You know who’s Chinese and who’s not on this forum? Really? Cause you keep on bring up this same point. Maybe some Chinese people have different views than you. You get fired up over this, and start boxing people in with words like: "you people", "your country". You don't find that condescending?
Lessons for China to learn from Ukraine conflict for Taiwan scenario
- Thread starter tphuang
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I can safely say most Chinese on this forum share or support Bellum's views.
Hint: you can 'read the room' by looking at post reactions, your views are a definite outlier on this forum.
KMT hasn't been in power since 2016 and is unlikely to win the 2024 election.
Current KMT chairman Zhu Lilun and the prior one Jiang Qichen are US cucks/assets. English Vegetable of course also takes orders from the US. So KMT has a positioning problem: Should they out-DPP the DPP, by being even more aggressively pro-secession? That doesn't fly with their electoral base. They can't beat DPP by being moderately pro-secession, and being pro-unification is political suicide in current climate.
On Taiwan, no matter KMT or DPP, China is actually dealing with the US.
One thing that is very clear is that Russia lacks reconnaissance capability, both tactical and strategic. Ukraine alone, of course, has nothing, but they're plugged into the US network.
First, some positivity: Krasnopol drone guided artillery doing good tactical work, showing good integration of tactical DJI drones. Shahed-136 strikes, indicating that their fixed position recon is decent. Their (air to air limited) AWACS also were mostly successful in netting them air to air kills.
Bad: they can only do fixed position recon because they only have 3 optical recon satellites and 0-1 radar satellites. The revisit time for SSO recon satellites is about 1 month, so 3 means revisit time of 1 week, and that depends on weather. Ukraine took advantage of poor time resolution on Russian strategic recon. In addition, they lack tactical recon from an E-8 equivalent. Note that China doesn't have this either.
Ideas for Russia: with a poor optical and radar satellite coverage, the Russian Navy has low chance of doing any combined arms offensives against the USN, as they cannot find them optically or via RF. SSNs can find them with passive sonars but can't communicate with surface ships effectively. Being unsuited for networked warfare yet also being a Russian strong suit, Russian Navy needs to focus even more on SSNs and protecting them with coastal naval aviation, which would also help their air force.
I was mistaken about the Oscars. They should keep them and upgrade them all to Belgorod standard. I stand by my recommendation to retire the Kuznetsov, Slavas, Udaloys and older (pre 1990) frigates to save money.
With the savings from this, Russia needs to improve their ground and aerospace forces. The top 3 things they should do: 1. Get at least daily satellite revisits which requires a minimum of 30 SSO satellites (10x more than now), 2. Get more E-8 equivalents like their Tu-22MRs for real time battlefield monitoring 3. More drones, duh.
Thoughts for China: E-8 type capability is lacking. Maybe drones can substitute. Otherwise this confirms Chinese thought that having sensors and situational awareness first can make up for worse shooting platforms like tanks and planes. China made the correct investment in satellites and drones.
First, some positivity: Krasnopol drone guided artillery doing good tactical work, showing good integration of tactical DJI drones. Shahed-136 strikes, indicating that their fixed position recon is decent. Their (air to air limited) AWACS also were mostly successful in netting them air to air kills.
Bad: they can only do fixed position recon because they only have 3 optical recon satellites and 0-1 radar satellites. The revisit time for SSO recon satellites is about 1 month, so 3 means revisit time of 1 week, and that depends on weather. Ukraine took advantage of poor time resolution on Russian strategic recon. In addition, they lack tactical recon from an E-8 equivalent. Note that China doesn't have this either.
Ideas for Russia: with a poor optical and radar satellite coverage, the Russian Navy has low chance of doing any combined arms offensives against the USN, as they cannot find them optically or via RF. SSNs can find them with passive sonars but can't communicate with surface ships effectively. Being unsuited for networked warfare yet also being a Russian strong suit, Russian Navy needs to focus even more on SSNs and protecting them with coastal naval aviation, which would also help their air force.
I was mistaken about the Oscars. They should keep them and upgrade them all to Belgorod standard. I stand by my recommendation to retire the Kuznetsov, Slavas, Udaloys and older (pre 1990) frigates to save money.
With the savings from this, Russia needs to improve their ground and aerospace forces. The top 3 things they should do: 1. Get at least daily satellite revisits which requires a minimum of 30 SSO satellites (10x more than now), 2. Get more E-8 equivalents like their Tu-22MRs for real time battlefield monitoring 3. More drones, duh.
Thoughts for China: E-8 type capability is lacking. Maybe drones can substitute. Otherwise this confirms Chinese thought that having sensors and situational awareness first can make up for worse shooting platforms like tanks and planes. China made the correct investment in satellites and drones.
The PLA does have the 8-10 Tu-154Ms with the ventral canoe radomes which is almost certainly an air to ground radar for SAR/GMTI purposes, and there are multiple GX variants with smaller (but likely more modern) ventral canoe housings for SAR as well.
And of course the PLA has quite a number of tactical assets with SAR capability, virtually all modern fighters (especially the AESA equipped jets with larger arrays like J-16) and UAVs like WZ-7 as well.
As far as approximation to E-8 capabilities are concerned, the PLA probably isn't too far.
However, going forwards the pursuit of more capable and distributed and survivable platforms would be necessary, in the same way the US is recognizing.
In the interim, greater pursuit of higher end more survivable UAVs (think RQ-180) with A2G radars would be a sensible approach.
