Taiwan Can Win a War With China

Beijing boasts it can seize the island easily. The PLA knows better.
BY TANNER GREER

When Chinese dictator Xi Jinping spoke to the 19th Party Congress about the future of Taiwan last year, his message was ominous and unequivocal: “We have firm will, full confidence, and sufficient capability to defeat any form of Taiwan independence secession plot. We will never allow any person, any organization, or any political party to split any part of the Chinese territory from China at any time or in any form.”
This remark drew the longest applause of his entire three-hour speech—but it’s not a new message. The invincibility of Chinese arms in the face of Taiwanese “separatists” and the inevitability of reunification are constant Chinese Communist Party themes. 

At its base, the threat made by Xi is that the People’s Liberation Army has the power to defeat the Taiwanese military and destroy its democracy by force, if need be. 

Xi understands the consequences of failure here. 

“We have the determination, the ability and the preparedness to deal with Taiwanese independence,” he stated in 2016, “and if we do not deal with it, we will be overthrown.”
China has already ratcheted up economic and diplomatic pressure on the island since the 2016 election of Tsai Ing-wen and the independence-friendly Democratic Progressive Party. 

Saber-rattling around the Taiwan Strait has been common. 

But China might not be able to deliver on its repeated threats. 

Despite the vast discrepancy in size between the two countries, there’s a real possibility that Taiwan could fight off a Chinese attack—even without direct aid from the United States.
Two recent studies, one by Michael Beckley, a political scientist at Tufts University, and the other by Ian Easton, a fellow at the Project 2049 Institute, in his book The Chinese Invasion Threat: Taiwan’s Defense and American Strategy in Asia, provide us with a clearer picture of what a war between Taiwan and the mainland might look like. 

Grounded in statistics, training manuals, and planning documents from the PLA itself, and informed by simulations and studies conducted by both the U.S. Defense Department and the Taiwanese Ministry of National Defense, this research presents a very different picture of a cross-strait conflict than that hawked by the party’s official announcements.
Chinese commanders fear they may be forced into armed contest with an enemy that is better trained, better motivated, and better prepared for the rigors of warfare than troops the PLA could throw against them.
A cross-strait war looks far less like an inevitable victory for China than it does a staggeringly risky gamble.

Chinese army documents imagine that this gamble will begin with missiles. 

For months, the PLA’s Rocket Force will have been preparing this opening salvo; from the second war begins until the day the invasion commences, these missiles will scream toward the Taiwanese coast, with airfields, communication hubs, radar equipment, transportation nodes, and government offices in their sights. 

Concurrently, party sleeper agents or special forces discreetly ferried across the strait will begin an assassination campaign targeting the president and her Cabinet, other leaders of the Democratic Progressive Party, officials at key bureaucracies, prominent media personalities, important scientists or engineers, and their families.
The goal of all this is twofold. 

In the narrower tactical sense, the PLA hopes to destroy as much of the Taiwanese Air Force on the ground as it can and from that point forward keep things chaotic enough on the ground that the Taiwan’s Air Force cannot sortie fast enough to challenge China’s control of the air. 

The missile campaign’s second aim is simpler: paralysis. 

With the president dead, leadership mute, communications down, and transportation impossible, the Taiwanese forces will be left rudderless, demoralized, and disoriented. 

This “shock and awe” campaign will pave the way for the invasion proper.
This invasion will be the largest amphibious operation in human history. 

Tens of thousands of vessels will be assembled—mostly commandeered from the Chinese merchant marine—to ferry 1 million Chinese troops across the strait, who will arrive in two waves. 

Their landing will be preceded by a fury of missiles and rockets, launched from the Rocket Force units in Fujian, Chinese Air Force fighter bombers flying in the strait, and the escort fleet itself.
Confused, cut off, and overwhelmed, the Taiwanese forces who have survived thus far will soon run out of supplies and be forced to abandon the beaches. 

Once the beachhead is secured, the process will begin again: With full air superiority, the PLA will have the pick of their targets, Taiwanese command and control will be destroyed, and isolated Taiwanese units will be swept aside by the Chinese army’s advance. 

