PLA Strategy in a Taiwan Contingency

RoastGooseHKer said:

The experience from Gulf War and 2003 Invasion of Iraq is that even if you have full domain awareness (via satellites, drones, surveillance aircrafts, etc.), it is still impossible to track mobile missile launchers. The U.S. had serious difficulties tracking and taking out every single Iraqi Scud launcher. Now the Taiwanese missiles are already disguised as civilian cargo trucks painted in gray. So I would expect the Taiwanese side being able to pop dozens of lucky shots. And of course, if the PLA have a serious policy of avoids collateral damages, it would be impossible to go after those launchers hiding in garages, supermarkets, office building parkings, etc. The key would then to intercept incoming Taiwanese missiles. However, given the extremely chaotic and crowded airspace over Taiwan in a war, such focus would in turn increase the chance of serious friendly fire incidents.

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lcloo said:

The problem for Taiwan is that Mainland may aready have all the buildings, with shop signboards, number and street name in their super computer. They may also have registration number, motor vehicle model etc of prctically all motor vehicles in Tawian as well. PLA probably have a better map of Taiwan then Google Map and Google Earth.

The whole Taiwan's population, buildings, motor vehicles numbers etc is just about the level of a tier 1 city on Mainland. Chongqing city alone has more population than Taiwan. It is not difficult task to digitalise everything on the island for strategic purpose.

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HardBall said:

Very valid points.

But you would also need to consider the positioning and topography after a considerable amount of destruction, building partially destroyed, and debris filling streets and alleys. That's always the most difficult type of challenge that ground forces would encounter, a partially destroyed complex landscape, where environment can rapidly change on tiny scales.

I'm sure technology would help with that. But they need to ensure that they are not bogged down over many small urban areas, which may prolong the conflict to the point where it is effectively a stalemate. Not saying that would happen, but they PLAGF and marines must have very robust plans to counter those types of scenarios. Many different powerful militaries have been endlessly bogged down in various theatres due to close quarter combat in unfavorable terrain for years, if not decades.

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FairAndUnbiased said:

How would non all terrain missile TELs drive around in rubble? It is a 6 axle heavy vehicle. It is like taking a semitruck off road drifting but with 10k kg of hazardous payload in the rear.

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HardBall said:

I assume you mean SHORAD, or other air defence. If you are getting to the point of urban warfare, many level of CIS from the air would be necessary. And at that stage, the most important and prevalent form of air defence could well be MANPADs or very light vehicle mounted systems. Those are definitely not impossible to hide in a destroyed urban landscape.

Like I said, technology would likely play a big role in overcoming things of that nature, especially certain forms of AI in the Reinforcement Learning setting, like DQN or actor-critic methods, but those are far from mature enough to be placed into areas full of rubbles and civilians.

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FairAndUnbiased said:

No I meant in the context of a TEL for retaliatory strikes. The context of @lcloo was in whether a Yun Feng land attack cruise missile launcher could launch, given that it might be disguised. I believe it cannot as it is not an all terrain vehicle and thus restricted to roads, and he pointed out that it is also likely to be tracked.

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HardBall said:

Very valid points.

But you would also need to consider the positioning and topography after a considerable amount of destruction, building partially destroyed, and debris filling streets and alleys. That's always the most difficult type of challenge that ground forces would encounter, a partially destroyed complex landscape, where environment can rapidly change on tiny scales.

I'm sure technology would help with that. But they need to ensure that they are not bogged down over many small urban areas, which may prolong the conflict to the point where it is effectively a stalemate. Not saying that would happen, but they PLAGF and marines must have very robust plans to counter those types of scenarios. Many different powerful militaries have been endlessly bogged down in various theatres due to close quarter combat in unfavorable terrain for years, if not decades.

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lcloo said:

Urban fighting is difficult because there are many covers and shelters from building and debris. To over come heavy casualty, PLA has to modernise their way of fighting.

The most obvious is extensive use of drones, recogn drones and strike drones working in teams. 24 hour overhead surveillance by Hale and Male drones to update changes in topography caused by collapsed buildings and structures and shell holes on the ground. And the ground drones can take points ahead of human soldiers.

The use of drones has been demostrated by PLA in video as well as in Zhuhai Airshow (the robot wolves for example), and in many videos from CCTV footages. I believe what we see in these videos are just a small fraction of the drone warfare by PLA.

Use of drones in Ukraine war shows its effectiveness, but the manufacturing of drones in Russia was started in big scale only after the war had started for more than a year. Thus we still see many battles there were fought in 20th century style.

China's drone manufacuring industry vastly out-produced that of Russia, and Taiwan as well. Thus we are likely to see low altitude air dominance by PLA drones, and also on the ground. Russia and Ukraine both must have deployed a few tens of thousands of drones todate. PLA could have deployed 10 times or 100 times more drones, from a few hundreds of thousands to more than a million drones.

In a battlefield where hundreds of drones flying overhead or lying low (example robbot wolves) on the ground will have similar effect as heavy suppresive fire, forcing the enemy to lay low instead of firing back. Thus the initiative will be with PLA to decide how the battle is to be fought.

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Wrought said:

Historically, if you wanted to avoid a brutal urban grind then you just besieged the city instead of storming it. The same logic holds true today. If the US is involved in the conflict, then PLA resources are better used against them. If the US is not involved in the conflict, then why waste blood and treasure on a foregone conclusion?

Either way, there is no reason to rush. Let time do the hard work.

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