CN China is building its military on a 'scale not seen since WWII' and is on track to be able to invade Taiwan by 2027: US admiral - China's military has added more than 400 fighter aircraft and 20 warships to its arsenal and doubled its missile inventory in the last three years said the admiral.

China's rapid military build-up is more expansive than anything seen since World War II, which means it's on track with its 2027 goal to be ready for a Taiwan invasion, said US Navy Adm. John Aquilino.

"All indications point to the PLA meeting President Xi Jinping's directive to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027," Aquilino wrote in a testimony to the US Armed Services House Committee.

"Furthermore, the PLA's actions indicate their ability to meet Xi's preferred timeline to unify Taiwan with mainland China by force if directed," added the admiral, the outgoing head of the US Indo-Pacific Command.


Navy Adm. John C. Aquilino, commander, U.S. Indo-Pacific Command holds a press conference at the Pentagon in Washington D.C., United States on October 17, 2023. Celal Gunes/Anadolu via Getty Images
Notably, Aquilino told lawmakers in a hearing on Wednesday that he also believes China still hopes to assimilate Taiwan without war, though Beijing is fast approaching the capacity for an assault.

He and Assistant Defense Secretary for the Indo-Pacific Command Ely Ratner both said the threat of direct conflict between the US and China is "neither immediate nor inevitable," but that the Pentagon must move fast to reduce the risk of war.

His projected timeline aligns with the one given by his predecessor, Ret. Adm. Philip Davidson, and other US military leaders that China seeks to reach Taiwan invasion capabilities by 2027 while not necessarily wanting war.

Aquilino wrote in his testimony that of the three main US concerns in the region — Russia, China, and North Korea — China is the "only country that has the capability, capacity, and intent to upend the international order."

"On a scale not seen since WWII, the PLA's buildup is occurring across land, sea, air, space, cyber, and information domains," he added.

China's military has added more than 400 fighter aircraft and 20 warships to its arsenal and doubled its missile inventory in the last three years, Aquilino said.
At the same time, Beijing has increased the number of satellites it fields by 50% and more than doubled its nuclear warhead arsenal, he added.

Aquilino urged the US to intensify its military development, saying threats in the Indo-Pacific continue to "grow and accelerate."

"We must go faster," Aquilino repeatedly told lawmakers over the two-hour hearing on Wednesday.

He recommended deploying systems in Guam that can defend against hypersonic and cruise missiles by 2027, two years earlier than the 2029 deadline set by Congress in December.


A U.S. Air Force Rockwell B-1B Lancer (L) and a Boeing KC-135 Stratotanker (R) sit on the tarmac at Andersen Air Force base on August 17, 2017 in Yigo, Guam. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

This year, the Indo-Pacific Command flagged in a priority wish list that it hoped for $11 billion more than the funds allocated by the White House, with $430 million requested for the Guam missile defense system, per documents obtained by Politico Pro.

China has not officially signaled a coming war with Taiwan. However, Xi has said that he believes unification is inevitable. He's also refused to rule out assimilating the self-governed island by force.

Analysts have debated its ability to successfully pull off an amphibious invasion of the island, and the likelihood and timeliness of US intervention are central to the calculus.

If it were to invade Taiwan, Beijing would have the herculean task of safely moving a mass ground force over the strait. China does appear to be exploring transport options like requisitioning civilian ships to help with transport.

On the other hand, analysts say Taiwan's best bet for defense is likely to hold out for the US to arrive.

Meanwhile, US leaders have been concerned with Xi's mandate to make China's military a "world-class" force by 2027, as the White House fears that Beijing seeks to supplant the US as the dominant power in the Indo-Pacific and eventually the rest of the globe.

More recently, Beijing's forces were caught up in a corruption scandal that saw Xi ousting multiple senior leaders — including some from its heavily emphasized Rocket Force.

The purge and reports of graft materially affecting China's arsenal triggered questions internationally about the true strength of the People's Liberation Army, and if Xi's military goals have been delayed.

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[Rei is Shit.]

This communist regime is reporting massive GDP growth while ever major domestic corp goes bankrupt.

So what are the numbers? How many have gone bankrupt? What percent is that? ect.

At any sign of war, it needs to be nuked immediately. You just demolished a significant portion of their infrastructure and recruiting base from the resulting flood.

This is a great idea, start using nukes against a country that has nukes.

Just what do you think will happen if you do that?

 

[Kiwisee]

I say just get it over with at this point. The US has its arms tied with Ukraine and Israel, so now would be a good time for China to do what they've been promising for decades

 

[Watcher]

I could see him do it it if reports from yesmen made him believe he'd win.

