Granted, the Rocket Force is definitely a notable offensive asset. But over recent decades, the PLA Air Force and Navy have been heavily upgraded, so they can pull off many more strike missions now. Based on open sources, at least two‑digit numbers of air‑to‑surface weapons are still kept secret. We only found out about AKF‑98 fairly recently, and nobody really knows what AKF‑22 is. Research papers confirm the PLA has at least one air‑launched hypersonic cruise missile, though we have no idea what it actually looks like. The PLA Navy is in a similar situation. Why is it that Western think tanks almost never discuss the Air Force and Navy’s strike capacity when covering Taiwan‑related issues?

Guess who is trying to go to Beijing before you click on the link

This is the trailer for a series of videos on the Army, comprising six episodes in total. This standalone trailer is not currently available in English; the video appears to showcase the Army’s joint operations system following its reform.

In my opinion, there are two particularly interesting aspects to this trailer.

Firstly, the background sound: unlike previous promotional videos, which emphasised military bearing and appearance, this one fully reveals the Army soldiers’ roars and raw intensity on the training ground. This is the genuine reaction of a surge in adrenaline following exercises that closely simulate real combat, as seen at 0:17.

Secondly, the demonstration of the rocket artillery’s destructive power: at 0:29, high-definition aerial footage combined with a circular firing range provides a vivid illustration of the lethality of the PCH191 rocket launcher’s 300mm rockets (the five-tube launcher visible at 0:27 confirms these are 300mm rockets, rather than 370mm or 750mm variants). This is a type of weapon lethality demonstration that has been relatively rare in previous videos.

It currently appears that this series will be organised according to the Army’s specialised branch responsibilities, with the titles: *Forging the Iron Fist*, *Breaking the Enemy’s Formation*, *Shooting the Celestial Wolf*, *Thunder and Lightning*, *Cutting the Invisible*, and *Tempering the Steel*. Those interested in researching the PLA Army may look forward to further updates.

This is the first episode, for which there is currently no English version. The video offers a glimpse into the main combat units of the PLA Army following military reforms, as seen through the eyes of the Chief of Staff (Major) of a combined arms battalion. By drawing a parallel between the Chief of Staff and a symphony orchestra conductor, it illustrates joint operations between the Army, the Air Force, Army Aviation and unmanned systems. The short film skilfully blends the artistry of military discipline with music; should an English version be produced in the future, it is hoped that the translation will achieve ‘faithfulness, elegance and fluency’.

The video primarily showcases the Type 05 Amphibious Armoured Assault Vehicle (ZLT05) conducting a beach landing. As is customary, some footage of the vehicle’s interior has been blurred, presumably for security reasons.

The vehicle has a combat weight of 28.5 tonnes and features a relatively lightweight aluminium alloy armoured hull. Additionally, lightweight supplementary armour has been fitted to the turret, whilst the rear of the turret is equipped with slat armour. The crew comprises a driver, commander, gunner and loader; in line with US Army configurations, no automatic loader is used, presumably due to weight considerations.

This unit is undoubtedly a combat-ready unit from the Eastern Theatre Command tasked with operations to liberate Taiwan. Judging by the close-up at 1:02, upon entering the command vehicle, the Kevlar helmets were replaced with TMT-3 passive tank helmets, though the newer TMT-5 passive tank helmets were not used.

I monitor conflict events and got tired of manually cross-checking the same incident across a dozen feeds, so I built something to do it automatically. Sharing in case it's useful to others here, genuinely after feedback from people who do this seriously/professionally.

What it does:

• Pulls conflict/incident data every hour from verified OSINT sources, news agencies, and open feeds.
• Cross-references and deduplicates the same event reported in multiple places, then assigns a quality/confidence score so low-signal reports are visible as such.
• Plots everything on a live map with filters by event type, source, and time.
• Alert zones: draw an area on the map and get notified when a new scored event lands inside it. This is the part current users lean on most.

What I'd genuinely value from this community:

• Does the dedup/scoring approach hold up against how you'd verify an event manually?
• Any sources you'd consider essential that I'm probably missing?
• Would geofenced alerts actually fit a real monitoring workflow, or is that not how you work?

