Lessons for China to learn from Ukraine conflict for Taiwan scenario

Richard Santos · Apr 25, 2022

FairAndUnbiased said:
It wasn't limited to the Ho Chi Minh trail. They bombed bridges and tunnels everywhere scores Vietnam including South Vietnam.

Taiwan is much smaller than Vietnam. It is about 100 km across side to side. All of it's built up infrastructure is on the coast. Their back is to the mountains and oceans.

Amphibious forces have the key advantage of striking at a variety of places along the littoral while land based forces in built up areas are constrained by existing infrastructure and terrain. Replace that infrastructure with rubble and it stops wheeled vehicles dead in their tracks and tracked vehicles are significantly slowed.

Air supremacy alone doesn't guarantee supremacy on the ground because of cover, which Iraq didn't have. It guarantees supremacy if used to immobilize enemy formations which allows each individual enemy formation to be eliminated piecemeal.

You miss the most important salient point.

in vietnam, in the air the US had air supremacy, but on the ground the US was always on the defensive, while vietminh and north vietnamese army was always on the offensive.

The US didn’t need the infrastructure it attacked because it had no plans to launch attacks on land around these that would benefit from these land based infrastructure.

It is essentially the same with US air interdiction over Yalu during the korean war,

so the US can freely attack the infrastructure because its enemy needs it, but the US has no prospect of needing it.

you may think having amphibious attack capability means you can attack anywhere. in reality the number of place where it is possible to land sizeable forces onto the beach is limited. The number of places where one could both land forces on to the beach, and the be able to readily break out of the beachhead and then reach someplace worthwhile is even more limited. I would not be surprised the number of locations where reasonable sized force can land successfully land and from their reach a operationally important objective in taiwan can be counted on the fingers or one hand,

FairAndUnbiased · Apr 25, 2022

Richard Santos said:
You miss the most important salient point.

in vietnam, in the air the US had air supremacy, but on the ground the US was always on the defensive, while vietminh and north vietnamese army was always on the offensive.

The US didn’t need the infrastructure it attacked because it had no plans to launch attacks on land around these that would benefit from these land based infrastructure.

It is essentially the same with US air interdiction over Yalu during the korean war,

so the US can freely attack the infrastructure because its enemy needs it, but the US has no prospect of needing it.

you may think having amphibious attack capability means you can attack anywhere. in reality the number of place where it is possible to land sizeable forces onto the beach is limited. The number of places where one could both land forces on to the beach, and the be able to readily break out of the beachhead and then reach someplace worthwhile is even more limited. I would not be surprised the number of locations where reasonable sized force can land successfully land and from their reach a operationally important objective in taiwan can be counted on the fingers or one hand,

The US did not have air supremacy in Vietnam. They had air superiority. PAVN was able to contest the air in both air to air and surface to air actions. Not being able to stop all enemy strikes just means YOUR side doesn't have air superiority.

It doesn't matter how many potential beachheads are available as long as there are multiple and they're sufficiently spaced apart such that the defender cannot concentrate force and they're not mutually reinforcing . With good ground infrastructure the defense, under cover, can shift assets from one beachhead to the other. Without good ground infrastructure, they can't.

in a hypothetical Taiwan scenario, with air supremacy by the PLAAF, it doesn't mean that PLAAF can instantly spot and destroy anything from the air. NATO had air supremacy over Yugoslavia/Serbia - unlike Vietnam, Yugoslavia could not contest the air at all. Yet even here, due to Serbian concealment and cover, they could still maneuver somewhat.

It isn't hard to imagine Taiwanese forces using light trucks and cars to shuttle ATGM teams between beachheads depending on which is actually attacked. Cars and light trucks can move without attracting attention and still ferry portable equipment up to 100 kg or so.

That won't be possible with destroyed ground infrastructure.

AndrewS · Apr 25, 2022

FairAndUnbiased said:
It isn't hard to imagine Taiwanese forces using light trucks and cars to shuttle ATGM teams between beachheads depending on which is actually attacked. Cars and light trucks can move without attracting attention and still ferry portable equipment up to 100 kg or so.

That won't be possible with destroyed ground infrastructure.

Unless fuel has already run out in Taiwan.

That would mean any vehicle movement is likely military in nature.

Richard Santos · Apr 25, 2022

They had air superiority over north Vietnam. They had air supremacy over south Vietnam. They were trying to defend metropolitan of south Vietnam from land attacks staged from North Vietnam, not trying to make land attacks into North Korea.

And also, the difference between the air superiority the US had over most of north Vietnam and air supremacy is minor and no more than a technicality. Vast majority of US sorties over north Vietnam were Unintercepted and faced no significant ground based anti-air defenses. Only in areas between Hanoi and Chinese border did it face a credible surface to air threat. Even there, air interception of US sorties is rare.

Richard Santos · Apr 25, 2022

FairAndUnbiased said:
The US did not have air supremacy in Vietnam. They had air superiority. PAVN was able to contest the air in both air to air and surface to air actions. Not being able to stop all enemy strikes just means YOUR side doesn't have air superiority.

It doesn't matter how many potential beachheads are available as long as there are multiple and they're sufficiently spaced apart such that the defender cannot concentrate force and they're not mutually reinforcing . With good ground infrastructure the defense, under cover, can shift assets from one beachhead to the other. Without good ground infrastructure, they can't.

in a hypothetical Taiwan scenario, with air supremacy by the PLAAF, it doesn't mean that PLAAF can instantly spot and destroy anything from the air. NATO had air supremacy over Yugoslavia/Serbia - unlike Vietnam, Yugoslavia could not contest the air at all. Yet even here, due to Serbian concealment and cover, they could still maneuver somewhat.

