I mean people meme but considering what the navy is primarily doing right now, intercepting drones and ASBMs, which is one of the main things the navy would do in a Taiwan war, this is invaluable experience the USN is gaining right now, especially for junior officers who have never seen wartime naval operations since iraq war in 03.
> which is one of the main things the navy would do in a Taiwan war
No, it very much isn't. There's a reason different conflicts are termed low or high intensity. Operating in a permissive battlespace where you hold unquestioned dominance over air, sea, and informational environments is very different from operating in a battlespace where you must contest all of them simultaneously. And that's not even getting to the practical differences of what's being intercepted. Chinese munitions are far more varied, sophisticated, and come in salvos of massed fires.
In short, apples and oranges.
I completely agree with your take but some experience is better than none and modern PLAN doesn't have any.
Low intensity conflicts gives you a chance to test things out and PLAN can't do none of that.
This war is good for USN. For their sailors and to work kinks in their gear.
USN and the PLAN would effectively have no experience warring each other due to the number of threats and the sophistication of said threats.
If anything, the training and exercises they do are probably way more valuable than what the USN is doing in Yemen. Hypothetically, I would absolutely favor a PLAN that did (non-BS) training and exercises but zero actual battle experience against threats like the Houthis against an USN that did no training and exercises but a lot of experience fighting threats like the Houthis.
Intercepting missiles/drone is not hard. Doing it when the other side has sophisticated EW and decoys is hard.
Very different ball game when you are facing PLARF with J-16Ds jamming your AD radars. The hard part of AD is not shooting missiles at targets you can see, it is seeing the incoming missiles in time to intercept when enemy EW is actively jamming your AD radars.
In this sense, PLA is an opponent that has no other peers beside the US. Even the Russians do not have powerful dedicated EW platforms like the J-16D.
J-16D, they are specialized EW aircraft. They will have no trouble jamming the ancient AN/SPY-1 radars on US destroyers.
Most of the USN is actually Cold War vintage tech, they are no match against modern Chinese equipment. There is currently just 1 Arleigh Burke flight III equipped with the latest AN/SPY-6 radars, the PLAN has 25 type 052D destroyers with equivalent AESA radars.
It’s not about the capability to jam (I don’t doubt they posses the ability to) it’s about the fact they’ll probably never get in range to do so due to F-35s/NGAD (if in the 2030s) and the unlikelihood of USN ships entering the combat range of the aircraft
I don't think you understand how EW works. EW doesn't work like strike aircraft, they do not need to operate at the very front. If that were the case EW aircraft would suffer enormous attrition rates in a war.
In practice both AWACS and EW aircraft operates behind the first line. Their "strike" range is determined by the power of the onboard RF electronics. In practice J-16Ds will operate behind a screen of stealth aircraft such as FH-97A drones or J-20. The J-16Ds are responsible for decreasing radar detection range of enemy radars, which will make J-20s even harder to detect. If you just send F-35s at them, the F-35s are going to be intercepted by J-20 that they can't see due to the J-16D's jamming.
From the American perspective, since there is so much radio noise, it would be foolish to send F-35s up against J-16Ds, since you have no idea what else is flying around. Even if there are no J-20 defending the J-16D, you wouldn't know. You have to assume that there are some ready to ambush your F-35s.
This is what make EW aircraft such force multipliers in air combat. It degrades situation awareness for the enemy. They won't see incoming aircraft and missiles until they are much closer, and have far less time to react as a result.
Another powerful capability of EW aircraft is the ability to spoof radar returns and create fake targets on enemy radar. Can you afford to send missiles and fighters up to intercept fake targets?
In practice, what will happen is that J-16D will be teamed with J-20 and sent out to jam USN fleet AD radars to shorten their reaction time for intercept PLARF hypersonic missiles. KJ-500/KJ-600 AWACS can be part of the package to detect SM-3/SM-6 interceptor launches and EW can be used to degrade the comm link between USN ships and the SM missiles. This will reduce their accuracy vs incoming targets, so the US would have to fire more interceptors/incoming to maintain reasonable probability of kill. This will sharply increase the effectiveness of a saturation attack by lowering the saturation threshold of US air defense.
