Lessons for China to learn from Ukraine conflict for Taiwan scenario

Michaelsinodef said:

Nah, expect there to 100% be guerillas.
The question though will be how many, and of those how many will fight to the death (especially in a very hopeless scenario).

Ofc, besides guerillas, there's also gonna be many deserters, and I would quite confidently bet money on there being more of these people (quite possibly, substantially more).

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Guerillas are irrelevant.

Remember, the key factor here is still the US. TW guerillas can take as many ATGMs into the mountains as they want, so long as the PLA holds the landing zones, and can keep the strait clear of enemy aircraft, TW will be pacified sooner or later.

solarz said:

Guerillas are irrelevant.

Remember, the key factor here is still the US. TW guerillas can take as many ATGMs into the mountains as they want, so long as the PLA holds the landing zones, and can keep the strait clear of enemy aircraft, TW will be pacified sooner or later.

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Fully agree, just pointing out that there will inevitable be ones so brainwashed that they become guerillas and fight to the death.

Although, at the end of the day I expect there only to be a very number of these people, and in the grand scheme can't change jack shit (if anything, I expect them to quickly be mopped up, Taiwan just isn't big enough for an insurgency, especially after the PLA/China gets controls of ports/cities).

PanAsian said:

Saw this over in the Taiwan military thread but thought it fit this thread as well and appropriate to discuss it here.

The impact of intelligence and propaganda/psyops/hearts & minds/soft power (including financial colonization/temptation thereof) should be two of the biggest takeaways from the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, or more accurately the latest episode of the US-Russia great game for Russia's periphery.

The article essentially says the US is attempting to pre-position the ROC for guerilla warfare. An interesting compare and contrast are the 2019 Hong Kong riots where there were rioters/potential guerillas but lacking weapons, and the ROC where there can relatively easily be weapons but the challenge of whether there are potential guerillas.

While foreign interventionists may have found Ukrainian elite and society primed for being co-opted and manipulated in various ways for years prior to 2014 Maidan, I don't think the same conditions exist in the ROC, at least not yet in the same ways nor to the same degree.

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Now I don't have 100% evidence to support this, this is an opinion shared to my by a friend of mine who is from Russia. Closest evidence would be an article like this one:
The Ukrainian elites used to have some relations with the Russian government. After Maidan, it was promised to them that EU would funnel a lot more money into the country (and into their pockets). Essentially buying them off. He offered as an example, the much harder turn towards the West that Zelensky took to the point of actively repudiating China (Xinjiang vote and Motor Sich deal), which Poroshenko never took. Of course to him, Zelensky is just a puppet.

The huge difference between Ukraine and ROC is that the biggest companies in the ROC basically make more money in the PRC than they do domestically. If they could "buy" Terry Gou, then they should just "buy" Foxconn by some shady private investment company, but they just don't have the means.

edit: In HK, these were not REAL guerrillas either. If the US truly believed that they were capable of taking down the central government of the PRC, they would have all the weapons they needed. However, they did not truly have popular support, and the hope was that the PAP would drive in and mow them all down. It was a ridiculous hope.

Michaelsinodef said:

Nah, expect there to 100% be guerillas.
The question though will be how many, and of those how many will fight to the death (especially in a very hopeless scenario).

Ofc, besides guerillas, there's also gonna be many deserters, and I would quite confidently bet money on there being more of these people (quite possibly, substantially more).

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I don't think the US plan is guerrilla warfare either. That would never work in Taiwan (or the Ukraine) because once the war was over everyone would go back to their lives. There may be some HK like protests but once the leaders had been rounded up they would die out.

The American plan is the weird hybrid asymmetric warfare where you have regular armies but they're fighting under American command while having much inferior platforms. Like turboprop drones versus jet fighters. American generals today believe warfare is fought on the internet for some reason so you'll have spambots posting on twitter that China is losing, winnie the pooh memes and mass censorship of reality.

PanAsian said:

Saw this over in the Taiwan military thread but thought it fit this thread as well and appropriate to discuss it here.

The impact of intelligence and propaganda/psyops/hearts & minds/soft power (including financial colonization/temptation thereof) should be two of the biggest takeaways from the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, or more accurately the latest episode of the US-Russia great game for Russia's periphery.

