Emerging tail-risk: An invasion of Taiwan

The military option

Instead of a soft takeover of Taiwan, Beijing could opt for the hard military option. As the Chinese economy grew, it was inevitable that spending on the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) would dwarf Taiwanese military spending. Indeed, Taiwan’s Ministry of Defense reported in 2013 that China had developed a plan to invade Taiwan by 2020 at the 18th National Congress. Moreover, the 100-year anniversary of the Communist Party in 2021 will raise pressure on Xi to show progress towards “unification”.
 

Beijing seems to be entering a new phase in its military actions. In the past, PLA warplanes have probed Taiwan’s air defenses but stopped at the “median line” separating Taiwan and the Mainland that served as an unofficial boundary. In recent months, PLA fighters have sortied in numbers, and ignored the median line as it became more assertive in its sorties.
 

What is China were to invade? DEFCON Warning Systems reported that repeated Pentagon wargames have usually resulted in victories for the Chinese side.

The Red Team, composed of experts on the Chinese military, aims to use all available forces to capture Taiwan, the island 90 miles off the coast that China regards as a renegade province and that it has repeatedly vowed to retake, by force if necessary.
 

The Blue Team, made up U.S. military personnel with operational experience — fighter pilots, cyber warriors, space experts, missile defense specialists – must try to defeat the Chinese invasion.
 

It doesn’t generally go well for the Blue Team.
 

“It’s had its ass handed to it for years,” David A. Ochmanek, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for force development and now a defense analyst at Rand, told RealClearInvestigations. “For years the Blue Team has been in shock because they didn’t realize how badly off they were in a confrontation with China.”

The assault would begin with airstrikes on American bases in the region.

;If China felt that the U.S. would intervene, military planners from the Pentagon and Rand who have gamed out scenarios believe a war over Taiwan would most likely begin with a massive attack by advanced Chinese missiles against three American targets: its bases on Okinawa and Guam, its ships in the Western Pacific, including aircraft carrier groups, and its air force squadrons in the region. 

The initial landings would be conducted by airborne troops. When the paratroopers have secured beachheads, the follow-up force would then come by sea.

“They are giving off a lot of signals about how this campaign would unfold,” Lyle J. Goldstein, a China and Russia specialist at the Naval War College in Rhode Island, told RCI. “They’re talking a lot about airborne assault in two varieties, by parachute and by helicopters. It’s what’s called vertical envelopment. Amphibious assault is old school. It may be necessary but it’s not the main military effort.  The new school is to bring lead elements over by air, secure the terrain and then bring in more forces over the beach. The intensity and scale of training in the Chinese military now for airborne assault is, to me, shocking.
 

“There would be 15, maybe 20 different landings on the island, east, west, north, and south, all at once, some frogmen, some purely airborne troops,” Goldstein continued, saying he was expressing his own views, not official assessments of the U.S. “The Chinese high command would watch these bridgeheads to see which of them is working, while the Taiwan command is looking at this amid decapitation attempts and massive rocket and air assaults. The Chinese would seize several beachheads and airports.  Their engineering prowess would come into play in deploying specialized floating dock apparatuses to ensure a steady flow of supplies and reinforcements—a key element. My appraisal is that Taiwan would fold in a week or two.”

While Taiwan’s military appears to be impressive on paper, its actual capabilities are suspect. Foreign Policy reported that a recent suicide revealed “the disastrous logistics of an undersupplied army”: Taiwan’s Military Has Flashy American Weapons but No Ammo,

As Taiwanese politicians showcase flashy U.S. weapons bought with taxpayers’ money, the logistics inside the military remain so abysmal that a young army officer killed himself after being pressured to buy repair parts out of his own pocket.
 

Huang Zhi-jie was a 30-year-old lieutenant in the Taiwanese army. Initially serving in the airborne troops as an enlisted soldier, Huang was so committed that he requested officer training—normally considered more work for little reward—and was later commissioned as a lieutenant in charge of a maintenance depot of the 269th Mechanized Infantry Brigade. Huang was supposed to be the model soldier of which Taiwan desperately wanted more: a young, college-educated volunteer who chose to serve the country out of his own volition, at a time when the military was still facing difficult transition from conscription to an all-volunteer military.
 

But on the night of April 16, Huang hung himself on a dark staircase by his base’s mess hall. Initially his death was not even reported in the Taiwanese media, until Huang’s mother took to Facebook in a long open letter appealing to President Tsai Ing-wen for an investigation.
 

