when it has nothing to do with Christianity; Russian conservatism in a 'strong Russia' lingo eben when it's about Putin's enrichment, or western European conservatism clouded in social democracy language. All of these use old words and and a more or less mythical past to justify whatever they want to be the case.
CCP is a party of old men shouting at clouds, with the difference that they happen to have the power to actually implement their ideas quite radically without much consultation.
How does this have nothing to do with communism? Li Guangman specifically calls out capitalists. What would a communist country think is the opposite of capitalism? Doesn't take a detective to know he means communism.
It's usually not even advantageous for the communist party. They'll get much richer running a corrupt mostly-capitalist state than they would running a centrally planned communist state.
Think of the most totalitarian and liberal times of the Soviet Union. The former is associated with the infallibility and seemingly permanent durability of the state, and the latter with Ronald Reagan and people dancing on the rubble of the Berlin Wall.
Is anyone afraid this is going to lead to nuclear war? Or an engagement that destroys us?
This feels much riskier than the Cold War. The mood of that time was one where school children practiced ducking under their desks in preparation for nuclear attack.
China isn't a weak adversary, and they really hate us according to their propaganda and rhetoric.
They have hypersonic nuclear weapons and could possibly pull off a first strike against our nuke sites. If they can also track our subs, maybe they'd try to disable us.
Their navy and armament are rapidly approaching parity. With their economy, it'll likely surpass us.
We aren't the manufacturing power house that won WWII and churned out naval ships on a weekly basis anymore. China is, and they have a ton of dry docks busy building right now.
> Their navy and armament are rapidly approaching parity. With their economy, it'll likely surpass us.
Their navy is approaching ours in terms of tonnage. But they're lacking in carriers at the moment.
This means that their navy can work anywhere with good missile/air force support. But they lack the ability to force project outward.
> What's the game plan?
Aircraft Carriers and the F35. How can they find our ships at sea, if their drones get shot down? How can they prevent us from finding their ships, if we have superior stealth?
If they can't see our ships, how can they attack, even with a hypersonic nuclear warhead? Aircraft carrier move at 35+ mph and turn on a dime. If it takes 10 minutes for a hypersonic nuclear warhead to be delivered to a location, the aircraft carrier is already 6-miles off target.
The DF-21 anti ship ballistic missile (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DF-21), affectionately known as the "carrier killer" is capable of maneuvering on the way back down from space, at speeds of mach 5-10. The initial guidance would be through satellites and then final phase guidance through a mix of electro-optical and radar guidance. Carriers, while being fairly fast for a ship, would not have enough time to maneuver away from an incoming missile. It is thought that they might not be able to outright sink a carrier but would inflict enough damage that the carrier would need extensive repairs and be out of the fight for several months at least, and that is for the conventionally armed versions. Nuclear tipped ballistic missiles would melt the ship and anything nearby.
US anti ballistic missiles (mostly the SM-3 for naval use) have been tested against ballistic missiles but not (as far as I know) in anything other than a test environment. The launchers are mobile and stationed fairly far inland, specifically to be out of easy reach of naval force projection from a carrier group.
Source: Used to be a weapons engineer in the Dutch Navy for 14 years, have been out of it for ~5 years now though. These kind of weapons were a major driver for doctrine revisions when I left, since much of Western naval doctrines were/are based on the idea that you could have a fairly safe and unreachable "seabase" a few hundred nm from shore from which to launch assaults. These kind of very long range area denial weapons upend that thought.
I certainly agree that Taiwan / near China is going to be problematic because of missiles like that. China seems to have the advantage in a Taiwan-scenario. When those missiles are based on land with much more defenses available to them, its a problem.
In a naval scenario (lets say China is attacking Hawaii as a hypothetical), those ballistic missiles will need to be launched from a Chinese ship of their own (3000km range vs Hawaii is still ocean), which means the Carrier + F35 has the edge once more. It seems more likely that our ships will find their ships first (or really, our F35 aircraft will find them first) and neutralize the missile before they lock in on our Carrier's location.
You're pretty much the only person who brought up a solid point though :-)
And its a very good point. China's strategy is to solidify its grip on the near-China areas (Taiwan, Korea, etc. etc.).
China seems to explicitly NOT be trying to challenge the USA on the open seas. Still, given US interests in Taiwan, its a threat to be taken seriously.
