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China Rising: “Serve the People!”

Spanking new and looking nice. They should since we paid for them.

‘Prepare for war’, Xi Jinping tells military region that monitors the South China Sea, Taiwan “It’s necessary to strengthen the mission … and concentrate preparations for fighting a war,” Xi said. “We need to take all complex situations into consideration and make emergency plans accordingly. We have to step up combat readiness exercises, joint exercises and confrontational exercises to enhance servicemen’s capabilities and preparation for war.”

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  • Casey Klahn November 2, 2018, 11:07 PM

    1 carrier. …and that’s about all you need to know about Chinese naval might. It takes years to train and operate a carrier system. You don’t simply open a can of carrier expertise and add water.

    Now, their army. That is a whole ‘nother matter. We have some chance of bettering them, short of nukes, by only engaging them outside of their country, and by crafting our initiatives very carefully. The intent has always got to be ours. Our initiative, our goals. The best choice is just don’t get in a fight with China on land; we’ve failed that test miserably a couple of times in the past.

    Naval war? They’d be stupid to try that. Taiwan is the whole enchilada. This’ll piss off all the conservatives present, but the only way to defend Taiwan is to be full-on belligerent about anything China wants regarding Taiwan. If we let Taiwan slip (Obama is why China is stronger now, and Clinton, too) we will backpedal forever on that account. Fuck China. They offer nothing useful to Taiwan or Asia. If we ignore the Pacific region, we’ll shrink economically and politically for a long time. You won’t like it, either. But at least you’ll have your conservative values intact.

  • bob sykes November 3, 2018, 5:23 AM

    If China wants it, it will take Taiwan, and we can’t do anything about it. If we try, we lose a whole fleet and a big chunk of our air force.

    As to air craft carriers, they are mostly useful for intimidating Third and Second World countries, which is how we use ours. But China must have drunk the carrier Kool Aid, since they have two Kuznetsov class and are building a non-nuclear Nimitz class. They likely know everything there is to know about carriers. It doesn’t take 200 years to figure it out.

  • Don Linsenbach November 3, 2018, 6:50 AM

    “We have some chance of bettering them…”
    =========
    Right. Red high heels, overweight minority sojers, tore up equipment.
    That’s the way to win a war, notice the past half doz or so.

    “If we let Taiwan…”
    =============
    Fuk them.
    There’s more than enough issues right here on terra firma that could use some addressing.
    One thumb in your own ass and the other thumb in another country’s ass is no way to run a country, especially when you have access to unlimited stolen money.
    Priorities matter and it has nothing to do with conservatism, it has to do with logic.

  • Casey Klahn November 3, 2018, 9:10 AM

    I can agree that Taiwan is a long ways off our shores. Which is a stupid way to look at it; rather an analog way of seeing. China is, by ethos, interested in fucking everyone next to them. That’s called Communism – it’s definitively an “internationalist” creed. From a practical standpoint, they are not very ready to take over neighbors. Their hands are full just feeding their own people, and watching every little move they make so they don’t step out of line.

    Golly, Bob. With all respect, do you shovel horseshit for a living? Flying off a carrier isn’t rocket science, but it is goddam close. My point stands: carrier ops do not come from a book.

    Just wondering, right now. How would it be to drop a MOAB right on a beachhead of Chinese men invading Taiwan? Yes, defending Taiwan would be costly for us, too. But, mostly in munitions.

    The defense of Taiwan starts right here, pilgrim. You’re either a man, or you aren’t. Defending America at the shoreline is a dream from maybe 1810, but I’m afraid the globe shrank.

  • ghostsniper November 3, 2018, 2:34 PM

    “Which is a stupid way to look at it…”

    Have I ever said that about anything you have ever written here?

  • Casey Klahn November 3, 2018, 3:13 PM

    There’s a personal pronoun in that sentence, Ghost. What I mean is the idea is stupid; it’s a formulation that doesn’t work. Taiwan is not “a long way away.” It is a Pacific state nation, and so are we.

    I don’t mean to deride or insult anyone’s person – I try to be careful that way.

    On China and whether we should defend Taiwan. Recall the time John Wayne punches the government agent allied with a certain gun running agent. The agent says, “I didn’t do anything!” Wayne says: “you should’ve!” You cannot run from alliances. All manner of evil happens afterward.

  • Casey Klahn November 3, 2018, 3:14 PM

    “Pacific nation,” I meant.

    Peace out.

  • Bad_Brad November 3, 2018, 4:50 PM

    There’s a real danger in steeling your perceived enemies designs. Counter measure for the the original designer become pretty simple.

  • Hale Adams November 3, 2018, 5:22 PM

    Edmund Burke is often quoted as saying, “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.”

    Apparently, he never said that. The quote most similar to it can be found in his Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents, published in 1770: “When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.”

    One can argue that Taiwan is far, far away, and that it’s not worth (to paraphrase Otto von Bismarck) “the bones of a single American soldier”. Yet, Taiwan is a friendly power in a region of the world which is important to us, while mainland China is NOT a friendly power and one which seeks regional domination — a modern-day Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere, so to speak.