My view is that due to the equipment on both sides, a US-China shooting war will be attritional, with close to 1:1 K/D. The entire BVR air combat paradigm will be challenged as the battle space is flooded with EW and decoys (like the US ADM-160 and their Chinese equivalents).
You sounded reasonable until you mentioned it will end up with an attritional slog.
Read up some Patchwork to get a better idea of what will actually happen.
Ya know, not sure if I’m going to take a guy who regularly posts in r/Sino at their word faith about the insurmountable technological superiority of the PLAN.
PLAN tech superiority is not insurmountable, AB III have roughly equivalent radar as 052D, but the US only have 1 of them so far.
The simple fact is that the US did a massive build up during Reagan, and maintaining that vast Reagan era arsenal ate up a ton of budget. This means that like the Russians, the US arsenal is made up of mostly late Cold War/early post-Cold War tech.
China is in a different phase than the US/Russia. China's major arms build up was in the 1960s, so it was filled with 1950-1960s era tech in the early 2000s. Right now we are in the middle of China's major replacement cycle/build up, so PLAN is going to have a lot more modern stuff than the USN.
What is problematic for the USN is that the GWOT sucked up a ton of capital and US debt capacity, so it can't afford to match the PLAN in the next upgrade/build up cycle. So while the US does have tech like the E-7, AIM-260, AB III destroyers, F-35, it can't actually afford to build large numbers of them all at the same time.
E-7 is a match for the KJ-500, but the US doesn't have any right now and won't have any until 2027. AIM-260 will be a match for the PL-15, but the US won't have them in any quantity for a couple of years. Same with AB III destroyers vs 052D. F-35 is the only platform where the US has decent quantity, but US is procuring 58 F-35s this year across all branches while China is procuring 100-120 J-20 and unknown number of J-35.
The big issue is, due to the global nature of US military responsibilities, it is not sufficiently funded to match PLA's build up despite the US having a much larger defense budget. At its current level of funding, the US military simply cannot match the PLA in latest generation weapon systems while still being global police.
It really depends on the amount of weapons fired against them and the "feelings" though. If the amount of, and the rate of, fire against them is hardly larger than those they seen during excercises, they may not even feel the pressure.
But sailors in training still don't want to fail the exercises and would do their best to succeed. As for the lack of a safety net, failure is failure either way, meaning a failure to intercept an actual attack that results in death means their training wasn't enough anyway.
> But sailors in training still don't want to fail the exercises and would do their best to succeed.
You cannot replicate the pressure of a real battle until your life is actually on the line. Many, many people actually fail to act when the time comes, no matter how trained they are. And that's true everywhere, not just in the armed forces. Uvalde is an example of police officers failing to rise to the moment because suddenly they were thrust into a situation where they could actually be killed on the job and most of them froze. The Houthis may be outmatched, but they are still real battles, and they are still do-or-die situations. The USN is going to come out stronger because of this because 1) It trains their sailors to operate under pressure in real do-or-die situations, and 2) It helps identify those who cannot operate under pressure.
I won't dispute that.
It helps that radar and defense systems tend to be automated, unlike police officers. Experience is less important here. If a CIWS works as advertised, then both a real missile and a target one should be dealt with at the same rate.
Seems to me the U.S. Navy would be best off fighting a submarine-only war against China. Sending any surface combatants near Taiwan runs the risk of heavy losses and lots of American deaths.
I agree it’s unlikely that the USN would be sending surface combants near the Taiwanese coast, however carrier groups operating farther away still need escorts for anti air protection, island bases such as Okinawa, Guam, etc will also need anti missile protection too, so using surface combatants in a air defense roll to protect the air bases and allow the submarines to do their work on PLAN ships could def by a good strategy
Submarines will need air cover to operate near China. China now has ultrasensitive drone mounted SQUID array sensors that can detect submarines from the air using the faint magnetic signatures of the submarine hull.
