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From military illiterates in Congress and political generals in the Five-Sided Wind Tunnel of the Potomac we hear noises about an upcoming war with China. This war, it is thought, will be chiefly naval with America’s carrier battle groups doing the heavy lifting. The carriers, it is further thought, will strike terror into the Chinese. Perhaps better thinking would help.
A bit of history:
Wikipedia: In 1967, aboard the carrier USS Forrestal, an anomaly caused a Zuni rocket on an F-4B Phantom to fire accidentally, striking an external fuel tank of an A-4 Skyhawk. The flammable jet fuel spilled across the flight deck, ignited, and triggered a chain reaction of explosions that killed 134 sailors and injured 161. At the time, the Forrestal was engaged in combat operations in the Gulf of Tonkin, during the Vietnam War. The ship survived, but with damage exceeding US$72 million, not including the damage to aircraft.
The Zuni is a small, five-inch ground-attack rocket suitable for such things as destroying trucks. This trivial weapon, all by itself, caused damage that rendered the carrier useless for over a year in the repair yards. The warhead was roughly the size of the suicide-drone warheads used in Ukraine. That’s all it took.
Washington, looking to start a war with China, which has vast numbers of anti-ship missiles, many of them hypersonic, might reflect on this.
We could say that the disaster on the Forrestal was a freak accident. It was. An “anomaly” means that the circuitry was badly designed, badly maintained, or badly employed. It is not likely to recur. However, almost any missile, or naval gunfire, can burst an aircraft’s fuel tanks. An aircraft carrier is a large bladder of jet fuel wrapped around high explosives. This is worth remembering.
The provincial lawyers in Congress who want a war with a country about which they know little might bear in mind a few things about China. It is not a primitive country of goatherds of the sort the American military likes to fight. It is a huge technological and industrial power with massive financial resources, universities of high quality, large numbers of excellent engineers, and an efficient government. It sent an automated sample-return mission to the Moon and a combination orbiter, lander, and rover to Mars, successful on its first try. It has a space station. America tries desperately to crush its artificial intelligence program. Chinese students dominate America’s best tech universities. It isn’t Guatemala. It very, very isn’t.
For decades China has been designing its military for almost the sole purpose of fighting America in the waters off its coast. It has developed hypersonic anti-ship missiles. America has not. It has a larger navy than the United States, in hulls if not in tonnage. It has a formidable air force. Many of China’s large and varied missiles are specifically designed as carrier killers. Military enthusiasts can argue whether the Chengdu J-20 is a better plane than the aging FA-18 or the F-35, a notorious dog. It doesn’t matter. The Chinese air force is right there, a hundred miles from Taiwan.
Americans have an almost mystical faith in the superiority of their technology. What they seem not to have is the almost mystical technology. America suffers both from complacency and a tendency to regard weapons programs chiefly as a means of funneling money to the arms industry. Washington talks of sending F-16s to Ukraine as if this were a fearsome bird. No. While it is not actually a biplane, it first flew in 1976. The Russian Su-57 is new and intended actually to fight. Kiev has 31 M1 Abrams tanks, touted as irresistible. The Pentagon, presumably noticing that Russia has destroyed the best tanks that England and Germany could send, has kept the Abrams off the battlefield.
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Unknowns come into play. Would the Russians side with Beijing and send their fleet? Mysteriously the Russian general staff has not communicated with me on this matter, but the Kremlin would have strong geopolitical incentives to do so. Then what? How much war does Washington really think it wants? The Pentagon might send strategic bombers to attack the Chinese mainland. Two can play this game. Russia and China have submarine-launched cruise missiles, of which several, hitting the Pentagon, would be something of a shock. What then?
The greatest unknown arises because no one has ever seen a battle involving a carrier-based navy on the Second World War model versus satellite-guided weapons and anti-ship missiles, and so on. The American fleet hasn’t been in a war since 1945, the Air Force since 1973. Nobody knows what would happen. How would Washington respond to several carriers irreparably in flames Forrestal-style, with several thousand dead per each?
Times change, and often, militaries don’t. Unused forces become mired in outdated doctrine and suffer grave astonishment come war. In the Russo-Japanese conflict of 1904-05, Europe was shocked when those funny little yellow people with the squinty eyes destroyed the Russian fleet. In the First World War, there were army officers who sincerely thought that cavalry would matter, utterly misunderstanding the effects of machine guns, and the armies had no idea that the conflict would consist of long years of murderous attrition war.