Satellites will be the first casualties on both sides in any major conflict. Anti satellite weapons have been successfully tested and are undergoing rapid development.
No that's not how it works. The expectation is that satellites will be knocked out before sending carriers into really high threat environments. Antiship ballistic missiles have very limited sensors and maneuvering capability so it's hard to reliably hit a moving target without another platform data linking a continuous track at least through the midcourse phase.
Both sides have only small numbers of attack submarines and long-range maritime patrol aircraft, including large drones. The small, cheap suicide drones are mostly useless for open ocean surveillance due to lack of range and weak sensors. This is the real world, not a Hollywood movie.
Cost is relative. When you're attacking a carrier you can afford to sacrifice a lot. A surveillance drone can very well be used in a suicide role, and they have more than enough range for this task.
Antiship ballistic missiles have strong maneuvering capabilities. You have to look at absolute displacement, not the relative change in velocity. And the sensors required to find a 7000m^2 target are much smaller and limited than you'd think.
Surveillance drones with sufficient range and sensors for effective broad area maritime surveillance are too large and slow to be effective in the suicide attack role. In theory someone could hang missiles in them but that would cut into range and sensor payload.
Antiship ballistic missiles have very limited maneuverability in the terminal phase where their onboard sensors come into play. Atmospheric heating and plasma effects reduce the effectiveness of those sensors. This article is a fairly good summary of the current state.
All of this stuff is possible in theory. It's just extremely difficult coordinate all the moving pieces together in real time and make it work in an operational environment.
Again, no one is talking about suicide attack. The drones are to be used to send the coordinates for a ballistic missile strike.
Carriers are large enough that you can start scanning for them before the terminal phase.
The article you linked is overly optimistic. The idea of masking the heat signature of a literal aircraft carrier is completely insane.
I also suggest you do the math on how much you can manoeuvre at a rate of speed of 3Gs at Mach 5 with a manoeuvring distance of 80km. (Hint : 33km radius). This is also an underestimation because it doesn't take into account decrease of transverse velocity.
This stuff was possible in theory 30 years ago. Now it's likely possible in practice.
That drone is most likely to engage an AEGIS missile cruiser (one of the escort ships) providing a protective perimeter around the carrier first. Which has more than enough capabilities to shoot down any "drone" before it reaches the carrier.
The carrier itself also provides multiple AWACS to constantly be scanning for aerial approaches. That's the good thing about a carrier, its got aircraft of its own defending the group.
Can your drone penetrate the scanning area of a E2 Hawkeye?
If the drone can find the CSG it's already done it's job. Close out the perimeter and send the missile, you'll have a perimeter more than small enough for the on-board sensors to scan.
And yes, a small modern drone can penetrate the scanning area of an E2 Hawkeye. It turns out stealth is a lot easier when your platform is much smaller, and you only care about the frontal aspect. Even moreso when you don't have large-wavelength radar.
So you're just gonna lob a missile at the first cruiser you see and hope that the carrier is nearby? Like, China's production for these missiles is like, 10 per year. They can't afford to miss that often.
Repeated air assaults to repeatedly tear down defenses (ex: target the Cruiser first, removing the first shield of the Carrier. Then target the next cruiser. Then finally work your way to the carrier) is certainly a workable plan. But again, this is a repeated air-assault against a CSG.
My point is that its not going to take "one missile". Its going to take a campaign, at least if the CSG is doing its formation correctly. In the meantime, the CSG is presumably in range of its target, and also launching an all-out aerial assault.
China's production for these missiles is 10 a year because they are still refining them - they haven't stuck to a final revision they will mass produce yet. Once that is done it's absolutely feasible to pump out 1000+ a year.
And no, I'm not suggesting lobbing it around the first cruiser. I'm suggesting to approach the cruiser from a different angle, finding another ship of the CSG and build a perimeter, and then strike the center.
This is not a repeated air assault of the CSG. That's an old doctrine. The doctrine is to completely bypass the defences of the CSG using a hypersonic missile.
And no, you don't do this while the CSG is already in range, that's ridiculous. You do this when it's ~2000km away.
> And no, you don't do this while the CSG is already in range, that's ridiculous. You do this when it's ~2000km away.
The AEGIS Cruiser's tomahawk missiles have 2500km range.
