Supplier bottlenecks threaten US Navy effort to grow arms stockpiles – By Megan Eckstein (Defense News) / Feb 6, 2024
WASHINGTON — If U.S. military planners’ worst-case scenario arose in the Pacific — having to defend Taiwan from a Chinese invasion — American military forces would target Chinese amphibious ships.
Without them, according to Mark Cancian, who ran a 2022 wargame for the Center for Strategic and International Studies that examined this exact scenario, China couldn’t invade the neighboring island.
But to sink these amphibs, forces would have to destroy a protective ring of combatants with air defense and anti-submarine capabilities, as well as decoy ships and merchant vessels moving invasion forces and their gear.
U.S. submarines would “rapidly fire everything they have” at the multitude of targets, Cancian said, ”using up torpedoes at a much, much higher rate than the U.S. has expected to do in the past.”
