The so called "bad signal" that is being sent to China is that the USN is starting to take the threat PLA fires generation against forward deployed assets in WESTPAC seriously. Brief ad hoc🧵
1/ John Culver explains the basics of it well, the F-15s are ill suited and is well within range of almost all PLA fires
2/ The reality is that the first island chain has already been breached for quite some time, but we've simply refused to acknowledge it - either due to hubris ("PLA can never catch up to us!" or willful ignorance.
3/ PLAAF can put up roughly 600+ ALCM alone across the entirety of the first island chain per sortie from land based aviation alone. This is before accounting for fires generated by long range artillery, AAMs, unmanned platforms, and rocket force assets
4/ Geography plays a huge role in this. There just simply isn't enough land area to put forward deployed assets that can survive, much less contest, PLA fires generation. As PLA procures longer and longer range munitions, probability of survival decreases dramatically
5/ Ever notice how we don't operate CSGs in the Taiwan Strait anymore? It's not because we can't, but because the risk is just too great. The most damning evidence is Nancy Pelosi's flight path in August 2022: it skirted the edges of the 1st island chain
6/ By retreating to the 2nd island chain, USN assets become more survivable by the simple fact that they will be out of the immediate range of PLA fires generation. But this balance is also slowly changing.
7/ Stationing more forward deployed assets in the first island chain only serves to make them into targets liable to be destroyed by a first strike. A jet destroyed on the ground is worse than a jet destroyed in A2A combat.
8/ In recent years, the USAF has been hitting abysmal numbers of flying hours, with active duty fixed wing pilots averaging less than 100 hours per year.
airandspaceforces.com/air-force-flyi…
9/ In contrast, the PLAAF has been stepping up their flight hours, where a minimum of 150 hours on the JL-8 are required at their flight academies, and with some PLAAF formations required to fly as many as 200 hours per year as early as 2015
airandspaceforces.com/PDF/MagazineAr…
10/ Taken altogether, it's the USN that is expected to do the majority of the heavy lifting against the PLAAF in a WESTPAC conflict, but we can only generate about 2 sortie per airframe per day from naval aviation, and that's using the surge tempo op from Desert Storm
11/ And given that our CSG deployment in WESTPAC has an upper limit of 3 CSGs maximum (thank CENTCOM for demanding a carrier in the Persian Gulf), this limits our total sorties to anywhere between 60 to 100 per day in the first island chain from CSGs.
12/ Meanwhile, PLAAF is capable of generating at least 60+ sorties per day in the vicinity of the limited space of Taiwanese ADIZ from the eastern theater command alone. And we've seen them do it.
13/ It's likely that PLA fires generation is capable of eroding, if not halting, land-based air operations from Guam, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan within 3-4 hours from H-hour, creating a more permissive environment for PLA aircrafts to operate beyond the 1st island chain
14/ The PLA has spent 31 years obsessing over US air operations since Desert Storm, and everything they've been doing has been to neutralize the aerial advantage the US used to enjoy in their own backyard.
15/ The vast array of long-range AAMs, AEW&C, unmanned, and EWar platforms that they have assembled was tailor made for one thing and one thing only: to contest and fight the USN all the way back to Pearl. End of 🧵
