FROM THE CHEAP SEATS: THE PRC IS HIGHLY UNLIKELY TO INVADE TAIWAN SOON
Over the last decade, the seemingly endless background noise amongst the military chatterati has been concentrated on when, not if, the PRC will invade Taiwan. In this essay, I hope to provide some details about why I think any invasion of Taiwan is years off at the earliest, and may not be possible for decades. I suspect this will draw some controversary, so keep the commentary logical and unemotional.
The PRC’s military growth, both in capacity and capability, has grown immensely over the last twenty years and must be respected. Let’s get this established from the start. They have invested wisely, used espionage to steal military and civilian technological secrets from the West to a massive degree, and have dedicated themselves to transforming all services within their military from being an inward-focused force designed to control the 1.3 billion citizenry to an outward-focused force designed for power projection and high-intensity conflict.
With all that said, the PRC has a series of weaknesses, and these weaknesses are not easily solved, and require time and investment. By identifying these weaknesses — which are known to the Chinese Communist Party and PRC military leadership — we can assess that any invasion of Taiwan is years away, and may take up to two decades to build a force that could actually conduct the extremely complex operation required to seize control of the island(s).
WEAKNESS #1: AN AMPHIBIOUS CAMPAIGN OVER A LONG DISTANCE? The narrowest part of the Taiwan Strait between mainland China and Taiwan is a whopping 81 MILES in distance! It gets as wide as 110 miles in distance, which is a massive distance to cover if you are a poor, bloody infantryman in the People’s Liberation Army Navy Marine Corps (PLANMC for those scoring at home). To compare, Operation Overlord, the Allied Invasion of Normandy in France, was 100 miles in distance from Portsmouth, England, to the beaches of France. The Allies had complete air, surface naval warfare and subsurface naval warfare dominance over the Germans at the time, and an extended bombing campaign had been conducted for weeks prior to the invasion. The American, British and Canadian assault forces also had a great deal of experience with amphibious operations, as the American 1st Infantry Division had conducted beach assaults in Algeria during Operation Torch and in Sicily during Operation Husky. The Chinese have no experience conducting amphibious operations, which are notoriously complex and difficult, and have become even more difficult to successful execute in the modern era due to the reliance on military space assets, secure networks, and modern weaponry. Trying to harmonize all aspects of these operations- known in modern parlance as “domains” — is extremely challenging even for Western militaries to execute. Trying to orchestrate land and carrier based air, surface naval warfare, sub-surface naval, space, cyber, airspace deconfliction, and possible airborne, air assault and amphibious ground invasions is something that has to be conceptualized and rehearsed over and over again. I don’t think the PRC has the ability to operate at the level today — which doesn’t mean they would attempt an invasion — and for the near future.
WEAKNESS #2: THE PRC MILITARY HAS LITERALLY NO COMBAT EXPERIENCE. In 2021, the last PRC combat veterans from the invasion of Vietnam in 1979 were promoted to Four-Star General, including new Western Theater Commander Wang Haijiang. With this lack of combat experience, especially at the tactical level (think Company and below), the first time the PRC military “sees the elephant” will come as a massive shock, especially facing Western weaponry. To make matters worse for the Chinese, their Air Force and Navy not only have no combat experience, they have very limited collective fighting experience as well. It’s one thing to send a ship out of port, it’s another thing to send a fleet out of port, conduct combat training, maintenance and sustainment operations, and do the little things, like firefighting, weapons maintenance and smaller critical tasks that cannot be ignored in a marine environment. While the PRC has grand aspirations for their Air Force and Navy, they are decades behind the United States in understanding how to actually maintain and sustain their force in protracted operations. If I were in the Chinese leadership, I would look to get combat experience somewhere else prior to trying to invade Taiwan. Conducting this operation with an untested Air Force, Army, Navy and Marine Corps is an absolute recipe for disaster for the Chinese.
Weakness #3: The CCP Leadership Can’t Ignore Domestic Politics and the Will of the People. Any war between the PRC and Taiwan is going to be bloody, longer than expected, and have substantial negative impacts on the citizenry of the PRC. Because of the CCP’s “one-child” policy, now rescinded due to emerging demographic problems, most families in the PRC only have a single son. Due to the lethality of modern warfare, losing your only son will have extreme impacts on mothers, who have been known to be vocal about these issues throughout history. In the USSR, mothers of the “Afghantsy” or Afghan war veterans became vocal once the dead soldiers came home by the thousand as “Mothers and wives simply received death notices, without any proud funerals of Soviet soldiers killed somewhere far away for some unknown reason. When these quiet funerals began to multiply by the thousands, it was impossible to hide the failure of the war effort.”
It is this kind of sacrifice that the CCP leadership will ask of not only their soldiers, sailors, marines and airmen, but also of their families. We can also look to the current COVID-19 lockdowns in China, which is at least the third time cities have been completely locked down, to another form of protest once the citizenry gets bad news. In addition, the reliance on foreign goods, from raw materials like fruits, vegetables, rubber, and crude oil, to finished goods and luxury Western goods, will have an increasing negative impact once those goods stop showing up at ports once the war starts. The PRC leadership will, of course, promise a quick military victory as politicians across the world always do, but once the materials that are critical to a functioning society start to disappear, look out…now, one must recognize this also can be felt in Western societies, as many finished goods produced in China were simply not available for long periods of time in the West during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Weakness #4: Are They Learning from the Russia-Ukraine War? Now that the Russian-Ukraine War is about to enter its second month, the world has seen the weakness of Russian equipment, especially their Infantry Vehicles and Tanks. Why does this matter? Well, a lot of Chinese kit is either Russian, altered from the original Russian equipment, or copied (and in some cases, improved upon) from the original gear. The Chinese have to understand some of their equipment is either as bad or even worse than the Russian stuff. In addition, corruption within the Chinese military-industrial complex has been notoriously bad for decades, although Xi has made real reforms in this area. In addition, there are smaller yet critical issues that need to be understood by the Chinese, such as ground, ship and air fleet maintenance, sustainment operations, medical evacuation operations, and urban operations. It’s yet to be seen if the Chinese will use this war as a starting point to seriously reform their military — my bet is that they will, but it will take years to get these lessons learned into new equipment, individual and collective training, and even something as critical as development of a real NCO corps.
In summary, the Chinese could ignore all of this and decide to launch an invasion at any point. But I think they are much, much smarter than that. The Russia-Ukraine War has provided them with the best kind of war, the one you watch on the television and take copious notes from other people’s mistakes. I think they will launch a years-long effort to improve their weaponry, understand how complex amphibious operations actually are (especially in the two way shooting gallery), and dedicate real time, effort and money to improving their maintenance and sustainment operations. The decision to invade Taiwan is one with immense political risk for Xi, as failure is not an option. But in the meantime, the Chinese will continue to watch what happens in and around Ukraine, and start laying the conceptual groundwork to improve themselves.