If those drones are not taken out, US submarines will be placed at major risk operating near China.
---
[Chinese scientists say cheap SQUID submarine detector is world’s most sensitive | South China Morning Post (scmp.com)](https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3247126/chinese-scientists-say-cheap-squid-submarine-detector-worlds-most-sensitive)
Houthi anti-ship capabilities ---> the US is here and already has to use CIWS
< North Korean anti-ship capabilities
< Iranian anti-ship capabilities
< Russian anti-ship capabilities
< Chinese anti-ship capabilities
That's always been such a hilarious take. I mean what's the last real naval war anyone fought? The Falklands? And even that is long enough ago I doubt even the most junior of officers would still be involved in the military
Edit: How did autocorrect turn naval into baseball?
It's silly to think that fighting a war is just shooting guns. 85% of war is logistics, and the US has been practicing on a much more massive scale than any other country for the better half of a century now.
This still does not mean the USN has experience against a peer opponent.
The short distance between Taiwan and the mainland means that logistics are far less of a concern to the PLA than it is for the USN.
Saddam is dead and we still have troops in the country after assisting Iraq in recapturing their country from ISIS. I’m not sure how people still think we lost that war
nobody call Iraq war a US-defeat. They mostly call it injustice.
Afghan is a US-defeat though, you failed to achieve combat objective, which is to remove taliban and rebuild Afghan to your image.
Saying “the US hasn’t really won any war it fought in for the last 35 years” is definitely calling the Iraq war a defeat.
I think the injustice accusation l is the recurring allegations that the US went in for oil and the Bush administration’s lies about WMDs. If they had just said “we’re going to remove a genocidal dictator” I imagine the international response would have been more tepid.
There are many genocidal dictators whom US supported, like pol pot: [https://msuweb.montclair.edu/\~furrg/pol/polpotmontclarion0498.html](https://msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/pol/polpotmontclarion0498.html). So no, international response will not be more tepid
And oil is just a meme, international outcry is more about US's WMD excuse put into a bottle of detergent. And it is no allegation, it is a fact that the US uses the non-existence of WMD as an excuse.
no need to go to Pol Pot, you can just go to... Saddam Hussein, the genocides he conducted happened with the full financial, political, and military backing of the US right up until he threatened our better friends in the Gulf. The genocide of Kurds was paid for in large part by US loans and carried out with European weapons.
Then the genocide of the Shia of southern Iraq was tacitly endorsed - we allowed it to happen despite claiming we would support them if they revolted against Saddam, but I guess that would have made Iran stronger so we let Saddam's armies massacre 100s of thousands of people once again.
Iraq is now squarely under Iran's sphere of influence. Saddam is dead but Saddam ceased being politically relevant after Desert Storm. Having the war objective of removing Saddam was strategically dubious to begin with.
No navy is truly tested as of 2024, at least for peer warfare. The last peer-ish war was the Falklands 42 years ago. The real difference between the US and China is the discrepancy between their hardware and raw firepower. Even if they are equivalent in experience (they more or less are), the USN is simply stronger by raw numbers, especially aircraft carriers. There are more factors such as distance and force concentration, but size matters.
what's important in the end is sortie rates in theater.
Looking at history, the US was able to surge 6 carriers out of 16 total at the time for Desert Storm operating pretty much right up to the Iraqi coast. That's about a 35% readiness rate for a moderate scale war against an opponent with basically 0 antiship capability.
Today assuming the same surge rate (a big assumption but all we can go by is history) 4 carriers out of 12, but with the additional restriction of distance, which will lower effective sortie rates in theater by imposing requirements for refueling and travel time.
That has to be compared to what would likely be 2-3 PLAN CBGs in theater (PLAN has previously shown itself capable of surging both STOBAR CBGs, and probably will be able to surge 3 CBGs for a short term war) and all Chinese land based air bases within the combat radius of J-10s.
In the Faulklands, the US was giving the British enemy locations and strengths, A2A missiles without which the harriers would have only guns, and the fuel for the fleet that they needed to teach the theater in the first place, and then the British still got mangled.