You're not even outranging the escort ships, let alone the carrier at 2000km. That's why two AEGIS Cruisers escort a carrier.
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BTW: This magic drone that can escape detection yet provide enough intelligence to pinpoint ships so that missiles can strike their targets on the high-seas sounds a lot like an F35.
If you could get by with Tomahawks you wouldn't need to send a carrier.
And no, the drone we're talking about is nowhere near an F-35. Examples of such drones are the CASC CH-7, the Okhotnik S-70, the GJ-11, the RQ-170 or the XQ-58. Unlike an F-35 these are extremely cheap, unmanned, and have very long loiter times, meaning that they can cover hundreds of kilometers in radius or even more.
We have 120,000 ton carriers and F35s. Does China have an airplane that can beat our airplane? Our Aircraft Carriers can hold something like 4 or 5 squadrons and do nearly simultaneous launch + landing exercises.
How quickly can that hypothetical 30% smaller Chinese Aircraft Carrier launch and land aircraft? Are there any advanced air platforms or stealth platforms that can spy on US Navy positions?
China will have 3 aircraft carriers by 2030, all under 100,000 tons. US will have 7 of 120,000 tons all equipped with F35s, each with a veteran crew that's been training on those systems since 2015 (15 years of experience).
Can those 3-Chinese carriers even take on one of ours in a fight on the open sea?
USCGs can't stay out at sea forever. They have to dock eventually, even nuclear powered carriers. At minimal the oilers and replenishment fleet that sustains them will be vulnerable to port strikes with conventionally tipped ICBMs and shortened kill chain. USN can tactically sink every PLAN ship due to exquisit capabilities in an opening salvo, but operationally PRC can produce/harden enough land based rocketry forces to destroy/degrade enough of USN capita assets that any victory would be pyrrhic. We're in the era of 30CEP ICBMs. Fortress America isn't inpregnable anymore.
Funny, 30% is also about how much larger the Yamato was than the Iowa class. But it turned out larger battleships weren't the deciding factor that time. Who knows whether larger carriers will matter for winning the next war?
Each US Supercarrier has two runways and four catapults. That's why they weigh so much.
Tonnage isn't the only factor. But presumably, having two runways on one carrier is a key advantage in carrier based combat. If you can launch aircraft faster than the opponent, you'll get more aircraft in the air before they can.
Can China's 3x aircraft carriers launch as many airplanes as one of our supercarriers? How many Chinese aircraft need to launch to have a chance against an F35C?
I feel the biggest advantage the West - in particular the US - has over china is 40-60 years worth of pretty much continual/high state of combat-readiness experience and culture.
> Your tonnage argument is good for the short term, but they won't be behind for long.
It takes years to build a carrier. There's no 100,000+ carrier being built by the Chinese at all. Its not their strategy.
> And if they hit our aircraft carriers with the hypersonic missiles they've developed, our advantage disappears outright.
How do those missiles hit a target they can't see? That's why the US has spent so much money shoving the most expensive radar suites on F35 fighters, so that those airplanes can radio-back to their ships about the position of enemies.
Basically: to have the same sight and stealth as the USA, China has to develop an F35 analog of their own.
> You're not making a stealth carrier. You can't hide a carrier.
Yes you can.
Step 1: Run out to the ocean to an area where satellites aren't over consistently.
Step 2: Move randomly at 35 mph with your twin nuclear engines.
Step 3: Where's the carrier?
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You can't scan the whole ocean. Its physically impossible, even with satellite coverage. No stealth capabilities needed at all, you just hide in the vast emptiness that is the ocean itself.
No, but you can scan the radius of uncertainty of where a known carrier-sized object may have gone in a satellite gap of a few hours at a top speed of say 40 kts, known maneuvering capability, and a known starting position and velocity, pretty easily.
Now, if you add teleportation in so you have to scan the whole ocean, sure, but that’s a big “if”.
Is there any reason to think your satellite, drone, or spy plane will survive that 2-hour window in a wartime scenario to in fact, pick out the aircraft carrier in the 15,000 sq. mile area it could have traveled?
> Is there any reason to think your satellite, drone, or spy plane will survive that 2-hour window in a wartime scenario
The threats of concern...have quite a large inventory of drones, spy planes, and other sensor platforms, and, in any case, if your method of evading detection is destroying all available hostile sensor platforms, stealth is superfluous.
