- China missiles filled with water, not fuel: US intelligence
- Xi seeking to root out corruption, prepare military for combat
US intelligence indicates that President Xi Jinping’s sweeping military purge came after it emerged that widespread corruption undermined his efforts to modernize the armed forces and raised questions about China’s ability to fight a war, according to people familiar with the assessments.
The corruption inside China’s Rocket Force and throughout the nation’s defense industrial base is so extensive that US officials now believe Xi is less likely to contemplate major military action in the coming years than would otherwise have been the case, according to the people, who asked not to be named discussing intelligence.
China missiles filled with water, not fuel: US intelligence
oops
US officials now believe Xi is less likely to contemplate major military action in the coming years than would otherwise have been the case
So this is a good news story.
Mmm.
Hopefully.
Unless you think war is inevitable.
The current Chinese doctrine in a theoretical conflict with America relies heavily on saturation of missile defenses to take out things like carrier groups.
If they didn’t know they’d have a 10% failure rate or whatever it could have completely invalidated their tactics.
But it you accept both that war is inevitable and that China will be the aggressor it would have been better for them not to discover this and thus be unprepared for the conflict, like we see with Russia and Ukraine.
War isn’t inevitable. Back in the cold war it was averted multiple times, and the USSR had a much more closed economy than China’s. China going to war with NATO would lose them all their largest trading partners.
No one builds a trillion dollar navy without intending to use it, but sure.
It might not happen.
In a world that solves its energy crisis and stops climate change.
Surely they intend to use it the same way the US does - projecting force to cement soft power?
Except for the families of those related to this flop.
That’s an occupational risk when working for a corrupt one-party state.
I mean…the US Navy is roughly 40 times more capable than the Chinese navy just looking at aircraft carriers compared, nevermind the carrier group components or the planes. A US super carrier is so much more capable than the 2 Chinese carriers combined.
China’s ship building capacity is greater than the US. They may be able to overwhelm the US Navy in an extended conflict.
That said, China is looking at a demographic cliff from the One Child Policy. Too many old people and not enough young ones to take care of them. If they’re going to start a war, it has to be in the next few years or not at all. It’s possible the window is already closed.
Putin has the same problem. Perhaps it made Xi look for it.
So… Chinese Watergate?
Chinese Waterballoon
Could be why they used weather ballons to spy on other nations, instead of spy planes. 🤣
They used balloons because it’s deniable and cheap.
A significant delay could be the ballgame in Taiwan for the foreseeable future.
The B-21 will be in service in 2027 and sixth generation fighters a few years later. The Chinese will need a very long time to try to come up with countermeasures for the new tech.
China missiles filled with water, not fuel: US intelligence
Somebody fucked up the actual story somewhere along the way. A normal problem with liquid ICBMs like a DF5 is tiny amounts of water contamination in propellant. N2O4 is meant to sit in a missile for months but if even just the humidity in the air gets in to it, it forms nitric acid and corrodes the missile. That happened to US ICBMs like the Titan II constantly and the US never reliably stopped it, they just switched to solid fuel. If contractors cut corners building a silo water contamination causing corrosion is the first thing that would go wrong. Meth heads siphoning rocket fuel and trying to replace it with water and dying instantly in a massive explosion didn’t happen.
What even uses a liquid fuel in the Chinese arsenal? The newer Dongfengs are all solid fuel. US intelligence once again demonstrates their impeccable research ability.
I guess the DF-4, but it was mostly decommissioned ages ago. There’s like one or two hanging around for historical reasons.
