China feared to be hiding missiles in shipping containers
Disguised as a regular shipping containers, they can be sneaked on board a vessel to blend in seamlessly with the hundreds of others on board.
The sheer number of container ships in the world makes them harder to pinpoint than warships in the event of war.
Like the fabled Trojan Horse, the missiles would be quietly smuggled into or near an enemy port on a civilian vessel before being unleashed in a surprise attack.
Rick Fisher, senior fellow in Asian military affairs at the International Assessment and Strategy Center, told The Sun Online while Chinese have not officially confirmed they have the missiles – it is likely they have them.
And the it was warned in a study by Stockton Center for International Law that the weapons could violate naval laws.
Meanwhile, retired Navy Capt. Jim Fanell, a former Pacific Fleet intelligence chief, previously said a containerized anti-ship missile would add a significant threat to the US Navy.
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GUNS N GEAR
So this idea popped in my head: I read there are currently 96 ships waiting to be off-loaded parked off the coast of Long Beach. Maybe they don’t want to unload them because if they did they would find plenty of these and they are just waiting for the right moment to sneak attack. It would be a brilliant way to get around all of our defenses. Just saying anyway.
Does anyone really think the Chicoms haven’t read One Second After?
This is old news but I am glad it’s being revisited. One of Clive Cussler’s early books dealt with nuclear bombs being smuggled deep into the American fabric in new cars. The possibilities are endless and a topic of conjecture by Seamen on watch on Bridges and over coffee in Galleys for ever. This is an extremely piss poorly written article but glad it got posted if for nothing else than bringing it to light.
America doesn’t know how fragile our Merchant Maritime life-line is. It’s constantly under attack by segments of our own government. There was an author I once knew who wanted to break out from writing tech journals and branch into novels. I gave him scenarios what one man, on one of our own Merchant ships, could do and the devastation five could do. He never went anywhere with it and now I’m glad. I don’t want to contribute to giving our enemies ideas.
This stuff is real. We are vulnerable. China doesn’t need to neutralize our power grid from a detonation fired from a sub-orbital missile, they could do it at will from St. Louis, Vancouver, Seattle, NY, anywhere in the Great Lakes. They don’t need sub orbital platforms but it is nice to have options.
Zero warning. Nothing we can do about it.
And we have no one looking out for our security.
I think I drunkenly and mostly jokingly pitched this to JohnnyParatrooper awhile back. I guess the ol’ dome piece is still good for something after all. They did shoot a missile out of a train in North Korea, it’s not far fetched to think they’d use that same crate on a ship. They already use their fishing fleets off South America as a sonar apparatus that also steals from fisheries to feed their people.
I believe the Soviets had missile trains as well, similar to what was in the 007 movie “Goledeneye” A smaller shipping container launcher could theoretically be carried anywhere in the US by truck once it was unloaded from the ship couldn’t it?
Conventional missiles or even nukes would be relatively useless, on the same level as the incendiary balloons the nips used in the war.
A handful of HEMP devices, though, would be strategically devastating.
That depends on what the targets for those missiles were. If they were targeted to some of the major transformers in the country the grid would mostly grind to a halt for the forseeable future. There are plenty of places where even conventional missiles could do catastrophic damage- dams, nuclear power plants, oil pipelines, shipyards, etc. They’re far from useless.
While anything is possible during these strange times, I think it’s more a form of economic/logistical warfare than anything else. IF and I do mean IF, this supply chain mess of laden vessels languishing off-shore were to be supporting kinetic direct warfare or a possible invasion, these ships and shipping containers would act as an improvised MPS (Maritime Prepositioning Ships) system which would be holding supporting/sustainment resupply for an initial assault by a forward deployed raid force.
The ChiComs study everything. Think of a plan they could formulate that combined the best parts of the initial invasion of Afghanistan by Russian forces and employing their own covert version of the MPS system, emulating our MPS system as was used in support of Desert Shield/Storm and again in 2001 & 2003.
When you look at these possibilities along with the strategic land purchases down in Texas, Ok and Washington state and the majority of US commercial ports being managed by companies w/ close ties to the CCP, the above should bring up any number of Red Flags that, for me at least, indicate just how vulnerable to a wide variety of attacks CONUS is, even in this post 9/11 world.
So, you could target a single transformer facility… or you could mount a HEMP device, and take out virtually every transformer within 1000 km.
Sure, an EMP might possibly do more damage to the powergrid- it would also give a clear excuse for us (or other countries) to respond in kind. A bunch of shipping container missiles, especially if they were on non-chinese flagged ships, or fired from within the mainland after being trucked in, would give them at least some deniability. Not to mention that they could build a bunch of those shipping container missile pods and scatter them all over the place. It’s like comparing a drone swarm to a bomber.
