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Border face-off: China and India each deploy 3,000 troops
Originally posted by Officer of EngineersView Post
No, the Mainland has to wait for Taiwan to clear the garbage blocking any subsquent wave. You know, like sunk ships and dead bodies? Kinda hard to dig a fox hole when you can't get to shore or dig through bone and guts before you reach sand.
China could blockade Taiwan. Nothing gets in or out. How many months can Taiwan last ? they are going to be going at this from all levels.
It's going to take a way bigger airlift than Berlin required to look after 23 million.
While a Tomahawk can be launched from the standard US submarine's 21 inch torpedo tubes you have to reduce to the number of Mk48 ADCAP torpedoes it can carry...which is what is wanted for Australia. The Tomahawks can have a dedicated suite of vertical launch tubes installed but I will ask this question...where is the RAN getting a nuke?
Same place we all get them. The US. Nukes belong to the US. Missiles belong to Australia. Dual National Command Authority release required. You know. The good old days where your nuke techs have to put up with Canadian and German beer because we don't stock American beer.
Originally posted by Officer of EngineersView Post
Way too easy. No missile tubes.
While a Tomahawk can be launched from the standard US submarine's 21 inch torpedo tubes you have to reduce to the number of Mk48 ADCAP torpedoes it can carry...which is what is wanted for Australia. The Tomahawks can have a dedicated suite of vertical launch tubes installed but I will ask this question...where is the RAN getting a nuke?
Windows are April & September. Whatever can't be done within those months has to wait for the next window.
No, the Mainland has to wait for Taiwan to clear the garbage blocking any subsquent wave. You know, like sunk ships and dead bodies? Kinda hard to dig a fox hole when you can't get to shore or dig through bone and guts before you reach sand.
Originally posted by Officer of EngineersView Post
Oh for fuck sakes! Somebody tell the fanboy Victor Gao that a SSN ain't a SSBN and the Chinese don't have the nukes to spare to attack Australia.
He seems to think the Aussie subs are dual use and there is no way to verify they won't carry nuke missiles. He is making a launch on warning argument.
Originally posted by Officer of EngineersView Post
A 30,000, hell let's go 60,000 Mainland invasion force on isolated beachheads with stretched to the breaking point LOCs harrassed by RoCN subs vs a 400,000 RoCA with internal C3. What protracted conflict?
If China goes that far they will be all in. They will be more waves.
How about the converse ? Does the US still retain a nuclear option to deter China from taking Taiwan
Otherwise they face the possibility of a protracted conflict with conventional
A 30,000, hell let's go 60,000 Mainland invasion force on isolated beachheads with stretched to the breaking point LOCs harrassed by RoCN subs vs a 400,000 RoCA with internal C3. What protracted conflict?
WASHINGTON — When Communist Chinese forces began shelling islands controlled by Taiwan in 1958, the United States rushed to back up its ally with military force — including drawing up plans to carry out nuclear strikes on mainland China, according to an apparently still-classified document that sheds new light on how dangerous that crisis was.
The document was disclosed by Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked a classified history of the Vietnam War, known as the Pentagon Papers, 50 years ago. Mr. Ellsberg said he had copied the top secret study about the Taiwan Strait crisis at the same time but did not disclose it then. He is now highlighting it amid new tensions between the United States and China over Taiwan.
While it has been known in broader strokes that United States officials considered using atomic weapons against mainland China if the crisis escalated, the pages reveal in new detail how aggressive military leaders were in pushing for authority to do so if Communist forces, which had started shelling the so-called offshore islands, intensified their attacks.
The crisis in 1958 instead ebbed when Mao Zedong’s Communist forces broke off the attacks on the islands, leaving them in the control of Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalist Republic of China forces based on Taiwan. More than six decades later, strategic ambiguity about Taiwan’s status — and about American willingness to use nuclear weapons to defend it — persists.
The previously censored information is significant both historically and now, said Odd Arne Westad, a Yale University historian who specializes in the Cold War and China and who reviewed the pages for The New York Times.
“This confirms, to me at least, that we came closer to the United States using nuclear weapons” during the 1958 crisis “than what I thought before,” he said. “In terms of how the decision-making actually took place, this is a much more illustrative level than what we have seen.”
