The USA does not have enough missiles and antimissiles to beat China over Taiwan and Russia over the Baltics according to RAND thinktank wargames.
Precision long-range missiles will be the critical ammunition in any future war with China and Russia. Those missiles can take out air bases, air defenses and aircraft carriers. Anti-missiles and missile defenses are for protecting your air bases and critical air assets.
China, Russia and the USA all have precision long-range missiles. China and Russia can cripple US satellites with missile and cyber attacks.
Being able to destroy air bases and aircraft carriers means that stealth fighter and stealth bombers can be destroyed on the ground.
Having a lot of aircraft carriers, tanks and other expensive military vehicles but not enough missiles is like having a lot of guns but not enough bullets.
The US needs to cut back on a few large military systems to get thousands of missiles and anti-missile systems.
The US needs to increase spending on missile and anti-missile systems to about 5% of the overall military budget. The US has a military budget of about $700 billion and 15% is for procurement of weapon systems and missiles. The US needs to spend an extra $24 billion on missiles and anti-missile systems.
SOURCES- Rand, Breaking Defense
Written By Brian Wang
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
Known for identifying cutting edge technologies, he is currently a Co-Founder of a startup and fundraiser for high potential early-stage companies. He is the Head of Research for Allocations for deep technology investments and an Angel Investor at Space Angels.
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The notorious EU doesn’t even try. They only fight themselves. You can lead them, General Coward.
No, we won’t panic. We’ll get angry. Nothing brings together America like a common enemy.
I don’t consider Russia a serious threat to the US, but creating a NATO bulwark from Central European nations is a provocation.
Translation: You didn’t read it at all or you did but don’t like that I am right so you have to mischaracterize what I said/meant.
It is a common debate rhetorical tactic by the intellectually outclassed. Sad that it works 90% of the time. But for the other 10% of the time, it blows up in your face.
Too bad for you that you are now in 10% land. AND I called you out for doing it.
EVEN WORSE: You just also got caught falsely attributing a quote to me made by foofighter, not me. I mean, I know that most of the intellectually outclassed do get really desperate at this point when getting their butts kicked by me, but really? That bad? And you thought you wouldn’t be caught?
Now that you did get caught, I predict now that you will try to pass this all off as a ‘mistake’ on your part or something. Sorry, not gonna work.
Nope. I do not. 🙂
Offensive behavior is what Matteo is doing right there in that post I replied to him about:
I never call specific people names. I call stupid content said names and attributed generalities assigned to no particular person said names, but that is not the same thing. 🙂
Example of the former: “YOU are a Libtard!”
Example of the latter: “And yet another reason why Libtard should be an actual term in the dictionary!”
The first is an insult directed specifically to you. So you thus have cause to claim I was being offensive.
The second is not. If you find it offensive, it is because you do so entirely via your imagination in your head, not because I actually said that about you.
Luca/Matteo gets banned for always screwing up and reverting to the former. I used to also get banned as well before I wised up and started doing only the latter.
End of today’s lesson on Forum Rule Lawyering 101 And How NBASSHOLE Exploits It To The Hilt.
(Although in this case, Matteo probably gets an exception because I DO call myself NBASSHOLE. I wonder if it is Matteo got smart enough to figure this out or just got lucky this time. I am voting for ‘just got lucky’.)
I agree that they can make a bomb in a few months. Taiwan is pretty well penetrated by China. I highly doubt that even that part will manage to get off the planning stage without being discovered by China. Even if they manage to get a bomb, you still need a good delivery system. Threatening China by saying “I have a bomb and I will nuke my own place if you invade” does not work. Taiwan does not have a missile that will deliver this to China so one would have to be developed. Even if the West slip them a few blueprints, it will still be a very expensive and long development. China will invade long before any of this done.
Which was actually a feature of the old European empires as they moved into the mid 20th century. It turned out that they were costing more money to keep and maintain than the mother country was getting from them.
Which is why they abandoned said empires when the world wars broke their economies and they were forced to realize that at this point they were only keeping their overseas colonies for ego and inertia.
High LEO is not that vulnerable, most missile systems in operation at the moment are limited to under 2000 km. You need a big rocket to get up that high and by then anything that is up can be defended against. If there is enough destruction in LEO, you get the Kessler Syndrome. Disabling or de-orbiting stuff is the only safe way or you screw yourself too.