Over and over and over, wars do not happen as expected. Few had any idea that Vietnam would go as it did.
The American fleet of today is just an up-weaponed version of the fleet of 1945: carriers surrounded by escort vessels. These latter are fragile and unarmored. The battleships of the Second World War had 16-inch belt armor and were designed to take multiple hits and keep fighting. Today’s Tico-class cruisers and Arleigh Burke destroyers have thin hulls and rely heavily on delicate phased-array radars.
Military history buffs will remember what a couple of French Exocet missiles, fired from Iraqi Mirages, did to the USS Stark, or what a missile did to the Israeli Eilat, or what a speedboat of explosives did to the USS Cole. Wrecked them. This bodes not well for a naval war in Asia. Check Wikipedia.
Never underestimate the effect of ravening vanity on international affairs. Biden suffered humiliation in his botched retreat from Afghanistan. More humiliation threatens in the Ukraine. “Losing China” is something he cannot relish having hung around his neck. Washington is on the raw edge of losing its international supremacy, and is likely to do anything at all to avoid this. China delenda est.
Further, a military is a state of mind as much as a practical organization. In my years of covering the armed forces, those within them often seemed to me to be testosteronal 12-year olds in the grip of pathological optimism. Officers tell themselves and, particularly, the enlisted men that all is well, that they are the best armed, best trained, etc., when they are not. Today’s military, unable to meet recruiting goals, rotted by social engineering, not meeting physical or mental standards, poorly led by an affirmative-action officer corps, is unlikely to fare well in a real war. Then what?
And of course if the war goes badly, the United States will just go home and leave Taiwan, a hundred miles from the mainland, at war with China and with nowhere to go, as happens in all of America’s wars.
15 comments
I wonder what America’s stock of ammunitions, missiles etc is, given how much they’ve handed over to Ukraine and Israel.
It’s low and there is no longer the industrial capacity to replenish the inventory anytime soon. The U.S. Navy also eliminated most of its tender ships which were used to resupply the fleet while it is at sea, so once they’ve fired off their stocks of munitions, they have to return to port to restock. The U.S. is no position to fight China, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t stupid enough to consider it.
In some ways a war would be cool with China. It wouldn’t go nuclear…probably, the only dead would be military boobs and it would cause the usa and china to form cordoned-off trade blocs, undermining corporate globalism and increasing the power of labor, like in Cold War days.
How would Washington respond to several carriers irreparably in flames Forrestal-style, with several thousand dead per each?
‘Irreparably in flames’ –sorry that won’t happen. Here what a strike on any floating aircraft carrier would look like… just go back in time to the HMS Hood versus the pocket battleship Bismark. Hood went down in three minutes (actually seconds) with nearly all aboard–three survived out of a crew of 1.418.
Any hit on a modern carries by a hypersonic weapon would resemble a close range shotgun blast to a watermelon…. without a warhead no less. The sheer kinetic energy from these weapons would blow apart a carrier. Now imagine with a warhead–even a nuclear warhead. Your carrier battle groups wouldn’t last a few hours into a hot war.
Bismarck was not a “pocket battleship”.
Yes, the Bismarck and its sister ship Tirpitz were Germany’s largest battleships, each with a displacement of about 45 thousand metric tons, comparable to Iowa-class battleships.
This puts them in league with the HMS Hood and the HMS Prince of Wales, both of which took part in the May 1941 Battle of the Denmark Strait. The Hood was sunk by the Bismarck, and the Prince of Wales took three hits from the “pocket battleship” Prinz Eugen, which was covering the Bismarck.
The Prince of Wales was later sunk by the Japanese just after Pearl Harbor, and the Prinz Eugen was scuttled after surviving two atomic bomb tests at Bikini Atoll in 1946.
A “Pocket Battleship” is basically an up-gunned heavy cruiser of about 15 thousand metric tons displacement with light armor and high speed that can only be caught by the best capital ships. Like most Kriegsmarine ships, they tended to accomplish more as “fleets in being” than in pitched battles against blue-water navies. Pocket Battleships, as the British nicknamed them, were also some of the first ships to be equipped with radars.
The famous Admiral Graf Spee was a Pocket Battleship with a UHF radar that was used as a commerce raider at the beginning of the war. It was damaged by three British warships and scuttled at Montevideo in late 1939.