In an emotional press conference, Huang’s mother alleged that her son was subjected to hazing by his superior officers, and that he was pressured to procure tools and spare repair parts out of his own pocket. Screenshots of private messages, receipts, and photos of items purchased by Huang were shown to the public as proof. For some time before Huang’s death, the novice lieutenant was desperately trying to make up for the shortages in his depot by buying a variety of items like repair hammers and fire buckets from the civilian market. Huang’s brother even used a U.S. website in Arizona to purchase a pair of spark plug gap gauges for him that used imperial measurements instead of metric ones.

The shocking part of this incident is it occurred at one of Taiwan’s frontline military units, indicating a lack of readiness among Taiwanese forces.

Even worse, the 269th Mechanized Infantry Brigade isn’t some rear-echelon unit but a major combat formation strategically stationed around the outskirt of Taoyuan City, northern Taiwan. It is expected to bear the brunt of ground fighting to stop any invading Chinese troops from reaching the basin of Taipei, Taiwan’s capital. If the 269th is in such bad material shape, how about the rest of the Taiwanese military?

An article in The Economist came to a similar conclusion about military readiness in Taiwan.

Alas, Taiwan’s preparedness and its will to fight both look shaky. “The sad truth is that Taiwan’s army has trouble with training across the board,” says Tanner Greer, an analyst who spent nine months studying the island’s defences last year. “I have met artillery observers who have never seen their own mortars fired.” Despite long-standing efforts to make the island indigestible, Taiwan’s armed forces are still overinvested in warplanes and tanks. Many insiders are accordingly pessimistic about its ability to hold out. Mr Greer says that of two dozen conscripts he interviewed, “only one was more confident in Taiwan’s ability to resist China after going through the conscript system.” Less than half of Taiwanese polled in August evinced a willingness to fight if war came.

America’s response

Should China decide to invade, how would Washington react? The DEFCON Warning Systems article stated that the cost to American forces would be high, and at a level not seen since the Vietnam War.

“We’re playing an away game against China,” Rand’s Ochmanek said. “When bases are subjected to repeated attacks, it makes it exponentially more difficult to project power far away.”
 

“The casualties that the Chinese could inflict on us could be staggering,” said Timothy Heath, a senior international defense researcher at Rand and formerly a China analyst at the U.S. Pacific Command headquarters in Hawaii. “Anti-ship cruise missiles could knock out U.S. carriers and warships; surface-to-air missiles could destroy our fighters and bombers.”

Much depends on the outcome of the election. President Trump has shown himself to be very transactional in his approach to foreign policy. Would he commit to defending Taiwan under such a scenario? An article in The Atlantic cast Trump as someone in the “Paul Kennedy” school in his conduct of American foreign policy.

When Trump’s first book, The Art of the Deal, was atop best-seller charts in the late 1980s, second on the list was a scholarly work called The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, by the Yale professor Paul Kennedy. That book warned that the U.S. could not sustain a policy of global supremacy indefinitely while its relative wealth continued to fall. The U.S. had risen to dominance in the aftermath of Europe’s implosion after World War II, but, Kennedy argued, this was an abnormality.
 

The challenge for America, he wrote, was to bring into balance its means and its commitments. In effect, whether it liked it or not, America was moving from being the only power that mattered to the greatest power in a world of them. The book, published in 1987, came out just before the fall of the Soviet Union and America’s unipolar moment of glory. Its central warning, however, has boomeranged back into relevance.
 

Trump may have no idea that he is revealing any of this; he may not even agree with the things he is revealing. Yet he is revealing them nonetheless. “He’s a Paul Kennedy, Rise and Fall of the Great Powersperson,” Fiona Hill, Trump’s former senior director on European and Russian affairs at the National Security Council, told us, before adding: “Though I doubt he ever read the book.”

After decades of international adventures that have left the U.S. overstretched, overwhelmed, and overburdened, it was Trump who blurted out the uncomfortable truth: American foreign policy was failing, and had been for decades.

 

Through a combination of hubris, ignorance, instinct, and ego, he pointed at the reality and demanded to know why it was being allowed to continue. Why was America still fighting wars in the Middle East and elsewhere? Why wasn’t it partnering with Russia against Islamist jihadists? Why was China allowed to abuse the rules of the game? Why were American workers losing their jobs to poorer countries? And why were so-called allies in Europe allowed to place high tariffs on American produce while American workers paid for their defense? Were these countries even allies at all?