Who knows, we very well might have to deal with both threats before it’s over and done with.
I don’t think it is so clear. The Russians don’t consider HEMP to be a nuclear attack, even if the device is simply a high-altitude nuclear detonation. They still consider it to be a form of cyber attack. If we respond with nuclear devices, then there is a very high chance that Russia launches on us as well, as nuclear aggressors. I honestly think that our nuclear readiness is ridiculously low (we just aren’t making enough tritium) and I don’t know if we would have enough effective devices to take on China AND Russia. If Russia is labeling us nuclear aggressors, there is no way that any other nuclear power (Europe/Israel/Saftica etc) will side with us.
So what are we left with? A wrecked grid that will take years to get running in isolated islands and maybe the ability to toss a few nukes over China and set their electrical system back a month. It’s an asymmetrical knockout punch, and the only think keeping China from doing it is that they would rather have our money. For now.
I agree with a lot of what you say, but what I meant was that if China hit us with an EMP, we could respond by doing the same to them. If Russia or others don’t consider an EMP to be a nuclear attack, we would be in the same boat as China if we retaliated in kind. We could also take out the Three Gorges dam (along with a few others if we wanted) and set China back a whole lot more than a month, and that could be done without going nuclear. Wiping out some of their best farmland would be a pretty big handicap.
I’m not even saying that an EMP couldn’t or wouldn’t be used, just that conventional missile systems are a long ways from being useless as you stated in your first post. Put enough conventional missiles out there in the right places and they could do a hell of a lot of damage, with a much higher degree of precision than what any use of an ICBM or a nuclear device could achieve.
I never intended to say that conventional missiles are useless. I intended to say that conventional missiles, deployed this way against America are nearly useless.
Weapons like that deployed against any developed country could be very useful. America, and most of our allies, have plenty of very soft infrastructure that can be targeted that way. Not to mention that they can be scattered all around our naval bases just like the article mentions. A system like that could render a lot of our fleet unusable for a long while, even if the vessels weren’t flat out destroyed.
The entire reason for a Chinese, Russian or a Sino-Russian joint effort to invade CONUS is for our natural resources and our geographical position.
The use of EMP weapons to the degree some have mentioned is likely not going to happen. This would do nothing but cause the invasion & occupation forces nothing but trouble and seriously degrade the operation.
The only targets which would be utterly destroyed would be those vital to the US National Command Authority/USDOD & DHS. Even then these missions would likely be very limited in scope and surgical in nature.
So, the widespread use of EMP/HEMP is something to be concerned about, but nothing to really worry about.
The invaders will need the overwhelming majority of the US infrastructure intact and for the most part, need the citizenry to be reasonably compliant and docile, in order for the initial phases of an invasion for occupation & exploitation of riches. tech and natural resources to succeed.
Only once the necessary objectives have been met and the needed dispersion of troops accomplished, and the regional command structures have been established and are functional, will the occupational forces then start tightening their hold on the indigenous citizenry to the point of complete subjugation.
It is a category error to assume that an attack is to support an invasion.
China, in the foreseeable contexts, has no desire to invade America. They would have MULTIPLE reasons to REMOVE us, militarily, from the Pacific. Wiping out the electrical grid from the Rockies west (or east) would have that effect. We would frankly have too much on our plate to bother with more than a token response, if we could even credibly blame them (since the purpose of clandestine launch systems start with deniability.)
Bingo
For now, maybe. They want our resources and our landmass though, and at some point they’ll have to put boots on the ground if they want to control either of those. Causing widespread infrastructure failure, whether by EMP or conventional missiles, would be a step towards getting them invited here for “humanitarian assistance” purposes. Why invade when you can get an invitation?
No, it’s not an error. There is zero reason for China to launch EMP/HEMP on CONUS otherwise.
If your assertions are that they would launch and EMP strike to keep us from responding in a substantive manner militarily. Then you are mistaken.
The CCP (As well as most of the US. Gov’t) knows full well, that our lack of political will and the extremely risk adverse US military leadership will not respond in a militarily substantive manner to an attack on Taiwan.
Therefore, there is no reason to EMP the west coast. All that would do, is unite the American people and give the impetus to our civilian & military leadership to respond with absolute force.
Currently our civilian & military leadership is weak and substandard, the American people are fractured, fragmented and split into opposing camps and view each other and their political parties to which they are affiliated as the Nation’s biggest threat. This is to China and Russia’s great advantage for us to continue down this path. The last thing they would want is an American public with a Dec 8, 1941 mindset, which is exactly what a west coast EMP strike would do.