If a drone is flying at 10km high, it can only see 357km before the horizon blocks its sight.
The Carrier's AEW in service (E2-Hawkeye) is allegedly able to detect threats up to 550km or so away. (remember: the Hawkeye is also in the air, so it will be peaking out of the horizon long before the carrier is visible)
The escort cruisers allegedly have Raytheon AN/SPS-49, which apparently have 474 km range vs air enemies (other radars / sonars exist for sea). Either way, if the drone can see the Cruiser, the cruiser probably can see the drone. Furthermore, AEGIS cruisers are literally the "shields" of the carrier: deployed in front to kill targets before they detect the carrier. So likely: you're not detecting the carrier first. The first things you detect are the AEGIS escort ships. Nominally, these radar systems are for missile tracking, but they will serve as eyes/ears for the strike group if a squadron of drones is approaching.
The one-two punch of the aerial radar (Hawkeye) + sea-based radar (Ticonderoga AEGIS cruisers) means that its no small feat to "sneak up" upon the carrier strike group.
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How long does it take for your drone to travel from 550km away to ~300km, during which it is under threat from at minimum, the escort cruiser? Maybe an airwing or two who could scramble a counter-attack? Its not like your drone is flying straight at the carrier either (you still haven't found the carrier: you only found an escort cruiser. The carrier is likely over the horizon still).
> if your method of evading detection is destroying all available hostile sensor platforms, stealth is superfluous.
Yeah, that's the idea for a Carrier's defenses anyway. The CSG has not only incredible airborne radar systems (E2-Hawkeye), but also incredible ship-based radar systems scanning for this sort of stuff.
That's why stealth aircraft (like F35) are so key for future wars. That's the only way to penetrate the radar coverage. Things like autonomous drones have a control signal that can be tracked, while F35 manned aircraft could go radio silent on their stealth approach (relying upon the human brain in the aircraft to make decisions without any connection to homebase).
Unmanned + Stealth is possible, but its a difficult kind of paradox. A lot of decisions need to be made during radio-silence periods.
You want to win at the sensor war. Detect the enemy before they detect you. Then destroy the enemy's eyes and ears.
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And then the AEGIS radar systems are also deployed on each Destroyer in the strike group (4 to 9 Destroyers deployed per CSG). That's a lot of sensors your drone squadron has to fly around to successfully find a carrier.
That is a risk, but it's tough to localize and hit a moving target. In any major conflict the reconnaissance satellites are likely to be knocked out quickly on both sides, which means everyone will be relying on aircraft and submarines to develop missile targeting tracks. They can't be everywhere at once. And carrier escorts now carry ABMs which have proven at least moderately effective in tests.
> Carriers are very big, very slow moving targets that change their velocity very slowly.
Where did you get that idea from? Carriers are equipped with two nuclear engines to travel at outstanding speeds. Naval doctrine is to have Carriers simply outrun most of their threats while pew pew pewing them from the sky. (Ex: Submarines don't stand a chance against this tactic)
Carriers might be a big ship, but its a big AND fast ship. The biggest source of Navy deaths is people falling off the sides of Carriers, they're that fast.
> With a 1200mm f/8 lens you can detect an aircraft carrier from 300km away.
The horizon at 30m height is only 20km away. Anything beyond 20km is literally hidden by the curvature of the Earth.
To even see 300km away, you need to be 7000 meters in the air (aka: an aircraft). If you're 7000 meters high, you have the issue of surviving against the Aircraft Carrier's airwings (aka: F35 fighters) long enough to do anything useful. Air Superiority is a bitch.
If the lens is in space, you have the issue of predictability. US Navy likely knows that satellite is there, and will either disable it or avoid it entirely.
Speed is counterbalanced by size. Going at 35mph is very slow when you're 300m long.
You need to survive with an aircraft once to get a picture of the carrier. Then the carrier sinks. Air superiority is a numbers game. There is precisely 0% chance that you will catch it every time.
With your strategy you have to win every time. The missile only has to hit once for the entire CSG to sink.
You don't have to survive long enough to do anything except find the position of the carrier and send it. Once that's done, it's game over. Done. Finished.
