China v Japan sure would be a fun war.
Fun, of course, being a relative term.
For those who like watching the world burn, sure, it'd be an interesting fireworks display. At least until cheap Asian labor dried up and Walmart had no shit left to sell. The world economy right now is married to the idea of backwater peasants, recently liberated from subsistence rice growing, getting subsumed into the brave new world of working for peanuts in concrete warehouses that fill western economies with cheap plastic toys and tech goods. China, the ultimate behemoth population wise, has been rising ever since they ditched Maoism and embraced the idea that Marxism, while a nice idea in theory, doesn't work because of a basic law in evolutionary science.
We're all greedy self preserving assholes and nature likes it that way.
Japan these days are entering the bumpy 21st Century and experiencing an existential crisis. They're economy is stale, electronics can me made cheaply elsewhere and they've got 1.6 billion just across the water Their aging population can't process this; to them, the Chinese are a bunch of filthy peasants.
But for the rest of us one thing is certainly for sure; if this war ever went live and these old school belligerents went at it (ostensibly over a bunch of shitty islands but really because both countries hate each others guts), so many escalation events present that nobody could put the nuke genie back in the bottle. It'd be like India v Pakistan on steroids. It'd screw the world economy so hard that any China/Japan shooting exchange would make Israel's bunker busting dream strike on Iran's nuke sites about as interesting to the world public as Bono talking about Africa at a U2 concert.
That's probably why China v Japan isn't going to happen anytime soon.
Because nukes.
Yeah, I'm one of those crazy fuckers who is a big fan of nuclear warheads. The cost benefit analysis since 1945's Fatboy airburst over Hiroshima has been positive once you take into account the conventional war alternatives. Nukes are probably the best thing to happen to first world economies since penicillin although it's not really a fair comparison because nukes have probably saved more lives. Without nukes, the Red Army would have stormed through the Fulda Gap and turned Western Europe into a mega death zone. Without nukes there would have been no Cold War and we'd be living in an endless Orwellian nightmare Eurasia v America war where the conflict is continuous but not winnable. Sure, without nukes to define the limits of human madness, proxy wars like Korea and Vietnam would have been obsolete but who cared about tertiary nations post WWII? Sadly, why people kill each other in world history is impossible to discuss due to the multitude of reasons But nukes cut through the bullshit and make war impossible. Sure, Penicillin saved a lot of 19th century top hatted sport fuckers from syphilis but western Europe under Stalin's policies would have wiped out the global economy.
And that would have resulted in a lot of dead people. Everywhere.
Advantage nukes.
That's why any future China v Japan conflict isn't going to happen any time soon. Japan is under the US nuke umbrella. We're still about a decade away from the time when the reNal noose tightens on the world economy when both Asian oil dependent super populations realize there are limits on growth. Energy supply is the ultimate limit which means everything from bread to i-Pads get expensive fast, especially when you don't have an Iraq in your back yard. Both China and Japan are reliant on seaborne delivery of oil right now. That's probably why both countries see the Diaoyu/Senkaku islands and their possible offshore oil and gas deposits as not some shitty island chain but a possible source of future energy that could keep the lights on in both countries for a few years more.
Still, when countries like China or Japan end up fighting for scraps, and that's what a shitty uninhabited island chain in the South China Sea is, you know the barrel is being scraped out.
Right now the Japanese surface fleet could handle itself versus China's medium tech fishing navy with it's sketchy second hand Russian carrier and cobbled together radar and missile systems. But if China decided to take the gloves off and started lobbing long range missiles at Japanese military installations, things would obviously get really ugly really fast. The US would be drawn in to break up the pew-pew but after that first ordinance trade, it'd already be way too late. China and Japan hate each others guts so much that the Senkaku island dispute would be just the marzipan layer on the global economy funeral cake. WWII and the Japanese rape of Nanking isn't going away anytime soon, probably never on Asian grudge timescales. That's why, as far as the US is concerned, this thing needs to be contained and so the US dispatched the USS George Washington carrier group to the South China Sea last week to remind everyone to keep their shit on the down low.
Naval power is not what it used to be.
