PLA Strategy in a Taiwan Contingency

• Domestic turmoil and possibly revolution against Chinese CCP for permanent loss of legitimacy, prestige, and territory.
• Taiwan acquiring nuclear weapons for self-defense and preservation purposes.

Phead128 said:

Rarely is the consequence of a failed invasion is discussed....Two aspects of a potentially failed invasion of Taiwan:

• Domestic turmoil and possibly revolution against Chinese CCP for permanent loss of legitimacy, prestige, and territory.
• Taiwan acquiring nuclear weapons for self-defense and preservation purposes.

Therefore, the chance are high that any war US-China attrition war will not be limited to conventional in nature, but must consider the possibility of escalating into the nuclear realm (tactical more likely, strategic less likely).

Which I think if China can impose sufficiently high economic costs and potential MAD (@ZeEa5KPul ) nuke buildup, then China can dissuade US intervention by virtue of catastrophic interdependency and nuclear MAD. China doesn't need a zillion CATOBARS or 5th gens and better navy, just make Taiwan not worth it for US to defend.

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Bltizo said:

It's impossible to have such a discussion when even simple things like "US conducting strikes on sites against the Chinese mainland," was first openly discussed and raised some four days ago:

PLA Strategy in a Taiwan Contingency

That is to say -- if foreign intervention occurs in the middle of an invasion, I expect the PLA to place the majority of its focus on asserting regional air and sea control against the foreign intervention. If the invasion has yet to really get underway with only minimal forces landed, I expect...

www.sinodefenceforum.com

And then people enter the conversation part way through without being able to recognize that was part of the original exchange (and thus part of the original set of assumptions) in the first place.
If someone wants to enter the conversation and challenge that perhaps the US conducting strikes against the Chinese mainland is not a reasonable assumption then that is fine.
Efforts would be made to debate that point (which is what occurred), or alternatively the discussion with that person will simply be finished and be unable to progress.


However, when things such as misportraying positions like claiming I had suggested "US strikes means there's 0 replenishment for PRC missiles," then yes it requires detailed and repetitive clarification of one's position to ensure that they are not being misinterpreted.

I can appreciate that a multipage, multi-party, long episode of a detailed discussion like this might be difficult to keep track of, but people who want to enter the discussion should be required to do the due diligence of understanding what the various positions are and what the actual arguments are and what arguments have already been made, before contributing their own arguments.
Requesting people to clarify their positions is reasonable, but putting forward one's own argument should necessitate an understanding of what has already been said and by whom.
This does not only go for this thread, but all threads in general.

I don't want to lecture, but I think that is a fairly reasonable expectation for forum etiquette.

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james smith esq said:

Please be careful not to center this discussion around yourself by representing your assumption as “the original” assumption; that’s both undemocratic and erroneous. This thread goes much farther back than when that assumption was presented as something other than assumption. The original/opening post in this thread does not present that assumption!

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james smith esq said:

As far as folks coming later to the discussion without preparatory reading, yeah that should be expected, at least. However, when we start to personalize intellectual laziness and seek to admonish, it might be time to take a break; every post doesn’t require a response. Nobody’s reputation, livelihood, or life is at stake, here. I’ve got plenty of folks that don’t know how to discuss reasonably, conscientiously, or respectfully on block, a luxury that moderators may not have.

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Bltizo said:

As I said, people are free to challenge the assumptions that were made at the start of the discussion, which people have done.
That is fine.
It is also fine to enter a discussion and ask for clarification as to what the assumptions and salient points are.
But it is not okay to enter the discussion and pretend as if those points were not there when the discussion had first began.
Or putting it another way, people have the freedom to enter a discussion without being up to speed about what's been written before -- but other people also have the freedom to tell them to please read what's been written and get up to speed first.




