NK is already sanctioned and armed with nukes, they could be doing all the dirty work for China. For example getting rid of US sattelite surveillance. Just give NK the technology to de-orbit US satellites. The US can't even retaliate in space because there are no NK assets.
Lessons for China to learn from Ukraine conflict for Taiwan scenario
- Thread starter tphuang
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NK is already sanctioned and armed with nukes, they could be doing all the dirty work for China. For example getting rid of US sattelite surveillance. Just give NK the technology to de-orbit US satellites. The US can't even retaliate in space because there are no NK assets.
Another key lesson that China must take into account is the absolute importance of maintaining battlefield discipline.
The video by Liu Xiaofei is only available in Mandarin, which I will sum up his talking points below.
On December 31st 2022, a Ukrainian HIMARS strike against a Russian army base in the Russian-controlled city of Makiivka in Donetsk has resulted in the deaths of more than 80 Russian conscripts.
There are several major points contributing factors to the high death toll suffered by Russian forces in the attack, which were pointed out by several retired Russian military personnel who have massive followers on Telegram (one or two can even 说得上话 with the Kremlin):
1. There are hundreds of Russian conscripts being cramped inside one building at the time of the attack, instead of dispersing them across multiple buildings in different locations around the base;
2. The building itself (and the base) is well within the range of Ukrainian HIMARS attack;
3. The same building is also packed with large amounts of weapons and explosives, which resulted in the building being practically flattened when the HIMARS struck; and
4. Most importantly, many Russian conscripts in the building were making phone calls to their homes, and their commanders have zero awareness of maintaining battlefield secrecy. This allowed Ukraine's electronic warfare unit to easily intercept the phone calls and locate the Russian conscripts' position before launching the HIMARS attack at them.
All of these could have been prevented had the Russian commanders and troops are equipped with high awareness of battlefield discipline, especially when it comes to communication between elements of the military.
These are key points regarding wartime communication that any commanders and higher-ups across the battlefield must understood and implement well for their units across the warzone:
1. Encryption features for communication devices;
2. Reduction of the duration of communication to a minimum;
3. Flexible usage of coded languages for communication;
4. Strict regulation on the contents used for communication;
5. Proper usage of the communication and radar equipment frequencies, etc.
Liu Xiaofei also mentioned that there have been instances where PLA units were caught using actual communication frequencies reserved only for wartime usage. Such violations of battlefield discipline is made worse with American ELINT satellites often flying overhead and RC-135 ELINT aircrafts frequently flying along the Chinese coastline to gather intelligence on the communication and radar equipment frequencies used by the PLA.
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Excellent summary, thank you. Indeed Liu brought up some good points, primarily on comms. usage and dispersion which boils down to field discipline.
I briefly touched on the former here, which I feel is generally overlooked given battles during a Taiwan contingency are conducted primarily over air and sea. Frankly, the most shocking part of today's conflict to me is the amount of content coming out of social media and OSINT accounts from both sides. Soldiers should NEVER carry unencrypted devices out to war, let alone engage in social media (like bruh, big tech is a huge spyware). PLAGF or PAP would do well to note the importance of operational secrecy far outweighs the value of propaganda clips/memes.
The other subject of force dispersion is also why I feel commentary on PLAN requirements for more Type 075/076s to conduct successful amphibious operations are sorely mistaken. As the example above of the HIMARS bombarding build-up areas has shown, there's no value in concentrating your force in one tiny area only to risk losing them all with a single blow e.g. mines/LRASM waves.
While it's nice that Dongfengs have gotten Taiwan's anti-ship/air platforms pre-sighted, one can never be too sure. Perhaps some camouflaged pillboxes/TELs may have been overlooked by ISR (US couldn't find Saddam's scuds), or they may be required to measure the value of each targets and take down those with greater ROI.