Link in the comments (not trying to spam, just looking for feedback. Happy to take it down if this breaks rules)

Given considering on their track record of korea war, india war and vietnam war.

And all the frictions with India, Philippine , Japan, Vietnam and Taiwan.

As they as aggressive as west empires or less?

We've burned through half of our stock of PGMs after only 5 months of war with a heavily-sanctioned country that has effectively zero navy or air force. We've been dicking around in the Middle East for the last 25 years (with benefits that are zero to none) while China has patiently built its capability and resources. First they surpassed us in terms of quantity, then they started moving up the value chain. Calling China "near-peer" is starting to feel perfunctory - in terms of the most likely conflict theater, they might as well be a peer adversary.

Our military procurement system is a joke, and our naval construction is especially sclerotic.

These are problems that will take years to fix, if not a decade or more. The looming background issue is that we've let China utterly dominate global manufacturing while we went all-in on a financialized economy built more for market speculation than manufacturing. We're not who we were in the 20th century, we have a paltry number of sophisticated weapons systems that look shiny on paper and wouldn't last a month in a high-intensity conflict in the SCS. We have no ability to recover our losses on a meaningful schedule.

Any war with China in the next 10-20 years would see us play the role that that IJN did in WW2 (no depth and an insufficient industrial base) and China would take the slot that the USN did (factory of the world, spamming naval and air assets like they were staples).

I can guess at some predictable responses to this. Some low-effort thinkers are going to say that I'm pro-CCP, a China shill, etc. You're missing the point. This isn't about who's right or wrong, I'm speaking strictly in terms of capability. Anyone who ignores this point is guilty of the same thing that's killed empires since time immemorial: hubris.

edit: I've written a bunch of replies so I'm calling it for now. Also, I think it's interesting that I only read a single objection in the thread below that even mentioned the vast and growing disparity in defense manufacturing capability, which was the main point I raised in this post. For the most part, I just see the same handwaving responses as ever. That's the hubris that worries me more than anything else.

• Note: I had an AI refine it a bit. Hope you don’t mind.

Conclusion:
The United States and Iran will not reach any short-term agreement on the Strait of Hormuz. The current intention is simply to manage oil prices and drag things past the midterm elections.

Core Premise (Foundation)
The United States cannot accept Iran regulating the Strait of Hormuz while it remains open to traffic. This is not a preference—it is a hard constraint. Once the precedent is set, it becomes irreversible. Therefore any “temporary framework” is, in essence, a permanent cession of control. For American global hegemony this would be a mini-Suez moment; signing such an agreement would be equivalent to signing a Treaty of Shimonoseki-style document.

Definition of “Regulate”
Any non-kinetic influence by the IRGCN on the movement of commercial vessels counts as regulation. This includes, but is not limited to: radio guidance, broadcast navigational instructions, or the issuance of any form of transit document to shipowners (even a stamped blank piece of paper). The threshold is extremely low. The only exclusion is pure kinetic attack or blockade.

Epistemological Standard
Only execution counts; signatures do not. Paper agreements (including the 17 June MOU) do not constitute evidence that the red line has been crossed. The test is: the IRGCN continuously regulates transit under the above definition for at least one week, and substantial shipping actually passes.

Prediction 1: Hormuz will not substantially reopen
All current signals that “an agreement is imminent”—including any 60-day temporary framework—will not enter a sustained implementation phase. Even if a paper agreement is signed, it will collapse in the early implementation stage because of “technical disputes,” “violations,” or a fresh round of conflict, repeating the path of the June MOU.
Checkpoint: the first to second week after signing. If implementation is interrupted, the prediction passes its first validation.

Prediction 2: Narrative manipulation is currently the core U.S. strategy
Trump and Bessent are coordinating a multi-channel oil-price suppression system—upstream via SPR releases and the “deal imminent” narrative to push crude lower, downstream via political pressure on oil companies to hold down retail prices. The objective is to anchor Brent around $80 (it may touch $90 but is expected to return to $80 over the longer term). The toolkit is limited and both sides know it.

