Red Teaming a Taiwan Invasion

Thinking about China's View of Options

China isn’t thinking about taking over China the way we assume. To avoid mirror imaging the most destructive war America could find itself waging—one against the “pacing” threat of China that defines the high-end of what America could face—figuring out how China will make a decision for war is critical. Yet the biggest lesson is that the very nature of the wargames we use to test our capabilities fail to consider how a long war between America and China that is centered around control of Taiwan could unfold.

This is an interesting article on gaming a Chinese plan to take over Taiwan:

In August 2025, 25 international experts gathered at Syracuse University to do something unusual: plan China’s invasion of Taiwan. For two days, academics, policy analysts, and current and former U.S. officials abandoned their typical defensive postures and attempted to inhabit Beijing’s offensive strategic mindset in a wargame. …

This role reversal yielded an uncomfortable insight. The invasion scenarios that dominate U.S. military planning — involving massive amphibious assaults on Taiwan and preemptive strikes on American bases — may fundamentally misread Beijing’s calculus. As the wargame revealed, analysts seeking to understand China’s intentions should pay greater attention to plausible alternative military pathways to reunification that involve far less force and far more political calculation.

Let me go through the article points.

First, how good is the PLA?

This is one that is preaching to the TDR choir:

Participants quickly discovered that when confronted with the decision to attack U.S. forces, this seemed to make little strategic sense when they attempted to look at it from Beijing’s perspective. A typical assumption held by many analysts, including most participants prior to the game, and one that features prominently in American wargames, is that China will simply launch a preemptive surprise strike against U.S. forces in a manner somewhat analogous to Pearl Harbor. But why start a war with America when you might avoid one?

One course of action is to use its propaganda that this is an internal matter—one I’ve long argued China should promote. One option in this is to smash up Taiwan—shock and awe—to persuade Taiwan to surrender with terms that on the surface look like a lot of autonomy. Despite the example of Hong Kong’s generous terms being revised without local input, Taiwan’s leaders—perhaps pushed by their people—might see no better option (and enough might be eager for unification) with the hope that America and its allies will rescue them a remote chance.

Second, China may be more cautious than we think:

The exercise forced participants to confront an uncomfortable truth about China’s military capabilities. Despite decades of modernization, the People’s Liberation Army has not fought a major conflict since 1979. It has never conducted an amphibious assault on a major scale. Its logistics remain untested. Its command structure is riddled with political interference. In contrast to most wargames that portray the Chinese military as a competent machine operating at maximum efficiency, the perspective from Beijing is likely more sobering.

That is possible. I do assume China’s military—especially its navy—isn’t as good as its shiny hulls portray. But two factors complicate that probable less competent reality.

One, do China’s leaders know what their military can do? Corrupt or fearful subordinates likely feed feel-good results up the chain of command:

I’ve been comforted to read that China’s rulers know their military isn’t as good as it appears. But what if the “neican” system means the CCP has no way to know how large the gap between reality and their reports is?

How can the CCP possibly use their genetically superior long-range planning abilities with bad information, eh?

And if the crisis is an international confrontation involving China, how can we possibly believe we can send those sacred, calibrated “signals” of restrained resolve that we think will cool off the crisis? What will our signal look like when it reaches the highest levels of the CCP?

The nuanced signal that our best and brightest craft might be twisted by the Chinese reporting system into a signal of retreat or a signal of intent to preemptively strike China. Delusion will be built on layers of delusions.

Can the CCP order the information flow to be honest? Can the lower level sources of information afford to admit they’ve been lying?

Is Xi’s knowledge of what he has better than Putin’s prior to his invasion of Ukraine?

You might say that this kind of mistake makes it more likely America will win a war with China. But we will then have to pay the price of defeating a peer power in its own backyard. That’s “less bad” than losing that war but it is not “good”.

Two, I think people miss the point that China doesn’t have to defeat America to win the war. China has to defeat Taiwan. China only needs to delay the American intervention long enough to beat Taiwan. That’s a different thing altogether. If China can throw an army across the Taiwan Strait by a wide variety of means, the generous terms in that first red team analysis might be tempting enough for Taiwan to accept.

And if might sound good enough to America to step back and pretend all is well in order to avoid a major war against nuclear-armed China. I mean, if Taiwan accepts the Chinese terms, that would be a tremendous fig leaf to cover America’s retreat. And it would be a retreat because if the PLA remains on Taiwan after a ceasefire, even if it takes another generation, Taiwan will be conquered, as I argued in Military Review.

Third, China could have many ways to take over Taiwan and conquest shouldn’t be the sole measure for our deterrence:

The wargame’s insights challenge conventional deterrence thinking in three ways.