It is the responsibility of people who enter a discussion to get themselves up to speed as to what has been written and the positions that have been laid out, and it is perfectly reasonable to criticize someone for that specific basis.
I write that here as a normal posting member that has been engaged in many long discussions both after becoming a moderator but also in the many years I was here before I was made a moderator, and also as someone who has made the mistake of entering discussions where did not accurately assess the lay of the land prior to my entry and being rightfully torn to shreds over it (not here, on this forum, and not recently).

In any case, I've already laid out all of my arguments, and for this particular discussion about the "war of attrition," I have already closed out my position in post #1114.

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For a Taiwan contingency discussion, there are essentially four pillars that are the most relevant to our interests:
1. PLA conventional forces necessary to conduct a successful Taiwan invasion
2. PLA conventional forces necessary to defeat a US conventional intervention

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montyp165 said:

I always go by my own observations and assessments, and so for my 2 cents on the following:



For condition 1, the PRC already has all of the necessary components to do so both qualitatively and quantitatively, it simply hasn't concentrated the necessary forces for immediate action to do so, but the capability is already present.

For condition 2, the PRC has the technology to do so even if the necessary forces are not yet fully present (which makes successful outcomes for the PRC at present condition dependent on things such as whether the US shoots first or not, etc.), but given the events of the past 5 years in particular my original estimate of 2035 shortened quite a bit faster than anticipated. In my experience the state of Chinese industrial developments gives a good indication of industrial scale combat capability and outcomes in the event of war, and as such I see the mid-decade being the breakpoint.

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Bltizo said:

This will be my last post on the matter:

The PLA of today currently does not have the capability to wage a favourable war of attrition against the US military in a western pacific conflict arising from a Taiwan invasion. There are no ifs and buts about it.
If you believe that you might have come up with a way in which the PLA might have an edge or some kind of advantage or some sort of stratagem, please re-read the last 6+ pages.
You will probably find it addressed already by myself or by others.


But, saying the PLA of today is unable to conduct a war of attrition against the US, doesn't mean the PLA will never be able to.

The PLA of the 1990s would not have been capable of properly suppressing the ROCAF and ROCN to even start thinking about an amphibious invasion, but after three decades of planning and procurement, look where they are now.

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Bltizo said:

I'm going to break down my reply in parts.

1. I never said that the US would be able to "permanently take out" hundreds of Chinese factories. What I said was that the US would have the capability to strike at Chinese production facilities while China would not have the capability to do the same to the US.

2. In any sort of serious westpac conflict, the US will frontload its airbases in the region with aircraft yes (at both major air bases and dispersed air bases), and also have multiple CSGs in the region. Additionally, the US would deploy a large fraction of its SSN fleet (most if not all of which can launch LACMs) to the region, as well as additional surface combatants as part of surface action groups (SAGs) -- and those SSNs and SAGs of course can carry Tomahawk LACMs capable of quite long ranged strike. Furthermore, the US will be capable of launching long range bomber raids carrying long range ALCMs from Hawaii and CONTUS. And in the future, basing of IRBM/hypersonic weapons in the region during wartime is virtually a given as well.
Taking all of those capabilities together at a system of systems level, versus what the PLA can field in the near future at a system of systems level, I do not see the PLA having the capability to robustly and quickly smash US westpac capabilities and mobile units (CSGs and naval forces) in the region in a manner that will permanently cripple US capability to project air and naval power in the region, which would be the prerequisite for China to be capable of robustly protecting its key military industrial complex facilities from US attack.

3. The production pipeline for modern weapons systems is much more fragile than we often believe. Think about various key subsystems that modern fighters, warships, and missiles cannot function without. The most obvious are key avionics systems like radars, and the other are powerplants. Think about how many factories there are which are able to produce those key subsystems. If I were a competent adversary, I would focus my strikes on the small number of key production sites that produce those key subsystems, and sure maybe I'll launch some strikes against final assembly/production factories as well. Those together would greatly hinder and delay China's ability to replace losses of many military systems. Sure, over time we can argue that China will be able to build replacement factories, distribute their operations, and so on -- but over that same period of time the US will be able to greatly expand its production facilities in CONTUS and in Europe -- all on top of continuing to run its unmolested existing production facilities. Meaning that in a prolonged conflict, the US will almost certainly end up being able to outproduce China the longer that time goes on.