The more likely scenario of PLA contesting the beach would be sending waves of fast crafts like gunboats and to swarm the defence line. Their objective is to drain the defenders carrying small arms and more importantly, buy time for more troops to land on the beach with as cheap an asset as possible. This also forces the defenders to be faced with the same aforementioned dilemma - are they willing to waste Hsiung Feng III missiles on a small boat? Or on a bunch of men? Or on a single saboteur heading to a key location? There's a reason why Normandy landings didn't include armour in the first wave but of course it'll be less bloodier given the proliferation of UAV surveillance and PGMs today.
Second phase would only begin when the beach head is secured for , ostensibly assisted by LHAs/LHDs and ROROs. Anything short of full spectrum dominance over land, air and sea within the AO would be a risk to critical assets.
It should be kind of given that we be seeing waves of missiles attacks along with drones followed by planes above Taiwan, before we really see attempts at landing people on the island.
We might sometime during the above have smaller sleeper groups within Taiwan along with smaller amounts of special forces try to say sabotage and attack/hold positions during that time.
And then afterwards we would maybe see some LHAs/LHDs with frigates/drones etc. providing air defense.
A telling story of Artillery employment particularly when you run short of PGMs. Important lessons being picked up by China already in their emphasis in increase of PGM ammunition
But there are Chinese and Russian assets in Space. Remember no plan survives contact with the enemy.
Are Elon Musk starlink considered surveillance satellite too? He is goin to have a constellation of tens of thousands of them in space. There will be thousands of them to shoot down
One great lesson is to kill all foreign spies, 5th columnists before war in Taiwan break out !!
Russia made this mistake !! Afterward, Putin himself lunched a massive internal campaign to purge !!
with that attitude, forget about AR.
No AR implies you are ready to accept what the Taiwanese want which is formal independence.
With that you better come to terms with the fact that US and its vassals will continue to contain China by using Taiwan's strategic location within the 1st Island Chain.
We can't have it both ways, 23 millions people fucked for a short term or 1.4 billion fucked living like second class citizens under Uncle Sam's watch. This decade is an inflection point. Either China successfully breaks out of US strategic containment or we cope with it due to our cowardice and inability to spill "Chinese blood". The same "Chinese" who at a whim would rather see Japan + US fuck over 1.4 billion of us.
They are not our people. They may look like us, talk like us and eat the same food. But 70 years is a long time for the national psyche to change. Look at what 99 years did to the Hongkongers.
I've been fortunate enough to have lived the majority of my life in the west. Most of my closest friends have Taiwan and Hongkong roots. And trust me they do not see themselves as Chinese. So we should accept this and stop pretending. It only took 23 years for Ukrainians to reject all that is Soviet about them. Time has a unique ability to change people's perspective. However most of Chinese people seem to be stuck in the 1970s and it's our propaganda that will preventing us from acting decisively if it comes to a shooting war.
I'd also like to add that the notion you can succeed in AR without a massive usage of firepower (think shock and awe in Iraq 2003, hell the Blitz of 1939-40.) is exactly where it all went wrong for Russians in the first week of the war.
Trust me, no Taiwanese will ever welcome the PLA with open arms like the Crimeans with the Russians. Their false belief that 2022 will be a repeat of 2014 is a lesson China needs to learn. Not learning it and using a half assed "soft" approach will cost too many PLA lives. Holding back our superior firepower in an attempt to spare Taiwanese lives will be seen as weakness by the opposition and achieve the opposite effect encouraging them to resist and buying time for US to provide aid. War is not rational or logical, it's very much influenced by human emotions.
Trust me, no Taiwanese will ever welcome the PLA with open arms like the Crimeans with the Russians. Their false belief that 2022 will be a repeat of 2014 is a lesson China needs to learn. Not learning it and using a half assed "soft" approach will cost too many PLA lives. Holding back our superior firepower in an attempt to spare Taiwanese lives will be seen as weakness by the opposition and achieve the opposite effect encouraging them to resist and buying time for US to provide aid. War is not rational or logical, it's very much influenced by human emotions.
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