PLA Strategy in a Taiwan Contingency

SunlitZelkova

New Member
Registered Member
Nah, just find an excuse to bomb a radar station on the Yonaguni Island which should trigger the US-Japan defense treaty.

No excuse even needed. Israel has normalized attacking neutral nations in support of wider war goals against another party, via their low-rate air campaign against Syria during 2019(?)-2023.

Not that Israel's tactics are to be admired or emulated, but from a legal POV, no "Iraqi WMDs" type excuse is needed.
 

Sinnavuuty

Senior Member
Registered Member
Incorrect. If PLA's air dominance enables it to land on Taiwan's beaches, then it can defeat ROC counterattacks from the air.

Assuming the US does not intervene, PLA will dominate air space over Taiwan, any attempt at counterattacking occupied beach head will be destroyed by airpower. The only way to survive would be to hide under ground or in urban areas. measures as you suggested, such as artillery and drones, are a non-issue because without air cover, they would not even know where to fire or how to coordinate their fire.

Assuming the US does intervene after PLA landing, then the nature of the conflict will change and PLA will likely just give up trying to protect their beach head and focus on defeating the US. If the PLA can win that battle, then no further action would even be required against Taiwan, the latter will simply surrender. The loss of landed troops is an acceptable price for defeating the US on the pacific. If the PLA cannot defeat the US, then no amount of landed troops will change the outcome of complete defeat. I have alluded to this possibility in my earlier posts, where the PLA could conduct a landing operation early to force the US to choose between prematurely engaging the PLA and to avoid getting involved, which would precipitate a collapse of ROC defence.
Taiwan could surrender strategic air dominance to decisively saturate the PLA in terms of tactical air dominance while in the landing operation and subsequent operations, ROCA could do so only with SHORADS mobility systems and other long-range systems to deny the PLAAF tactical air superiority and exploit the PLA’s vital weakness, joint air-ground integration. Therefore, the advantage for Taiwan lies not in its ability to compete for air superiority against the PLA, but rather in its ability to gradually deny air superiority and impose severe costs during one of the most complicated military operations, an amphibious landing. Furthermore, air power is not everything, even if Taiwan is still unable to deny the PLA tactical air superiority, there are still several ways to inflict casualties on Chinese amphibious units on the coast.
 

AndrewS

Brigadier
Registered Member
Taiwan could surrender strategic air dominance to decisively saturate the PLA in terms of tactical air dominance while in the landing operation and subsequent operations, ROCA could do so only with SHORADS mobility systems and other long-range systems to deny the PLAAF tactical air superiority and exploit the PLA’s vital weakness, joint air-ground integration. Therefore, the advantage for Taiwan lies not in its ability to compete for air superiority against the PLA, but rather in its ability to gradually deny air superiority and impose severe costs during one of the most complicated military operations, an amphibious landing. Furthermore, air power is not everything, even if Taiwan is still unable to deny the PLA tactical air superiority, there are still several ways to inflict casualties on Chinese amphibious units on the coast.

If Taiwan surrenders strategic air dominance as you put it, this inevitably means that China can saturate all of Taiwanese airspace with MALE drones and also smaller tactical drones.

Taiwanese SHORADs and other long-range systems won't survive for long.
 
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