I also have some doubts on the amount of ammunition the ROC military have stored so far for its armed forces. Things like artillery shells, SAM and AIM-120,etc. Some of the “acquired” hardwares of the ROC are not actually stored on Taiwan Island, but in US military facilities on Guam under the agreement between the US.
PLA Strategy in a Taiwan Contingency
- Thread starter pugachev_diver
- Start date
you are right. the military aspects have been studied thoroughly, but I do wonder about the command structure and force composition of northern taiwan. if a war were to breakout and the president (whoever it may be at the time) decides to jump on a helicopter and head to the command post in the mountain, assuming there were temporary or permanent communications breakdown, how will field commanders decide on their actions?
Are you talking about Mount Fuji or Cheyenne Mountain? I think the moment there is credible build up, the president will be gone.
Field commanders will know the primary objectives, should the situation deteriorate then the only choices are surrender or fight to the death. What else is there?
solarz
Brigadier
I'm sure those fields commanders will be asking themselves, if the President has already fled, then what am I fighting for?
None of this is relevant. SAMs are essentially irrelevant against long range standoff munitions that vastly outnumber them. 200 PAC-3s are essentially nothing compared to 2000+ SRBMs and 1000+ LACMs.
Mountain airbases are a terrible idea because instead of needing to hit every runway you now just need to hit the doors which are necessarily shallow.
Once air defenses are neutralized it is easy to target ground targets such as troop concentrations, oil refineries, water treatment, sewage, electricity, bridges and semiconductor fabs.
Note the specifications of the following ground-launched land-attack missiles:
SLAM-ER (270km and $0.5M)
JASSM (370km and $0.8M)
ATACMS (300km+ and $0.8M)
So GPS-guided powered rockets with a range of 300km aren't actually that cheap.
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That compares with the unpowered GPS-guided weapons delivered by air which are 10-30x cheaper, such as:
SDB-1 (110km and $40K)
JDAM (25km and $26K)
JDAM-ER (70km and $50K?)
Paveway (25km and $21K)
If the Chinese Air Force have air superiority, it makes sense to use aircraft such as JH-7s as dedicated bomb trucks to deliver these weapons equivalent to these. For a single JH-7 that could mean the following loadouts:
7x [454kg JDAM/Paveway]
14x [227kg JDAM-ER] or [227kg JDAM/Paveway]
28x [113kg SDB-1]
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If China dedicates a hundred JH-7s for 28 days, that could be 700 sorties delivering 14 JDAM-ERs each, from a safe distance of 70km away.
That's 9800 aimpoints at a total munitions cost of about $490M
If you wanted to use ground-based MLRS to deliver the same payload, each rocket would likely cost $0.5M.
So the same 9800 aimpoints would cost $4900M, which is 10x more.
The advantages of aircraft launched, unpowered, GPS-guided munitions grows even further if you assume a campaign length of 28days.
39200 JDAM-ERs would cost about $2Billion whilst 39200 MLRS rockets would cost $19.6 Billion.
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This is a simplified example, but you get the idea. A more sophisticated strategy might comprise the following.
1. Use powered ballistic missiles, cruise missiles or MLRS rockets at the beginning for critical hardened target and against runways and air defences. These weapons mostly cost in the $0.5-1 Million range from what I can see.
2. This can be combined with SDB-1s launched by aircraft from 110km away. The vast majority of aircraft would barely spend any time (2-10min typically) over the waters of the Taiwan strait before launching and then turning back to the safety of mainland China.
3. Over the course of a week, Taiwan's air defences and air force should be decimated. In that time, low-cost glide bombs would mostly be used. That sets the stage for UAVs and UCAVs to overfly Taiwan, and for manned jets to drop JDAMs and Paveways.
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We can also see that the US has an inventory of 250K JDAMs and 18K SDBs.
If we say that Taiwan has 50K fixed targets worth hitting, we're looking at less than $2 Billion for these 50K munitions. Over a 5 year period, that would only be $400M per year. So it shouldn't be an issue for China to purchase more than enough JDAMs and SDBs to cover all of these fixed aimpoints.
