"Chad Irby" wrote in message
. com...
In article ,
"Kevin Brooks" wrote:

Oh, a mere 1200 to 1400 miles up the Yangtze River, maybe 1500 miles
from Taiwan; piece of cake, right? Let's see, F-16's (the most potent
potential ground attack platform the Chinese possess), lugging
weapons heavier than anything the F-16 has ever lugged, on a 3000
mile round trip,

...because nobody would ever send a number of planes on a one-way
mission to destroy something that's a major part of the enemy's
infrastructure, right?

The above is about what one would expect from the guy who earlier postulated
that maybe a *really* big shaped charge would do the trick, before
meandering off into the world of Supercommando underwater demolition attacks
1400 miles up the Yangtze with a few *tons* of explosives toted along for
the purpose...or were you going to just have these Rambos mix their own demo
on site? (Gawd, you'll probably argue they should submerge a few tons of
ammonium nitrate... LOL!)

No, the idea of Taiwan sacrificing a goodly portion of its best fighters,
when faced with a growing PLAAF threat themselves, does not make much sense.
Face it, *if* Taiwan were to embark on this strange Three Gorges strategy
(strange because there are a heck of a lot of other high-value targets
located a whale of a lot closer than TG, and a lot easier to neutralize),
and even that has not been conclusively demonstrated yet, then they would be
looking at ways of removing TG's value without gunning for a full breach of
the dam itself. Cruise missiles can take down the supported power grid and
generating stations, and it is even conceivable that the Taiwanese could
develop some capability to knock the associated locks out of operation;
anything beyond that is fantasy, short of them using a nuclear wepon of
their own (a generally *bad* idea).

Brooks


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