I hope they do, I wish no harm on either side of the strait, but even the best land army in the world is useless drowning underwater, so I hope the "Communist" Sturmabteilung fanatics end their careers of terror during the anti-ship turkeyshoot, than actually winning victories against Mongols, Vietnamese or Russian positions. If the "PLA" take Vladivostok, then all my dear friends in Beijing will die. If they besiege Hanoi, then it'll make the Ukraine war seem like a toddler fight. If they take Mongolia then Xi's regime would have the resources to continue even longer.

Taiwan on the other hand would either be a quick failure or a quick victory and short of the Americans mistaking the trajectory of China's unreliable 'carrier killer' missiles for nukes or Taiwan's airforce/rocket artillery blowing up the three gorges and making Wuhan and Shanghai the new Atlantis, civilian casualties would be minimal.

There's no better time then this decade. China has a big but middle income trapped economy, and has made most of the easy wins improving their military through copying foreign tech and doctrine. They've got a large cohort of young single men, who become frailer and less militarily useful as the years go by. Emperor Xi isn't getting any younger himself and wants to carve a deep mark in the history books.

It's not going to work out for China long term if they do it.

China relies on the US economically. Even if they somehow manage to occupy Taiwan the US is going to impose so many sanctions on China that their manufacturing will just collapse. Ontop of that most of the countries they import food from will also collapse. Most big Chinese corporations will also collapse as a result of this. It'll cause the economy to shrink. China is also on the cusp of a population crisis occurring in 2030 so it's a really bad time to cause the economy to tank.

 

[Individualism Incarnate]

China: OUR ARMY IS AT WW2 LEVELS OF POWER
America: Oh no!
Japan:

 

[Prokhor Zakharov]

China relies on the US economically. Even if they somehow manage to occupy Taiwan the US is going to impose so many sanctions on China that their manufacturing will just collapse. Ontop of that most of the countries they import food from will also collapse. Most big Chinese corporations will also collapse as a result of this. It'll cause the economy to shrink. China is also on the cusp of a population crisis occurring in 2030 so it's a really bad time to cause the economy to tank.

Not to mention that the population crisis, if they start a war in 2027, will literally be catastrophic, with the loss of lives fighting this war. It would cause an unrecoverable population crash that would put them in a hole for 50 years, and the restructuring of the world economy required to deal with such a situation would throw the entire world into a literal second depression with no end in sight. It would put everyone in the world into a position where they would likely envy the dead.

 

[pikachudidnothingwrong]

China is immensely more dangerous than people appreciate. A lot more than Russia, NK or Iran at the very least. In the short to medium term..

They are sitting on a demographics disaster that makes SK, europe or Japan's problems look like a small speed bump. They are only a few decades away from having tens -to- hundreds of millions more old people than young or middle aged. (i.e. working aged), and on top of that, their efforts to quietly restart their birth rates over the last decade or so have failed utterly and they are still falling. There is no chinese/totalitarian exception for the first world birthrate paradox it seems. (this seriously needs to be thought of and treated as the greatest threat to humanity going forward.. before it's too late to do anything without emergency totalitarian methods) Not to mention the sex imbalance brought on by the one child disaster. Lots of men without hope of wives and families, historically, leads to major societal problems.. And were usually dealt with through creating external conflict for them to fight/die in.

On top of all that.. Most of their economy (trillions of it) is based on a real estate fraud scheme which sees whole major cities worth of empty, poorly built, falling apart real estate. With most families, and companies "invested" in such schemes. (a LOT of families owning 2nd and even 3rd homes/apartments) Thanks to lack of other legal ways to invest or save. When real estate crashes, so to goes construction and their banking system.. to say nothing of the local and regional governments who are eye deep in these schemes as well. It will be like our real estate, corporate/personal/savings banking, construction and investment systems crashing all at one time. Now add onto that the local and state governments going down with them. All that real estate, beginning to fall apart, is only going to hold up the illusion for so long. If you think the ongoing collapse of the construction end of the real estate industry over there looks bad already... Just wait until nobody is able to pretend that their "investments" are even worth pennies on the dollar!

You combine all this and see why the Chinese going forward a few decades are barely even just a paper tiger. It also becomes a lot clearer why they take such hardline stances on things. And puts into context their actions in the south asian sea, with India and all the other lands of others that they claim. We even see it internally with a crackdown on everything, and political in-party shit.. With Xi making power grabs and securing his position. They know it's now or never to project power, regionally or locally, or to achieve their political and empire goals. That's what makes them so dangerous. A lot of their targets are countries and land that we have explicit, legal or default obligation to defend. (SK, Taiwan and don't forget, they claim Japanese islands as well) Even Vietnam is scared enough to talk about the potential for a future defense agreement with the US.