Though the USN has the largest fleet of the next 5 nations combined, they're still operating off a 19th century British Empire paradigm. Every admiral worth his salt these days knows that naval warfare is a leftover from the 20th century. Naval warfare is great for force projection versus low tech nations but for industrialized nation v industrialized nation warfare missile tech is so sophisticated these days that surface ships are really just large, floating, meat filled shipping containers, easy to hit hold overs from a different century when having a Dreadnought added inches to your nation's dick. The Russians and Chinese have expended years of R&D on satellite guided ways to sink USN carriers but that doesn't mean fielding a carrier group is not force projection. Still, history says you may not always be right in how you allocate your dollars. 1916 was fun for the British if you liked Dreadnoughts but then there was a precedent setting dust up in at Jutland where they traded some shells with the Germans, both sides lost a few ships and the crafty Germans realized naval battle with the largest fleet in the world would be very costly and so they went back to port and preserved the idea that having a naval "fleet in being" was better than having no navy at all.
These days it's economic war with a smiley face where the plebs glued to the TV watch as the multi national corp that owns the politicians mixes some irrigation project in Africa into their mass media advertising campaign and suddenly the thirsty people ear somehow beneficiaries from our lunch burger as the proceeds dig a well in some comfortably far away shithole. Maybe. If you believe those fuckers. Either way, it amounts to the same thing. It's the whole world working their asses off and some fucker on a yacht in Monte Carlo hosting a party you'll never be invited to.
The era of nukes has made force projection primarily an economic move. These days national might is based on how many semi conductors you can fabricate on the cheap in you city annex or how many teenagers you can send to college in your post industrial service economy.
The US defeated the Japanese in the Pacific in WWII. While a victory it was primarily an industrial win, when the unstoppable juggernaut of US industry churned out ships at a rate that sank the Jap navy; the skilled US victory at Midway excepted. In many ways, that victory set a precedent in US naval war theory and in many ways the post war Navy grew exponentially because of it. Carrier groups won that war as far and today the USN has eleven carriers that cost billions to run and ultimately, haven't been tested in the modern realm of hypersonic missile tech even potential enemies like Iran can afford.
Advantage boats.
For now some dated military maxims remain true. One of them is that when you see a US carrier group sitting off your shore, that means you're probably fucked. Unless you're China or Russia when shit could get interesting. Fast forward one hundred years from that Jutland "fleet in being" and we're looking at a similar type stalemate for China and Japan. Neither of them have the force projection to land an army on each other's mainland. Sure, they may not like each other but they are still each other's main trade partners. How do you fight the guy paying for your lunch even if his uncle killed your grandpa?
No easy answer for us upright apes.
War costs a fuck ton of money and worse, it's really bad for business.
For those who like watching the world burn, sure, it'd be an interesting fireworks display. At least until cheap Asian labor dried up and Walmart had no shit left to sell. The world economy right now is married to the idea of backwater peasants, recently liberated from subsistence rice growing, getting subsumed into the brave new world of working for peanuts in concrete warehouses that fill western economies with cheap plastic toys and tech goods. China, the ultimate behemoth population wise, has been rising ever since they ditched Maoism and embraced the idea that Marxism, while a nice idea in theory, doesn't work because of a basic law in evolutionary science.
We're all greedy self preserving assholes and nature likes it that way.
A quick look at recent Chinese history tells you that the burgeoning new middle class in China (they bought more new cars than the US in 2011) are casting a cold eye on their history and noticing how they've been screwed over by outside forces (white men) since forever. Worse still, at least for Western war planners, the Chinese angry people are angry and they've got money now. Critical difference from colonial times. Poor people complaining means jack shit in the worldwide equation. But when consumers complain, shit get's serious.
Chinese history makes Chinese people angry.
Hell, the nineteenth century British won an Opium Heroin War where they basically turned a huge segment of the working population of China into junkies just so they could pay for Asian goods in smack instead of silver. For all of China's rise in the early 21st century, Japan has been dealing with stagnation. The Japanese cannot process this. The Japanese are primarily a warrior culture. And I'm not even talking about just Samurai here. From the moment their resource poor island culture got wind of the industrial revolution, and they got wise to the idea that they needed oil, war was the method. Two nukes later and a surrender in WWII meant they had to give up on the idea of domination and accept US Pacific hegemony. The Japanese got with the post war program and saw the value of getting rich instead of having plowing cash into a naval fleet. And rich they got, flooding the world with cars and electronics that made western nations in the 70s and 80s wonder who the fuck won the war in the first place.
