Seems like a like of armchair general theory-crafting without much substance. Yeah, a $75,000 gravity bomb with some form of guidance to target ships is cheaper than a cruise missile, but a bomber capable of getting within range of a carrier group to drop such a bomb is far more expensive than the cruise missile.
And it misses the single most important rule of war: weapons don't win wars, logistics does. See Russia's failed push on Kiev last year for an example of this, or Germany for the entire eastern front of WW2.
> who else is really really good at Logistics? China.
This remains to be seen. Over-the-horizon logistics are a different beast. China shares Russia’s lot in being a land power. Adapting those lines of communication to long-distance force projection across oceans, something that comes naturally to a maritime power like America (at the cost of raw power), is incredibly difficult.
They have an enormous civilian shipping fleet, some of which has been designed to meet military requirements. For example, China has a good number of RoRo car ferries which also incorporate military requirements, and even participate in military exercises [1]
Yes. The US does the same with commercial ships[1] and aircraft[2]. Interestingly, in the case of the US, part of the payment for providing this service is priority access to government contracts during peacetime. Which is doubly great for the government - no extra cost beyond operating cost, and the capability is regularly exercised even in peacetime.
Yup! That's how the Allies won WWII - the British Empire had an amazing civilian naval logistics machine. The US had insane industrial capacity (which got juiced by the war!). Over the course of the War the US basically took over that logistics capacity and by the end of it replaced the British Empire.
China have a similarly amazing capacity - the likes of aliexpress are more capable than anything I've seen in Europe. For consumers it's only Amazon who come close.
In a total war situation all of that capacity and - importantly - the deep knowledge - are used for the war effort.
China could use these ships as described, but they’d first have to disable Taiwanese defenses and keep the US out of the area, in which case the war is already over. If China were to just send boats like these across the straight without the prior conditions being settled, they’d be sunk and sunk easily since they’re defenseless. Seems like fear mongering to me.
Or to use the infrastructure for a landwar. The "boats" are extremely important part of the logistics chain but there are also rail, road, warehouses etc etc.
In a land war the boats would be moving raw resources to feed their industrial machine, just as they are now.
They thought they were still tough. We can make our own assessments, and we can hack or bribe their officials to get their take -- but if they think they're hot shit, what are we to expect?
And it's clear that they did indeed think they were hot shit: their planning, and eventual failures, reflected that.
If the Russian Army itself didn't think it had a problem, why would foreign intelligence?
Tim Cook: “In the US, you could have a meeting of tooling engineers, and I’m not sure we could fill the room. In China, you could fill multiple football fields"
And that story repeats all the way up and down the supply chain. In WW II the USA was basically China- they had a thick supply chain from raw materials up, and could spin up factories because they had experienced people who could bring along new employees. We still think of ourselves as being that country but we're not, and a new serious war would play out with a very different script.
There was a great econtalk episode that I can never dig up claiming that even that was mostly about hedonic adjustments for the quality of Intel chips.
And it misses the single most important rule of war: weapons don't win wars, logistics does. See Russia's failed push on Kiev last year for an example of this, or Germany for the entire eastern front of WW2.