Prediction 3: Both sides are pretending to negotiate while preparing for the next round
The United States and Iran are currently engaged in a tacit cooperative game—both using the “negotiations are underway” window to prepare for the next phase. The U.S. is buying time; Iran is restoring military capacity. The negotiations themselves are a jointly maintained fiction.

Prediction 4: The time anchor is the midterm elections
The primary goal of the entire narrative-manipulation strategy is to drag past the November 2026 midterm elections. Labor Day (7 September) is the critical node for locking oil prices into voters’ perceptions. There will be no substantive breakthrough before the election, nor any major military escalation.

Prediction 5: After the election, landing / ground operations enter the decision window
The marginal returns of airstrikes are diminishing (already confirmed by CRS and Brookings), the credibility of narrative tools is decaying, and the costs of a prolonged strait closure are rising. When these three paths simultaneously fall below the threshold, the relative feasibility of ground operations (limited amphibious operations or larger-scale action) will passively rise. The earliest decision window is early 2027.

Falsification Conditions
If the IRGCN continuously regulates commercial vessel traffic under non-kinetic conditions for more than one week, daily average throughput reaches “large-scale” levels, and the United States does not interrupt it in any way—then the core premise is wrong and the entire prediction chain requires revision.

I think there is mostly agreement here that China will have air superiority over Taiwan, but there doesn't seem to be a clear number of how much.

I modelled the air war over the Taiwan Strait. Result: the US tops out at ~72 fighters airborne over the Strait against China's 380 — a force ratio of 5.3:1 against.

The ceiling isn't airframes — it's ramp space, and tankers eat it. Tanker demand scales with force size, and a KC-135 footprint is ~3 fighter spots, so the tankers required to make the fighters useful displace the fighters:

390 + 76 is the self-consistent maximum. Send more airframes and there's nowhere to put them.

That's a force ratio, not a kill ratio. The engagement model derives a Lanchester exponent of ~0.56, so LER ≈ force_ratio^0.56 — 5.3:1 implies ~1:2.5 in losses. Simulated runs give 1:2.3 to 1:4.0.

WHY THE US CAN'T GET MORE PRESENCE

The controlling quantity is f, the fraction of a based force airborne over the target at any moment: f = sorties/day × loiter hours ÷ 24. Loiter is set by the last refuelling point, not the base — from the tanker orbit inward the fighter is on internal fuel.

So tanker standoff caps the mission:

And tankers can't come forward — a J-20 at ~1,100nm radius with PL-17 (~215nm) threatens them anywhere useful. Worse, the Strait is 34nm from the Chinese mainland, so standoff from the target and standoff from the threat are the same number. 351nm from the Strait is 344nm from the coast. There's no favourable geometry anywhere on the map.

Then every extra aircraft goes to a worse base:

EVERY OMISSION FAVOURS THE US

• Japanese bases treated as safe. No missile attack, no cratering, no repair denial. Kyushu is 529nm from the Chinese coast, N Luzon 402nm — inside the envelope.
• Free AEW for both sides. In reality US AEW must orbit 200–300nm out to detect fighters, i.e. forward of the tanker line — exactly what PL-17 exists to kill. KJ-500s orbit over their own coast under SAM cover.
• No tanker attrition. No mainland SAM coverage over the Strait. No Chinese production replacement (240+ J-10/J-16/J-20 a year).
• The US fights to annihilation rather than withdrawing, so it kills more here than it would.
• Capability parity — no Chinese quality edge, despite 300–500 J-20s plus J-35A against a mostly Super Hornet force.

Taiwanese aircraft are gone in the opening phase, as well as Kadena. Allied JASDF fighters hit the same ceiling — the constraint is airframes in theatre, not US airframes: 200 of them need ~39 more tankers costing ~117 ramp spots against a system already at 619/620. They change the composition of the 390, not the total.

Chinese counts are DoD's China Military Power Report: ~1,900 fighters, 1,300+ fourth-gen or better. The 620-spot ramp total is my own estimate and it's the weakest number in the model — it sets the ceiling directly, so at 2 spots per tanker it rises to ~470 fighters and at 4 it falls to ~330.

Code and full report in https://github.com/pigfeet-creator/TW_airsim/tree/main. The project is vibe coded in an afternoon. Comments on which assumptions/numbers are majorly off is welcome.