An Academic's Detailed Analysis of China Contingency on Taiwan

choi

Michael Beckley, The Emerging Military Balance in East Asia: How China's Neighbors Can Check Chinese Naval Expansion. International Security, 42: 78–119 (2017).
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/full/10.1162/ISEC_a_00294

Quote (citations omitted):

"With few exceptions, American studies on the East Asian military balance suffer from a bilateral bias: they focus on U.S. and Chinese capabilities while ignoring the capabilities of China's neighbors.8 For example, the most detailed studies of the military balance in the Taiwan Strait and South China Sea assume, implausibly, that Taiwan and Southeast Asian nations do nothing in their own defense and that the U.S. military has to save the day single-handedly.

"For the foreseeable future, therefore, China has little prospect of developing a force capable of conquering Taiwan or enforcing its maritime claims in the East or South China Seas—as long as China's neighbors remain willing to use their A2/AD forces [against China] and the United States continues to bolster and backstop them.

"This article proceeds in six sections. * * * The second evaluates whether China can conquer Taiwan through an amphibious invasion, strategic bombing campaign, or naval blockade.

"Of all the nations impeding China's military rise in East Asia, none is more important than Taiwan. * * * For all these reasons [omitted], many strategists consider Taiwan to be a center of gravity in East Asia: in Taiwanese hands, the island is a defensive barrier against Chinese expansion; in Chinese hands, Taiwan could become a launching pad for Chinese aggression.

"First, however, I discuss whether China could destroy Taiwan's air, naval, and missile forces in a surprise air and missile attack. * * * The bottom line is that conquering a developed island nation is difficult, so China would probably need to destroy most of Taiwan's military in the first few hours or days of a war to prevail.

"In 2000, the PLA had only a few hundred inaccurate missiles and a few dozen [that is it!] advanced aircraft and clearly could not carry out a disarming first strike. Today, however, China has 1,500 accurate missiles pointed at Taiwan and more than 1,000 advanced fighter aircraft.

"History suggests that at least some of Taiwan's major weapons systems would survive a Chinese air and missile attack. In the 1990–91 Gulf War, for example, the U.S.-led coalition pummeled Iraq with 88,500 tons of ordnance and shredded Iraq's airfields with cluster bombs, yet most of Iraq's air force and all of Iraq's road-mobile missile launchers survived and fought on. In 1999, NATO pounded Serbian air defenses in Kosovo for 78 days with 7,000 tons of ordnance, but destroyed only 3 of Serbia's 22 mobile missile batteries.  Given that China's short-range ballistic missiles could deliver only 700 total tons of ordnance on Taiwan—not to mention that Taiwan's air defenses and strike platforms are more numerous, mobile, and advanced than Iraq's or Serbia's were—China would have even more trouble than the United States did in Iraq and Kosovo in disarming its adversary with air and missile strikes alone. Recent Chinese studies bolster this conclusion. For example, computer simulations in a 2013 PLA study found that China's missile inventory could knock out only a few Taiwanese air bases for a few hours.

"Assume nonetheless for the sake of conservatism that China could destroy most of Taiwan's air and naval forces in a surprise attack and quickly establish air and sea dominance. Would China then be able to conquer Taiwan via amphibious invasion * * * ?  

"An amphibious invasion is the most difficult mission in warfare and requires three vital elements. First, an attacker must achieve air superiority. Second, the attacker must land forces in a place where they outnumber the defender. Third, the attacker must surge reinforcements to the landing zone faster than the defender. In the successful amphibious invasions of World War II and the Korean War, the United States and its allies enjoyed all three advantages—and still suffered huge losses.

"China currently has 89 amphibious ships. If all of them survived the 8-hour trip across the Taiwan Strait, the PLA could land a maximum of 26,000 troops and 640 armored vehicles on Taiwan's shores

"In reality, Taiwan will have many more troops at the point of attack, because only 10 percent of Taiwan's coastline is suitable for an amphibious landing. The east coast is off limits, because it consists of steep cliffs * * * 20-foot waves and torrential rain are common in Taiwan's [surrounding] waters—and attacks from any surviving Taiwanese ships, aircraft, or shore-based missile batteries.34 The west coast, on the other hand, consists mostly of mud flats that extend 2 to 5 miles out to sea and are buffeted by severe tides. To avoid getting stuck in the mud, PLA units would have to land at high tide at one of a few suitable locations.

