Comment by chriselles

I think biggest threat of invasion for Australia is illegal immigration.

It’s happened before, and Australia has used discrete and unconventional means to disrupt it.

RAN could probably surge 3 Collins boats depending on timings of depot level maintenance.

P8 paired with C17/C130 used as arsenal planes to saturate PLAN air defence and F35 hitting hard targets with LRASM would make it a slaughter.

PLAN’s recent live fire exercise in the commercial air corridor between Australia and NZ single handedly justifies increased defence spending for ANZ.

Personally, I think China’s horrible demographic wall it’s about to hit at 100kph combined with a stagnant economy(140+ car makers today that will surely drop to 20 or less by 2035) leaves Xi with plenty of domestic crisis to solve.

The risk is if Xi needs(or needs to create) an external crisis to activate nationalism and deflect away from domestic strike(akin to Argentina-Falklands 1982).

Even Taiwan might be a stretch too far. Xi will need a guaranteed win.