SO maybe you live in Vietnam as an ex-pat, or maybe Bali? They have great coffee.
Funny thing is that California and NY provide a huge level of financial support to smaller states though federal taxes. Take those two out of the US and the federal deficit goes up by 50% or more if you left all other spending and tax levels alone. Seriously, the US deficit would increase by ~400-500 billion per year without those two states tax contributions at current spending in all states that are not CA and NY.
No, I read your comment and it was dibble. Taiwan doesn’t even need nuclear capability, but they could have it in an instant since they currently operate nuclear power stations and have all the materials and level of tech to do it in a matter of months. No one needs to give them it. If China pushes too hard, they could go nuclear and MAD happens.
“Working knowledge should be available for a place like Taiwan, but to take nuclear material and make it weapon grade still involve huge undertaking and would not happen with the snap of a finger.”
Dribble. Yes it would happen in the snap of a finger, just like Japan could have a working nuke in a week if they wanted it badly enough. Once you have a series of nuclear reactors and a stockpile of fuel for them, adapting one to bombard some material and breed the stuff you need for an A-Bomb is not as hard as you think.
He doesn’t get banned for nutty ideas, he gets banned for offensive behaviour.
And you kind of set the bar there.
You don’t SAY it’s a long distance space missile. You call it a Mars transport ship.
Earth Orbit assets are extremely vulnerable to missile attack.
Space is big. Something in the asteroid belt is probably safer than anywhere on Earth.
Cyber attack is distance agnostic, but I can’t see why space, or orbital, assets would be different from anywhere else.
I am reminded of the original European age of exploration.
If the Iberian Peninsula gets a head start using intercontinental resources at industrial scale, the economic advantage will become so big, the competition can “never” catch up as long as the growth curve is maintained.
Which did sort of hold for about 150 years, but internal politics and hopeless economic management meant they couldn’t maintain the lead. (A huge Earthquake and Tsunami didn’t help Portugal either.)
A small disagreement that people ARE talking about developing space mining tech. To the point of floating companies and investing money.
But overall I agree.
Adding boiled tree sap to rubbish coffee is hardly an improvement.
Nobody has air breathing hypersonic propulsion and nobody is particularly close, and no, Avangard isn’t it, and no, Zircon isn’t it.
Space based assets are extremely vulnerable to missile attack and cyber attack. It can become a new leg of the triad (quadrad?) but it doesn’t make any sense to rely on it significantly. Fat lot of good your weapons platforms do when their computer systems are crippled with a worm.
Higher than LEO doesn’t make sense. You don’t save enough money in reduction of number of platforms to make up for the additional launch cost, the additional mass cost of the missile itself and you lose on response time. If you want to put missiles in LEO, you can practically stick existing modified SM-3 Mk II-A’s up there. If you want to put a missile at MEO or god forbid, higher, you have to start a whole new missile design program from the ground up. You could probably get a missile platform and a handful of SM-3’s onto a FH launch in a few years on a classified launch without anyone even knowing. You put a RFI out for a giant fucking “can go 12,000 miles through the vacuum of space” missile, everyone’s going to know what you’re doing 3 years before you even get to test doing it.
If you wait for them to get to ‘the homeland’, you are already in a catastrophic amount of shit. Keep the enemy off balanced enough in their little regional agendas that they don’t even have the free time to ponder fucking with your homeland. We don’t wargame around the Baltics because we actually care about the baltics, we wargame around the Baltics because it’s a way to keep Russia occupied. It is resource attrition.
Actually, it is $11 billion, the $300 bil is in Taiwanese currency.
It is great that SpaceX made the rockets cheaper. At the end of the day, there still needs to be something up there that is worth enough money to do this in an industrial scale. Further, a whole host of technologies needs to be developed to make space mining possible. Developing such tech may take decades. The fact that nobody is talking about this probably means we are decades away from any viable space based mining operation. Heck, we can’t even frack and break even for most of the companies. Otherwise it is money down the rat hole. Efficiency does not mitigate the fact that space mining is many times the cost of earth mining.