The article essentially says the US is attempting to pre-position the ROC for guerilla warfare. An interesting compare and contrast are the 2019 Hong Kong riots where there were rioters/potential guerillas but lacking weapons, and the ROC where there can relatively easily be weapons but the challenge of whether there are potential guerillas.

While foreign interventionists may have found Ukrainian elite and society primed for being co-opted and manipulated in various ways for years prior to 2014 Maidan, I don't think the same conditions exist in the ROC, at least not yet in the same ways nor to the same degree.

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You have to remember the perspective of each party. The Americans believe that China is planning an unprovoked attack on a distinct nation. In that belief system it makes sense to wage guerilla warfare until the PLA gets tired of fighting and returns to the mainland.

However, both Taiwan and the mainland understand that once the PLA has secured just a small beachhead, the war is decided. China will make whatever sacrifice is required for victory and guerilla fighters have no hope of success, as the experience in Xinjiang or Tibet shows. Very few people enter a fight with no hope of victory.

So from a Taiwanese nationalist and mainland Chinese perspective it's obvious that the war will be decided on the sea and the minor islands in the Taiwan strait. The only way for Taiwan to win is conventionally. Switching to preparing for guerilla warfare is admitting defeat and would destroy support for independence. They are forced to maintain the illusion that Taiwan can prevent the PLA from ever getting to Taiwan island

I have done a back of the envelope calculation once. Taiwan is around 36,000km2. That means you can take 3.6m people and space them out in a grid with 100m between each person and cover the whole island. For reference, both Ukraine and Afghanistan are approximately 20x larger.

Abominable said:

I don't think the US plan is guerrilla warfare either. That would never work in Taiwan (or the Ukraine) because once the war was over everyone would go back to their lives. There may be some HK like protests but once the leaders had been rounded up they would die out.

The American plan is the weird hybrid asymmetric warfare where you have regular armies but they're fighting under American command while having much inferior platforms. Like turboprop drones versus jet fighters. American generals today believe warfare is fought on the internet for some reason so you'll have spambots posting on twitter that China is losing, winnie the pooh memes and mass censorship of reality.

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Minm said:

You have to remember the perspective of each party. The Americans believe that China is planning an unprovoked attack on a distinct nation. In that belief system it makes sense to wage guerilla warfare until the PLA gets tired of fighting and returns to the mainland.

However, both Taiwan and the mainland understand that once the PLA has secured just a small beachhead, the war is decided. China will make whatever sacrifice is required for victory and guerilla fighters have no hope of success, as the experience in Xinjiang or Tibet shows. Very few people enter a fight with no hope of victory.

So from a Taiwanese nationalist and mainland Chinese perspective it's obvious that the war will be decided on the sea and the minor islands in the Taiwan strait. The only way for Taiwan to win is conventionally. Switching to preparing for guerilla warfare is admitting defeat and would destroy support for independence. They are forced to maintain the illusion that Taiwan can prevent the PLA from ever getting to Taiwan island

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I agree that strictly militarily in the immediate conflict guerillas require the following to be a factor:
- a large number of ROC citizens are willing to take up arms
- with a large percentage of the population actively supporting them
- with immediate and continuing operational support by foreign interventionists
- with the PLA suffering early significant defeats

Which highlights again the importance of intelligence and influence operations (i.e. propaganda/psyops/hearts & minds/soft power). It's not difficult to find gullible potential recruits to radicalize the world over. There is also a long term effect and self-reinforcing cycle with local and international divisions and hostility fostering armed conflict and vice versa.

look like gamer become drone pilot. they are using chinese drones, probably a commercial version

s002wjh said:

look like gamer become drone pilot. they are using chinese drones, probably a commercial version

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Dragonfish 2. Supposedly the IR camera onboard could see through fog/mist and conventional smoke decoy.

People underestimate just how steep the learning curve is for China in this war. The Russian and Chinese militaries have a lot more in common than you think. A lot of the weaknesses and problems exposed in the Russian military during this war also exist in the Chinese military as well.

I have no doubt that China will be working hard to mitigate and correct these weaknesses and problems now that they are known. Will China be able to correct all the problems and issue's learned from this war? Most likely not.

But the steps taken to deal with the problems exposed by this war will make the PLA into a more formidable and efficient fighting force in the future than otherwise would be.

This goes far beyond just Taiwan. This will increase the overall effectiveness of the PLA.