But for a Taiwan contingency, given the geography and the system of system force comparisons, I would wager to say that the PLAs current aerial A2G SAR/GMTI capability probably isn't too shabby at all.
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If we take Patchwork's analysis as a given, and we proceed with the assumption (1) that China is now capable of neutralizing the US threat in this theater in the opening phase (and the US isn't even gearing up to effectively defend itself), then the next question is the invasion itself: Does Taiwan even have enough targets to justify a month-long air campaign? Probably not, which means a short+intense air/missile campaign, perhaps lasting a few days. After which, the Taiwanese land forces will have (2) no air cover, no logistical chain, no capacity to maneuver and no C4I to coordinate them i.e. they would be operationally kaput.
Now, if we assume the above 2 conditions are met, the rest is just boring. By the time the PLA makes landfall, the Taiwanese Army will be combat ineffective, without any ability to sustain conventional operations. They will melt away on contact. Plus, the probability of a sustainable insurgency is low, given that Taiwan would be an island under blockade without any resupply, and they are an advanced post-industrial society with a lot to lose.
Given the above, the only relevant dimension now is strategic, economic and geopolitical i.e. US vs China on the global stage. If that dimension is won by China, then the rest is just academic. Taiwan's own capacity to defend itself from China is non-existent. The likely outcome in that event would be that Taiwan accepts reunification without a shot fired, if the US is out of the equation.
p.s. Yes, I know Russia also thought Ukraine would be a walkover. None of that changes the above calculus, as long as the two assumptions hold true.
Now, if we assume the above 2 conditions are met, the rest is just boring. By the time the PLA makes landfall, the Taiwanese Army will be combat ineffective, without any ability to sustain conventional operations. They will melt away on contact. Plus, the probability of a sustainable insurgency is low, given that Taiwan would be an island under blockade without any resupply, and they are an advanced post-industrial society with a lot to lose.
Given the above, the only relevant dimension now is strategic, economic and geopolitical i.e. US vs China on the global stage. If that dimension is won by China, then the rest is just academic. Taiwan's own capacity to defend itself from China is non-existent. The likely outcome in that event would be that Taiwan accepts reunification without a shot fired, if the US is out of the equation.
p.s. Yes, I know Russia also thought Ukraine would be a walkover. None of that changes the above calculus, as long as the two assumptions hold true.
The great fear is always that US troops will roll into Taiwan province while aircraft carriers drive into Chinese waters and US establishes a de facto territory on Taiwan. But how likely is this really when US is not building up?
US leadership is not that brave. They talk about always being at war, but since the failure of Vietnam, they've not fought anything that weren't tiny former US client states and therefore have no international friends at all.
The power balance between Iran and US is similar to Ukraine and Russia, but unlike Russia, US has never directly attacked Iran with the intention to redraw borders. Not even smaller scale Crimea style actions.
But the ultimate proof of American carefulness is that Taiwan remains free today. If US wanted the island and had the balls, they could easily attack in 1990, 2000 etc. Back when US had 200 F-22s and China's stealth fighter hasn't even begun first flight.
However, America, unlike Russia, for better or worse, doesn't fight wars it isn't sure to win.
Even if 1990s China had nothing special going for it militarily and US had a more than twice as large economy, just the threat of nukes alone, or perhaps threat of Jiang Zemin pulling a Zelensky and conscripting the whole country, apparently was enough to make sure US didn't attack.
Therefore it is also unlikely an attack will come today during a time when PLA quality surpasses US military and PLA quantity is quickly catching up.
Hence, the way I see it, Taiwan is the Fulda gap of the current cold war. The US will constantly threaten to roll in whenever they need to press China for favors. They'll send agitators or put the rebels on high alert when they want to do it. But Taiwan will not be a hot battlefield of the new cold war.
This part is not that simple. The fact is that never before in history have two competing powers been this economically co-dependent. The Soviet Union and NATO had the Iron Curtain separating them. That is not the case with China and the US.
If an alien civilization visited Earth, they would have a hard time telling the US and China apart. Just look at the sheer volume of trade and flow of capital every day between these two countries. A fight between the US and China, from an economic perspective, would basically be like a civil war. This phenomenon didn't exist at the time of the Fulda Gap.
Remember, Patchwork also said that the US is not going to simply give up and walk away, even though it doesn't have the military strength to hold on to its empire. This is the irrationality built into the system which makes things very hard to calculate. There's always the possibility that the US simply collapses domestically, but that is hard to predict and the global economic consequences of that are even harder to predict. It's a non-linear chaotic system....
Like I said, this is now a strategy problem, which is much harder to solve than operations/tactics.
This overstates things. Trade with the US is only a few percentage points of China's GDP.
Yeah, the US doesn't want to give up, but it doesn't matter what the US wants or doesn't want. China must and is going to build its strength to such a degree that the US is either going to give up and walk away or get beaten to a pulp.
Add to that the trillion dollars that China has invested in the US, in the form of holding US debt and the rest of its portfolio. That's a long term investment. Even those "few percentage points" of trade have strategic impact on both the Chinese and US economies. This flow can't be turned off without having cascading effects throughout each other's industrial economy, which is to say nothing of the interconnectedness of the global supply chains, and the reflective impact that would have on both US/China if they collapsed.
Sure, that's a possible path. If the co-dependence is reduced over time for one or both of the competitors, then the calculus changes drastically.
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