And my guestimate is that it might take the Chinese Air Force 2-4weeks to go through 50000 aimpoints.
But after the first week, Taiwan's economy would already be crippled from the destruction of the electricity network, road network, communications networks, etc etc. By the end of the 3rd week, I expect food, water and fuel to be running out in Taiwan.
With Chinese air superiority, I see very little that Taiwan can do to prevent large numbers of low-cost unpowered glide bombs being launched by Chinese aircraft.
We had some discussions on Desert Storm and Taiwan a few months ago on this thread
Desert Storm - overview, data & statistics
The following is a collection of maps, tables and quotations from publicly available sources with heavy emphasis on Government Accountability Office's report "Operation Desert Storm - Evaluation of the Air Campaign". I divided the whole set into five posts: air superiority over Iraq -...
www.sinodefenceforum.com
Here is a possible scenario.
Just right before the hot leads fly, the commander and officers of ROC 8th army surrender, with guaranteed cushy jobs and positions after re-unification, and they open the port of Kaohsiung and entire southern flank to PLA, round up all DPP luminaries and sympathizers, possibly including the mayors and such, just like the old times in mainland before.
Everybody goes home before the end of week?
Just right before the hot leads fly, the commander and officers of ROC 8th army surrender, with guaranteed cushy jobs and positions after re-unification, and they open the port of Kaohsiung and entire southern flank to PLA, round up all DPP luminaries and sympathizers, possibly including the mayors and such, just like the old times in mainland before.
Everybody goes home before the end of week?
I don't think that is possible, why would any commander surrender before war is declared? how does he guarantee that his subordinates will go along? and his surrender is not even a decisive one because he does not have access to the top brass. for a regional commander like that, a more reasonable thing to do is to wait until war breaks out, see how the first couple of days go. if it was a disaster for ROC with comms down and air defence in ruins, then send units to take control all ports airports and early warning establishments, declare themselves neutral in exchange for PLA stop firing in the area. that way if PLA wins, the commander will be rewarded for opening up the southern flank, if ROC wins then he can still defend himself claiming to have spared the southern region of PLA fire.
the people whose defection will work well are units guarding Taipei, though i imagine those units are closely watched by higher-ups and by each other.
These commanders and officers will surrender 15 minutes before DPP president and the entire cabinets, including the top general and defense minister, take off from tarmac fully loaded with gold and paintings. And that is at least a day before real deal comes. Mark these words down.
Within 10 years time, a lot of questions and reasons you deemed not possible now will certainly not carry the same degree of certainty and conviction you have now. There would always be turncoats in Chinese civil war, whatever the underlying reasons are for that, especially the other side is rapidly falling behind in everything metrics necessary to stave off an offensive on such a scale.
From early 50's when US first test thermonuclear bomb and a decade later, US built up an arsenal of over 20,000 bombs starting from less than a thousand. That's 50's tech and Hbombs don't require a lot HEU. It's now 2021, China's tech, logistics and infrastructure are way better than 50's and 60's US. So you do the math. Maybe US right now can glass China over 10 times, but in 10 years time who knows what China can do, maybe 5 times over?
It was a good link.
A note, Tsai Ing-Wen will probably give you a DM and ask which seller on ebay you found SLAM-ER for 500K a pop. She recently paid almost 8 mil each to Uncle Sam, now she feels maybe it was too much
Now relative to my post, you have to remember that this was made in reference to his point of heavy AA coverage/Initial air superiority not guaranteed. It is a reasonable assumption as Patriot and TK-series SAMs should have the capability to hit aircraft before they can use cheaper PGM or UAV.
As discussed to death, Ballistic Missiles will likely be reserved for the most valuable fixed targets, bases, radar stations, etc.
Guided rockets and cruise missiles are almost going to be like a form of counter battery fire, firing at wherever interceptors were fired from and any likely hiding spaces as determined by intelligence. $500K to $800K vs. ~8M(?) for Patriot/TK complex (launcher and missiles), it's not even close.
Then when the TC-2/1, Chaparral, Hawk, Avenger try to light up the 370mm rockets and CJ-10, that's when aircraft with PGM will have the best chance (To me at least).