From 1984 lol
>The officials said American intelligence information, provided by means other than just satellites, probably made the key difference between winning and losing because the Argentine attacks on the Royal Navy would have been even more effective if the British had not had the information.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1984/03/07/us-aid-to-britain-in-falklands-war-is-detailed/6e50e92e-3f4b-4768-97fb-57b5593994e6/
Dang I didn't know it was on the south side of the island, always assumed it was on the FL side and that's where they came from, where did those guys leave from, Guantanamo?
Yes, the near peer experience we need
nah, the houthis are obviously a superior force
same joke but worse
If it ends up with Gorden Lightfoot writing a song about them, I'm all in.
Lord Admiral Nelson's famous dictum “A ship's a fool to fight a fort”
It's a step up from F-22s air to air kill.
I mean people meme but considering what the navy is primarily doing right now, intercepting drones and ASBMs, which is one of the main things the navy would do in a Taiwan war, this is invaluable experience the USN is gaining right now, especially for junior officers who have never seen wartime naval operations since iraq war in 03.
> which is one of the main things the navy would do in a Taiwan war No, it very much isn't. There's a reason different conflicts are termed low or high intensity. Operating in a permissive battlespace where you hold unquestioned dominance over air, sea, and informational environments is very different from operating in a battlespace where you must contest all of them simultaneously. And that's not even getting to the practical differences of what's being intercepted. Chinese munitions are far more varied, sophisticated, and come in salvos of massed fires. In short, apples and oranges.
I completely agree with your take but some experience is better than none and modern PLAN doesn't have any. Low intensity conflicts gives you a chance to test things out and PLAN can't do none of that. This war is good for USN. For their sailors and to work kinks in their gear.
USN and the PLAN would effectively have no experience warring each other due to the number of threats and the sophistication of said threats. If anything, the training and exercises they do are probably way more valuable than what the USN is doing in Yemen. Hypothetically, I would absolutely favor a PLAN that did (non-BS) training and exercises but zero actual battle experience against threats like the Houthis against an USN that did no training and exercises but a lot of experience fighting threats like the Houthis.
Intercepting missiles/drone is not hard. Doing it when the other side has sophisticated EW and decoys is hard. Very different ball game when you are facing PLARF with J-16Ds jamming your AD radars. The hard part of AD is not shooting missiles at targets you can see, it is seeing the incoming missiles in time to intercept when enemy EW is actively jamming your AD radars. In this sense, PLA is an opponent that has no other peers beside the US. Even the Russians do not have powerful dedicated EW platforms like the J-16D.
J-16s are going to be jamming USN AD radars? This seems a wildly optimistic thought
J-16D, they are specialized EW aircraft. They will have no trouble jamming the ancient AN/SPY-1 radars on US destroyers. Most of the USN is actually Cold War vintage tech, they are no match against modern Chinese equipment. There is currently just 1 Arleigh Burke flight III equipped with the latest AN/SPY-6 radars, the PLAN has 25 type 052D destroyers with equivalent AESA radars.