Add to all that, stuff like this.. They don't need a military on the tech or quality level of the US, when they can throw 100 million bodies armed with guns and an outfit, into a local fight.

And in case anyone forgets.. They are currently, desperately, attempting to build a system to circumvent global sanctions, along with a handful of other failed and pariah states. Do people not find it interesting that they watched one country get punished for trying to annex another and then instantly thought "hey, we better find a way to prevent that happening to us"

It's all pretty clear and explicit. Anyone who doesn't view CCP China as the greatest threat, is not paying attention.

Worst off all.. They are aligned with most of the other threats. If anything happens with China.. NK at the VERY LEAST is going off on SK. God only knows what Iran and Russia would feel/be empowered to do.

 

[anustart76]

I don't see China invading Taiwan any time soon because Taiwan would pull a poison pill strategy with their chip fabs. It would basically destroy electronics manufacturing for the entire world to a huge degree, and hurt China itself very badly. To actually do it would be a very stupid move.

 

[Golden Boy]

Having a standing army? Only the US is allowed to do that!

 

[SIMIΔN]

the Donbass (yes, really) and Africa.

Seriously? I know Russia needs at least some domestic chips for security reasons, but not within enemy artillery range.

China is immensely more dangerous than people appreciate.

Yes, there's nothing more dangerous than a hungry tiger. Politically though, it's insane how quickly Trump's diplomatic success in North Korea was undone, and how Russia was forced to switch from supplying Germany to supplying China.

 

[BoomerSperg1922]

The CHIPS act's subsidized initiative to bring fabs on-shore to the US has failed utterly because it demanded half the workforce be niggers.
niggers don't know how to make computer chips, or anything else aside from crime, so the companies decided the subsidies didn't pay for the dead weight and cut bait for stable areas like the Donbass (yes, really) and Africa.

This is true, but I was thinking more along the lines of 'Taiwan wont produce 90% of chips when most of the island is ashes.'

 

[Blazeuser56]

Russia invading Ukraine? Check.
Hamas fighting with Israel on a full scale war? Check
Just need Chinese invasion of Taiwan and North Korean invasion of South Korea and we will get WW3

 

[draggs]

I say just get it over with at this point. The US has its arms tied with Ukraine and Israel, so now would be a good time for China to do what they've been promising for decades

The US Navy isn't tied anywhere except 1 CSG and some additional destroyers in the Red Sea. There's 3 CSG in the Western Pacific and 1 more at San Diego plus whatever's at Pearl

The US Air Force isn't tied anywhere it has lots of planes chilling in Japan and South Korea and Guam and Hawaii

 

[The Gene Genie]

The US Navy isn't tied anywhere except 1 CSG and some additional destroyers in the Red Sea. There's 3 CSG in the Western Pacific and 1 more at San Diego plus whatever's at Pearl

The US Air Force isn't tied anywhere it has lots of planes chilling in Japan and South Korea and Guam and Hawaii

7th Fleet only has one permanently stationed CSG. The rest in PACFLT are either under temporary deployment in the Far East or are a few days’ steaming from their bases in San Diego and Bremerton. In the shooting war, it’ll be decided in the first few days with the Naval forces stationed in Yokosuka.

Naval warfare a numbers game at the end of the day. Ships aren’t built like they used to so they withstand hits. If you want a somewhat modern example, take the HMS Coventry and Sheffield at the Falklands. Moreover, the way the USN mans their ships, it makes it so that they’re not very flexible when it comes to casualties. Even having just a dozen men go down could theoretically cripple the ship, and I’m not talking about guys like the Captain. In World War II they had guys in the crew who were there solely to take over when someone died. That doesn’t exist anymore. There’s no redundancies and more often than not there’s one guy with ten guys’ worth of responsibilities under his hat.

It’s grim and it’s not as good of an outlook as you think it is. Like I said earlier I have faith that we’d beat the Chinese in the long run (if, domestically, America can stomach continuously high casualty rates for the duration) but the Navy has been set up for failure by generations of poor leadership, corporate grift, and government retardation.

 

[Pendulous Dong]

The way you can tell that this is bullshit is because it's just pushing the timeline up by two years. Remember in February of last year when the military was saying that they would invade Taiwan in 2025? I do.

The truth is that China is incapable of projecting force literally anywhere. American doomers like to bitch about Chinese shipbuilding capacity, but forget that most of these ships are literally just fishing boats that have been deputized by the military to shore up numbers. The new Chinese service rifles keyhole at ten yards. The concept of "give your soldiers body armor" was a foreign concept to the Chinese until 2020. The one military engagement the Chinese have had in the past 40 years was in 2016, in which Chinese soldiers literally pissed their pants and ran away after two of their soldiers got shot by Sudanese retards with AKMs.

