Is The U.S. Misreading The Nature Of China's Threat To Taiwan?

An interesting analysis casts doubt on the worst case scenario that is one of the biggest drivers of the U.S. defense budget (especially for the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps), which is the fear that the U.S. would have to help defend Taiwan from an amphibious invasion of Taiwan from the Chinese mainland. 

The argument that this isn't the right threat to be planning for is that while China has a large and modern navy, that its amphibious forces are far smaller (about 100,000 troops at most, perhaps a hundred or two hundred ships, and scores of helicopters) than what history teaches us is necessary for a large and successful amphibious invasion. 

The last significant amphibious invasion in world military history was more than 72 years ago and that too suggests that some skepticism is in order. Perhaps this tactic hasn't be used for generations because it no longer makes military sense.

China's military might be ill suited to a credible mass amphibious assault on Taiwan because that isn't the real or likely threat to Taiwan and other U.S. allies in the region. If so, the right kind of U.S. response to a Chinese threat to U.S. allies in the region might be very different than the one that military planners and lobbyists for defense contractors are currently focused upon.

Unlike Russia, there is no indication that China is prone to take precipitous military action that has a high risk of turning out disastrously. 

Three World War II campaigns are relevant: operations Overlord, Causeway, and Jubilee. 

Overlord was the landing at Normandy on June 6, 1944. About 180,000 British, Canadian, French, and American soldiers disembarked from some five thousand ships and small craft on the first day. 

Operation Causeway planned for four hundred thousand marines and soldiers and six thousand ships and small craft to invade Taiwan; it never happened, deferred by the invasion of the Philippines.

Operation Jubilee was the disastrous raid on Dieppe against the Nazis in August 1942. Approximately 10,500 allied troops, mostly Canadian, were carried in about 240 ships and small craft landing on the northern coast of France. The assault was immediately repulsed by the Germans with substantial British losses. 

The last major amphibious operation under fire was Inchon during the Korean War in late 1950. 

During the 1991 Iraq War, the U.S. Marines lobbied for an amphibious assault from inside the Gulf. That was denied as too dangerous. The Marines instead were used as a decoy force. With today’s precision weapons and ubiquitous surveillance, any amphibious operations would be even more difficult and costly.

While the exact size and capability of the PLA for conducting large-scale amphibious operations is uncertain, in general terms, China’s navy has about thirty thousand marines and a combined seventy large amphibious ships. China has two and is building a third helicopter assault ship that reportedly can carry about nine hundred marines. Taken together, these ships could carry perhaps fifteen to twenty thousand marines, and possibly as many as thirty thousand.

The PLA also has six army amphibious combined arms brigades with a total of twenty-four-to-thirty thousand troops and up to fifteen Special Operations (SOF) brigades. However, as with airborne troops, deploying SOF across the Taiwan straits in helicopters raises logistics problems that restrict their use over such a distance and in uncertain weather conditions.

It can be argued that China’s large shipbuilding industry could turn out the thousands of smaller landing craft essential for an amphibious assault. However, those shipyards build big ships, and making any transitions would be time-consuming, expensive, and difficult to conceal.

From a Chinese perspective, an invasion would be a worst-case option. Greater pressure can be applied by threatening or imposing a blockade against Taiwan, cutting off access by sea and air, and by economic sanctions. Grabbing small offshore islands belonging to Taiwan as leverage is well within PLA capabilities. Leninist doctrine has long called for regime change from within, as China could step up its attempts to use internal Taiwanese politics to effect a change.

And China could destroy or threaten to destroy Taiwan’s infrastructure under a rain of missiles after attempting a Dieppe-like assault to gain a foothold. But a traditional amphibious assault is more problematic.

Taiwan’s geography is unsuitable for those as well as amphibious operations, as it lacks the beaches of Normandy or Luzon. There are only a handful of landing sites on the west coast. Mountainous areas run the length of the 250-mile-long island, some topping ten thousand feet above sea level. While Taiwan does not train for guerrilla war, this difficult terrain would be very suitable for it. And Taiwan lacks the physical infrastructure to accommodate hundreds of thousands of invaders and support their logistical needs, the bulk having to come from the mainland.

Hence, to mount an opposed PLA amphibious assault to seize and occupy Taiwan, China lacks, probably indefinitely, the military capability (power) and capacity (numbers).

A two year effort from 2017-2019 at the Naval War College called “Breaking the Mold” examined alternative means to implement the NDS. For the Indo-Pacific theater, a Mobile Maritime and Porcupine Defense for Taiwan was proposed in close concert with allies. That Japan is increasing defense spending is one indication of greater allied concern, as is the AUKUS program to provide nuclear submarines to Australia.

This Mobile Maritime strategy would confine the PLA to the first island chain running from Japan through Taiwan to Indonesia, the Philippines, and Vietnam. As in World War II in the Pacific against Japan, China would be blockaded and denied access to overseas access and resupply. It would be cut off from its Belt and Road outposts. And by Taiwan adopting a Porcupine Defense to make a PLA invasion too costly to consider, the United States would not have to spend as many resources in deterring and preparing for that contingency.

If an opposed-entry invasion of Taiwan is beyond China’s capacity, and it could be prevented by a Porcupine Defense of the island, what would be the consequences for U.S. strategy? 

If Taiwan is not the immediate or even long-term danger spot the U.S. believes it is, then is it time to ask if U.S. strategy towards China has become overly militarized.

From here.