It’s all about logistics and efficiency, i.e industrial output and bang for the buck. The US will have a massive delta-v advantage for the foreseeable future unless something dramatic happens. The advantage must be kept and/or increased by following up with industrialization of space. Militarization will bootstrap everything with ISRU, fuel depots, orbital tugs, power stations, space nuclear power, bases etc.
After missiles directed towards the ground comes big lasers for offensive capabilities in space. This will mitigate any enemy space based assets. The lasers have dual use as propellantless propulsion, which will accelerate development even more.
If the US gets a head start using space resources at industrial scale, the economic advantage will become so big, the competition can “never” catch up as long as the growth curve is maintained. 50% more citizens on Earth won’t matter as much in a future with AIs and robots. Just bootstrap capitalism in space and watch the exponential growth.
No, that wasn’t my main point.
Learn to read.
Answers in order:
No
No
Russia isn’t the Soviet Union. Warsaw Pact is gone.
Cold War is over. Period.
.
Being next door to a Russian-occupied Poland that is savaging cutting down every Russian solder stupid enough to go into the woods to take a pee is in Germany’s interest for sure. The Germans might not anger Moscow by smuggling supplies and weapons to the Poles but the Czechs and Hungarians most certainly will.
Germany’s refugee crises are all made by Germany, not imposed.
Last, you present this as a ‘choice’ for the Germans. Whereas the only choice for them is how to deal with what the Russians will do anyway to get the best of the situation as possible. The Germans can not fight the Russians today. So if they decided to do so in Poland, the Russians will just extend their invasion into Eastern Germany at the very least.
That means Ribbentrop-Molotov 2.0 or close to it is the best possible outcome for them today. For tomorrow, that they worry about later.
Hello Matteo! Time for you to get banned again, I see.
That is not a geopolitical imperative of the US. Damaging, yes. But the US can recover from that a whole lot easier than a geopolitically strategic loss.
Is the EU capable of nothing? What is the point of it then?
They can do that now. Why would that stop the US?
BTW, the Taiwanese defense budget is about $300 bil. Cannot afford too many of these missile sites that cost tens of billions.
Missiles are expensive. Defensive ones more then the average. You need in flight course adjustments, on board radar and in-flight data link. Something like the Patriot which is $3 mil apiece. You will need at least two for each incoming projectile to have a 90% interception rate. The rocket artillery cost maybe $50K apiece. If they know where your missiles are located and how many you can fire, they can always design an attack that will overwhelm your system. Let’s say 200 rockets are timed to arrive at the same time, on the defense side, you will need 400 missiles, $10 mil is traded for a billion. At the end, 10%, or 20 rockets get through. Equipment damaged, people wounded, some radars out of action. Amid the screaming and confusion, the second wave arrives. This time, 30% got through. By the fourth wave, the facility, along with most of the missiles in storage, are destroyed. At the cost of $40 mil, they have destroyed something that will cost the Taiwanese side tens of billion to build.
Foxconn is in China.
This comment is perhaps the most clueless.
Really that is your main point? they stole A-bomb deigns? MAD was already a thing decades before then, adapt or be destroyed.
Any conflict between China and the US is likely to go nuclear, and we have plenty of missiles for that. How many sons and daughters and family are we going to lose in the next conflict caused by the greed and ambitions of the political class?
Wow a lot of clueless comment here US outspends the next what – 5 countries combined in military spend the current isolationist rhetoric is rubbish Russia has Italy’s gdp and China just wants to subvert the world both know fighting the US is pointless and expensive but it’s weakness is the racist gun nut misogynistic rednecks poorly educated easily subverted and too busy fighting other Americans
Canadian ?
Point is that we operate that kind of tech now, not 10 years from now.
And your don’t think that the USA would loose something in long term if more and more states were to fall into the hands of Russia and china?
By the way, I agree that Europe has been freeloading on the USA, but that doesn’t mean that it might not be in the interest of USA to stave off the communists and the oligarks..?
Well, not true.. Even if China could hit the missiles, it would be a moot option if the Taiwanese missiles could be fired while the attack was in the air. And that is feasible, right?
Missile defense, they are only good if you got some place to put the missiles so they cannot be hit at will. Taiwan is a small place and crowded. There are only a limited places you can put these. You can jam all the missiles you want, but the Chinese will know where they are and they have the first mover advantage. Most will be knocked out in the first salvo of bombardment launched by the Chinese. They don’t even need missiles to do it. They have improved rocket artillery that, while not as accurate, are significantly cheaper. They can launch them from many bases across the strait.