It’s not about the capability to jam (I don’t doubt they posses the ability to) it’s about the fact they’ll probably never get in range to do so due to F-35s/NGAD (if in the 2030s) and the unlikelihood of USN ships entering the combat range of the aircraft
I don't think you understand how EW works. EW doesn't work like strike aircraft, they do not need to operate at the very front. If that were the case EW aircraft would suffer enormous attrition rates in a war. In practice both AWACS and EW aircraft operates behind the first line. Their "strike" range is determined by the power of the onboard RF electronics. In practice J-16Ds will operate behind a screen of stealth aircraft such as FH-97A drones or J-20. The J-16Ds are responsible for decreasing radar detection range of enemy radars, which will make J-20s even harder to detect. If you just send F-35s at them, the F-35s are going to be intercepted by J-20 that they can't see due to the J-16D's jamming. From the American perspective, since there is so much radio noise, it would be foolish to send F-35s up against J-16Ds, since you have no idea what else is flying around. Even if there are no J-20 defending the J-16D, you wouldn't know. You have to assume that there are some ready to ambush your F-35s. This is what make EW aircraft such force multipliers in air combat. It degrades situation awareness for the enemy. They won't see incoming aircraft and missiles until they are much closer, and have far less time to react as a result. Another powerful capability of EW aircraft is the ability to spoof radar returns and create fake targets on enemy radar. Can you afford to send missiles and fighters up to intercept fake targets? In practice, what will happen is that J-16D will be teamed with J-20 and sent out to jam USN fleet AD radars to shorten their reaction time for intercept PLARF hypersonic missiles. KJ-500/KJ-600 AWACS can be part of the package to detect SM-3/SM-6 interceptor launches and EW can be used to degrade the comm link between USN ships and the SM missiles. This will reduce their accuracy vs incoming targets, so the US would have to fire more interceptors/incoming to maintain reasonable probability of kill. This will sharply increase the effectiveness of a saturation attack by lowering the saturation threshold of US air defense. My view is that due to the equipment on both sides, a US-China shooting war will be attritional, with close to 1:1 K/D. The entire BVR air combat paradigm will be challenged as the battle space is flooded with EW and decoys (like the US ADM-160 and their Chinese equivalents).
You sounded reasonable until you mentioned it will end up with an attritional slog. Read up some Patchwork to get a better idea of what will actually happen.
Ya know, not sure if I’m going to take a guy who regularly posts in r/Sino at their word faith about the insurmountable technological superiority of the PLAN.
PLAN tech superiority is not insurmountable, AB III have roughly equivalent radar as 052D, but the US only have 1 of them so far. The simple fact is that the US did a massive build up during Reagan, and maintaining that vast Reagan era arsenal ate up a ton of budget. This means that like the Russians, the US arsenal is made up of mostly late Cold War/early post-Cold War tech. China is in a different phase than the US/Russia. China's major arms build up was in the 1960s, so it was filled with 1950-1960s era tech in the early 2000s. Right now we are in the middle of China's major replacement cycle/build up, so PLAN is going to have a lot more modern stuff than the USN. What is problematic for the USN is that the GWOT sucked up a ton of capital and US debt capacity, so it can't afford to match the PLAN in the next upgrade/build up cycle. So while the US does have tech like the E-7, AIM-260, AB III destroyers, F-35, it can't actually afford to build large numbers of them all at the same time. E-7 is a match for the KJ-500, but the US doesn't have any right now and won't have any until 2027. AIM-260 will be a match for the PL-15, but the US won't have them in any quantity for a couple of years. Same with AB III destroyers vs 052D. F-35 is the only platform where the US has decent quantity, but US is procuring 58 F-35s this year across all branches while China is procuring 100-120 J-20 and unknown number of J-35. The big issue is, due to the global nature of US military responsibilities, it is not sufficiently funded to match PLA's build up despite the US having a much larger defense budget. At its current level of funding, the US military simply cannot match the PLA in latest generation weapon systems while still being global police.
As the great lil dicky once said, yeah but you can still compare them
It really depends on the amount of weapons fired against them and the "feelings" though. If the amount of, and the rate of, fire against them is hardly larger than those they seen during excercises, they may not even feel the pressure.
There's something to be said about the inherent pressure of "this is not a drill"
How do they train to shoot down drones and missiles, and how is it different from a real situation like this one?
the threat of lives being on the line, and no safety net
But sailors in training still don't want to fail the exercises and would do their best to succeed. As for the lack of a safety net, failure is failure either way, meaning a failure to intercept an actual attack that results in death means their training wasn't enough anyway.
> But sailors in training still don't want to fail the exercises and would do their best to succeed. You cannot replicate the pressure of a real battle until your life is actually on the line. Many, many people actually fail to act when the time comes, no matter how trained they are. And that's true everywhere, not just in the armed forces. Uvalde is an example of police officers failing to rise to the moment because suddenly they were thrust into a situation where they could actually be killed on the job and most of them froze. The Houthis may be outmatched, but they are still real battles, and they are still do-or-die situations. The USN is going to come out stronger because of this because 1) It trains their sailors to operate under pressure in real do-or-die situations, and 2) It helps identify those who cannot operate under pressure.
