When I previously covered the possibility of China invading Taiwan, I quoted:
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.
Well, guess what month it is?
Over the past few days, over 150 Chinese aircraft have violated Taiwan’s airspace. The sabre-rattling has been serious enough that Taiwan has asked for Australia’s help.
In some way the timing is right for Beijing to go to war. Their economy is faltering, the Biden White House has proved its weakness in Afghanistan (and may be compromised by CCP ties), and a “Great Patriotic War” to bring a “renegade province” in line may be just what the doctor ordered to distract the nation.
In another way, this is exactly the wrong time to launch an attack, with global supply chains snarled and ports clogged up, how is China supposed to transport troops across the Taiwanese Strait, especially since they need civilian transports to carry troops.
The Chinese navy now has access to 1.5 million tons of shipping that could carry an assault force across the Taiwan Strait and initiate an invasion of Taiwan.
For those of you keeping score at home, that’s a transport fleet equal in displacement to U.S. Military Sealift Command’s own quasi-civilian fleet.
In other words, a lot of ships.
To have any chance of conquering Taiwan, China might need to transport as many as 2 million troops across the rough 100 miles of the Taiwan Strait and land them under fire at the island’s 14 potential invasion beaches or 10 major ports.
That’s a lot of people—far, far more than the People’s Liberation Army Navy can haul in its 11 new amphibious ships, together displacing around 370,000 tons. To transport the bulk of the invasion force, Beijing almost certainly would take up into naval service thousands of civilian ships.
The National Defense Transportation Law of 2017 mandates that all of China’s transport infrastructure, including ships, be available for military use. Naval engineers have begun modifying key vessels to make them better assault ships—in particular adding heavy-duty ramps that can support the weight of armored vehicles.
If I was of conspiratorial cast, I might suspect that the shipping snarl was designed to hide the presence of troops ships in the Taiwanese strait.
Taiwan is taking the threat seriously enough to prepare for war:
Taiwan is preparing for potential war with China following a series of increasingly aggressive military activity from Beijing, with Taipei’s foreign minister warning that should the nation attack, it would “suffer tremendously.”
China on Monday sent 52 military aircraft into Taiwan’s air defense identification zone, the largest military provocation seen yet.
In anticipation of further aggression, the self-ruled island is preparing to repel any strike and has asked Australia to increase intelligence sharing and security cooperation, Taiwanese Foreign Minister Joseph Wu told the Australian Broadcast Corporation’s “China Tonight.”
“The defense of Taiwan is in our own hands, and we are absolutely committed to that,” Wu told ABC’s Stan Grant in an interview to be broadcast Monday.
“I’m sure that if China is going to launch an attack against Taiwan, I think they are going to suffer tremendously as well.”
China, which claims that Taiwan is part of its territory, in the past week has stepped up its saber rattling against the island to press it to back down and accept Chinese rule. Taipei, meanwhile, maintains it is a sovereign country separate from Beijing.
Is China getting ready to invade? I have no way of reading Xi Jinping’s mind, but I think if a real war were in the offering, we’d see less saber-rattling tests of airspace and more signs of troop mobilization. I looked for any evidence that this was happening, but I haven’t seen in.
That said, we should still be doing our best to arm Taiwan to the teeth:
It’s been completely obvious for a long time that China has been preparing, if it so chooses, to take Taiwan by force of arms and keep us from being able to do anything about it.
It has massively increased its force of ballistic missiles, better to target a wide array of ships and hold at risk U.S. ground units. Prior to the latest, more serious iteration of the missile threat, Tom Shugart of the Center for New American Security estimated that a preemptive Chinese strike on our bases in the region “could crater every runway and runway-length taxiway at every major U.S. base in Japan, and destroy more than 200 aircraft on the ground.”
China has been churning out long-range strike aircraft and engaged in a historic naval buildup. It now has the largest navy in the world.
Nonetheless, invading and occupying Taiwan after launching a gigantic, logistically taxing amphibious operation across a 110-mile strait would be no small feat, to put it mildly.
It should be our objective to keep China at bay, toward the goal of keeping it from establishing its dominance over Asia, as former Trump defense official Elbridge Colby argues in his compelling new book The Strategy of Denial.
But the Taiwanese haven’t exhibited the urgency one would expect of an island of 24 million people coveted by a nearby nation of 1.4 billion people that makes no secret of its compulsion to try to swallow it whole.
Until a few years ago, Taiwan’s defense budget was shockingly inadequate. Its military reserves are lackluster. Its frontline units tend not to operate at full strength. It has often been seduced by the allure of so-called prestige weapons, such as top-end fighter aircraft that are irrelevant to its predicament.
We should be fortifying Taiwan and making it as difficult as possible for China to take. That means stockpiling food, energy, and munitions against a Chinese blockade. It means making its infrastructure more resilient and enhancing its cyber capabilities. It means increasing its capability to detect an early mustering of Chinese forces. It means more mines, anti-ship missiles, air-defense capabilities, and unmanned systems to frustrate a cross-strait invasion.
Speaking of arming countries against China, Japan is now testing flying F-35Bs off an aircraft carrier. If adopted, F-35s would be Japan’s first carrier aircraft since World War II.
Tags: aircraft carrier, Australia, China, Communism, F-35, Foreign Policy, Japan, Military, Taiwan, Xi Jinping
You ask me, Trump missed an opportunity to set up a conference call between Taipei, Tokyo, and Jerusalem. On the agenda: purchases by the former of certain products made at Dimona.