In 2006, the Nazi eagle crest of the Admiral Graf Spee was recovered by treasure hunters, but the German Bundestablishment objected to the display or sale of the crest because of its swastika ornamentation.
An Argentine Jewish businessman offered to purchase the 350 kilogram brass eagle and crest to explode it “into a thousand pieces” to keep it out of the hands of neo-Nazis. On 17 June 2023, the New York Times reported that the crest would be melted down and recast into a dove by Uruguayan artist Pablo Atchugarry. However, this iconoclastic scheme has been very controversial and the Uruguayan President Luis Lacalle Pou has apparently reversed himself.
🙂
The American ruling elite is in the Chinese pocket. The European ruling elites are in the Chinese pocket, Austalian, Canadian, etc. elites are too. I mean not only politicians, but also business, media, academia, artists, local communities, and much more. Chinese intelligence feels at home everywhere in Europe, Americas, and ANZ. Chinese hackers can know everything, and Chinese propagandists can influence the political and social developments in any country of the world. Just look at Hollywood where nobody dares to criticize the Maoist regime in Beijing.
Asians and African countries are openly vassals of the PRC. Russia is partially in vassal relations with China, and Iran is simply dependent on China. You can count tanks, guns, airplanes and ships, but we live not in the 1940s. Now the war is won not only on the battlefield, but much more in politics and in societies. Thus the problem is not that China is strong, but that the West is weak, and subverted from within.
I think most people would agree that the USAF was at war in 1990 and 1991.
Moreover, it was at war also in 2001-2003 in Afghanistan and Iran. And also US Navy was. Without sea battles, of course, but using missileas and aircraft against land targets.
These were not peer competitors. My recollection is that the Iraqi air force was destroyed on the ground.
“The Iraqi Air Force had a mix of combat aircraft, ranging from 190 advanced Mirages, MiG-25s, MiG-29s, and Su-24s to about 300 moderate-quality MiG-23s, Su-7s, Su-25s, Tu-16s and Tu-22s. Most of the air force however comprised of older aircraft like the MiG-17s and MiG-21s.”
“Iraqi losses included some 35 aircraft downed in air-to-air combat, at least 100 destroyed on the ground, and 115 flown to Iran to avoid destruction.”
American defeats in wars, from the Vietnam War to Iraq and Afghanistan, were defeats not of the US military, but of US politicians. The military almost always defeated the enemy’s armed forces, moreover, the enemy’s losses were always significantly greater than American military losses. Problems began later, when the Americans for some reason began to engage in so-called nation building in these completely foreign and incomprehensible for them countries, imposing completely unnecessary there freedoms, democracies and human rights on strange foreign peoples. This imposition caused national resistance, which led to the fact that the Americans had, sometimes in disgrace, sometimes not, to leave these countries, in which the state power sooner or later passed into the hands of opponents of the United States, sometimes much more radical than those who ruled there before American intervention. The conclusion is clear – the United States can inflict military defeat on other countries, but it should not engage in nation building there. Also it should always be fruitless to impose American or Western norms on non-European peoples, be they the Vietnamese, the Somalis, the Afghans, the Iraqis, the Ukrainians, the Syrians, the Libyans, or in the possible future the Iranians and even the Chinese. Just let them live as they want to live.
I strongly recommend the book The Failure of Democratic Nation Building: Ideology Meets Evolution by Albert Somit and Steven A. Peterson; Palgrave Macmillan, 2005 for this matter.
I don’t know much about military events and/or potential problems facing our country, especially with China, but if our military preparations are as bad as our politics, we are in trouble. The other big worry with China is that they have a population nearly three times our numbers, even with the helpful presence of our illegals — just kidding, of course. As a West Coast resident, I feel we will be the first to be taken out in any war, since we’ve never been hit previously. I sure hope I am wrong. The other fear of China is their adept use of germ warfare AKA Covid — which could be jazzed up and sent out again.
Well, so much for engaging in DEI with China. When will we ever learn.
Mao Zedung would never have won the Civil war and got the power in China without the American betrayal of the Chinese legitime national government of Chiang Kai-shek.
Dean Acheson and lots of his Deep State buddies are long overdue for a medal and a box of chocolates from Chairman Mao for exemplary service in pursuit of the revolution.
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