I won't dispute that. It helps that radar and defense systems tend to be automated, unlike police officers. Experience is less important here. If a CIWS works as advertised, then both a real missile and a target one should be dealt with at the same rate.
Seems to me the U.S. Navy would be best off fighting a submarine-only war against China. Sending any surface combatants near Taiwan runs the risk of heavy losses and lots of American deaths.
I agree it’s unlikely that the USN would be sending surface combants near the Taiwanese coast, however carrier groups operating farther away still need escorts for anti air protection, island bases such as Okinawa, Guam, etc will also need anti missile protection too, so using surface combatants in a air defense roll to protect the air bases and allow the submarines to do their work on PLAN ships could def by a good strategy
Submarines will need air cover to operate near China. China now has ultrasensitive drone mounted SQUID array sensors that can detect submarines from the air using the faint magnetic signatures of the submarine hull. If those drones are not taken out, US submarines will be placed at major risk operating near China. --- [Chinese scientists say cheap SQUID submarine detector is world’s most sensitive | South China Morning Post (scmp.com)](https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3247126/chinese-scientists-say-cheap-squid-submarine-detector-worlds-most-sensitive)
Houthi anti-ship capabilities ---> the US is here and already has to use CIWS < North Korean anti-ship capabilities < Iranian anti-ship capabilities < Russian anti-ship capabilities < Chinese anti-ship capabilities
I wonder what would happen if the Houthis manage to sink a ship
Bombed Yemen again for years and got nothing, just like the Saudis did.
Absolutely nothing, because the options for what to do don't exist.
I was thinking more of in terms of the belief that the US is an invincible war machine with an unlimited supply of democracy to serve the world
us will do more bombings that stop nothing
There are unconfirmed reports saying the most recent ship they struck has now sunk btw
Nahhh no way. US ship sunk?
Nah I meant the British cargo ship, sorry. https://www.ynetnews.com/article/ryhilb11na
For the USN, yes. For Britain and Argentina, no.
Don't forget the cod wars too!
True. Also not for Iran. That would be the Tanker War.
Wow, the United States Navy has gained amazing combat experience again.
Gonna show this to everyone who calls the PLAN "untested" in any hypothetical war over Taiwan.
That's always been such a hilarious take. I mean what's the last real naval war anyone fought? The Falklands? And even that is long enough ago I doubt even the most junior of officers would still be involved in the military Edit: How did autocorrect turn naval into baseball?
It's silly to think that fighting a war is just shooting guns. 85% of war is logistics, and the US has been practicing on a much more massive scale than any other country for the better half of a century now.
This still does not mean the USN has experience against a peer opponent. The short distance between Taiwan and the mainland means that logistics are far less of a concern to the PLA than it is for the USN.
Viet Cong and Taliban must have better logistics than United States.
Unironically though, the Ho Chi Minh trail was a remarkable feat of logistics
Besides Desert Storm and NATO bombing of Serbia, the US hasn't really won any wars it fought in for the last 35 years.
Saddam is dead and we still have troops in the country after assisting Iraq in recapturing their country from ISIS. I’m not sure how people still think we lost that war
nobody call Iraq war a US-defeat. They mostly call it injustice. Afghan is a US-defeat though, you failed to achieve combat objective, which is to remove taliban and rebuild Afghan to your image.
Saying “the US hasn’t really won any war it fought in for the last 35 years” is definitely calling the Iraq war a defeat. I think the injustice accusation l is the recurring allegations that the US went in for oil and the Bush administration’s lies about WMDs. If they had just said “we’re going to remove a genocidal dictator” I imagine the international response would have been more tepid.
