- Malcolm Fraser is really an idiot. I wish I had the time to give this silly piece on the Asia pivot as an election tactic the beating it deserves.
- Taiwan tests its new subhunting weapons. Yet without control of the air, those aircraft will be useless in a war with China.
- Sen Grassley continues to claim that the Ma gov't promised to open up to US ractobeef.
- The implications of US-China co-dependence, with some stern warnings about Chinese militarism.
- Lawrence Chung of SCMP claims the DPP is softening its China stance.
- China's financial system undergoing catastrophic de-leveraging
- Bloggingheads on the South China Sea and Asia (video)
- In Taiwan's urban areas, women outnumber men.
- Is this Taichung's hardest cycling climb?
- One severe problem of having relations with China is the unremitting smuggling. The hoof-n-mouth disease mess of the 1990s that devastated Taiwan's pork industry was attributed to smuggling; now dozens of birds smuggled in from China are found to have H5N1
- Nunns in The Diplomat asks whether isolated Taiwan is propping up dictators.
- Taiwan needs 5,000 Filipino fishing crewmen
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5 comments:
You're pretty much right about those sub-hunting helicopters being unable to do much in a Chinese invasion scenario, due to Chinese air dominance. But even the USAF wouldn't be able to change that.
USAF assets in Okinawa are insufficient to contest Chinese air superiority over the Taiwan strait, for the following reason: the Taiwan strait is beyond the "loiter radius" of any F-15s, F-16s, or F-22s. By loiter radius, I mean that the fighter jet has enough fuel to fly there, circle around for a meaningful amount of time, and then fly home, unrefueled. In order to loiter, the USAF will have to do mid-air refueling, but the USAF does not have sufficient tanker capacity to keep aloft anything beyond one or two squadrons at a time, which will likely be outnumbered nearly 20:1 by PLA air assets.
The only way the US could contest air dominance would be if a carrier was parked close to the straits, which would obviate the need for anti-submarine helicopters anyhow (as a USN carrier battle group has more than enough anti-sub assets to lock down the strait if it chose to do so.) But carriers would be too slow to reach the straits in a crisis, and moving one to the straits in would paint the US as a clear aggressor in the international arena.
One final thing to note is that the survivability of Taiwan air assets is very, very low--the air defense systems of the ROCAF can and will be penetrated by PLA missiles and bombers, and you can bet that most of those initial strikes will fall on airbases and radar installations. In fact, most DoD planners give Taiwan's airpower a 24-hour window of survivability, at most--with projected equipment destruction rates of nearly 30-50% in the first twelve hours alone.
I don't normally agree with much that Malcolm Fraser says but he seems pretty much on the money in that piece. It seems to be a decent analysis of the situation that makes fairly good sense, which is surprising as conservatives rarely make sense. I'm not sure what problem you have with it.
Damn, I was looking forward to your disemboweling of Fraser.
The only way the US could contest air dominance would be if a carrier was parked close to the straits, which would obviate the need for anti-submarine helicopters anyhow (as a USN carrier battle group has more than enough anti-sub assets to lock down the strait if it chose to do so.) But carriers would be too slow to reach the straits in a crisis, and moving one to the straits in would paint the US as a clear aggressor in the international arena.
Excellent point.
I think the Fraser piece was unadulterated 'blame America'-style garbage, but I would not want to write a criticism of it since there is quite simply so much to criticise in it.
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