Hell, the nineteenth century British won an Opium Heroin War where they basically turned a huge segment of the working population of China into junkies just so they could pay for Asian goods in smack instead of silver. For all of China's rise in the early 21st century, Japan has been dealing with stagnation. The Japanese cannot process this. The Japanese are primarily a warrior culture. And I'm not even talking about just Samurai here. From the moment their resource poor island culture got wind of the industrial revolution, and they got wise to the idea that they needed oil, war was the method. Two nukes later and a surrender in WWII meant they had to give up on the idea of domination and accept US Pacific hegemony. The Japanese got with the post war program and saw the value of getting rich instead of having plowing cash into a naval fleet. And rich they got, flooding the world with cars and electronics that made western nations in the 70s and 80s wonder who the fuck won the war in the first place.
But for the rest of us one thing is certainly for sure; if this war ever went live and these old school belligerents went at it (ostensibly over a bunch of shitty islands but really because both countries hate each others guts), so many escalation events present that nobody could put the nuke genie back in the bottle. It'd be like India v Pakistan on steroids. It'd screw the world economy so hard that any China/Japan shooting exchange would make Israel's bunker busting dream strike on Iran's nuke sites about as interesting to the world public as Bono talking about Africa at a U2 concert.
That's probably why China v Japan isn't going to happen anytime soon.
Because nukes.
Yeah, I'm one of those crazy fuckers who is a big fan of nuclear warheads. The cost benefit analysis since 1945's Fatboy airburst over Hiroshima has been positive once you take into account the conventional war alternatives. Nukes are probably the best thing to happen to first world economies since penicillin although it's not really a fair comparison because nukes have probably saved more lives. Without nukes, the Red Army would have stormed through the Fulda Gap and turned Western Europe into a mega death zone. Without nukes there would have been no Cold War and we'd be living in an endless Orwellian nightmare Eurasia v America war where the conflict is continuous but not winnable. Sure, without nukes to define the limits of human madness, proxy wars like Korea and Vietnam would have been obsolete but who cared about tertiary nations post WWII? Sadly, why people kill each other in world history is impossible to discuss due to the multitude of reasons But nukes cut through the bullshit and make war impossible. Sure, Penicillin saved a lot of 19th century top hatted sport fuckers from syphilis but western Europe under Stalin's policies would have wiped out the global economy.
And that would have resulted in a lot of dead people. Everywhere.
Advantage nukes.
That's why any future China v Japan conflict isn't going to happen any time soon. Japan is under the US nuke umbrella. We're still about a decade away from the time when the reNal noose tightens on the world economy when both Asian oil dependent super populations realize there are limits on growth. Energy supply is the ultimate limit which means everything from bread to i-Pads get expensive fast, especially when you don't have an Iraq in your back yard. Both China and Japan are reliant on seaborne delivery of oil right now. That's probably why both countries see the Diaoyu/Senkaku islands and their possible offshore oil and gas deposits as not some shitty island chain but a possible source of future energy that could keep the lights on in both countries for a few years more.
Still, when countries like China or Japan end up fighting for scraps, and that's what a shitty uninhabited island chain in the South China Sea is, you know the barrel is being scraped out.
Right now the Japanese surface fleet could handle itself versus China's medium tech fishing navy with it's sketchy second hand Russian carrier and cobbled together radar and missile systems. But if China decided to take the gloves off and started lobbing long range missiles at Japanese military installations, things would obviously get really ugly really fast. The US would be drawn in to break up the pew-pew but after that first ordinance trade, it'd already be way too late. China and Japan hate each others guts so much that the Senkaku island dispute would be just the marzipan layer on the global economy funeral cake. WWII and the Japanese rape of Nanking isn't going away anytime soon, probably never on Asian grudge timescales. That's why, as far as the US is concerned, this thing needs to be contained and so the US dispatched the USS George Washington carrier group to the South China Sea last week to remind everyone to keep their shit on the down low.
Naval power is not what it used to be.