Within a week, they will have marched into Taipei; within two weeks they will have implemented a draconian martial law intended to convert the island into the pliant forward operating base the PLA will need to defend against the anticipated Japanese and American counter-campaigns.
This is the best-case scenario for the PLA. 

But an island docile and defeated two weeks after D-Day is not a guaranteed outcome. 

One of the central hurdles facing the offensive is surprise. 

The PLA simply will not have it. 

The invasion will happen in April or October. 

Because of the challenges posed by the strait’s weather, a transport fleet can only make it across the strait in one of these two four-week windows. 

The scale of the invasion will be so large that strategic surprise will not be possible, especially given the extensive mutual penetration of each side by the other’s intelligence agencies.
Easton estimates that Taiwanese, American, and Japanese leaders will know that the PLA is preparing for a cross-strait war more than 60 days before hostilities begin. 

They will know for certain that an invasion will happen more than 30 days before the first missiles are fired. 

This will give the Taiwanese ample time to move much of their command and control infrastructure into hardened mountain tunnels, move their fleet out of vulnerable ports, detain suspected agents and intelligence operatives, litter the ocean with sea mines, disperse and camouflage army units across the country, put the economy on war footing, and distribute weapons to Taiwan’s 2.5 million reservists.
There are only 13 beaches on Taiwan’s western coast that the PLA could possibly land at. 

Each of these has already been prepared for a potential conflict. 

Long underground tunnels—complete with hardened, subterranean supply depots—crisscross the landing sites. 

The berm of each beach has been covered with razor-leaf plants. 

Chemical treatment plants are common in many beach towns—meaning that invaders must prepare for the clouds of toxic gas any indiscriminate saturation bombing on their part will release. 

This is how things stand in times of peace.
As war approaches, each beach will be turned into a workshop of horrors. 

The path from these beaches to the capital has been painstakingly mapped; once a state of emergency has been declared, each step of the journey will be complicated or booby-trapped. 

PLA war manuals warn soldiers that skyscrapers and rock outcrops will have steel cords strung between them to entangle helicopters; tunnels, bridges, and overpasses will be rigged with munitions (to be destroyed only at the last possible moment); and building after building in Taiwan’s dense urban core will be transformed into small redoubts meant to drag Chinese units into drawn-out fights over each city street.

To understand the real strength of these defenses, imagine them as a PLA grunt would experience them. 

Like most privates, he is a countryside boy from a poor province. 

He has been told his entire life that Taiwan has been totally and fatally eclipsed by Chinese power. 

He will be eager to put the separatists in their place. 

Yet events will not work out as he has imagined. 

In the weeks leading up to war, he discovers that his older cousin—whose remittances support their grandparents in the Anhui countryside—has lost her job in Shanghai. 

All wire money transfers from Taipei have stopped, and the millions of Chinese who are employed by Taiwanese companies have had their pay suspended.
Our private celebrates the opening of hostilities in Shanwei, where he is rushed through a three-week training course on fighting in the fetid and unfamiliar jungles of China’s south. 

By now, the PLA has put him in a media blackout, but still rumors creep in: Yesterday it was whispered that the 10-hour delay in their train schedule had nothing to do with an overwhelmed transportation system and everything to do with Taiwanese saboteurs. 

Today’s whispers report that the commander of the 1st Marine Brigade in Zhanjiang was assassinated. 

Tomorrow, men will wonder if rolling power outages really are just an attempt to save power for the war effort.
But by the time he reaches the staging area in Fuzhou, the myth of China’s invincibility has been shattered by more than rumors. 

The gray ruins of Fuzhou’s PLA offices are his first introduction to the terror of missile attack. Perhaps he takes comfort in the fact that the salvos coming from Taiwan do not seem to match the number of salvos streaking toward it—but abstractions like this can only do so much to shore up broken nerves, and he doesn’t have the time to acclimate himself to the shock. 

Blast by terrifying blast, his confidence that the Chinese army can keep him safe is chipped away.
The last, most terrible salvo comes as he embarks—he is one of the lucky few setting foot on a proper amphibious assault boat, not a civilian vessel converted to war use in the eleventh hour—but this is only the first of many horrors on the waters. 

Some transports are sunk by Taiwanese torpedoes, released by submarines held in reserve for this day. 

