China vs Taiwan please?

[billbindc]

41 minutes ago, alison said:

Well, the election is done, went pretty much the way people expected. If anything the deadlock in the legislative yuan is likely to make the status quo even more status quo-y than it already was. The ball remains in China's court, as it has been for the last 8 years since they unilaterally broke off official relations.

Council on Foreign Relations released something fun for the wargamers a few days back: https://www.cfr.org/article/why-china-would-struggle-invade-taiwan

It's a multimedia presentation style article that shows the challenges China would face if it it attempted a ground war in Taiwan. I think most people agree that in reality this will mostly be a war waged in cyberspace and the financial sphere, and even if it gets hot it'll more be about subs and missiles than infantry and drones, but it's still interesting to see visualizations of the terrain and imagine how it all could go down.

That visualization is quite good but I routinely hear even the paltry invasion sites shown above overstate things and that for a variety of reasons there are only 14 reasonably useful landing points. In rougher weather, that number drops to zero and there are an average of 3 to 4 typhoons between June and October. That combination of readily definable logistics chokepoints and the friction of a long sealink make a conventional invasion quite daunting. Add in the PLA's lack of real operational experience and the risks of a purely military approach explode. 

If Taiwan falls, it's almost certainly going to be a political event not a military one.

[Erwin]

Isolating Taiwan via blockade would be a more likely strategy as it would dare the US to "do something".  Very hard for the US to get reinforcements to or even close to the island due to the Chinese developing long range anti-ship missiles - longer than the range of our aircraft carrier's planes.  At the same time the US/West cannot afford to lose Taiwan's indispensable chip production.  

The weakness of subs is that once a sub fires anything everyone knows where it is and anti-sub missiles will soon be raining down on it.  They are largely "one shot" weapons.

 

[Sequoia]

This is behind a paywall but certainly relevant to this discussion.

 

US Intelligence Shows Flawed China Missiles Led Xi Jinping to Purge Military - Bloomberg

Edited January 16 by Sequoia

[Erwin]

Let's hope that their equipment is as well made as the stuff they export to us. 

 

[cesmonkey]

Thoughtful conversation about last year's Taiwan invasion scenario war game:

 

[cesmonkey]

 

[TheVulture]

Today's Perun has a good high-level overview of the Chinese military that is worth a listen for anyone interested in the China  / Taiwan / US situation.

Also has the wry observation that China is modernising its navy partly to be able to protect its international trade, which it is very dependent on economically. Particularly with the US, Japan and Korea. But the main geopolitcal threats it sees  to its international trade are from the US, Japan and Korea. So it is trying to build a navy to compete with those countries in order to be able to protect its trade with the same countries....

 

[alison]

I've been waiting for a decent article on the 珠海云 drone mothership to come out, and CSIS delivered: https://features.csis.org/snapshots/china-research-vessel-taiwan/

There's been other articles on this thing but they're all scant on details and pics, so this piece is a nice summary that gathers together most of what we know. It's probably just a slightly overhyped command+control ship, but I'm a sucker for any drone-related hardware, so here you go.

[cesmonkey]

Yet another look at that invasion scenario war game. This time, they show more visual detail on how it was performed:
 

 

[Erwin]

Interesting video.  Can't help feeling that they are looking at the situation purely from a conventional thinking military perspective.  As we are seeing in Ukraine that is not a good predictor.  It would be like trying to fight WW2 using WW1 tactics and strategies.  What about Cyberwar, taking out US carriers, disabling communications or the ability of aircraft (or any unit to properly function), destroying the civilian infrastructure etc etc.  It is unclear if those concepts are in the wargame.  Since the motivation of all defense industries is to demonstrate how great their products are (that they have sold or want to sell), one doubts that any "disruptive" technologies would be represented.

[cesmonkey]