Lessons for China to learn from Ukraine conflict for Taiwan scenario

ecaedus said:

i'm gonna play devil's advocate and say tw's best chance is to drag the invasion out to as long as humanly possible in order to garner as much international attention/support as possible, just like what Ukraine is doing to russia at the moment.

hand out atgms/manpads to small teams and civilians and deploy in every single taller than 5 stories buildings in all of the cities.

either make it so hostile to the PLA ground forces that they can't move one inch into any city without losing manned/unmanned armored units, or force their hand into razing every single building to the ground in order to eliminate one threat, which will ensure the absolute long lasting hatred of the locals toward PLA/china for generations to come, making conquering tw as costly as possible.

even if PLA has hordes of drones and smart munitions, clearing each building is going to be extremely time consuming and costly, especially if they want to "preserve" the local infrastructure. and if they decide to categorically destroy all potential buildings of threat, then they'll be committing an even greater atrocity.

but like previous posters said, this heavily depend on the taiwanese will to fight when they clearly know it's just delaying the inevitable by sacrifice. there's no realistic scenario where they can drive the PLA back into the ocean, but they can make it hurt so much that it forever hamper China's economic/political advances.

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Couple of issues.

There are no telecoms out of Taiwan, except for some satellite comms.
There is no electricity, fuel or food imports either. Plus the transport network will have been crippled. So no food distribution or effective military mobilisation etc etc

So I give it a few weeks until Taiwan's society undergoes a complete collapse from hunger.

The Chinese Air Force can take out all the power plants, oil refineries, oil depots plus 300-odd bridges on major rivers/canals to separate Taiwan into 15 regions of 1-2 million people each.

AndrewS said:

Couple of issues.

There are no telecoms out of Taiwan, except for some satellite comms.
There is no electricity, fuel or food imports either. Plus the transport network will have been crippled. So no food distribution or effective military mobilisation etc etc

So I give it a few weeks until Taiwan's society undergoes a complete collapse from hunger.

The Chinese Air Force can take out all the power plants, oil refineries, oil depots plus 300-odd bridges on major rivers/canals to separate Taiwan into 15 regions of 1-2 million people each.

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but all that above doesn't take away the capability for soldiers to hole up in buildings and fire atgm/manpads.

there'll be no need for further communication as the last command issued by tw military leadership would be to "fight until death and deal as much damage as you can to the PLA before you get taken out".

no further transports would be needed because the minute PGMs start falling on power stations and SAM sites, the order would be given to prepare for street battle and the deployments to civilian buildings will be complete before PLA boots land on the shores.

you can divide tw into however many regions but at the end of the day there'll be only two choices:

either clear the buildings in every city one by one, floor by floor until no ROC combatants (soldier and armed civies alike) remain, while suffering armor units and personnel loss

or

identify the building where they are holed up and raze it to the ground with innocent civies (held hostage by ROC combatants in some cases) inside and prepare for prolonged backlash and instability after the "conquering" is done.


edit:

just to add, my point isn't that tw will somehow "win" with the tactic, for sure it won't. the point is to drag it out for as long as possible and make the international repercussion to China as severe as possible and maybe, just maybe, after suffering losses so great (not seen after WW2), finally be able to convince the Allies to come to the rescue (long shot but could be worth it from tw's perspective).

ecaedus said:

but all that above doesn't take away the capability for soldiers to hole up in buildings and fire atgm/manpads.

there'll be no need for further communication as the last command issued by tw military leadership would be to "fight until death and deal as much damage as you can to the PLA before you get taken out".

no further transports would be needed because the minute PGMs start falling on power stations and SAM sites, the order would be given to prepare for street battle and the deployments to civilian buildings will be complete before PLA boots land on the shores.

you can divide tw into however many regions but at the end of the day there'll be only two choices:

either clear the buildings in every city one by one, floor by floor until no ROC combatants (soldier and armed civies alike) remain, while suffering armor units and personnel loss

or

identify the building where they are holed up and raze it to the ground with innocent civies (held hostage by ROC combatants in some cases) inside and prepare for prolonged backlash and instability after the "conquering" is done.

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It doesn't work to have soldiers holding out in the cities whilst the civilians they are protecting are suffering from hunger around them.

Whatever Taiwanese leadership remains will bend to this reality and accept terms to save what it can.

I don't think people realise how small Taiwan is. Taking the Russia-Ukraine war as an example and then making estimates on Taiwan doesn't make sense

Overbom said:

I don't think people realise how small Taiwan is. Taking the Russia-Ukraine war as an example and then making estimates on Taiwan doesn't make sense
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Basically just the size of Donetsk. I think we should always plan for the worst, overestimating them is better than underestimating. They know they will fall if China invades....it's just how much China is willing to pay.

AndrewS said:

It doesn't work to have soldiers holding out in the cities whilst the civilians they are protecting are suffering from hunger around them.

Whatever Taiwanese leadership remains will bend to this reality and accept terms to save what it can.

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in a perfect world, yes, but we don't live in one. remember in WW2 the japan imperialist wanted to drag the war out to the point where US marines would have to make landfall in Japan and fight to capture the entire island? US firebombing tokyo quickly "put out" that crazy idea, i'm pretty sure PLA won't firebomb taipei under any circumstances, even if it would seem like PLA could lose the war.

ecaedus said:

in a perfect world, yes, but we don't live in one. remember in WW2 the japan imperialist wanted to drag the war out to the point where US marines would have to make landfall in Japan and fight to capture the entire island? US firebombing tokyo quickly "put out" that crazy idea, i'm pretty sure PLA won't firebomb taipei under any circumstances, even if it would seem like PLA could lose the war.

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But the Taiwanese aren't imperialists.

Remember that Taiwan is a high-income and hi-tech economy.
If Taiwan comes to terms, they get to remain like this, like Hong Kong.

But the longer Taiwan fights, the more Taiwan is devastated.

And Taiwan does understand that China is far larger.
Eg. China has 59x the population

Overbom said:

I don't think people realise how small Taiwan is. Taking the Russia-Ukraine war as an example and then making estimates on Taiwan doesn't make sense
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Grozny was even smaller by comparison, and yet look at the losses and time it took the russians to capture it, while eventually razing it to the ground.

if taiwanese were half as resilient as the Chechens, the war to conquer the entire island could last up to months depending on how aggressive the PLA is.

Han Patriot said:

Basically just the size of Donetsk. I think we should always plan for the worst, overestimating them is better than underestimating. They know they will fall if China invades....it's just how much China is willing to pay.

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Not exactly. Remember this is on the Mercator Projection Map. The full Donetsk Oblast Region is about ~10,250 sq mile meanwhile Taiwan is ~14,000 sq mile. It’s bigger than the Donetsk region but Ukraine is 233,000 sq miles. So Taiwan is about 6% the size of Ukraine. Concentrating bombardments with more munitions is possible with the smaller size.

The problem with Taiwan is less the area but more the terrain. You will basically enter into a city fighting phase from day one. And you cannot do what the Russians are doing here, making people evacuate the main cities. They will have no place to evacuate to.
As for communications you guys seem to be forgetting submarine optical fiber cables. Those would have to be cut.