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In a Taiwan type conflict I'd be more worried about all the advanced Chinese anti-ship ballistic/cruise missiles if I was in the US Navy (not to mention submarine torpedoes and drone ships). That stuff can be launched from land/air even without the hundreds of new ships. I'm not convinced the Navy could operate anywhere close to China in a true conflicts. Those US ship VLS cells will empty out pretty fast trying to shoot them down and submarine detection would heavily slow them down plus limit any logistic chains to resupply. But admittedly I'm no modern expert on the topic, just like reading military wikipedia and twitter.

The US Military is very aware of this. The Next generation fighters and bombers all have longer ranges and longer ranged missiles. The Air-force is working on building more runways and hardened hangers

The Army and Marines are planning around having units on Islands that have to have their own anti-aircraft and anti-ship capability since they won't be able to rely on air or sea support.

That's all moot if the industrial capacity to produces missiles doesn't match the Chinese capacity to produce ships.

Recent wargames predict the US will exhaust regional supplies of antiship missiles within days to weeks and those missiles have a lead time of years to build and the US only has a capacity of a few dozen a year.

> Recent wargames predict the US will exhaust regional supplies of antiship missiles within days to weeks and those missiles have a lead time of years to build and the US only has a capacity of a few dozen a year.

We don't need to sink their warships, just their freighters leaving Brazil - which they cannot quickly replace.

An immediate lack of calories will sort out any military problem out remotely.

Sprinkle in ten thousand naval mines and things look very different.

China has been stockpiling commodities for a while[0] now in preparation for this kind of situation and that they are accelerating the rate at which they are stockpiling.[1]

It is also important to note that China is not an Island like Britain or Australia and can secure food from other locations over land.

This kind of thinking that military conflict with China would be trivial due to some simple ace in the hole like having many aircraft carriers or cutting off their food supply needs to stop. It is hopelessly naive and underplays the very real possibility of humiliating defeat in an impending conflict with China over Taiwan.

[0]https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2024/07/23/w...

[1] https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/china-plans-acce...

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