samsara
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Nice exposition, it tells something about your deep inside thoughtI can and I will. I laugh every time someone even implies there is NO comparison between China and Iraq.
Am going to give you one of many incidents of Desert Storm that military historians and analysts continues to study to this day.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Khafji
https://www.army.mil/article/141322/JSTARS_plays_critical_role_in_Operation_Desert_Storm
JSTARS was a new sensor platform that made its combat presence in Desert Storm 1991 while it was still in the development phase.
At the Battle of Al Khafji, the E-8 JSTARS proved its worth in ways that the PLA can only dream of.
Two radars: Moving Target Indicator (MTI) and Synthetic Aperture (SAR).
SAR is more resource intensive than MTI, from CPU to graphical display. MTI discriminates only velocity differences. If you are moving faster than background, you will be noted. On the other hand, SAR uses radar returns to compose, as approximate as possible to a black and white photograph, of what it sees. For SAR, moving objects are the most difficult to represent.
At the Battle of Al Khafji, the JSTARS crew used the MTI radar to track the Iraqi Army convoy. The JSTARS crew can only guess at the composition of the column. When the convoy stopped, the MTI radar showed nothing. Simply put, there were no velocity differences to display, so the scopes were blanks, so to speak.
If the convoy stopped, that can be either the convoy arrived at its destination, or was preparing to secure itself for the night. But since the convoy stopped moving, it means less computing power demands for the SAR system, so the JSTARS crew turned on the SAR. Back then, the graphics were blurry, but still good enough for the JSTARS crew to discriminate tracked from wheeled vehicles in the convoy. Tracked vehicles means tanks and/or mobile artillery. Wheeled vehicles means troops carriers or other.
The JSTARS crew then guided in fighter-bombers and the slaughter began with the tracked vehicles the first victims.
This is the kind of combat experience the PLA do not have. It does not matter if we are talking about the PLA of today. Convoys obeys certain rules in order to make themselves efficient at what they do -- transport stuff. Under fire, soldiers scatters and seeks cover, even to the ground. Air force fighters like to travels at least in pairs. And so on...
What happened at the Battle of Al Khafji showed how US airmen can quickly adapt as far as EMPLOYMENT of what they have. And as far as airpower goes, this is just one in the thousands of situations, large and small, of how US airmen accomplished their missions using their equipment in ways the original designers never thought of using.
Let us be generous and assume that, in a hypothetical shooting fight between the US and China, the two countries are technological parity.
China WILL still lose. That is my prediction. And I am a Desert Storm veteran.
China will be facing an opponent that has a proven record of creative uses of technology to adapt to the immediate environment and combat situation, as the JSTARS example showed. It is at least one magnitude, but more like two, difference between US and China. What the JSTARS crew did at Al Khafji, we had 20 yrs since then to refine at analyses and exercises, as well as advances in technology. In the decades that we were studying what went right and what went wrong of Desert Storm, China finally started modernizing her military.
People on this forum laughed at US because we defeated Iraq, a country that they said 'could not fight back'.
Iraq definitely could fight back. Iraq watched US build up for months. The Iraqi Army was probably the most combat experienced in the ME. Not even China could have fought the Iraqi military. People foolishly reasoned that the swift defeat of the Iraqi Army meant it was weak.
WRONG
That swift defeat of the Iraqi military, from land to sea and to air, meant that the US military was far superior at the EMPLOYMENT of what we have, including superior technology, than the Iraqi military was the EMPLOYMENT of what it had.
Any shooting fight against US -- China WILL lose.
No further comment is necessary!