Though the USN has the largest fleet of the next 5 nations combined, they're still operating off a 19th century British Empire paradigm. Every admiral worth his salt these days knows that naval warfare is a leftover from the 20th century. Naval warfare is great for force projection versus low tech nations but for industrialized nation v industrialized nation warfare missile tech is so sophisticated these days that surface ships are really just large, floating, meat filled shipping containers, easy to hit hold overs from a different century when having a Dreadnought added inches to your nation's dick. The Russians and Chinese have expended years of R&D on satellite guided ways to sink USN carriers but that doesn't mean fielding a carrier group is not force projection. Still, history says you may not always be right in how you allocate your dollars. 1916 was fun for the British if you liked Dreadnoughts but then there was a precedent setting dust up in at Jutland where they traded some shells with the Germans, both sides lost a few ships and the crafty Germans realized naval battle with the largest fleet in the world would be very costly and so they went back to port and preserved the idea that having a naval "fleet in being" was better than having no navy at all.
These days it's economic war with a smiley face where the plebs glued to the TV watch as the multi national corp that owns the politicians mixes some irrigation project in Africa into their mass media advertising campaign and suddenly the thirsty people ear somehow beneficiaries from our lunch burger as the proceeds dig a well in some comfortably far away shithole. Maybe. If you believe those fuckers. Either way, it amounts to the same thing. It's the whole world working their asses off and some fucker on a yacht in Monte Carlo hosting a party you'll never be invited to.
It's like Victorian London but with i-Phones.
Military history is sometimes a story of battles that were never fought.
And that sure holds true for now.
The era of nukes has made force projection primarily an economic move. These days national might is based on how many semi conductors you can fabricate on the cheap in you city annex or how many teenagers you can send to college in your post industrial service economy.
The US defeated the Japanese in the Pacific in WWII. While a victory it was primarily an industrial win, when the unstoppable juggernaut of US industry churned out ships at a rate that sank the Jap navy; the skilled US victory at Midway excepted. In many ways, that victory set a precedent in US naval war theory and in many ways the post war Navy grew exponentially because of it. Carrier groups won that war as far and today the USN has eleven carriers that cost billions to run and ultimately, haven't been tested in the modern realm of hypersonic missile tech even potential enemies like Iran can afford.
Advantage boats.
For now some dated military maxims remain true. One of them is that when you see a US carrier group sitting off your shore, that means you're probably fucked. Unless you're China or Russia when shit could get interesting. Fast forward one hundred years from that Jutland "fleet in being" and we're looking at a similar type stalemate for China and Japan. Neither of them have the force projection to land an army on each other's mainland. Sure, they may not like each other but they are still each other's main trade partners. How do you fight the guy paying for your lunch even if his uncle killed your grandpa?
No easy answer for us upright apes.
War costs a fuck ton of money and worse, it's really bad for business.
The time when the G12 nation states go to war is still quite a ways off. But at some point later this century, shit's going to be worth fighting for. Iran oil reserves are major but the Arctic circle offers promise too. The only question is when does the cost benefit analysis reach a zero sum point. When does launching a nuke become the same as not launching a nuke? At what point does energy supply dip so low that your food demanding hungry population ask the question...
Which is better? Death by your enemies' resource squeeze or death by your enemies' nuke?
Either way, that's the ultimate question of the 21st century.
Interestingly, this whole Japan v China stuff suits both nations politically for now. The upcoming Chinese "communist" (lol) leadership benefits because pointing out how bad the Japs are diverts attention from the serious failings of the Chinese political class in the sudden Chinese economic rise. China is suddenly dealing with a middle class with all those imported dollars floating around, and the rise of a middle class is when populations start asking questions of their government. Enter a Senkaku Island dispute to deflect attention to the nearest enemy, Japan. There's nothing better to deflect the masses then rekindling the doings of an outside enemy.
The Japanese are not adverse to this conflict either, languishing as they are under a stagnant economy for twenty years and dreaming of the '80s when their multinationals ruled electronics. They have a right wing you never hear about in Western media and they get a pass because their modern post WWII capitalist economy is in line with the West's except for those schoolgirl used panty vending machines which are skipped over at the UN. Also, there's the Tokyo mayor, X. He's like a neocon Karl Rove on crack and goes and worships at Jap war memorials where at least twelve generals buried there are convicted of war crimes by an international tribunal. The Japanese sure have a sketchy record when it comes to their memory of their actions in World War II. Whereas the Germans have been dealing with guilt for the past 70 years and attempting to make recompense for it, the Japanese are classic Basil Fawlty about the whole thing and don't mention the war.
The Chinese demand an apology for Nanking.
