Search Results: trying too hard

For me it's hard to say. I was talking about it with someone from China and they said that fear of getting their tech industry sanctioned was what made the CCP hesitant about invading Taiwan so now they have "nothing to lose" by doing so.

However, while sanctioning China from getting chips may have taken away America's economic leverage, from a military perspective, China has a lot more to lose now because now they would have to take a "brute force" approach to taking Taiwan. A brute force approach may work for a country like Ukraine, but I doubt it would work against Taiwan.

You could say that Russia is trying but failing to take a brute force approach to Ukraine but in reality Russia doesn't have the industrial base to brute force anything. They went in with a bunch of old Soviet equipment that keeps malfunctioning because it either had too many parts flogged off it or was rusted to shit because the soldiers stationed at the supply depot kept pencil whipping the maintenance reports. China however does have an industrial base and had it been them invading Ukraine and went in without high tech weapons, I'd say there's a 50/50 chance Kiev would have fallen by now.

But while China isn't Russia, Taiwan isn't Ukraine. Ukraine's border with Russia consists mostly of flat, open terrain while Taiwan is a Rugged Island with many defendable choke points and any invasion by China will see their forces funneled into these choke points, nullifying their numerical advantage.

The political significance of the 1991 Gulf War is debated but there was no doubt that it was a turning point in military history. That turn was away from the quantity over quality trend set by the industrial revolution (i. e. industrialized warfare) and it heralded the beginning of "mechanized warfare' where high tech precision weapons versus masses of tanks and warplanes win wars.