Could the US take over China in a war?

I'm thinking... the one thing you always hear about China is that it has a vast population. But against America that's not as big an advantage as against many other countries - the US having 300 million people itself, the numerical advantage of China is therefore about 4 to 1.

That's close enough that the qualitative difference between the US military and Chinese military are likely to give the US a decent chance of victory. They only need to maintain more than a 4 to 1 kill ratio against the PLA.

This assumes that both nations field a military that is a similar proportion of their overall population.

If it goes to drafting to increase the size of their armies, the US has an advantage again since many of their recruits would be from hunting backgrounds or otherwise practised civil shooters, while the totally disarmed citizenry of the great communist police state would have to be trained/practised in marksmanship from the ground up, taking time they may not nescesarily have.

I am of the mind no one would win this war, everyone would lose. It's one I sure would hate to see go down.

If you think we stand a snowball's chance in hell of defeating them that borders on delusional since China has survived thousands of years and did so by remaining a powerful nation. Little has changed in that reguard.

If we went to war with them the populous would revolt since their cheap shit gravy train would jump the tracks.

The U.S. could win a war with China and occupy key portions of that nation.

It would take:

1) At least five years for the U.S. to build large enough of a military to be able to do so.

2) The American population willing to fight a long term war with large scale casualities on the order of 100,000 a year (World War II type numbers).

3) No other nations intervene on China's behalf or use harsh economic warfare on behalf of the Chinese.

4) No nuclear weapons on either side.

Too much uncertainty to make such a war worthwhile.

This is a war you win by simply not fighting it.

Ultimately, whichever side tries to project power in this scenario loses more.

I could see something happening to cause a war though.

China and Taiwan come to blows. Things escalate suddenly out of control and the Chinese shoot down an American airliner and kill hundreds of American citizens (whether accidentally or on purpose) or some other incident happens during a conflict that outrages Americans.

If so we'd better pray that Tom Clancy in "SSN" was a prophet.

If and when things come to blows over Taiwan it will be a sad day for the US because we'd do fuckall with the military, we'd go the sanction/tarriff route at best especially with the current crop of politians in office.

It'd take a global conflict instigated by a third party to set off this scenerio, but Taiwan ain't it.

You rang?

No.


What's next?

Close enough, China has about 1.3 billion citizens, and the US has about 300 million citizens.

A vague equation at best, please expand a bit on the reasoning behind your conclusion.

No way in hell IMO.

Why do I get the feeling some folks would start jacking off to the idea of a war with China?

Hell yes, invade China ! Christ, a bunch of armchair "Generals" and Halo 2 players theorizing about "how we could take them."

You're too stupid to post here. I don't see anyone calling for an invasion of China.

"The only winning move is...not to play."

Joshua!

In a nuclear conflict the United States could easily defeat China, but undoubtedly would suffer severe damage in doing so.

Recent history has shown that in a conventional conflict, the United States would be hard-pressed to successfully "take over" a nation the size of Iraq and maintain hold of it.

If you apply that experience to a nation several orders of magnitude larger, such as China - and factor in the fact that the American economy is utterly dependent on China - then it is clear that odds against the United States successfully conquering China as approaching infinity.

The United States has never successfully won a land war in Asia - not in this reality.

Could we? Easily.

Should we? Not really.

Never get involved in a land war in Asia.

Theoretically... yes. But it would take extremely surgicallly precise H-Bomb detonations in key military facilities and cities. The one enormous disadvantage China has is that 90% of its entire population is concentrated in its southeastern and eastern seaboards. Take out their concentrated population, and military installations (hoping to God your intelligence is accurate) and the bombing survivors, Western China, and Tibet would have very little with which to mount a resistance.

Though, as of this moment, love them or hate them, China and the USA exist in a sort of mutualistic-symbiotic relationship.

Like a whore and her client, both of you get "something" out of your business transactions.

Japan. We walked away from Korea and Vietnam, but could've won either of those if the will had existed.

China isn't some omnipresent threat, they're still playing catch-up with us and have a lot of ground to gain. Besides, we can eliminate their nuclear arsenal easily and quickly, and that's the minimal casualties strategy.

For once, "our thoughts are one."

dude.

"surgically precise H-Bomb detonations" is like saying "a virginal orgy"

Actually, our nuclear capabilities have progressed to the point where casualties would be less than a million for a near total destruction of the PRC's nuclear arsenal.

An article in The Atlantic a couple of years ago by two weapons experts put the Chinese death toll from a U.S. first strike on their ICBMs at IIRC, something like 60,000 killed and twice that number injured.

Assuming four W-87 warheads launched on Trident II D-5 missiles from Ohio class submarines targeted on each Chinese ICBM launch site.

Still, it would take one hell of an "imminent threat crisis" for any American president to launch a first strike on the Chinese.

Something like a Chinese submarine being tracked moving toward the U.S. with the U.S. intercepting orders for it to launch missiles into American territory.

Oh I'm not talking about death toll. If I were Commander in Chief over such an operation, I wouldn't care how many were killed. What I'm saying is you would need to deal a CRIPPLING sudden blow to their primary infrastructure, population centers, and military arsenals, facilities, and barracks. In fact the more you initially kill with WMD, the less resistance you shall encounter when you occupy the country. Unfortunately, as so many of our past occupations have shown us, unless you can totally scare them into submission, the only way to win completely is to completely wipe them out and reap their resources.

(which does not currently benefit our interests)

Spoken like someone who doesn't know dick about China. First of all, the Chinese populace are not disarmed by any stretch of the imagination. Plenty of the rural types have rifles they use for hunting. Secondly, the Chinese have the draft and thus large members of the population have spent some time in the military and could be expected to perform reasonably well in combat. Third, one of the largest manufacturers (and exporters) of the AK-47 is China, so were the US to invade, we could expect to find a populace which was able to arm itself rapidly. Fourth, given that large amounts of goods which would be essential for a military operation are made in China (think electronics), the US could run into supply problems pretty quickly. Fifth, the Chinese hold a bunch of the US debt, so such a war would royally fuck up the global financial markets.

Chinese economic leverage regarding the U.S. is way overstated.

Anything they did to hurt us would probably hurt them worse.

AIUI, the CEP of our missiles is small enough that they could be used to take out China's missiles before they could launch.