4. China has no capability in the foreseeable future to realistically to strike US production facilities that the US uses for the production of its military assets. Fairly simple.

5. SLOCs -- sure one can argue that in a "wartime economy" China might be self-sufficient in energy and materials. But you are talking about a war of attrition. In such a conflict, the side with secure SLOCs and superior resource lines will hold a significant advantage.


All of which, brings me back to the point I wrote in my previous post -- as the current balance of military power stands, a war of attrition would be unfavourable to China and the PLA.

That is simply because of two things:
1. The pre-positioning of US forces in westpac (air bases, facilities) and mobile US forces (CSGs, naval forces) are in close proximity to the Chinese mainland where they are capable of striking production facilities of China, while the PLA has no way of realistically doing so to the US. That combined with the US having greater freedom to rely on global SLOCs for maintaining its resources and denying those SLOCs to China, means that the longer a war goes on, the worse it is for the PLA.
2. The degree of military power the PLA holds is not sufficient to defeat and annihilate said US forces (both pre-positioned and mobile) described above, in a sufficiently comprehensive and rapid manner to allow the PLA to cripple US capability to project power in the western pacific and allow the PLA to take the strategic initiative in the pacific in general, and also to allow the PLA to secure its SLOCs in the key important area/s of the western pacific and Indian Ocean.


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Directed to everyone in general:

Now, let me describe a degree of PLA military power whereby a "war of attrition" might actually be a positive for them:
Such a PLA force (let's call it PLA XYZ) would be capable of doing two things:
1. Defeating a massive combined US force (including both their based forces and their mobile naval/air forces, which would make up over half of total US global forces) in the western pacific in relatively quick order (such that the US has no chance to wear down PLA defenses of the mainland let alone robustly strike at Chinese production facilities), AND
2. After the action described in 1., the remaining surviving PLA forces (air and naval) that they have, are able to significantly quantitatively and qualitatively outnumber the remaining surviving US forces in the world, enabling the PLA to take strategic advantage in the pacific in general (i.e.: not just the western pacific, rather including the central and eastern pacific) as well as in the Indian Ocean.

By achieving that, the PLA will be able to:
A. Secure the production facilities of their own home turf and to be capable of expanding production robustly
B. Secure SLOCs for efficient, expansive transport of resources in a way that provides both redundancy and capacity
C. Have a globally sufficient and quantitative balance of forces capable of placing the US on the geostrategic defensive, by placing Hawaii and Alaska at serious risk and also to have the capability to conduct a degree of strikes against the US western seaboard and force the US to reposition and suboptimize their own production facilities on CONTUS.


Needless to say, PLA XYZ would need to be very large and very powerful to be able to achieve such a mission -- at minimum it would require PLA XYZ's total high end military capability to be quantitatively larger than that of the US's total global force and to be at minimum qualitatively equal if not qualitatively superior.
Such an operation would require the PLA XYZ to be able to robustly defeat a frontloaded US force (composing of over half, or at least a major fraction of US total global forces in existence) in the western pacific while suffering minimal losses on its own, to result in the PLA having a quantitative correlation of forces on the scale of something like at least 3:1 against the US's total globally available forces that still survive.



.... Or, putting it another way, I believe for a "war of attrition" to be plausibly desirable for China, will require the PLA to at least be 50% larger than the US military in key mobile air-naval forces, and to have massive regional/westpac advantages to be capable of robustly defeating a forward deployed US force (composing of 50-60% of total US global forces) in the western pacific while suffering minimal PLA losses of its own, to seek a correlation of naval and air forces that is at least 3:1 in the PLA's favour by the time that the dust settles in the western pacific phase of the conflict.

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