Can Pain Deter China From Invading Taiwan?
The CCP will care no more about PLA losses than it cares for the civilian death toll it has already inflicted on its own people
Counting on making the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) shrink from enduring losses implies the CCP cares one bit for their subjects. I think Taiwan’s adoption of a “porcupine” strategy is a Maginot Line in the Taiwan Strait. And if that hard crust is breached in that all-or-nothing technology-based defense, Taiwan is doomed.
[The] flaw is that if the enemy decides it is willing to accept the casualties it will invade and win. How sure are we that we can calibrate the acceptable losses? How do we know when the potential invader's calculations change?
And now it is official for Taiwan:
Taiwan wants to scrap a longtime focus on equipping the island for a conventional war. Instead, it is racing to build up new, asymmetric defenses aimed at making China’s much more powerful military think twice before attacking. Failing that, it aims to inflict enough pain to slow China while it seeks help from Washington.
How quickly Taiwan upgrades its military could determine whether Beijing decides to invade, and whether it would succeed in seizing the island.
Combined arms has long been the key to winning battles. But no, that’s badthink. Think new and improved!
Taiwan’s goal now is to build layers of coastal defenses to hold off an amphibious invasion. That involves stockpiling new weapons and expanding and training an army that can use them. Taiwan’s navy is establishing a coastal command, a shift from a focus on control of the sea to a focus on fending off attacks.
I’m not saying that it is bad to have more robust coastal defenses. But that is all or nothing, no?
First of all, for the Taiwan Strait that new naval focus is good in light of China’s growing strength. But what about Taiwan’s east coast. A more conventional navy to hold open sea lines of communication to the outside world would be nice, no?
Taiwan's bigger ships are too vulnerable in the narrow straits exposed to Chinese fast attack boats, submarines, and aircraft. The bigger Taiwanese ships with air defense and anti-submarine capabilities are safer east of Taiwan where they can keep Taiwan's sea lines of communication open. Together with mine countermeasures vessels and helicopters, that's where these ships belong. Also, operating at the northern and southern tips of Taiwan, the bigger ships could use anti-ship missiles to strike into the strait area before retiring behind the shield of the home island.
Don’t make it easy for China to skip the invasion and go right to blockade.
Also, learning from Ukraine’s Black Sea experience in asymmetric “porcupine” weapons misses the point that Taiwan would need to do multiples more in the first 39 hours than what Ukraine has done in 39 months.
But what happens if China sucks up the losses with its broad effort to get troops ashore? The initially quoted article says:
One of the biggest obstacles facing Taiwan’s military is staffing. It has set a goal of having a military numbering around 215,000, which would still be dwarfed by China’s two million-strong force.
At the end of last year, only 78% of Taiwan’s military positions were filled, according to the defense ministry. It has been difficult to draw recruits from an educated young population raised in an era of economic growth and demilitarization.
I fear that if China gets past Taiwan’s Maginot Line at sea and Taiwan has to face People’s Liberation Army (PLA) troops ashore that Taiwan’s civilian and army morale could shatter the way the defenders of Constantinople collapsed after a tiny penetration of the fortified city’s impressive defenses manned by technicians rather than soldiers was made by the Islamic attackers:
I'm very worried about Taiwanese resolve to fight hard if China invades. And I see a recent CRS summary states:
Civil defense preparedness is insufficient, according to some observers, and Taiwan’s military struggles to recruit, retain, and train personnel. At a societal level, it is not clear what costs—in terms of economic security, well-being, safety and security, and lives—Taiwan’s people would be willing or able to bear in the face of possible PRC armed aggression.
And if the Taiwanese lack the will to fight or even to spend to prepare to fight, some Taiwanese may go to Plan B to survive the conquest. This is something that keeps me awake at night.
[If China invades Taiwan, it will] "rely on treason within Taiwan’s astonishingly lackadaisical armed forces to win quickly."
And winning quickly may only require getting ashore intact and defying efforts to eject the PLA. I don't think that the Taiwanese are island Israelis. Or even Ukrainians.
And once the PLA gets ashore in some strength, I believe the measure of China’s victory isn’t whether China can drive on and capture Taipei but whether Taiwan can drive the invaders into the sea, as I wrote in Military Review.
This is good news for Taiwan’s defense, at least (back to the initially quoted article):
For Taiwan’s military to be prepared to fend off China, it will also need to know how to work together with the U.S. in a time of crisis. The U.S. and Taiwan are still learning to coordinate their combat plans and are far from being able to conduct a joint operation, said Chung, the defense analyst.
This is good. But unless America helps Taiwan drive the PLA into the sea, as I discussed in my Military Review article noted earlier, intervention is pointless. I don’t think America yet has the logistics or naval power to deploy and sustain enough Army units to help Taiwan do that.
And if Taiwan makes its defenses a porcupine-based force without the ability to mount a combined arms counteroffensive to eliminate the PLA bridgeheads, it will have no more success than Ukraine’s summer 2023 counteroffensive had. America is not even going to try to help Taiwan on the ground under those circumstances.
Further, if Taiwan is supposed to learn from how Ukraine uses drones to resist Russia’s invasion, maybe Taiwan should also learn from Russia’s willingness to lose hundreds of thousands KIA to fight Ukraine. How much more would far larger China be willing to lose?
I believe the “porcupine strategy” that downgrades rather than supplements traditional combat capabilities is not a strategy. It is a technological solution to a problem that is really one of instilling a will to fight in the Taiwanese with all their means despite the fear that a huge China looming over them inspires.
The fact is that Taiwan is not doomed. Not much of China’s size advantage can be weaponized against Taiwan. FFS, Ukraine would give a lot to have a 100-mile wide water-filled anti-tank ditch as Taiwan has.
You can pretend this old but newly labeled idea is forward thinking, but Taiwan dooms itself with a porcupine defense.
NOTE: I made the image with the Substack capability.