> You don't have to survive long enough to do anything except find the position of the carrier and send it. Once that's done, it's game over. Done. Finished.
In 10 minutes, a carrier moving at 35 mph will have moved around 6 miles.
That's a 100+ sq. mile radius. How will your missile in fact, lock onto the carrier on the approach? How does the missile know where to go?
If your missile is traveling at Mach 5, what communication system are you using to track and talk with that missile? Is something in that communication chain still alive to constantly tell the missile where in fact, the carrier is? Or does the missile have such an advanced radar system that it can too, magically pick out a carrier in a 100-sq. mile radius?
As I said, a carrier is big. When you're making a guidance system, wether EO or Radar, you're trading off accuracy, senstivity, and range.
In the case of a carrier, you need very low accuracy - in the 10 meter range instead of the centimeter range - very low sensitivity, because the target is positively huge and sticks out like a sore thumb from its surroundings, so you can get range.
Besides, I think you really underestimate modern sensors. A fighter jet can detect a 1m^2 from 100km away almost omnidirectionally. That's around 10 000 sqkm, and that radar is built for very fast targets and requires very high accuracy.
As for communication, you can communicate from a ground station. You don't need to tell the missile where the carrier is constantly. As we've seen before, carriers are big and sensors are advanced. Carriers also can't change course very rapidly. You just need the missile to get a 50km radius of where the carrier will be when it hits it.
These missiles are very fast. From the order to launch until impact you have 12 minutes.
Ummmm... yeah they can. If we're talking about 10-minutes for a hypersonic missile to arrive, that thing's bearings / velocity can be completely different by the time the missile arrives on the horizon.
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I'm still not really convinced that you'd detect a carrier first in most open seas. Carriers would have airplanes of their own, scanning for enemies, and a number of anti-air destroyers ready to shoot down any spy plane. You call it a numbers game, but IMO, its a sensor game.
Any airplane who approaches the carrier has to themselves, survive the Carrier's defense systems (including the defensive spyplanes keeping watch over the carrier group)
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> In the case of a carrier, you need very low accuracy - in the 10 meter range instead of the centimeter range - very low sensitivity, because the target is positively huge and sticks out like a sore thumb from its surroundings, so you can get range.
I'm not sure if the carrier sticks out that much in its CSG. No carrier works alone: there are a lot of other ships floating around it providing support.
>Ummmm... yeah they can. If we're talking about 10-minutes for a hypersonic missile to arrive, that thing's bearings / velocity can be completely different by the time the missile arrives on the horizon.
Sure, at the expense of distance travelled from last detection.
> I'm still not really convinced that you'd detect a carrier first in most open seas. Carriers would have airplanes of their own, scanning for enemies, and a number of anti-air destroyers ready to shoot down any spy plane. You call it a numbers game, but IMO, its a sensor game.
> Any airplane who approaches the carrier has to themselves, survive the Carrier's defense systems (including the defensive spyplanes keeping watch over the carrier group)
Look at exemples of modern warfare. Air defences are made to whittle down and slow down repeated strikes by your oponents. No one has ever managed to completely prevent any intrusion at all, much less from a single carrier's airwing.
>I'm not sure if the carrier sticks out that much in its CSG. No carrier works alone: there are a lot of other ships floating around it providing support.
The surroundings in the context of that comment are the open ocean. Unless you mean that the sensors aren't going to be able to distinguish the carrier from other ships in the CSG.
> Look at exemples of modern warfare. Air defences are made to whittle down and slow down repeated strikes by your oponents. No one has ever managed to completely prevent any intrusion at all, much less from a single carrier's airwing.
Exactly. Now: Does China have the capability to launch these repeated aerial attacks to whittle down the defenses of a US Carrier Strike group?
And secondly: what ships in China's Navy can defend against such an assault (since our Navy is designed to do just what you described to our opponents).
Again, they don't need to whittle down the defences, the CSG is completely unable to stop a volley of Mach 5 missiles. They just need to find the CSG, once. No AD system has every managed anything near a 100% interception rate, even less against surveillance platforms.
There is no ship in the Chinese Navy that can defend against such an assault. But they don't need to, because they largely only care about their backyards. They don't need carriers.
Also the US Navy has no hypersonic anti-ship ballistic missiles. The USN was always very late compared to their oponents as far as AShM go.