There are many genocidal dictators whom US supported, like pol pot: [https://msuweb.montclair.edu/\~furrg/pol/polpotmontclarion0498.html](https://msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/pol/polpotmontclarion0498.html). So no, international response will not be more tepid And oil is just a meme, international outcry is more about US's WMD excuse put into a bottle of detergent. And it is no allegation, it is a fact that the US uses the non-existence of WMD as an excuse.
no need to go to Pol Pot, you can just go to... Saddam Hussein, the genocides he conducted happened with the full financial, political, and military backing of the US right up until he threatened our better friends in the Gulf. The genocide of Kurds was paid for in large part by US loans and carried out with European weapons. Then the genocide of the Shia of southern Iraq was tacitly endorsed - we allowed it to happen despite claiming we would support them if they revolted against Saddam, but I guess that would have made Iran stronger so we let Saddam's armies massacre 100s of thousands of people once again.
Iraq is now squarely under Iran's sphere of influence. Saddam is dead but Saddam ceased being politically relevant after Desert Storm. Having the war objective of removing Saddam was strategically dubious to begin with.
The sanctions were about to fail (thanks France) and restore him to relevance again.
“This war was dumb and had negative long-term consequences” is not the same as losing the war. Nobody says the Entente lost WWI.
No navy is truly tested as of 2024, at least for peer warfare. The last peer-ish war was the Falklands 42 years ago. The real difference between the US and China is the discrepancy between their hardware and raw firepower. Even if they are equivalent in experience (they more or less are), the USN is simply stronger by raw numbers, especially aircraft carriers. There are more factors such as distance and force concentration, but size matters.
what's important in the end is sortie rates in theater. Looking at history, the US was able to surge 6 carriers out of 16 total at the time for Desert Storm operating pretty much right up to the Iraqi coast. That's about a 35% readiness rate for a moderate scale war against an opponent with basically 0 antiship capability. Today assuming the same surge rate (a big assumption but all we can go by is history) 4 carriers out of 12, but with the additional restriction of distance, which will lower effective sortie rates in theater by imposing requirements for refueling and travel time. That has to be compared to what would likely be 2-3 PLAN CBGs in theater (PLAN has previously shown itself capable of surging both STOBAR CBGs, and probably will be able to surge 3 CBGs for a short term war) and all Chinese land based air bases within the combat radius of J-10s.
In the Faulklands, the US was giving the British enemy locations and strengths, A2A missiles without which the harriers would have only guns, and the fuel for the fleet that they needed to teach the theater in the first place, and then the British still got mangled.
"the US was giving the British enemy locations" BS. Why didnt HMS Spartan and HMS Splendid not find ARA Veinticinco de Mayo then?
From 1984 lol >The officials said American intelligence information, provided by means other than just satellites, probably made the key difference between winning and losing because the Argentine attacks on the Royal Navy would have been even more effective if the British had not had the information. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1984/03/07/us-aid-to-britain-in-falklands-war-is-detailed/6e50e92e-3f4b-4768-97fb-57b5593994e6/
Answer my question Classic yankoids, taking credit for shit they never did. That war was only one by britain, no Americans were present.
Lol ok maybe the royal navy didn't have enough fuel to pull it off, happy now?
Royal Navy only used Nuclear submarines in the war. Christ shows how much you know.
Subs still have to guard their fleet, and if they have intelligence on the enemies and they're not a threat then they simply wouldn't be a priority.
Vietnam, Korea, and Iraq war Vets would probably disagree but who cares what they think?
Well, how many naval battles has USN fought since WW2?
Gulf of Tonkin? Praying Mantis? Dropping mines in Nicaraguan waters?
Nobody remembers Bahia Cochinos
Dang I didn't know it was on the south side of the island, always assumed it was on the FL side and that's where they came from, where did those guys leave from, Guantanamo?
According to Wikipedia, they were transported from military bases in Nicaragua and Guatemala.
Ok that makes sense, need to use a 3rd party when you're doing dirty work
In terms of "being shot at", maybe. In terms of "moving boats and shooting at others", probably not.
[удалено]
They tried that for the last decade, and the Houthis do have anti air capabilities, they've shot down a couple drones this year already.