Unfortunately, the Japanese do apologies the same way they do unconditional surrender. That is, you have to bust out more than one nuclear detonation over a major population center before they'll consider the merits of your argument. For right now, the Chinese are dealing with the fallout.
Of course, all this fomenting conflict in the "Pacific Theater" could be part of China's wider geopolitical plan. If the Israelis go ahead with their dream strike on Iran, the crafty Chinese see the Senkaku islands as a way to disrupt any action against all their sweet and cheap Persian oil. By stirring things up in the South China Sea and along with their support of the Syrian regime, they see a way of keeping US forces busy.
Still, if we ever hit a full on China v Japan shooting war, it sure would be interesting.
At least the opening salvos.
For one thing, Japan's version of the AEGIS cruiser/destroyer system, the Kongo based on the US Arleigh Burke class, would go up against China's lower tech Chinese vessels spamming anti-ship missiles and, if they got close enough, torpedoes . The Chinese Navy relies on foreign tech and their ships have cobbled together reader and missile systems from France, Russia and reverse engineered stuff in true Chinese improvised fashion. The fun part is how all these missile trading systems (the role of modern cruisers along with sub detection) )would hold up under the classic "Fog of War". Sure, in multi country war-games these designs have been billed as effective, intercepting at best X% [classified] of the incoming missiles but all it takes is 1% of the incoming to gets through and what happens if it's in the nuke belly of a carrier?
That's why nobody really wants this war.
How does this play out if both sides want to appease the forum warriors?
Basically, I see it as a rerun of the Falklands War in 1982 where one side lands a token troop contingent and declares an exclusion zone around the islands while the UN frantically scrambles to stop WWIII. Meanwhile, 3 US carrier groups arrive and we have a rerun of the Cuban missile crisis and the world shits bricks.
How does this play out if both sides want to appease the forum warriors?
Basically, I see it as a rerun of the Falklands War in 1982 where one side lands a token troop contingent and declares an exclusion zone around the islands while the UN frantically scrambles to stop WWIII. Meanwhile, 3 US carrier groups arrive and we have a rerun of the Cuban missile crisis and the world shits bricks.
Even though Japan might be superior in surface vessel tech the Chinese wouldn't be out of the battle by any account. Their sub surface fleet of diesel submarines is large. Sure, you might giggle at the mention of 'diesel' (conjuring up images of sweaty guys running around leaky pipes) but don't be so quick to discount the effectiveness of old 20th century pistons and batteries just because we've gone all nuke generation on primary sub fleets. The Soviet K-19 story is an object lesson in how these designs are dodgy even if everybody these days says sleeping in close proximity to a nuclear reactor is about as harmful as playing Space Invaders on acid. Diesel subs still have a card in the game especially when you consider the continuing stealthiness of the old diesel designs. Just ask the Germans, Israelis, Australians or, in this case, the Chinese in the proven quietness of a diesel sub. The Chinese managed to surface one undetected in the middle of a USN carrier group in exercises off Taiwan in 2006. The Chinese have a lot of these babies ranging from the useless to the effective but modern sonar technology has shown that even the AEGIS system is vulnerable.
For fun, let's say two Jap cruisers go down to Chinese torpedo tech because they strayed inside the hypothetical "exclusion zone".
By now, the Japanese are wishing to fully enact that clause of the Agreement where the US assures their mutual defense in return for them having only a "defensive" army. God, you gotta love us humans and our bullshit. No country on earth has so far gathered their armed forces under the moniker "Offense Department". All of us together have "defensive armies" and that sure makes for some kind of divine comedy for the aliens... if they're watching.
There is no such thing as a defensive sub. They are primary attack weapons and the Chinese have more of them so yeah, the naval war will be fun. This is the point where the war must die because the next step is trading missiles at "military installations" but you know how that always works out. The Blitz on London by the Luftwaffe relieved bombing on RAF airfields just when the Germans were about to knock the RAF out of the war but an errant night raid by Lancaster bombers on Hamburg so enraged Hitler that he lost the plot and ordered city bombing on population centers.
Human affairs are like that.
Full of lies, stupidity, genius, luck, irrelevance, madness and sometimes a little common sense.
For right now, the Senkaku island dispute stays irrelevant.
Because we're not that desperate.
Yet.
What is this now?
ReplyDelete2 posts in 2 weeks?
Have you started giiving a shit again?