A hypothetical invasion of Taiwan would be won or lost in and over the straight of Taiwan.
denbeste.nu
Taiwan is capable of defending itself against an invasion by China without our help, and with our help such an invasion would be hopeless. But we would not help with ground troops; our contribution would be naval and air.
In many ways the closest equivalent in the history of warfare is the English Channel in WWII. After France fell in 1940, Germany planned operation Seelöwe (Sea lion), an amphibious assault on the UK. Barges and other ships were accumulated in ports in France and Belgium and the Netherlands, but there were two problem: the Royal Navy Home Fleet, and RAF Bomber Command.
The Home Fleet waited in Scapa Flow to defend against such an invasion, and Germany did not have a fleet which could oppose it. Certainly it had E-boats (small fast torpedo boats) but at best that would only hurt the Home Fleet; E-boats could never prevent it from reaching the site of an invasion, and devastating the shipping, and the forces which had already landed, through heavy gunfire. If 25% of the Home Fleet reached the invasion, it would have been catastrophe for Germany. And there was never any doubt that the RN would have accepted such losses.
RAF Bomber Command was just as much of a problem. An invasion fleet could be attacked by air, from high level or low, and there could be no question that Bomber Command would likewise accept catastrophic losses in order to destroy an invasion.
There was a solution to both of those problems: the Luftwaffe. Dive bombers and torpedo planes could have stopped the Home Fleet and prevented it from reaching any invasion. Luftwaffe fighters could have stopped Bomber Command.
But that faced another problem: RAF Fighter Command. Purpose-built dive bombers and torpedo planes are not able to defend themselves against hostile fighters; they're not sufficiently maneuverable. Converted fighters could, but only by jettisoning their bomb. And Luftwaffe fighters might well inflict great losses on RAF bombers but if RAF fighters provided cover then Luftwaffe fighters couldn't prevent RAF bombers from decimating the invasion force.
So as long as RAF Fighter Command was able to contest the skies over the channel, the Luftwaffe could not guarantee to protect an invasion against RAF bombers or an attack by the Home Fleet. That's why the Battle of Britain was fought in the air; its purpose was to cripple Fighter Command. Fighter Command was the lynchpin of British defenses.
It's never been clear to me whether Seelöwe was a serious plan or a demonstration. There was a lot of skepticism among top military officers in Germany about the feasibility of an invasion, but the books I've read differ on whether Hitler himself thought it was possible, and intended to follow through on it.
Ultimately it doesn't matter: Fighter Command held on, and Seelöwe was cancelled.
The Channel played a factor again, in 1944, and again air supremacy was required, but this time those planning the invasion did gain air supremacy, and the invasion worked. By that point the ongoing battle in the air over Germany had reduced the Luftwaffe enough so that British and American fighters were able to swarm over the invasion force from dawn to dusk, while only two Lufwaffe planes made any attacks at all. (Two fighters made a single strafing run down one of the American beaches.)
The lesson of the Channel is that for an invasion to succeed on land, you have to have absolute control over the water; and to do that you have to have absolute control of the air over the water.
The Battle of Britain wasn't fought on the ground, and a hypothetical invasion of Taiwan wouldn't be, either. If we got involved, we would fight with naval forces and air forces, not with ground troops. We would use carrier battle groups (probably two) operating in open ocean east of Taiwan, land-based bombers flying out of Guam, fighters and bombers flying out of Okinawa, and attack subs.
To begin with, it should be clear that if China wanted to destroy Taiwan it could do so with nuclear-tipped missiles. Doing so would risk an American nuclear response, and for that and many other reasons I do not think that such an attack is being seriously contemplated by the leaders in Beijing. What they want, or claim to want (more on that later), is for Taiwan to be incorporated into China more or less intact. Ideally it would happen voluntarily, but that seems less likely every year, and any serious attempt at reunification now would have to be based on conventional military force.
But Taiwan is a tough nut to crack. For fifty years it's been clear that the primary threat to Taiwan was a Chinese invasion, and for the last 30 years Taiwan has been rich enough to buy and field a large and powerful military for defensive purposes.
Taiwan would have to be assaulted with enough ground troops to defeat Taiwan's army of about 200,000 men in regular service, and an additional 1.5 million reserves, who are armed and trained specifically for counter-landing operations. Obviously it would take a huge force to defeat that; it isn't going to be done by a regiment or two.
Such a force can only be moved by sea, and would have to number in the hundreds of thousands at the very least. It is by no means clear that China has enough shipping to move such a force, but that's only the beginning of the problems facing any invasion plan.
In fact, it is by no means clear that China has that many troops who are actually capable of engaging in that kind of combat. The People's Liberation Army is immense, but equipment is terrible and training is poor and most of the soldiers spend their time in service working on PLA farms. And in 2000 China reduced the size of the People's Liberation Army by 500,000 men.
To move a large force from China to Taiwan, and to keep it supplied, would require absolute control over the Strait of Taiwan, and early capture and control over at least one major port on Taiwan.