It isn't hard to imagine Taiwanese forces using light trucks and cars to shuttle ATGM teams between beachheads depending on which is actually attacked. Cars and light trucks can move without attracting attention and still ferry portable equipment up to 100 kg or so.

That won't be possible with destroyed ground infrastructure.

keep in mind the taiwanese are defending. it is possible for them to cache supplies of fuel, rations and munitions at locations where they plan to fight. So this would reduce their need to move large volume of supply once war starts.

The chinese are attacking. wherever they go they would need to bring supply forward from sea side depots, so chinese need for moving large amount of supply by land would be much greater.

This is further accentuated by the fact that as the attacker, they chinese needs substantial numerical superiority to ensure success, this would further increase the relative need for ground transportation capacity on the part ot the chinese relative to the taiwaneses.

I reiterate it is insane for chinese to try to destroy rather than try to prevent the destruction of taiwanese land transportation infrastructure.

Equation · Apr 25, 2022

Richard Santos said:
keep in mind the taiwanese are defending. it is possible for them to cache supplies of fuel, rations and munitions at locations where they plan to fight. So this would reduce their need to move large volume of supply once war starts.

The chinese are attacking. wherever they go they would need to bring supply forward from sea side depots, so chinese need for moving large amount of supply by land would be much greater.

This is further accentuated by the fact that as the attacker, they chinese needs substantial numerical superiority to ensure success, this would further increase the relative need for ground transportation capacity on the part ot the chinese relative to the taiwaneses.

I reiterate it is insane for chinese to try to destroy rather than try to prevent the destruction of taiwanese land transportation infrastructure.

Chinese satellites and other UAV can keep an eye on suspicious activities of people moving supplies around any area of Taiwan and call in air or missile strikes, day or night. Boom, supply depot gone!

The PLA can also air drop supplies onto needed troops 24/7 via helicopters or parachute drops. It won't take the PLA too long to also take over the ports in Taiwan bring in further supplies to troops.

Gloire_bb · Apr 25, 2022

Equation said:
Chinese satellites and other UAV can keep an eye on suspicious activities of people moving supplies around any area of Taiwan and call in air or missile strikes, day or night. Boom, supply depot gone!

Not yet. The required number of UAVs to maintain this level of control over such a large area, over an extended period of time, and despite a significant attrition rate, is plainly unrealistic. I frankly doubt the combined dronewaffe of the entire world is capable of such a feat.

I.e. kabooms of depots will happen, a lot, but to just shut down an entire island, with a significant entrenched military, several multi-million cities&lots of urban square mileage, lots of mountains, helluva vegetation, very uneven weather this way - no.

alfreddango · Apr 25, 2022

this whole ukraine thing really made me question a lot of my previous assumptions when it comes to modern warfare.
did the russians really leroy jenkins this, or did all these assumptions about drones, fancy data links, real time surveillance, etc, crumble when faced with the harsh reality of the battlefield?

in other words, how viable is all this fancy tech? sure the russians are probably too poor to afford fielding adequate numbers of these systems, but still, it makes me wonder if this is all armchair analysis

no offense to anyone of course

AndrewS · Apr 25, 2022

Richard Santos said:
I reiterate it is insane for chinese to try to destroy rather than try to prevent the destruction of taiwanese land transportation infrastructure.

It's not insane.

As I pointed out "The transportation network could also be crippled with another 300-odd bridges on major rivers/canals in Taiwan, which would result in roughly 15 isolated regions comprising 1-2 million people each."

You want to isolate each region from each other.

But within each region, it's mostly land connections so the transport infrastructure is going to remain relatively intact as it is comprised of networks of paved roads with many route options.

And a key assumption is that the Taiwanese can destroy bridges before the Chinese Army can get to them, which is what we've seen happening in Ukraine.

Overbom · Apr 25, 2022

alfreddango said:
this whole ukraine thing really made me question a lot of my previous assumptions when it comes to modern warfare.
did the russians really leroy jenkins this, or did all these assumptions about drones, fancy data links, real time surveillance, etc, crumble when faced with the harsh reality of the battlefield?

in other words, how viable is all this fancy tech? sure the russians are probably too poor to afford fielding adequate numbers of these systems, but still, it makes me wonder if this is all armchair analysis

no offense to anyone of course

The problem on drawing serious warfighting lessons from this war is that Russia didn't even follow basic war principles. When it cant even do this, then we can't move a step forward and start questioning more advanced things (some of which you mention)

Military discipline, training, delusional leaders, idiotic attacking methods leaving their logistics overstreched, armoured convoys moving like yoyos without any infantry support, etc.

To call the performance of the Russian military as shambolic would be quite an understatement.

For me, this war is more about drawing (basic..) lessons about basic war principles. The Armenia/Azerbaijan war has been more useful for actual equipment/tech/doctrine lessons

Lessons for China to learn from Ukraine conflict for Taiwan scenario

Richard Santos

Captain

FairAndUnbiased

Brigadier

AndrewS

Brigadier

Richard Santos

Captain

Richard Santos

Captain

Equation

Lieutenant General

Gloire_bb

Captain

alfreddango

Junior Member

AndrewS

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Overbom

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