Drawing parallels to today’s tensions — when China’s own conventional military might has grown far beyond its 1958 ability, and when it has its own nuclear weapons — Mr. Westad said the documents provided fodder to warn of the dangers of an escalating confrontation over Taiwan.
Even in 1958, officials doubted the United States could successfully defend Taiwan using only conventional weapons, the documents show. If China invaded today, Mr. Westad said, “it would put tremendous pressure on U.S. policymakers, in the case of such a confrontation, to think about how they might deploy nuclear weapons.”
“That should be sobering for everyone involved,” he added.
In exposing a historical antecedent for the present tensions, Mr. Ellsberg said that was exactly the takeaway he wanted the public to debate. He argued that inside the Pentagon, contingency planning was likely underway for the possibility of an armed conflict over Taiwan — including what to do if any defense using conventional weapons appeared to be falling short.
“As the possibility of another nuclear crisis over Taiwan is being bandied about this very year, it seems very timely to me to encourage the public, Congress and the executive branch to pay attention to what I make available to them,” he said about what he characterized as “shallow” and “reckless” high-level discussions during the 1958 Taiwan Strait crisis.
He added, “I do not believe the participants were more stupid or thoughtless than those in between or in the current cabinet.”
Among other details, the pages that the government censored in the official release of the study describe the attitude of Gen. Laurence S. Kuter, the top Air Force commander for the Pacific. He wanted authorization for a first-use nuclear attack on mainland China at the start of any armed conflict. To that end, he praised a plan that would start by dropping atomic bombs on Chinese airfields but not other targets, arguing that its relative restraint would make it harder for skeptics of nuclear warfare in the American government to block the plan.
“There would be merit in a proposal from the military to limit the war geographically” to the air bases, “if that proposal would forestall some misguided humanitarian’s intention to limit a war to obsolete iron bombs and hot lead,” General Kuter said at one meeting.
At the same time, officials considered it very likely that the Soviet Union would respond to an atomic attack on China with retaliatory nuclear strikes. (In retrospect, it is not clear whether this premise was accurate. Historians say American leaders, who saw Communism as a monolithic global conspiracy, did not appreciate or understand an emerging Sino-Soviet split.)
But American military officials preferred that risk to the possibility of losing the islands. The study paraphrased Gen. Nathan F. Twining, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as saying that if atomic bombings of air bases did not force China to break off the conflict, there would be “no alternative but to conduct nuclear strikes deep into China as far north as Shanghai.”
He suggested that such strikes would “almost certainly involve nuclear retaliation against Taiwan and possibly against Okinawa,” the Japanese island where American military forces were based, “but he stressed that if national policy is to defend the offshore islands then the consequences had to be accepted.”
The study also paraphrased the secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, as observing to the Joint Chiefs of Staff that “nobody would mind very much the loss of the offshore islands but that loss would mean further Communist aggression. Nothing seems worth a world war until you looked at the effect of not standing up to each challenge posed.”
Ultimately, President Dwight D. Eisenhower pushed back against the generals and decided to rely on conventional weapons at first. But nobody wanted to enter another protracted conventional conflict like the Korean War, so there was “unanimous belief that this would have to be quickly followed by nuclear strikes unless the Chinese Communists called off this operation.”
Mr. Ellsberg said he copied the full version of the study when he copied the Pentagon Papers. But he did not share the Taiwan study with reporters who wrote about the Vietnam War study in 1971, like Neil Sheehan of The Times.
Mr. Ellsberg quietly posted the full study online in 2017, when he published a book, “Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner.” One of its footnotes mentions in passing that passages and pages omitted from the study are available on his website.
But he did not quote the study’s material in his book, he said, because lawyers for his publisher worried about potential legal liability. He also did little else to draw attention to the fact that its redacted pages are visible in the version he posted. As a result, few noticed it.
Mr. Burr said he had tried about two decades ago to use the Freedom of Information Act to obtain a new declassification review of the study — which was written by Morton H. Halperin for the RAND Corporation — but the Pentagon was unable to locate an unabridged copy in its files. (RAND, a nongovernmental think tank, is not itself subject to information act requests.)