First, deterrence can’t focus solely on defeating an invasion. If China’s theoretically preferred strategy involves limited strikes and political coercion, Taiwan needs resilience against pressure campaigns, not just beach defenses. …

Second, the exercise showed that uncertainty about U.S. intervention shapes every Chinese decision. … A key takeaway from the game was that Chinese strategists will be focusing at least as much on these basic issues about whether the United States will use force as opposed to what forces they will use.

Third, deterrence requires denying China easy political victories, not just military ones. If Beijing believes it can achieve reunification through limited force and favorable terms, traditional military deterrence fails.

In theory that’s fine. But I think China wants a crisis over fast to give the rest of the world incentive to accept the conquest and get back to business with China. China needs global trade and investment for political stability more than it needs Taiwan. And the ability to defeat an invasion—not deter an invasion because we can’t calculate how much pain China is willing to endure to win—is the foundation of deterring anything else.

Sure, military power can’t prevent other means of conquest. But military power may prevent China from escalating to military means if their other means fail, falter, or make progress too slowly. And I’ve certainly thought about battling the other means.

Fourth, is a blockade of Taiwan a superior strategy for China to pursue?

Several critical debates remained unsettled when the exercise ended. Participants disagreed sharply on whether China would choose to blockade Taiwan — some saw it as perfect graduated pressure, others as an invitation for U.S. naval intervention, an opportunity for Taiwan to bring its forces to maximum readiness, or prone to rapidly escalate to a full-blown confrontation if attempts are made to break through it.

I think a Chinese blockade—actually they’d simply “close their ports on Taiwan” as an internal matter to avoid making Lincoln’s mistake that implied the Confederates were independent—could take too long. And giving enemies time is the best gift one can give them.

Will a Western counter-blockade of China work faster? Will Taiwanese air, ground-based, and naval assets (including submarines that are really a force multiplier if Taiwan’s subs use the same anti-ship weapons as America—and Japan and Australia, for that matter) inflict a visible local defeat on the PLA Navy off the east coast beyond easy reach of China’s land-based air power that shakes China’s image of strength?

Time means enemies can gather and get stronger. Time means you might get weaker in military or political terms. Time means black swan events could throw a monkey wrench into your plan. When you start to take Vienna, take Vienna.

Fifth, must China invade soon?

Most revealing was the disagreement over timing. Some participants argued China must move within this decade while it maintains a favorable military balance. Others speculated the timing might be tied to the 72-year-old Xi Jinping wanting to achieve reunification before his death. Alternatively, it was contended that time favors Beijing — Taiwan’s economy increasingly depends on the mainland, younger generations lack their parents’ anti-communist fervor, and the conventional and nuclear balance may become even more lopsided in China’s favor.

This is an excellent question. The so-called Davidson Window says 2027 is a magic date for China to be able to invade. I too am conflicted over whether the threat is imminent. And I don’t know what effect Xi’s lifespan has on the issue. Would the Chinese Communist Party let Xi make Putin’s apparent mistake of being in a hurry to be known as Vladimir the Great?

Yet I do not think the Thucydides Trap dooms America and China to fight. Distance really reduces the impact of a possible power transition between America and China, whether China passes America or comes close and recedes. Remember, I think the primary calculation for China is defeating Taiwan and delaying America. The correlation of forces for those two things aren’t fully dependent on the U.S.-China balance.

The article was really good. Read it all. And the effort to avoid mirror imaging China’s outlook is valid and needed. In that light, I think my twenty-year-old invasion scenario holds up very well, all things considered.

Given that few armies come home by Christmas, the major weakness of past Western wargames of a Chinese effort to take Taiwan is the need to keep the game short for the participants. One result is that the wargames are biased toward bringing in the Americans early, generally with a Chinese disarming attack to knock back the American forces in the western Pacific.

While I do think America is likely to enter the fight early, I doubt China will speed up American reaction by making our decision for us. Further, making the American decision to go to war easy—and sustain popular American support longer—by striking American forces first seems foolish. Pulling America in also pulls in Japan, South Korea, and Australia which wouldn’t go in alone very rapidly—if at all. Or which might take longer to join if America initiates U.S.-China combat.

I think China will try to keep their campaign to take over Taiwan narrowly focused on Taiwan so China can argue that this is an internal Chinese matter.

Although I admit you can never tell if the Chinese will be convinced that America will intervene rapidly or think that the chance to use China’s awesome military power to strike forward-deployed American forces and settle the broader issue of Western Pacific dominance is too tempting.

It would be even better to know what the Chinese are learning from their own wargames.

NOTE: I made the image with the Substack capability.