Pentagon Freaking out re Potential War with China

[Vine Abider]

I read this very sobering article about how worried Pentagon generals are about fighting a war with China. It's rather long, but went into some great detail regarding how we got into this predicament.  Basically we stopped keeping up after the end of the Cold War and thought smart weapons technology would fill the gap.  In the mean time, we gave up the lion's share of manufacturing capability and just don't have the capacity to rapidly resupply ourselves if anything significant were to break out.

One alarming statistic is we now only have 1% of the world's ship building capacity, and cannot produce anything near the numbers or rate that we used to.  (China has over 35% of the world's ship building capability) Plus many of our current stockpiles of weapons have gone to supply the Ukraine and other allies.

Generals fear that even if we knew for sure that we would have to defend Taiwan in 5 years, it would not be nearly enough time for us to come up to speed!  And China most likely knows this, therefore the time for them to strike Taiwan would be in the next few years, before the US can fully wake up and react.

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/06/09/america-weapons-china-00100373

[teddyv]

Did not a head of the Chinese military recently state that any conflict with the US would be mutually destructive, particularly economically? I know to take anything from any source like the CCP or Pentagon with a grain of salt or two, but I'm not sure what anyone would gain from such a conflict. Taiwan seems to be as idealistic goal, possibly more valuable as a geopolitical lever rather than any real strategic asset.

China still receives a huge amount of natural resources from various Western nations so cutting that off would seem to not be a great idea until they can fully secure their resource supply. They are all over Africa extracting resources but the general sense I've gotten from personal sources are that they are not well regarded by the general populations of those countries.

[FJK]

All war is based on deception.

In any event, wars are not won by the weapons themselves, they are won by the morality and moral integrity and determination of the people fighting them.  The moral strength of both the military personnel and the people of the countries doing the fighting determines the eventual winner.

So who has the stronger morality, us or them?

 

As the Art of War would say, when weak appear strong and when strong appear weak.  Attack the enemy where he is not (the Viet Cong defeated the US that way).

 

[Marathoner]

Nothing unusual. This is the stuff of War Plans, common fare in strategic operations. The DoD has been paranoid from the beginning, @Vine Abider. It's their duty to be paranoid, yes?

Yep. For decades, the DoD overestimated Soviet military capability as a matter of doctrine. The Red Scare was all the rage for a very long time. That paranoia was the reason why men like my late father were involved with the Army's nuclear program. My father field-tested tactical communications equipment that would remain operational on the so-called nuclear battlefield. It had to be guaranteed to work. As a result, my military occupational specialty was born. 

All of that Korean War vintage equipment had a purpose: vacuum tube radios capable of transmitting and receiving continuous wave. That equipment would not be affected by EMP phenomena (transistor electronics would be instantly fried). Continuous wave radio transmissions can penetrate nuclear fallout. The means to communicate via continous wave is Morse Code. 

Hence the International Morse Code school located at the U.S. Army's Signal Corps school (that's where I was trained). It was part of my MOS. We also had NSA equipment designed to withstand EMP. Those were in my inventory along with that relic of a radio I operated. That radio array contained uranium. It had a nuclear warning symbol on the outer shell.

The point is this: paranoia is their stock and trade, brother. Back when I was a soldier, I was part of the Army's "nuclear battlefield." In case of mushroom clouds, I was ready to roll.