Drones are cool when you play video games, but they are not survivable unless you control the sky. After the initial bombardment, most of the Taiwanese fighters will be destroyed in their hangers. What is left will be outclassed and hopelessly outnumbered by the Chinese fighters and missiles. If the Chinese control the sky, the drones are useless. They will be shot out of the sky as soon as they are launched and will be all gone after the first few hours if the Taiwanese loses control of the sky.
Have them pay a huge price, Now how exactly do you plan to do that? Maybe you can elaborate?
Really, the US already has a satellite killer drone. The X-37. How hard would it be for that thing to cruise around drilling holes into enemy satellites? It already has a robotic arm and can cruise around for years.
Don’t assume I even live in the USA. I couldn’t stand the atrocious coffee.
Coastal envy?
Empire? Only if you consider California and New York to be the rulers and the rest of the USA the subject states.
Where, exactly, were you thinking is under imperial rule?
Instead of talking about fighting a war (which will invariably lead to nuclear exchange). We should be talking about taking down the weapons. Rand is just funded by the military-industrial complex to scare dollars out of the taxpayers.
In the next 5 years, probably so.
But big strategic decisions have to look further ahead than 5 years.
Will China have heavy space lift available in the next 20 years? Almost certainly. Even more likely if the USA has been demonstrating how useful it is.
As much as the Germans might not be happy about being next door to a heavily armed Polish army, being next door to a heavily armed Russian army would be worse.
Hence a Russian invasion of Poland would not be to Germany’s advantage.
Not to mention ANOTHER refugee crisis for the Germans to be completely unable to deal with.
So I’m not following your logic here.
You can call any comment you want meaningless, also yours, that doesn’t make it meaningless!
Uh, losing access to TSMC would be a fairly critical blow to the semiconductor supply chain (which now has its tentacles everywhere), never mind all the electronics subcontractors there. The US has made a conscious choice to not retain a full strategic industrial supply chain domestically (via subsidy or nationalization) to cut costs, at their peril.
These vehicles are still above the clouds and visible from space. That is one area of defense development which would be highly guarded.
You sound just like the Red Guard during the Cultural Revolution. slogan along without substance is meaningless.
First, I never said that no country can buy nukes from another country, just that no country will sell nukes to Taiwan. The repercussion from China will be severe. Nuke is 19th century tech. Working knowledge should be available for a place like Taiwan, but to take nuclear material and make it weapon grade still involve huge undertaking and would not happen with the snap of a finger. Even with Western experts, this will take months to construct the centerfuge that do the separation. Once known, this very easily could be bombed to stop the progress. Assume somehow this could be done, miniaturizing the bomb to fit on a missile is not trivial and could take years. Indeed, to have a fast enough missile to evade the Chinese missile shield, which Taiwan currently does not have, is another major bottleneck that I am not sure if the Taiwanese could ever overcome.
Enough with the American doom defeatism! Of course it is possible to defend Taiwan! It is all about making better missiles defense, missiles, attack drones, intelligence drones countering and waiving Chinese progress and having them pay a huge price for trying to get ahead in this game.
…and we can all sit around the campfire and sing ‘Kumbaya!’, too.
We are the only country with lots of reusable lifting capability. And that capability is only going to increase drastically over the next 5 years.
Hence why we need to get as many KEWs up there while we can. Because the other folks will try to do the same if we are weak. In other words, we have to put them up there because we have what they call here a ‘use it or lose it’ opportunity.
Who said anything about them buying nukes from us? And as for ‘no country’, that isn’t true. It has happened before. The Saudis financed the Pakistani nuclear program in exchange for the Paks keeping nukes ready to deliver to SA at a moments’ notice, for example. The Israelis and South Africans, etc. etc.
Not if they have working plans. If the Chinese walked out the door with the plans for our W-88 warhead, then the Taiwanese certainly got them also, one way or another.
No country, even the United States, will sell them nukes. If the U.S. were to sell them nukes, before it could be passed by congress, the invasion would have happened. The Chinese, in turn, will sell nukes to Iran and Lebanon. How about Venezuela? would they want a little nuke? I am sure the U.S. will not like this exchange. To develop them domestically, even for Taiwan, will take years. The secret will not last that long.
