PLA Strategy in a Taiwan Contingency
- Thread starter pugachev_diver
- Start date
Hot air is all he has left, poor guy.
wuguanhui
Junior Member
My humble (dumb) suggestion: a Submarine APC. Don't need speed or armor if you're swimming underwater.
lcloo
Major
PLAN Marine corps do have underwater motorized scooter capable of carrying multiple divers. These are niche equipment for special forces in infiltration, mine clearance, beach landing site survey and marking etc.
A large underwater vehicle capable of half or full squad is an existing technology that may have already in service but classified. Submarine APC may be too vulnerable once they hit the beach since APCs are thin skin armored vehicle, especially an amphibious one that have to reduce weight and thus thinner armor.
Robots for various roles like fire support, obstacle clearance, supply carriers, surveillance and so on are also existing equipment with PLAN Marine corps. Working together with the human soldiers they can reduce human casualties dramatically. They can be brought along with the special force divers in airtight containers while under water, or in submersible landing craft.
In future we might see submersible amphibious fighting robots which is a not a sci-fiction since we have seen video on submersible flying drones under development in China.
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plawolf
Lieutenant General
Cost and practicality.
Submarines are expensive and big and have significant limitations on water depths and ground conditions that they can operate on. How much utility is a submarine troop lander that can’t get troops closer than half a km from the beach due to a shallow gradient beach?
Additionally, the whole point of amphibious IFVs is to get armour and heavy weapons ashore to support your troops. If you want to carry that internally, you are looking at Typhoon sized subs as disposable landers, who are liable to have to drop off even further out. If you go the other way and make mini subs that can also go ashore and work as IFVs, that further increases unit cost and size of each vehicle so you can bring fewer of them in each LPD/LHD/LHA but need more of them to get the same number of troops ashore. It’s a vicious cycle.
The PLA’s choice of going with IFVs for shore assault is actually an acceptance that losses are likely and probably going to be fairly high. The underlying strategy behind this approach is to minimise the impact of each loss. With things like a Zubr, it’s a high risk high reward game where you are betting that the heavy armour and point defences of those beasties can prevent the bulk of incoming fire from causing damage and tank what damage that it does take. The fact that the PLA has them and even has production capability to make more but hasn’t tells you how they assess the likelihood of that strategy paying off.
Also, I think it’s interesting that the first operational deployment of laser DEW on a PLAN warship is on a 071, and the PLAN is building a brand new batch of 071s, so I would not be surprised if the PLAN intends to use 071s as drone defence for the swimmers and will build their new batch of 071s as such.
So obviously DEW as standard, which together with the 76mm main gun, would provide a decent amount of ranged anti-drone capability. They could also add in some microwave anti-drone swarm arrays for masses of smaller FPV class drones, as well as jammers and any number of smaller anti-drone micro missiles and interceptor drones for terminal defence. Hell, they could even modify the design and build the new batch from the start with the outer most decks empty to function as ablative spaced armour and moving all critical systems and cabling/piping as far from the outer decks as feasible etc.
Having 071s move up just behind or even alongside the swimmers would also make them the ultimate munitions magnet as opfor defenders are highly likely to target fixate on the ‘big prize’ and focus all firepower on the now empty 071s with skeleton crews, high automation and designed to take a beating, so the swimmers are all but ignored on the most vulnerable and perilous part of their journey.
This also isn't taking into consideration of mass produced ground combat drones either, which can be rapidly organized and inserted into drop zones far faster than conventional ground units either and thus enable greater sustained combat action on the frontlines.
I would add that before any Chinese beach assault, the Chinese military would almost certainly control the air.
And it's a lot easier to air deploy very large numbers of 50km FPV drones to cover all the coastlines and all of Taiwan's urban areas. And it's economic to use these FPVs to hunt down to an individual Taiwanese soldier.
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I also reckon there would be a lot of small recon units (potentially unmanned) landing on the coastline, whose job it is to act as sensor nodes, draw fire and also force the defender's to expend munitions and also to reveal themselves.
For example, they could start landing $2K robot dogs along the coast, and equip them with cameras to serve as targeting nodes. So you end up with a war of attrition, similar to what we see today in no-man's land in Ukraine, except that China is expending low-cost robot dogs and FPV drones.
And China would have an essentially unlimited supply of these.