If Germany had a problem with surface naval forces, China has an even worse one. By modern standards, the People's Liberation Army Navy (that's how the symbols get translated) is a joke. It's intended for what are known as "brown water" (coastal) and "green water" (river) operations but it is totally hopeless for any kind of "blue water" operations in open ocean. In particular, it has no credible antisubmarine capability, which means it has no chance of defending convoys of troop transports and cargo ships against submarine attack.
The days of subs attacking by aiming with a periscope are long gone. A modern attack sub can identify and destroy a target from a range of more than 15 kilometers. By the time you hear a torpedo coming in, it's long since too late to do anything, and the direction the torpedo comes from tells you nothing about where the sub was that launched it.
Modern torpedoes don't travel in a straight line like a bullet. They're wire-guided and remote controlled from the firing sub, and if the wire breaks a local brain on the torpedo takes over. They carry passive and active sonar and magnetic field detectors.
Modern torpedoes don't attack to strike a ship on the side just below the water line; they maneuver to just below the keel of the ship and detonate there. That's a much more effective attack which has an excellent chance of breaking the ship's back and turning one ship into two sinking wrecks.
Taiwan has four submarines. They are not nuclear powered, but modern conventional subs can stay submerged for a long time and are not to be underestimated. The US has far more subs than that, and all ours are nuclear powered and don't ever have to surface when away from port. One LA-class attack sub is capable of massacring an entire fleet and getting away unharmed. And they can also fire missiles.
Such convoys can also be attacked from air. Air-to-surface antishipping missiles are cheap and plentiful, and you can be sure that Taiwan has a goodly supply of them. Such missiles can also be fired from the ground. There's no reason to believe that the People's Liberation Army Navy has any equivalent of the American Aegis system to defend itself or a convoy against antiship missiles.
Nor do they have any credible amphibious landing capability which could plausibly take and hold a beach, and then a city, and then a port, supplied completely over the beach, against Taiwan's military.
Taiwan also has a lot of artillery which could attack ships near to shore.
Nor does an airborne assault solve their problem. They do not have enough transport aircraft to put enough airborne troops into Taiwan to capture and hold a port (let alone conquer the entire island). And even if they did, they'd never reach Taiwan. Taiwan has excellent ground-based air defenses.
But before the Chinese leadership could contemplate any of those problems, they'd face the same problem Germany did: control of the air. As long as Taiwan (and America) could contest the air over the strait of Taiwan, any military operation would be hopeless.
The People's Liberation Army Air Force is one of the largest in the world, but most of its planes are museum pieces. Most of the PLAAF consists of Chinese-built imitations of Soviet-era designs: 2500 J-6's (copies of the Mig-19), 600 J-7's (copies of the Mig-21) and 400 J-8's (a refinement of the J-7). Those jets were obsolete 30 years ago. The only significant credible fighters are about 200 J-11's (copies of the Su-27) and about 60 SU-30's purchased from Russia.
Taiwan's air force includes 145 F-16's, 60 Mirage 2000's, and 130 Taiwan-built Ching-Kuo interceptors. More important is that there's every reason to believe that Taiwan's pilots get a lot more training and air time than PLAAF pilots do. I do not believe that China could defeat Taiwan in the air, even if the US did not get involved. Add to that American F-15's and F-16's from Okinawa and F-14's and F-18's from carriers, and there's no chance at all of achieving air supremacy.
The problems pile up. Even if China managed to capture a port on Taiwan, it's difficult to see how they could prevent Taiwan or the US from mining the waters in and around that port, rendering it useless. Mines can be delivered by bombers, by missiles or by submarines, and modern mines are terribly difficult to find and disarm. The days of big floating spheres covered with detonator buttons are long gone; a modern mine is best thought of as a torpedo launcher that sits on the bottom listening for something to shoot at. The PLAN has no credible mine-clearing capability to deal with that.
A Chinese plan might begin with a saturation missile strike against Taiwanese air bases, hoping to ground most of the Taiwanese air force. But that would do nothing about American planes, or Taiwanese SAMs or surface antiship missile launchers, or the submarines, and given that Taiwan has anti-missile defenses (Patriots) China could not be sure of crippling Taiwan's air force that way.
Absent initial attack with nuclear weapons, a Chinese invasion is not militarily credible. There are at least six problems they cannot solve each of which would be sufficient to make such an invasion fail. And even if there were such an attempt, and even if the US got involved, we would not rely on ground forces to do so.
So I don't take threats of invasion seriously. The PRC is rattling its sabers because it would be political suicide inside the PRC for any leader there to do otherwise. But they won't make the attempt, because it would lead to disaster.
And even if they successfully invaded Taiwan and incorporated it into China by force, their trade with the US (and probably with Japan and South Korea) would collapse, and the economic consequences of that to China would be tremendous.
The status quo for the last thirty years, since Nixon's visit, is that Taiwan is in practice already independent, and China pretty much accepts that as fait accompli. But the leaders in China insist on being able to keep pretending that it isn't, for domestic political reasons. Everyone else (including the leaders in Taipei) put up with that as long as the Chinese don't do anything other than growl |