"China could supplement its invasion with an airlift of two brigades (roughly 6,000 troops and some light vehicles). Even if all 6,000 paratroopers landed safely on Taiwan, however, they would be isolated and outnumbered.

"Computer simulations suggest that Taiwan would need to fire only 50 precision-guided missiles to destroy a dozen Chinese amphibious ships, losses that would end all hopes of a successful invasion. Taiwan also could bombard PLA landing craft with short-range artillery fire as they made their final 20-minute run into the beach.

"Past operations suggest that the PLA would lose many ships. During the 1982 Falklands War, when the United Kingdom carried out the world's only major amphibious assault in the past 40 years, an Argentine military with only 95 combat aircraft, 5 antiship cruise missiles, and some World War II era 'dumb' bombs (half of which failed to explode) sank 15 percent of Britain's naval task force (5 ships out of 33), and damaged an additional 35 percent, even though British ships never came within 400 miles of the Argentine mainland [What this means is the Argentine defenders in a little island group of Falkland. Taiwan is a huge island, enjoying the advantages of Argentine mainland (more peoople, more weaponry than teh Falkland can hold].

"If PLA ships somehow landed on Taiwan's shores, Chinese troops would then need to run up the beaches and attack Taiwanese defenses—actions that essentially guarantee mass casualties. During the D-Day assault of 1944, the United States lost roughly 10 percent of its troops on the beaches while attacking a severely overstretched German army defending thin positions on foreign soil with small arms and mortars. (Most German units, including all of Germany's most highly trained units, were fighting the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe.) If the PLA invaded Taiwan today, it would be attacking massed forces defending home soil with precision-guided munitions, helicopter gunships, tanks, and smart mines. PLA losses during each wave of attack, therefore, would likely be much higher than 10 percent.

"China, therefore, probably could not conquer Taiwan, despite the absence of U.S. intervention. * * * Consequently, the United States would only need to tip the scales of the battle to foil a Chinese invasion, a mission that could be accomplished in numerous ways without exposing US surface ships or non-stealth aircraft to China's A2/AD forces.  Specifically, American defense planners estimate that it would take 10,000 to 20,000 pounds of ordnance to decimate a PLA invasion force on the beaches of Taiwan.47 The US military could deliver that payload many times over with a single B-2 bomber or an Ohio-class submarine firing cruise missiles from an underwater location hundreds of miles away. Alternatively, the United States could unleash its attack submarines on the PLA invasion fleet

"in World War I, the machine gun made attack difficult, if not suicidal, for all sides; hence fighting on the western front got bogged down in trench warfare. In World War II, by contrast, the tank shifted the balance back to the offense by allowing attackers to 'blitzkrieg' static defenses.  What is the offense-defense balance today? Many scholars argue that defense is dominant * * * because [of] precision-guided munitions

"According to a recent study, the average cost of an A2/AD capability is about one-fiftieth of the cost of the power-projection capability that it could neutralize in war.131 A 50-to-1 cost ratio may be hard to believe, but U.S. experience suggests it is not wildly off the mark

"China probably will not be able to afford resilient power-projection forces anytime soon, because its fiscal future is bleak. * * * The volume of waste in China's economy is staggering. China has built more than fifty 'ghost cities' [and other wastes] * * * The unsurprising result of this waste has been a dramatic rise in China's debt [in its corporations, not in governments], from 121 percent of GDP in 2000 to nearly 300 percent in 2016. * * * Even if China's economic situation were not so dire, China still might lack funds for power projection, because homeland security costs drain a substantial portion of its military resources. * * * Dealing with this [domestic] unrest strains the PLA's resources. * * * All told, the PLA devotes more than 1 million troops (roughly 45 percent of the active-duty force) to internal security and border defense [thus unable to free up troops to invade Taiwan]

My comment:
(a)
(i) Michael Beckley. Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, Tufts University, undated
http://as.tufts.edu/politicalscience/people/faculty/beckley
(PhD Columbia University [2012])
(ii) The journal is published by MIT press.
(b) This is the first detailed analysis I have read, though I became aware of the fact that most of Taiwan's west coast are mud (City of Kaohsiung, where I came from) had black sandy beach).
(c) There is no need to read the rest. I did not read sections like
(i) Blockade, which will take too long to work -- besides, China can not blockade Taiwan's east coast -- and therefore in unlikely, or
(ii) how China's neighboring nations can band together without US intervention -- because Taiwan ALONE is capable of beating back China's invasion, which is always my conviction).