What platform is carrying that hypothetical lens? How does it avoid being destroyed before detecting and tracking the target? How does it data link targeting targeting data back to offensive platforms? What is the visible horizon range at its operating altitude? How well does it see at night, or through clouds?
The lens is given as a general example you can easily apply the Rayleigh criterion to to verify. You can use many other types of sensors.
You could carry such a sensor on a satellite, a drone, or even the missile itself.
You need to get within 300km of the carrier once. It doesn't matter if it's the 15th try or if you don't survive either. You really overestimate air defences if you think an airwing can do that. And of course you can make even better sensors, we have the technology and it's been practically done.
The satellites are vulnerable and will likely be the first casualties in any major conflict. Neither side can afford to build enough long range drones with powerful sensors to blanket large areas of open ocean.
Sometimes adversaries will get lucky and have the right platform in the right place at the right time, but it's hardly a sure thing. In the end it will probably come down more to timing and luck than any other factors.
You don't need to cover large areas of the open ocean. Only where you have tracked the carrier to be. You are insane if you think that hiding a carrier is feasible in 2021. Even with cold war tech the US had tracked down most USSR submarines let alone carriers.
Not as reliable as you'd like, especially at sea. Satellites are either Geosynchronous (aka: the US Navy knows where they are and knows where to avoid them), or they are not Geosynchronous (aka: they only are over a certain area at certain times).
Again: your Satellite feed goes dead for just 10 minutes, the Carrier is now 6-miles away (113-square mile search area), with no guarantee that the new area is covered by a satellite either.
Is radar stealthiness still relevant? I would assume a combination of microphones&cameras everywhere, internet everywhere, ML everywhere, and satellites have made it obsolete.
Low observable technology is more relevant than ever. It's not magic invisibility but greatly reduces the range at which sensors can detect and track.
Microphones can't be placed at sea, and the speed of sound makes effective microphone range very short. Regular cameras are also short ranged, and don't really work at night or through clouds. IR search sensors have very narrow field of view. In any major conflict the reconnaissance satellites will be the first targets.
We don't even have geosync satellites that cover the seas today. Not enough travelers to make those areas worth it to cover the satellite launch costs.
I heard that American movies, games, and sports are still popular in China, and Chinese-made goods are always popular in America. There's so much economic inter-dependency that a war will be rather inconvenient for many members of the ruling class of both countries.
(Not saying that it's impossible, but generally, if you are a high-ranking Chinese officer and your son is studying at UCLA, maybe it's a bad idea to nuke LA.)
Also, you have to take reports of Chinese military power with a grain of salt. The US military (and many politicians) would love to exaggerate China's power: that's how they get more budget.
Blame Nixon and especially his advisor Kissinger who figured he'd divide and conquer without caring much about consequences and then Bill Clinton for the coup de grace.
Initially it was to weaken communism (I guess it did, but China had long departed from the USSR) and later it was dollar eyes from business and the Clinton admin.
The people deserved a better future, but we didn't have to enable a dictatorship that would soon threaten stability.
In its core, China still believes it's the middle kingdom and believes that's its patrimony and should be the center of the world.
If they were democratic, if flawed, like India or the US, yes, they deserve the ascent, but not if they want to dominate with their vision of a Sino world and throw the world into conflict over this.
Russia and India are wildcards, Russia on the descent and India on the ascent, but both have heft. Now, if only the US, Russia, India and the EU could align for some good.
> Now, if only the US, Russia, India and the EU could align for some good.
The US and Russia will never align. The US is content to have two powerful foes to utilize for various purposes (military industrial complex spending, propaganda, political power, control, espionage excuse, foreign adventurism). The present incarnation of the US would only tolerate Russia as at least somewhat subservient, which is what the US thought it had obtained with the Yeltsin era.
The Russians are intensely nationalistic and independent. They have a serious confrontation coming in the future with China, as China will seek to take their territory and regional influence. Russia is at risk of being put into a badly weakened, near-subservient role with China, and they know it. Russia still had a larger economy than China as recently as 1992; ten years from now China will have an economy ~14 times larger than Russia. 30 years ago Russia still had a superior military to China; China has now passed Russia overall militarily, and will considerably eclipse them in military technology over the next decade or two. China will begin to increasingly push Russia around and treat them as a lesser partner, the Russians will react predictably to that. The two will probably try to continue to coordinate as far as countering the US and EU, where their interests align, other than that their relationship will get more antagonistic with time. The US and Russia had the good fortune to not share a large land border.