    (Please remember, China is NOT a nation-state in the usual sense. It is, rather, an empire inhabited by many peoples, not all of whom are ethnically Chinese, and most of whom do not speak anything that could be considered a common tongue. If the People’s Republic is acting these days like an empire, it is because it IS one, and always has been one.)

    (/history lesson)

    Bob and Don, like or not, we MUST associate (as Burke put it) with Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, and other friendly powers in the region, the better to forestall any funny-business on the part of the Chinese Empire (to give the PRC it’s proper name). The best war you can have is the one you never have to fight.

    Hale Adams
    (ex-First Lieutenant, Air Defense Artillery, United States Army Reserve, in a world long long ago and far far away)
    Pikesville, People’s still-mostly-Democratic Republic of Maryland

  • John A.Fleming November 3, 2018, 10:37 PM

    I found the carrier takeoff sequence very interesting. It was agonizing slo-mo compared to ours. And I counted only six fighters on deck. It got me to thinking, we’ve been doing carriers for nigh on 80 years. China’s just baby-stepping; and fooling the gullible. Force on force, we win and China’s carriers all sink. So they’re not going there.

    China doesn’t need carriers. They can take Taiwan anytime they want, with all those little ships carrying the invasion forces. By the time our carrier task forces get there, it’ll be too late. Game over, man.

    What China needs is a way to track our task forces from afar, so their land-based hypersonics are effective. So our carriers have to stand too far off, and then our planes are useless. Carriers may just be the 21Cen dreadnoughts.

    And so forms the 21Cen hemispherical hegemonies. Ya cain’t close with ’em, and ya cain’t nuke ’em. All you can do is cut off their oceanic shipping routes, and punch through their cybersecurity and with non-attribution disrupt their comm and blind them. Oh, wait …

  • John the River November 4, 2018, 5:32 AM

    I’m just simple minded I guess, why don’t we just stop giving them money?

    …also technology, food, education, etc…

  • Casey Klahn November 4, 2018, 6:56 AM

    I’m just an old grunt (Captain, Infantry, Army National Guard), so naval warfare is not in my portfolio. But, maneuver is (I graduated high from the highest-echelon infantry school; I know you graduated “high,” too, but that’s another story).

    China’s game is to get us to stand down strategically. Bide their time until the next Obama gets into office, and drop taiwan rhetorically from our priorities. Scare us enough with force improvements and make sure we see it in the (commie) news medias. They simply walk into Taiwan without firing a shot. That’s my estimate.

    You still have to game a shooting war on paper, though.

    Jam their e-defenses enough with an aerial blitz of satellites, ground and air based radar, and follow in with fast-moving stealth bombers. Try to deliver a handful of MOABs right to the beachhead. This will give the Chinese generals a huge headache. Members of their version politburo (I just looked the spelling for that up on Google, and it gave me number one answer: chinese polituro; fucking Google is reading my comments here, I guess) will get butthurt. Google will blow fuses and lose huge sales volume/ it will damage their bottom line end of the year sales statement, and western peoples will turn against Google in massive numbers. This will be the critical blow to their authority as a company.

    To continue, at some risk to our vaunted air force, we will crater the landing areas. Their shipping will be damaged, but more can come behind those. More troops, too. Our navy will have to sally forth, under cover of our counter-electronic measures, and deliver damage to Chinese ports and naval targets.

    Our objective has to be to bloody their army so badly that Xi’s last hair curls. He must feel embarrassed, and stupid. The center of gravity in any war with a tyrant is the tyrant’s personal feelings. same with Putin.

    Out here.

  • Bill Henry November 4, 2018, 8:21 AM

    I think Taiwan is just bluster. China is just head faking there.

    China has their collective sights on Africa. They will silently invade Africa and gradually turn it into China 2.0 without a word from the world.

  • Howard Nelson November 4, 2018, 4:57 PM

    If the need of a buildup is repeated, when clearly no buildup is necessary, it will be a sure sign that the Chinese rulers recognize the calamitous inner rot they have on their hands. The blame game of a threatening external enemy is a ridiculous ploy to distract the Chinese from their approaching economic collapse and to conceal the government’s need for a major scapegoat for the economic and social-political strictures to come to pay for the buildup.
    The USA as a major trading partner is a life-saver for China. All lose in a hot war. EMP, cyber, and bio attacks would set civilization back 300 years and pollute the gene pool so that the future populace will be mainly half-assed idiots, in contrast to today’s political full-assed fools.

  • Phil Ossiferz Stone November 4, 2018, 5:05 PM

    None of you seem to remember that the vaunted Chinese military is made up of one-per-family boys.

    Maybe someone should wargame how many Little Emperors the Chinese lose– in other words, how many Chinese families get utterly and irretrievably wiped out — before they turn on their own government and start ripping people apart with their bare hands.

  • Casey Klahn November 5, 2018, 7:48 AM

    Phil, perhaps they’ll send in girls. What are you, sexist? Commies are the most progressive, as you know.