Quit thinking China is going to invade Taiwan, they're not a real country.

 

[draggs]

7th Fleet only has one permanently stationed CSG. The rest in PACFLT are either under temporary deployment in the Far East or are a few days’ steaming from their bases in San Diego and Bremerton. In the shooting war, it’ll be decided in the first few days with the Naval forces stationed in Yokosuka.

Naval warfare a numbers game at the end of the day. Ships aren’t built like they used to so they withstand hits. If you want a somewhat modern example, take the HMS Coventry and Sheffield at the Falklands. Moreover, the way the USN mans their ships, it makes it so that they’re not very flexible when it comes to casualties. Even having just a dozen men go down could theoretically cripple the ship, and I’m not talking about guys like the Captain. In World War II they had guys in the crew who were there solely to take over when someone died. That doesn’t exist anymore. There’s no redundancies and more often than not there’s one guy with ten guys’ worth of responsibilities under his hat.

It’s grim and it’s not as good of an outlook as you think it is. Like I said earlier I have faith that we’d beat the Chinese in the long run (if, domestically, America can stomach continuously high casualty rates for the duration) but the Navy has been set up for failure by generations of poor leadership, corporate grift, and government retardation.

Sounds good but it doesn't match the reality of how well air defenses have operated on both sides in the only war we have useful data on. None of these ships on either side other than the aircraft carriers and amphibious assault ships are built to withstand hits from big missiles. Some of them it would take only one, fortunes of war some of them it would take 2-3 more. That's why they've both spent tens of billions on air defense systems. The rest is degeneracy sperging and a weird reference to ships built 50 years ago that were sunk 40 years ago

Even if you do, China isn't dismissing Ukraine not getting blasted in short order by long-range missile strikes because it has a limited number of donated Western systems, a limitation that doesn't exist in an Aegis group or at Kadena or Misawa

 

[newuser131]

why is china losing patience with taiwan? china waited 100 years to get hong kong back. they waited over 200 years to get back at the west with the opium wars. but not for taiwan? why not wait for 50 years to subvert taiwan elections to get a commie government in there, then unify?

 

[Bummer]

They won't do it, their economy is already faltering and war against Taiwan would convert their recession into a fully fledged crisis.

There is an argument that their current economic and demographic situation could force the CCP to try Taiwan even if they know it is a loosing war. If they know the government is going to fold up anyway due to internal problems, starting a war to galvanize the people and fight when the demographic situation is best may look like the only way to ensure a future where the CCP still exists in some form. It's like being trapped in a building with an active shooter. If your options are fight and probably die or sit around waiting to definitely die, fighting becomes the most logical course of action.

 

[Skeletonized Cow]

the US is going to impose so many sanctions on China that their manufacturing will just collapse.

Just like Russia, right? The American economy is *also* reliant on China so when the Chinese manufacturing "collapses," so too does the American economy. It's economic MAD.

Except, of course, for the fact that America and the global west lack the large-scale manufacturing and resource exploitation that China possesses or has ready access of. The only thing China doesn't have a domestic supply (or friendly trade partner) are the most advanced microchips, but they're only about a decade behind so it isn't the end of the world for them. So China is actually the one holding the winning hand in this conflict, at least at the moment.

 

[No. 7 cat]

They won't do it, their economy is already faltering and war against Taiwan would convert their recession into a fully fledged crisis.

They're failing through demographic and real estate implosion. Companies are fleeing a country that rips off their patents in favor in insourcing to local contract or own manufacturing. Their imported energy is massively expensive compared to the US. Finally, Red China has a record of defeat or bloody stalemate against India and Vietnam. They're a paper tiger. They will not be making an opposing landing on a fortified island opposed by the US Navy. Some here worship turd worlders, but they're not doing shit to the Republic of China on Taiwan.

 

[Weeb Slinger]

Part of me wonders if this sudden surge of army enlistment isn't more about getting all these youths off the streets and away from trouble as currently youth unemployment, unofficially of course, is somewhere north of 20%.

That's a lot of potential trouble makers sitting idle, better to get them into the Army and keep them busy and out of trouble.

Also it sure don't hurt to have a nice big pool of ready trained bodies to call up if Chairman Meow does decide to set things off.

It's kind of what Eritrea did after they gained independence. Ostensibly 18 months conscription that has a habit if being extended for longer periods. The problem is, down the line, you end with a cohort of military trained individuals with no other avenues of employment and a grudge against the government.