Saturday, January 13, 2018

Robert Farley — By 2020, China Could Have Hypersonic Missiles to Sink U.S. Aircraft Carriers

The United States can strike back with its own systems, of course,but on balance the U.S. military demands access, while the Chinese military wins by denying that access.
Please notice that Chinese strategy is based on defense (denial of access) rather than offense (access). So is Russia's and also Iran's.

The Chinese "threat" to the US is chiefly economic, and one the present trajectory, China surpasses the US economy in the next decade in output owing to its sheer size, even the US standard of living will exceed that of China for some time.

But standard of living doesn't add substantially to power, while output does.

The National Interest
By 2020, China Could Have Hypersonic Missiles to Sink U.S. Aircraft Carriers
Robert Farley | senior lecturer at the Patterson School of Diplomacy and International Commerce at the University of Kentucky

5 comments:

John said...

I'm sure I've read US military analysts who claim that China and Russia already possess hypersonic missiles. Missiles so fast that no US interception programme can possibly intercept the missiles raining down on them. Of course, the US has these similar weapons, but this ups the ante considerably. All of which is to say, every US Navy ship would be blown out of the water before they even knew it. Similarly for all the other branches of the US military. It makes war almost an impossibility, if you're sane that is. Or it just makes nuclear war more probable. Once a conventional war has been fought with extremely destructive hypersonic missiles taking out all your ships, aircraft and personnel, what strategy is left other than nukes?

Tom Hickey said...

Right, John, but this is an intercontinental deterrent that would only be used as a last resort since it would likely involve MAD (mutually assured destruction).

This involves tactical weapons used strategically to counter US forward positioning, which is the basis of sea power.

China and Russia are land powers and the US is unlikely to engage either of them and almost certainly not both of them in a land war.

The greater part of US military power is force projection, by sea, air, space, and cyberwar.

The trident of ICBMs, subs and bomber armed with nuclear weapons is basically deterrence based on MAD.

Forward projection of power is supposedly about containment, but it assumes offensive capability to at least intimidate adversaries and to force compliance.

Kaivey said...

What a world, you couldn't make this up!

Noah Way said...

Forward projection of power is essentially the "security" arm of the corporate financials.

Tom Hickey said...

Forward projection of power is essentially the "security" arm of the corporate financials.

Security to some extent, but that is not the whole story. "Opening up" (liberalization) is a also a large part of it.

Neoliberal globalization, neo-imperialism and neocolonialism are joined at the hip.

Global domination under neoliberalism (contemporary capitalism, such as it is) means financial and economic domination.