Mr. Ellsberg said tensions over Taiwan did not seem as urgent in 2017. But the uptick in saber-rattling — he pointed to a recent cover of The Economist magazinethat labeled Taiwan “the most dangerous place on Earth” and a recent opinion column by The Times’s Thomas L. Friedman titled, “Is There a War Coming Between China and the U.S.?” — prompted him to conclude it was important to get the information into greater public view.
Michael Szonyi, a Harvard University historian and author of a book about one of the offshore islands at the heart of the crisis, “Cold War Island: Quemoy on the Front Line,” called the material’s availability “hugely interesting.”
Any new confrontation over Taiwan could escalate and officials today would be “asking themselves the same questions that these folks were asking in 1958,” he said, linking the risks created by “dramatic” miscalculations and misunderstandings during serious planning for the use of nuclear weapons in 1958 and today’s tensions.
Mr. Ellsberg said he also had another reason for highlighting his exposure of that material. Now 90, he said he wanted to take on the risk of becoming a defendant in a test case challenging the Justice Department’s growing practice of using the Espionage Act to prosecute officials who leak information.
Enacted during World War I, the Espionage Act makes it a crime to retain or disclose, without authorization, defense-related information that could harm the United States or aid a foreign adversary. Its wording covers everyone — not only spies — and it does not allow defendants to urge juries to acquit on the basis that disclosures were in the public interest.
Using the Espionage Act to prosecute leakers was once rare. Mr. Ellsberg himself was charged under it, before a judge threw out the charges in 1973 because of government misconduct. The first successful such conviction was in 1985. But it has now become routine for the Justice Department to bring such charges.
Most of the time, defendants strike plea deals to avoid long sentences, so there is no appeal. The Supreme Court has not confronted questions about whether the law’s wording or application trammels First Amendment rights.
Saying the Justice Department should charge him for his open admission that he disclosed the classified study about the Taiwan crisis without authorization, Mr. Ellsberg said he would handle his defense in a way that would tee the First Amendment issues up for the Supreme Court.
“I will, if indicted, be asserting my belief that what I am doing — like what I’ve done in the past — is not criminal,” he said, arguing that using the Espionage Act “to criminalize classified truth-telling in the public interest” is unconstitutional.
They're being allowed to talk. I don't accept this but its unofficial pretext. In a tightly controlled media landscape these people get to say things that the CCP is responsible for.
If the CCP has a spine then they should speak officially and not shoot from the shoulders of 3rd parties.
ABC Australia on their 60 minutes program interviews a CCP water boy who then issues threats to Australia using Aussie media (!) Typical opposition channel antics.
Better way to handle Victor Gao is invite him on your channel after any statement in Chinese media and then turn him into a punching bag like Arnab does here
Don't let him pass along any messages or deliver statements. Just ask him for answers.
From July. The sort of thing Pompeo called out. And yeah that Vietnam vet, Chinese Colonel I mentioned half a year back is a part of it with his launch on warning nonsense.
The message: If Tokyo steps in to defend Taiwan against China, "nuclear weapons will surely be used against Japan".
Did Beijing use the local government account to share propaganda and send a message to the world, or did a low-level official just go a little rogue?
Tom Sear, a cyber propaganda and China expert from the University of New South Wales, said it could be both.
"The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) are allowing a posture to have a life, while also making it seem like it's not their official message," he said.
"Of course China can't say that. That's a massive diplomatic incident if they were to do that, but if a fanboy does it, that appears like the voice of the people."
For a country with a very tightly controlled media landscape, experts say the fact the video exists tells us something.
"It wouldn't be there to see if someone didn't want us to look at it," Mr Sear said.
"So, it's not an official statement by the CCP but the fact it isn't blocked or censored demonstrates a complicity, a passive endorsement."
At one point, the narrator says Japan will be an "exemption" to China's "no use or no first use of nuclear weapon commitment" if Tokyo "intervenes militarily in our domestic affairs, including in the unification of Taiwan".
"Nuclear power is an elephant in the military-diplomatic room," he said.
"China doesn't talk about its nuclear power much, so this kind of [social media] subterfuge is a way of placing a threat on the agenda."
Nonsense statements are made by various actors but they cannot be ignored and have to be flagged as such.
This is the definition of grey zone media operations.
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