Who says? Do-gooders who can’t deal with reality.
No, it is not. Closest analogy would be the Peloponnesian League — which it doesn’t even really need anymore nor has needed since 1993.
Not to mention the fact that while re-taking Taiwan is of enormous interest to the PRC for domestic reasons, US defending it really is not nor is it even that much of a strategic loss, either.
So they need to get them before the Chinese could react. The Chinese could not just invade the place ‘on a dime’, after all.
While securing nukes can be had quite fast. And they would make a wonderful deterrent if Taipei were to mine Chinese cities with nukes or fitted them onto cruise missiles that can be fired from cargo ships approaching Chinese ports of call.
Uh…why would EU produced aircraft ever even carry US nuclear weapons?
The US nuclear umbrella is all US made and manned nuclear weapons — including aircraft.
Willing, yes. Capable: no. Even their own Defense Ministry has publicly acknowledged that the Russians would roll right across Poland. It is mostly one vast plain that continues on through Eastern Germany of Fulda Gap fame. And that any real fight would be after the invasion, with stay-behind-troops out in the woods. The Baltics are set up similarly.
The Poles want us there simply to force the Russians to choose risking their troops fighting Americans in order to prevent a war. As you said.
All the more reason for Germany to stab Poland in the back with Ribbentrop-Molotov 2.0 before that happens. And if NATO is exposed as the fake tiger it is, that is exactly what Berlin will do. 🙂
Switzerland is a very rugged country with inhospitable climate. It is a neutral country without the strategic value that justifies the cost of the invasion. Taiwan is considered part of China by the Chinese. It has a network of highways that allow tanks to move quickly. Its location is very strategic for the Chinese. What is more, the people of Taiwan today are not like the Swiss back in the day. The most vocal green camp who advocated for independence, their kids are not even willing to join the military. Ironically, most of the military came from the KMT. Taiwanese kids in general will not be able to survive if you take away their smart phone for a few minutes. They will surrender just to get their iphone back.
Geez, Brian, no mention whatever of diplomacy.
Just for Fun is right, there are no winners in big war. The US is running what amounts to an empire, but that model leads to overspending, crisis, potential collapse. What, really, is the threat to the US homeland? In a nuclear exchange, Russia could badly hurt the US but in turn would be destroyed. What would cause them to trigger such a situation? Likewise China. NK? Their piddlin’ nukes are clearly just a poison pill. No, the modern paradigm is by economics and population transfer.
Why would anyone think in terms of conventional warfare? The world is now hyper-sonic with nuclear warheads there is no trajectory and by the time you think the weapon flight path is, it is not. Think peace because as always everyone loses in future war.
Taiwan could adopt the Swiss model and make an invasion terribly bloody for China.
Defending Taiwan is an unattainable goal. Whatever missiles we can provide to Taiwan, the Chinese will be the first to make a move. The locations of these missiles will be known. Taiwan is a small rock and lack strategic depth. It adds to the cost of invasion, but I don’t even think by much. If the Chinese made the decision to invade Taiwan, adding more cost will not deter them. That cost is coming down by the year as the Chinese modernize their military.
The only thing that Taiwan can have that truly protects them are nukes, but they tried once and the U.S. took them down. Today, if they try to acquire nukes again, it would guarantee to trigger the invasion.
I agree: if Germany isn’t willing to defend itself then there’s no reason for the U.S. to defend it. I’m inclined to say that the U.S. should refuse to certify any future EU produced aircraft for being capable of carrying U.S. nuclear weapons… and thus exclude nations like Germany from the U.S. nuclear umbrella. At least France has their own domestic nuclear program and good on them for maintaining it.
Poland is very keen to defend itself and I think the U.S. should cooperate with Poland to that end. Poland’s military is quite capable but if Russian tanks were to roll over the boarder it would be a very tough fight for them if they had to go it alone. However if there were a large U.S. military base in Poland and Poland were under the U.S. nuclear umbrella their security would be assured (unless Russia was feeling suicidal).
TBH, it’s not impossible to foresee a scenario in twenty years where a militarized Poland threatens a demilitarized Germany. Irony.
