Gumboot wrote: ↑Thu Sep 16, 2021 9:36 pm
_Os_ wrote: ↑Thu Sep 16, 2021 6:22 pmIf China continues on its current trajectory they'll take Taiwan in the 2030s, no one will be able/willing to stop them so no one will. And even if China is stopped from taking Taiwan once, there's still a China with a massive population/economy that will be regionally dominant just because it's in the region and the US is not, and still a China that has taking Taiwan as its primary objective, so stopping them once just means having to stop them again the time after.
Disagree. I don't think you've taken into account the probable Taiwanese response to a PRC attack, or just what a vibrant, robust and hard-earned democracy the 'renegade province' now is. Their very well equipped and trained military are not about to capitulate without one helluva fight. And the Taiwanese have shown through recent free and fair election results that they are in no mood to take any shit (other than the usual endless sabre-rattling) from Beijing. And that's all before taking into account the international support Taiwan would undoubtedly receive. China won't attack any time in the foreseeable future, imho.
Taking Taiwan is China's primary strategic objective, the main Taiwanese island is 50km from the Chinese coast, not far. Military action will be the last resort for them, I doubt it'll even come to military action. But I'll do a rundown of their military quickly.
Russia ended up selling them Sukhoi Su-35S fighters, it wasn't a big sale and very obvious China are going to reverse engine the bits they want (the engines probably), it was a token sale of about 20 units because the Russians decided they could either give it up now and get some cash or the Chinese would have superseded the tech in 5 years anyway. Chinese aircraft tech is minimum what Russia has, then there's all the tech they've stolen (the Z10 Chinese attack helicopter is clearly a stolen Rooivalk or Eurotiger), then there's some collaborations they've had (the Israeli Lavi and Chinese J10 look the same, there's a reason Russia and China don't oppose Israel). They also now have some stuff they've made like the semi-stealth J20, that can be armed with beyond visual range air-to-air missiles that have an estimated range of 200km, in any invasion of Taiwan the battle space will be so crowded that even semi-stealth will be good enough to get something through Taiwanese/US air defence. Right now today they're probing Taiwanese airspace all the time.
Their missile inventory has the DF series of ballistic anti-shipping missiles. They could fire them from the Gobi desert unmolested at targets beyond Japan and still have range to spare, they have an accuracy of 100m so they'll be used in saturation attacks on carrier groups. For targeting they've been launching Yaogan spy satellites in batches of 3 since the 2000s, there must be getting on for over 100 of the things up by now. There's a whole variety of shorter range cruise missile type anti-shipping missiles. The point with the missiles is, China is on the land and is good at manufacturing shit, it doesn't matter how good a ship's countermeasures are if it's overwhelmed uses up all those countermeasures and is still overwhelmed.
As for "the international support Taiwan would undoubtedly receive", the minimum buy in for nations hosting US bases and allowing those bases to be used, is a lot of missiles raining down on them (most of the US bases in Japan are right next to heavily populated areas), so that's mass civilian causalities win or lose. The worst case for Japan if they get involved and lose, is losing some of their very small islands near Taiwan. For South Korea though, the potential downside is much more severe, worst case for them is a land war against NK and China. Even Taiwan isn't going to fight for long if they think they'll lose, it'll hardly do them any favours "fighting hard" if they're not going to win.
And the main point in all this is, it's their primary objective 50km from the Chinese coast (smaller islands are close enough to swim to from China, they'll be gobbled up long before Taiwan proper is). There is no plan capable of preventing China taking something 50km away forever. No one else has it as their primary objective so no one else is going to risk whatever they're prepared to risk.
The Aussie plan does seem to be US defence and Chinese economy. Good luck with that and the war with China that'll definitely never happen.
