RE: Chinese Fighter Forces US Air Force...
China is the one country that poses a potential non-nuclear existential threat to the USA.
Russia is a nuclear threat, but the Red, er, Russian Army is declining as their birth rates decrease the number of 20-somethings, and the Russian navy sent a tug along on the last deployment of its aircraft carrier, to tow it back if it broke down, before it caught fire in a repair yard. If Ukraine is any indication, that decline may be further along than anybody realized. For the first time in maybe 80 years, Russia is probably unable to mount any kind of successful offensive against western Europe. Still a nuclear threat, and we need to be ever vigilant in addressing that, but not really competent enough to pose a conventional threat at this point.
As far as China, what can we accomplish? At this point China pretty much controls the China Sea (CS), aided strongly by it's A2/AD (anti-access/area denial) systems. If we can prevent their gaining a foothold anywhere on the first island chain (1IC, basically Japan, Taiwan, Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore) then we can limit them to the CS area. PLAN (the Chinese navy) is built to intimidate its neighbors around the CS, not to project power as blue-water fleet beyond that.
My approach would be to try to reprise what happened after WWII. Truman (with help from Marshall) bribed up an alliance in western Europe (NATO, which NATO's first secretary-general, Hastings Ismay, reportedly described as designed to keep, "the USA in, Russia out, and Germany down") that stopped the westward expansion of Soviet control at the Iron Curtain ("from Stettin i the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic," per Winston Churchill). We basically told Europe, "Your economy and your military are in shambles after the war. We will give you preferred access to our economy, so you will be able to sell to someone who has money and you can rebuild your economy, our Navy will protect your sea lines of communication (SLOC) so you don't have to rebuild your own, and we will guarantee your national security. In return, you just have to take our side against the Soviets and follow our orders." Four decades later, Reagan applied pressure on the Soviet economy and brought down the Evil Empire. It worked very successfully, perhaps too successfully. When the Berlin Wall fell, we did not know what to do next. Ross Perot suggested an approach, "In the post-Cold-War period, economic power will become more important than military power," but nobody in power in the USA has followed that. China has, and as a result today poses the most significant threat to the USA.
All of the first island chain nations currently feel threatened by China. I think we can make a similar offer to what Truman did, "We will be moving manufacturing out of China, bringing essential stuff back home, and giving you the other stuff, and we will guarantee your security. In return you will give us basing rights and take our side and follow our orders against China. I would start with the Quad--USA, Australia, India, Japan. I would have offered to bring UK into NAFTA/USMCA to ease the strain of Brexit, and give us all the AUKUS partners. I would strongly support the creation of the proposed Australian A2/AD system that would protect its northern approaches and potentially threaten any Chinese naval of commercial movement through the Malacca or Sunda Straits. I would do whatever we could to facilitate the proposed CANZUK (Canada, Australia, New Zealand, UK) trade and defense partnership, and would seek some kind of associate membership. I would try to expand that to include the entire British Commonwealth. Personally, I admit that I would like to see the USA playing rugby 7s in the Commonwealth Games, but more seriously, if we had Singapore and Malaysia in the mix we could pretty much threaten China's exports westward through the Malacca or Sunda Straits, and also their oil imports from the MidEast, without which their economy craters and their people starve. Finally I would bring Indonesia, the Philippines, and Vietnam into the mix with promises of economic growth. Just as we did with NATO, we would have to maintain a stronger military presence in the area for credibility. I'm thinking the Navy would need two carrier battle groups (CVBG), one north between Japan and the Philippines, and one south in the Malacca/Sunda area, to cut off PLAN escape/China trae routes through either. I would also want to see at least one full Marine Expeditionary Brigade (MEB) in the area somewhere. We could base out of Hawaii and Guam, with tenant forward bases at Subic, Sepanggar, Singapore, Darwin, Fremantle, and Cam Ranh Bay. The Marine bases at Okinawa would be sitting ducks for China, and thus I would reduce the presence there. Army and Air Force would need to bolster their presence similarly, but I will leave the specifics of that to those who are more familiar with those particular branches.
If we could put all the pieces of that alliance together, then we could put pressure on China's economy at any time. Some background here. China is basically an amalgamation of people who don't like each other. The warlike Han in the north don't like the commercial, almost capitalistic, folks in Shanghai and the Yangtze Valley, and neither group gets along well with the Cantonese south, not to mention Tibet and the Uyghurs out west. China holds it all together by exporting cheap consumer goods and using the cash to fund make-work projects with little or no economic value (for example, the empty cities). As a result, Chinese banks are way, way more overextended than USA banks were in 2008, and to borrowers who have zero chance of repaying. In addition to extreme dependence on exports for cash flow, they are also heavily dependent on oil and gas imports from the MidEast. They currently consume about 12MM barrels of oil per day (BOpD) and produce about 4MM BOpD. They get 2MM BOpD from Russia, expected to increase somewhat with the completion of an additional pipeline from Siberia, leaving 4-6MM BOpD to come from the MidEast. So their economy is strong on the face of it, but rests upon a very shaky foundation. Cutting them off at the first island chain would throw their economy, and shortly thereafter their domestic tranquility, into chaos.
(This post was last modified: 01-12-2023 12:07 PM by Owl 69/70/75.)
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