Airborne Harpoon missiles, fired by F-16s leaving the safety of cavernous, nuclear-proof mountain bunkers for the first time in the war, will destroy others. 

The greatest casualties, however, will be caused by sea mines. 

Minefield after minefield must be crossed by every ship in the flotilla, some a harrowing eight miles in width. 

Seasick thanks to the strait’s rough waves, our grunt can do nothing but pray his ship safely makes it across.
As he approaches land, the psychological pressure increases. 

The first craft to cross the shore will be met, as Easton’s research shows, with a sudden wall of flame springing up from the water from the miles of oil-filled pipeline sunk underneath. 

As his ship makes it through the fire (he is lucky; others around it are speared or entangled on sea traps) he faces what Easton describes as a mile’s worth of “razor wire nets, hook boards, skin-peeling planks, barbed wire fences, wire obstacles, spike strips, landmines, anti-tank barrier walls, anti-tank obstacles … bamboo spikes, felled trees, truck shipping containers, and junkyard cars.”
At this stage, his safety depends largely on whether the Chinese Air Force has been able to able to distinguish between real artillery pieces from the hundreds of decoy targets and dummy equipment PLA manuals believe the Taiwanese Army has created. 

The odds are against him: As Beckley notes in a study published last fall, in the 1990 to 1991 Gulf War, the 88,500 tons of ordnance dropped by the U.S.-led coalition did not destroy a single Iraqi road-mobile missile launcher. 

NATO’s 78-day campaign aimed at Serbian air defenses only managed to destroy three of Serbia’s 22 mobile-missile batteries. 

There is no reason to think that the Chinese Air Force will have a higher success rate when targeting Taiwan’s mobile artillery and missile defense.
But if our grunt survives the initial barrages on the beach, he still must fight his way through the main Taiwanese Army groups, 2.5 million armed reservists dispersed in the dense cities and jungles of Taiwan, and miles of mines, booby traps, and debris. 

This is an enormous thing to ask of a private who has no personal experience with war. 

It is an even great thing to ask it of a private who naively believed in his own army’s invincibility.

This sketch makes sense of the anxiety the PLA officer manuals express. 

They know war would be a terrific gamble, even if they only admit it to each other. 

Yet it this also makes sense of the party’s violent reactions to even the smallest of arms sales to Taiwan. 

Their passion betrays their angst. 

They understand what Western gloom-and-doomsters do not. 

American analysts use terms like “mature precision-strike regime” and “anti-access and area denial warfare” to describe technological trends that make it extremely difficult to project naval and airpower near enemy shores. 

Costs favor the defense: It is much cheaper to build a ship-killing missile than it is to build a ship.
But if this means that the Chinese army can counter U.S. force projection at a fraction of America’s costs, it also means that the democracies straddling the East Asian rim can deter Chinese aggression at a fraction of the PLA’s costs. 

In an era that favors defense, small nations like Taiwan do not need a PLA-sized military budget to keep the Chinese at bay.
No one needs to hear this message more than the Taiwanese themselves. 

In my trips to Taiwan, I have made a point of tracking down and interviewing both conscripts and career soldiers. 

Their pessimism is palpable. 

This morale crisis in the ranks partly reflects the severe mismanagement of the conscription system, which has left even eager Taiwanese patriots disillusioned with their military experience.
But just as important is the lack of knowledge ordinary Taiwanese have about the strength of their islands’ defenses. 

A recent poll found that 65 percent of Taiwanese “have no confidence” in their military’s ability to hold off the PLA. 

Absent a vigorous campaign designed to educate the public about the true odds of successful military resistance, the Taiwanese people are likely to judge the security of their island on flawed metrics, like the diminishing number of countries that maintain formal relations with Taipei instead of Beijing. 

The PLA’s projected campaign is specifically designed to overwhelm and overawe a demoralized Taiwanese military. 

The most crucial battlefield may be the minds of the Taiwanese themselves. 

Defeatism is a more dangerous threat to Taiwanese democracy than any weapon in China’s armory.
Both Westerners and Taiwanese should be more optimistic about the defense of Taiwan than is now normal.
Yes, the Taiwanese Army projects that it can only hold off its enemy for two weeks after the landing—but the PLA also believes that if it cannot defeat the Taiwanese forces in under two weeks, it will lose the war! 

