PLA Strategy in a Taiwan Contingency
- Thread starter pugachev_diver
- Start date
Just realized that PLAN technically hasn’t lost a fight yet.
Most likely similar to when Russia did the big Donbass announcement last year, if/when US does the big announcement, some parts of the KMT would immediately go with them, while the ones either still loyal to Chinese people or simply fearful of foreign confrontation would take Beijing’s side.
A lot of Taiwan residents have their relatives, money and even careers stashed in the other provinces. So despite the KMT threatening they will leave with the whole province, in reality it's not necessarily true that they can seize the whole province from the start. Chances are, there would be some pro-government holdouts.
Like we saw in the Donbass, it's easy to talk about secession when it's peacetime, but when you are forced to enlist foreigners to help you and start a full fledged war against the government, that takes a much more difficult leap.
At the end of the day, people prefer stability and practicality, only a very small fraction wants to fight for values, unless their existence is directly threatened.
To play devil's advocate, US shouldn't expect the KMT to do much at all, because counting on every Chinese in the disputed region to help them isn't realistic. To win, they need to bring their own manpower.
Due to the curvature of the earth the US will need to come within 500 km of Taiwan to get a targeting solution on PLA assets. I think we can all agree that within 1000km of China's coast due to the mass of fires and tracking complex that the PLA has the US will not come within here. So therefore so long as the PLA can neutralise the US offboard sensors/jam the data links and networks to the fires that will force them to either come within the Chinese A2/AD complex and loose their navy/air force or to just loiter around 1500 miles away and watch Taiwan and by extension their hegemony fall. I don't see how the US can win this war tbh but I would like some counter points.
As I've written elsewhere, depending on the nature of the target, the US may not need ISR for midcourse or terminal updates, such as if they are targeting fixed locations like bases or C4I centers, or if they are targeting mobile targets that they know are confirmed to be only in a relatively small area (such as ships in the Taiwan strait).
For those targets, it is very possible that the weapons can be used at their near maximal ranges.
That doesn't mean it will be a decisive situation where the US can launch long range stand off weapons where the PLA has no responses or no defenses, but it does mean that the outcome is one where theoretically our best answer in the public space "we don't know".
That will not get the required targeting data needed espec for moving targets. Add some EW and the US could be wasting its entire inventory.
I assume you mean LRASM rather than NSM as the latter is a much smaller and shorter ranged missile, but yes the point stands.
As I wrote above, fixed land targets and naval targets that are known to be at sea in a given fixed location, can be targeted by such weapons without needing midcourse updates or substantial ISR.
Sure I agree with a lot of that. But compared to the US being reliant on half a dozen bases or so with a large share of their forward deployed assets positioned there, individual Chinese fixed assets are much less operationally important than Guam and Okinawa. Also only a portion of PLA tracking assets are fixed and they are defended by the Chinese SAM complex and incoming fires will be tracked by all the sensors the PLA has in west pac.