A lot of people think Japan and Taiwan already have nukes. The technological infrastructure and know-how are already there, and both nations have nuclear power plants.
Counterpoint: what if all the threatening against Taiwan is a distraction, and their real target is the Philippines?
From Richard Fernandez:
https://wretchard.com/why-not-luzon-instead-of-formosa-in-2021/
Later on he describes the situation on the ground:
… and then, consider geopolitics. Taiwan, Philippines? In the mind of the left, both are “expendable”, but … while everyone talks of protecting Taiwan, a tiny few ever talk of protecting Manila. Politically, the latter is even easier to lose.
Forgive this point for being a bit long…
New Moon phase for October is today (Oct 6th), so unlikely there’ll be a Chinese attack on TW this season. They are taking advantage of the darkness to conduct air runs within TW airspace however, and that’s prep for any big operation they’re planning. I trend to thinking April 2022 might be the date. While not in the news, I would think that at sea there’s also probably a lot of activity in TW waters as PLAN and “fishing militia” boats test sovereignty and observe TW counteractions.
While we don’t know if TW has a nuclear capability now, they were most certainly working on one well into the 1990s and beyond. A family relation who’s “MIT Uncle” was on such a project related that it’s likely they have something that can be quickly assembled.
If you really want to read what the Chinese are planning on TW, watch the KMT on Taiwan itself and what they say and do. The Nationalist Party is now all but controlled by Beijing and align themselves with the Mainland culturally. The KMT has declining popularity on Taiwan but still has many members in the military, national police, government bureaucracy, big business, and especially in the media. They still have delusions of grandeur and would love to go back to the days when they ran everything on Taiwan.
Howard’s point about the Philippines is spot-on, they’re most definitely a target for China but something I see as a phase two, not the initial theatre. They are however much less well defended than TW is, and while China couldn’t take all of PH in one go it could probably take many of the major islands.
After studying a China-TW conflict for 25 years my main conclusion is that China can and will prefer an internal coup to an opposed invasion mostly as if successful a coup can occur very quickly, and then backed up by Chinese military forces be nearly impossible to dislodge. There is no 2nd amendment on Taiwan, the population would have no serious means to resist if suddenly the government was overthrown by rogue KMT_led factions that then clear the way for the Chinese to fly in and land their own troops in the confusion. While an armed, opposed invasion is still in the cards to me this is the most probable outcome.
One might compare the scales the allies achieved against the Germans in Normandy to realize that the PRC is rattling an empty and broken saber.
-10,000 Allied aircraft faced 400 Germans. The PRC has achieved anywhere near this ratio-nope.
The Luftwaffe best pilots were dead or defending the reich allowing the allies overwhelming air superiority. The German hardware was on a par with the allies however. The PRC-flies copies of Russian stuff with avionics that are obsolete. Their pilots are actually limited in their flight time and range they can fly because of the problem of defections.
The allies required a massive naval superiority plus over 8,000 vessels to put 250,000 troops and 50,000 vehicles ashore. The PRC can’t hope to match this.
At Omaha beach two US divisions faced about 1300-1300 dug in third rate German troops. It was a close run thing. The other beaches saw force ratios that were about three to four times as bad for the Germans. The Germans had only started fortifying the Atlantic coast in earnest in the year prior to the invasion. Formosa has been preparing for 50 years. There are entire airbases built into mountains.
Yeah the PRC is going to invade Formosa about the same time Canada invades Texas.
[…] PROBABLY NOT: Is China Getting Ready To Invade Taiwan? […]
Might I recommend an alternate approach? Let’s call it Plan Zeihan (which makes it pretty obvious where the concept originates from).
The balloon goes up, the US immediately declares an embargo and blockade of Chinese trade… to be enforced primarily from the Indian Ocean westwards. Any vessel suspected of carrying Chinese cargoes or visiting Chinese ports is subject to impoundment. Unless cleared by an investigation, the offending ships would be seized, and any profits from the seizure would go to the seizing parties (to encourage other nations to join in). In addition, access to dollar markets worldwide would be restricted by using all of the tools that the Trump administration put in place for use against Iran.
China needs sea trade in order to survive. I don’t just mean their economy; they literally have to import massive amounts of not just food, but fertilizer, pesticides, and herbicides in order to stave off famine. Overuse and horrible farming practices have left Chinese agriculture heavily dependent upon them. Without trade, the CCP’s lifespan could be measured in months.
So, one thing to watch for in advance of an actual invasion would be massive purchases of non-perishable food and hydrocarbon byproducts. Even then, it’s an open question as to how long China could endure. The other thing to watch for is their nuclear development; the CCP may choose to gamble that they can extort the US into letting them get away with whatever they like with threats of armageddon.
The Chinese air show is most likely a response to the very large carrier task force now maneuvering to the east of Taiwan. This force consists of the USS Jefferson and Vinson, the HMS QE II, and a Japanese helicopter carrier plus support vessels. The British and Japanese carriers also each have a US Marine F-35B squadron. Total combat aircraft might be in excess of 120.
The irony is that every country involved in the carrier task force has already agreed that Taiwan is a province of China and that it will one day be reunited with the mainland.
Madness prevails. August 1914 is not a mystery at all. And our Elites are stupider than Europe’s was over 100 years ago.
I think it’ll look something like this :https://nexttobagend.blogspot.com/2020/08/and-now-for-something-little-different.html
Taiwan would do itself a lot of good by having a world class defensive mine warfare capability employed in advance – with tons of media.
We won’t be much help.