Yes, the disparity between the military budgets on both sides of the strait is large, and growing—but the Taiwanese do not need parity to deter Chinese aggression. 

All they need is the freedom to purchase the sort of arms that make invasion unthinkable. 

If that political battle can be resolved in the halls of Washington, the party will not have the power to threaten battle on the shores of Taiwan.

Why China Can't Conquer Taiwan in a War

The United States should focus on helping China’s neighbors deny China sea and air control in the region

By Zachary Keck

With Xi Jinping having consolidated his power at the 19th Party Congress, and the United States increasingly distracted at home, it may seem like a given that China will reestablish its predominance over the India-Pacific region. 

A new study casts doubt on this, however, arguing that Beijing doesn’t have the military power to defeat its neighbors. 

In fact, it probably can’t even conquer Taiwan.
The new study by Michael Beckley, an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Tufts University, was published in the academic journal International Security. 

In the article, Beckley argues that China’s neighbors could thwart Chinese military aggression through anti-access/area denial strategies with only minimal U.S. assistance.
“My main finding is that there is a budding balance of military power in East Asia, which the United States can reinforce at moderate risk to U.S. forces,” Beckley writes in the article. 

“Furthermore, this balance of power will remain stable for years to come, because China cannot afford the power-projection capabilities it would need to overcome the A2/AD forces of its neighbors. The main reasons are that power projection forces are more expensive than A2/AD forces by an order of magnitude.”
A2/AD is most commonly discussed in relation to China’s efforts to deny America the ability to intervene in any regional conflict or make it so costly that Washington is deterred from doing so. Some observers, including James Holmes, Toshi Yoshihara and Andrew Krepinevich, have argued that the United States and its Asian allies should this strategy around on China. 

Instead of seeking to maintain command of the sea and air as America has traditionally done, these scholars suggest Washington and its allies could simply seek to deny China the ability to achieve its goals. 

As Beckley puts it, “Under this strategy, the United States would abandon efforts to command maritime East Asia and, instead, focus on helping China’s neighbors deny China sea and air control in the region.
Beckley’s main contribution is to test the viability of this strategy for a number of foreseeable conflict scenarios. 

One of these, of course, is a Chinese invasion of the Taiwan strait. 

While amphibious invasions have always been the most difficult military maneuver to pull off, they are especially difficult in an era of precision-guided munitions that can pick off an invading force while they are still at sea.
To have any chance of successfully invading Taiwan, then, China would have to establish total air superiority and command of the sea in the area. 

As Beckley explains, “If Taiwan retained substantial air defenses and offensive strike platforms, a Chinese amphibious invasion would be impossible, because Taiwan could pick off PLA landing craft as they motored across the Taiwan Strait.” 

Although China has amassed an incredibly large missile force to destroy Taiwan’s defensive capabilities at the outset of a conflict, it would still need to take Taipei by total surprise to be successful. 

If Taiwan had some advanced warning of an attack, it could disperse its aircraft to some thirty-six military airfield across the islands, while also relying on a number of civilian aistrips and even some highways that double as emergency air bases. 

Taiwan also has a bunch of road-mobile missile launchers and anti-aircraft weaponry, as well as a number of ships and submarines capable of attacking Chinese forces with cruise missiles.
As Beckley points out, there is little reason to believe that China would be able to knock out all of these defenses in a surprise first strike. 

To begin with, Taiwan has sophisticated early warning air defense systems. 

Moreover, the United States has not even been able to achieve this level of destruction against much lesser enemies like Iraq during the First Gulf War or Serbia in 1999.
But if China was far more successful than the United States had been in those conflicts, Beijing’s ability to execute an amphibious invasion is still far from certain. 

For instance, Beckley notes that only ten percent of Taiwan’s coastlines are suitable for an amphibious landing, which would allow Taipei to concentrate its forces on a few key areas. 

Chinese forces trying to land would likely be severely outnumbered.
Thus, even using the the most optimistic assessments (from Beijing’s perspective), China would have its hands full trying to conquer Taiwan.