The Baltics is a European problem. They don’t invest in NATO at a level which justifies American support of such a questionable conflict, especially in Ukraine. We could probably keep China at bay just by making the idea of invading Taiwan cost-prohibitive. America needs to build defenses which make the homeland more secure.
We need to be careful what we wish for. We are not the only country that can weaponize space. Before the weaponization of space, the U.S. can strike a country like China and the Chinese would, except for a very expensive DF41 missiles, be limited to striking our allies in Asia. If we both have “rods of God”, this will change. They will now be able to strike the U.S. proper at the same cost as we could them. Any rocket advantages Spacex has could easily be copied.
I was referring to Western Europe and even countries like Poland. The few countries left that are still under the influence of Russia have always been under the shadow of Russia due to their small size and proximity to Russia. I think it is misguided mission to wade into Ukraine for example. In this case, the stake for the U.S. is to mess up Russia, where as the stake for Russia is existential. Adding more missiles to Ukraine simply does not make the situation more tenable. If Ukrainian army were to launch missiles against Russia proper, I think there will be an invasion and Russia will take back Ukraine. There would not be anything we can do about it.
Yes. Taiwan and allies Islands in the the South China sea can be protected with thick arrays of anti ship, submarine, aircraft and anti missile missiles, as well as longer range missiles against bases on China shores. That coupled with screens of drones can deter china with very little manpower and no aircraft carrier additions. Same with Russia in the Baltics and eastern Europe. Big share of the procurement will be done by our allies under a joined plan.
Sorry pal. But here on Planet Reality, it ended in 1993.
Russia is NO Soviet Union. A regional problem, yes. But not a continental hegemonic threat to US geopolitical imperatives like the USSR was. As for it being a nuclear threat, that risk can be severely diminished by simply leaving NATO. What? You actually think we fought the Cold War for the sake of Western Europe? Hahahahahah.
It’s over. Sucks for Europeans that Americans are finally waking up and taking notice. Nice free ride they’ve had sucking on America’s NATO teets! But it is over.
Yup. Put up 5,000 or so permanently orbiting Rods From God kews that we can drop anywhere, anytime.
To further take what Brett already said:
Russia is more motivated to pay the costs to invade Europe than the US is in defending it. EVEN MORE SO if events overtake any semblance of ‘choice’ in the matter (i.e., Riga, Tallinn, etc are taken by Russia within 60 hours and most of Poland is well on its way to being overrun by then as well).
And why should we anyway when the rest of Europe doesn’t seem to care? Only 15% of Germans think their defense spending should increase. If the Germans could basically care less about this situation, then why should we?
Cold war is definitely not over
Here is an even easier and vastly cheaper option:
Don’t defend the Baltics and Taiwan.
Cold War is over, kiddies.
Either that, or keep pretending we will only to screw them over like Poland got in 1939 when the sh-t actually hits the fan.
These “countries”, as you put it, are part of Europe. Eastern Europe, sure, but Europe. And the Russians absolutely have been willing to invade them.
Ergo, the Russians have been willing to invade Europe.
In the European theater, the problem is somewhat different. There are enough places to place these missiles, but borders are largely settled and the issue will be the West trying to challenge Russia in its last bastion of influence like Ukraine. The difference in overall power is so great between Russia and these “countries” and being so close to Russia, missiles will simply not alter the strategic balance. There is no chance that the Russians will invade Europe so the missiles will just sit and collect dust.
Predictable solution is to weaponize space. Conventional missiles in orbits higher than LEO can reach anywhere without additional deployments. The US has a massive delta-V advantage. They will start using it within a few years when the heavy launchers go online.
Good if you want ww3.
Put them in Europe including Ukraine
The problem is, there are very limited platforms to deploy these. We can deploy them along the islands in the first island chain, but they are small places and will be knocked out easily.
We can deploy them in S Korea and Japan, but they still lack depth and not that useful for SCS. Korea is connected to China by land and could be invaded. Japan stands to lose much of its industrial base in a missile exchange, at the end of which, all the U.S. military bases in these two countries are gone.
We can deploy these missiles on ships like the Berks. but ship born missiles are always going to be outclassed by land based missiles so ships will be kept out of their effective firing range in a war.
You can build missiles until the cows come home, but where and how are we going to deploy them?