What On Earth Are We Learning from Ukraine?
Watch this one neat trick to win wars cheaply and easily!
So, we have lessons from Ukraine for Taiwan. Some are valid for Taiwan. But Taiwan has no strategic depth. It lacks the ability to sacrifice much territory to buy time. And good luck with whipping reservists into shape.
Let me just focus on the lesson for Taiwan of Ukraine’s suicide sea drones:
But there’s also a need for more imaginative approaches to the fundamentals — Ukraine has won the Battle of the Black Sea despite having a tiny navy that was largely neutered at the war’s outset. Cheap, single-use unmanned drone vessels armed with large explosive charges and long-range missiles have sunk numerous Russian warships and seen the rest huddled in safe ports.
I’m going to give a heart-felt, Hell no. Yes, this author mentions the anti-ship missiles. But that’s not what visionaries fixate on. As I wrote here earlier, we’re in a Torpedo Boat Craze 2.0 over these unmanned surface drones:
Anybody who says Ukraine's success against Russia's Black Sea Fleet should cause China to worry about what Taiwan could do ignores that Ukraine has inflicted this damage over 25 months. Taiwan would need to inflict multiples of that damage in 25 hours.
Russia’s ships are “huddled” in port because Russia has no need to risk them at sea needlessly sailing around. This is something I’ve wondered about in regard to our Navy’s focus on penetrating China’s more conventional version of anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) weapons than Ukraine has created in the western Black Sea with USVs:
I've been puzzled that Air-Sea Battle efforts to penetrate Chinese anti-access weapons in order to operate near China haven't really said what we'd do with the ability to operate near China[.]
But when needed, like when launching a surge of missiles at Ukraine on August 26, 2024, the Russian fleet put to sea to contribute to the barrage with:
28 Kalibr cruise missiles from both surface and underwater missile carriers in the eastern Black Sea
Ukraine's success isn't only based on the cheap precision weapons that provide Ukraine's threat to the Russian Black Sea Fleet. It is the very expensive NATO-provided surveillance network blanketed over the region that provides Ukraine with up-to-date target information using those cheap weapons that creates the threat. So stop throwing panties at USVs.
Is anybody really going to argue that anti-ship missiles are less effective than USVs if the missiles have ISR to direct them? I dare say that if the good guys are going to sink enough Chinese ships in 30 hours rather than 30 months, it will be done mostly with conventional naval mines, anti-ship missiles, and long-range torpedoes.
Okay, the exact number changes over time as we get farther from the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but the point remains valid: Taiwan does not have months to defeat China’s invasion flotilla. And China has a reason to risk Taiwan’s A2/AD network rather than “huddle” safely in port.
Ultimately, all that talk of asymmetric means of winning sounds like “this one weird trick to remove belly fat” nonsense. No neat trick is going to save Taiwan from the hard work of driving the PLA into the sea—as I wrote in Military Review—to preserve their free democracy.