Consequently, Beckley writes, “the United States would only need to tip the scales of the battle to foil a Chinese invasion, a mission that could be accomplished in numerous ways without exposing U.S. surface ships or non-stealth aircraft to China’s A2/AD forces.” 

More specifically, by the U.S. military’s own estimates, America would need “10,000 to 20,000 pounds of ordnance to decimate a PLA invasion force on the beaches of Taiwan.” 

This could be done, Beckley notes, using a single B-2 bomber or an Ohio-class submarine.
Beckley goes on to demonstrate that China would have difficulty gaining control over the East and South China Sea, given the nearly certain resistance it would face from countries like Vietnam and Japan. 

Thus, China’s ability to militarily dominate the region is more unlikely than is commonly appreciated. 

That being said, China’s strategy to date seems to be to win without fighting. 

So far, this has been relatively successful.

Sina Delenda Est

Is Great Britain Preparing for a War with China?
By Michael Peck

The Pacific Ocean does not exactly bubble with happy memories for Britain. 

In December 1941, Japanese torpedo bombers sank the battleship Prince of Wales and the battlecruiser Repulse off Malaya. 

In early 1942, the Japanese captured eighty thousand British soldiers at Singapore.
Already overstretched fighting the Nazis in Europe, Britain couldn’t do much in the Far East during World War II. 

For almost a century, America has been the big stick in the Pacific.
So why is Britain vowing to send its military muscle to the Pacific?
Kim Darroch, the British ambassador to the United States, recently told a Washington think tank that Britain will send aircraft carriers to the Pacific once they become operational in the 2020s. 

Four Royal Air Force Typhoon fighters, which arrived in Japan in October for joint exercises, are scheduled to fly over the South China Sea.
“Certainly, as we bring our two new aircraft carriers onstream in 2020, and as we renew and update our defense forces, they will be seen in the Pacific,” Darroch announced. 

“And we absolutely share the objective of this U.S. administration, and the next one, to protect freedom of navigation and to keep sea routes and air routes open.”
Naturally, Beijing warned that these moves could threaten relations between China and Britain.
There are two questions here. 

The first is technical: What exactly does Britain think it can accomplish militarily against China? 

The Royal Navy is now down to just nineteen destroyers and frigates, and is phasing out its antiship missiles, leaving British warships to slug it out with cannon like the Grand Fleet at Jutland in 1916. 

The Royal Air Force is shrinking, and the British Army has fewer infantrymen than were killed on the first day of the Somme in 1916.
Compare this to China, whose defense spending has surged 12.9 percent per year between 1989 and 2011. 

Even with the Chinese economy slowing, the defense budget was still expected to increase by 7.9 percent in 2016.
Assuming the Queen Elizabeth–class carriers and their F-35B aircraft are ready by 2020—two big ifs, given the history of these two programs—then each carrier will accommodate perhaps fifty aircraft at most, including F-35B vertical/short takeoff and landing strike fighters, as well as assorted airborne early-warning and antisubmarine aircraft and helicopters.
If the Americans, with their bigger carriers and sophisticated Aegis-equipped escorts, are worried about Chinese submarines, hypersonic weapons and carrier-killer ballistic missiles, how would a British carrier task force fare? 

If a time warp could take a Queen Elizabeth battlegroup back to 1982, it could possibly take on the entire Argentine air force and navy. 

But China in 2020? 

Not likely.
Which in turn brings up the question of what Britain hopes to accomplish. 

As a means of asserting British influence in East Asia, the British military presence probably won’t help much unless London is prepared to somehow wield a bigger stick (nuclear weapons don’t count—China has them too). 

As deterrence against a Chinese attack on Taiwan or Japan, if Beijing isn’t afraid of the United States, then it’s not likely to be afraid of Britain.
Militarily, despite some claims that Britain could defeat China under some conditions, this seems a risky proposition at best. 

With Chinese GDP almost five times greater than Britain’s, it is a proposition that will only get riskier. 

In the high-tech arms race between America and China, Britain simply doesn’t have the resources to compete.
Nor should it. 

Regardless of what China does, there is still the emerging Russian threat in Europe. 

Wouldn’t it make sense to concentrate the Royal Navy in Europe and the Mediterranean, as in World War II, and let the United States worry about the Pacific?