From a philosophical point of view, they share more with the US than they do with China. Confucianism is somewhat alien to Western thinking. Russia shares some of the pillars of philosophy with the US (and EU). So I think it depends on how things shape out in the future.
>The US is content to have two powerful foes to utilize for various purposes.
Sadly, this is part of it. I think Putin wants a Détente with the US, but some factions (both Dem and Repub) are allergic to anything Russia due to distrust from the Cold War.
>The Russians are intensely nationalistic and independent. They have a serious confrontation coming in the future with China.
Russia is nationalistic, but maybe even more so is China. They two had military skirmishes in the 60s (Amur). This may happen again as China looks toward Siberia for expansion. On the other hand, Siberia is mostly uninhabitable unless you raze it and pave it, but the temp extremes are quite unique too.
I personally believe the politicians and elite have sold us out and we will end up submitting to China without the need for a "hot war". Note that the only president who attempted to challenge China was tarred and feathered to hell and back.
Obama's TPP was a much better counter to China than anything the Trump administration accomplished. Too bad your "tarred and feathered," President didn't have the vision to take effective steps, and instead took loud, boisterous, and largely ineffective measures instead.
And yet, the Biden admin has largely retained the previous administration's adversarial policies. The Washington consensus seems to have shifted, at least for now.
I'm not aware of any meaningful policies that exist today to fend off growing Chinese dominance. In any case, I believe it would require a huge transformation of the US to turn around our decline to even begin to face off with China. There are 3 concerns I have:
1. We are deadlocked by domestic politics and our populous are divided.
2. We are completely dependent on China for critical goods and supply chain.
3. We are beholden to China via corporate and political interests.
Unless these things can be turned around, and I believe it is impossible at this stage, we will succumb to the Chinese in the next decade or so.
Average U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods are still approximately 20%. No it's not enough and the issues you've mentioned are pressing but to say there are "no meaningful policies", relative to U.S. policy pre-Trump, is not accurate.
Which president attempted to challenge China recently? Obama or Dubya? I can't recall too much of that.
If you're speaking of the most recent one though, he personally has some rather large outstanding personal debt to China, and his mainland nickname known to the Chinese is quite literally "Nation Builder"
I'll give you a hint - they aren't talking about the U.S. that he's building.
Comrade Building the (Chinese) Nation
Actions speak louder than words, something that nobody seems to keep in mind anymore...
You are however correct in the fact that politicians and companies across the board have sold us out to China in the name of profit. At least we have Matt Parker and Trey Stone, right?
Trade war comes to mind among other things (attempted Wechat/Tiktok ban, attempted Chinese investment ban, etc). Many of his ideas were shot down and DOA. Were they the right solutions? I have no idea. Were they stupid solutions? Maybe, but the important thing was his administration was explicit and made it publicly known China was more than just an adversary.
> administration was explicit and made it publicly known China was more than just an adversary.
You're very seriously completely missing a major point.
No, literally everything Trump did was helpful to China.
Like, a lot
Sorry if the stream of whatever garbage you expose yourself to in order to shape your view of the world has conditioned you to believe otherwise. For what it's worth, everybody with your line of thinking, that that administration was "hard on China", is just another reason the article is correct and why China is going to make the US look like a complete joke this century.
But keep saying Orange man very hard on Jhyyynna if it makes you feel better during your time on Earth.
In my 4.5 years in China (I left in Nov 2019) the country seemingly became more paranoid, with noticeable increases in internet censorship and street-level policing, as well as intensifying nationalist propaganda in everyday media.
We all saw what happened in Hong Kong in the past couple years. We know what has been happening in Xinjiang for longer. China is clearly at war with the "enemies within," and this article gives me an extremely similar vibe. To my mind, this all adds up to weakness, not strength. The Xi regime is trying to forestall dissent, fragmentation, and collapse. Will they succeed? Maybe. But at what cost? The brain drain on China is continuous, the capital flight steady. A "second cultural revolution" may strengthen and perpetuate the CPC's grip on the country, but it ultimately weakens China, and is hardly a threat at all to other countries.