It preemptively wrecks the idea that you can use the urban population as hostage to reinforce your urban stronghold.
PLA Strategy in a Taiwan Contingency
- Thread starter pugachev_diver
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So you’re perfectly fine causing mass harm to civilians because China suffered worse? Yiur fine with civilians in Taiwan having no clean water, little food and no basic functions like hospitals all because China faced worse so it doesn’t matter? I’m going to leave it off here but just know what your saying is a massive war crime and potentially a crime against humanity that will cause a massive crisis and it would destroy anyone who is pro reunification in Taiwan and gives what the US wants what is to frame China as evil
I'm being realistic that Taiwan's will and capacity to fight will evaporate long before the human toll reaches those numbers. Sentiments will recover over time precisely because of how small Taiwan's population is in the grand scheme of things.
International law is theatre for rich people to virtue signal with. The moment the "rules based order" goes against the mighty's interests, it's thrown into the garbage. Since there is no higher power to enforce international law, it's anarchy all the way down.
It doesn't have anything to do with it.
Urban environment is conductive to military operations regardless of civilians, and presence of civilians doesn't really change ROEs in these circumstances all that much (proportioinality principle is the only concern, and with guided weapons it is in most cases passed more or less by default). Furthermore, it's unrealistic population will be truly used as hostage (people in ROC military come from same exact cities, it isn't Ukrainian case). More that tens of millions of people won't have anywhere to go. Where, to the mountains?
Lack of "special"(unreasonable) regard for civilians is a given in these circumstances. Lack of "any" regard won't happen, because it doesn't achieve anything useful for military campaign, but has huge political and moral costs, and frankly contradicts the entire point. China doesn't want "Crimea preferably without Crimeans", like Ukraine. China's goal is national reunification. That means people. Pouring water on hate watermill isn't exactly conductive.
Dead civilians will be used by opfor no matter what, - the more of them, the worse the impact. And yes, there will be huge civilian casualties, they're unavoidable in this conflict(Taiwan is several megapolises, of a type which haven't seen war evern before). Best way to counter is visible (demonstrated) restraint and visible humanitarian effort.
I guess we will just have to agree to disagree because we’re not going to agree here. But I just hope what you realize is well a potential crime against humanity. You have a good day
I agree. The only caveat being that there will be a significant portion of people who will hate PRC regardless of what happens in the war. Though I suspect, most will get with the program far quicker than Westerners think. Similar to the Russians living in Crimea who quietly moved on.
Once you have the okay to just freely smash civilian buildings ROE and tactical calculus for viability of urban combat completely changes. Half the constraints that make urban combat difficult for the invading party is precisely because civilians are basically de facto hostages in the urban environment. If they weren’t you could just reduce the hiding spaces and infrastructure to rubble and starve anyone trying to encamp, like Israel did with Gaza.
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Nothing changes too much - even Israel didn't really get to starve Palestine to death. This isn't applicable to China in Taiwan at all.
And while Israel can reduce rather poor buildings in Gaza easily - Taiwan is a far nastier matter, even compared to Donbas. It's a far more recent, far higher and far more concentrated construction.
It isn't all that hard to reduce buildings to unlivable. It's in fact quite hard to reduce them into pile of rubble. Moreover it's sort of pointless - their hiding value doesn't diminish from that (in fact it sort of grows, tracking things in orderly city is easier).
Overall, indiscriminate bombing won't achieve much - military is better dealt with precision effects, indiscriminate ones will indeed make civilian suffering worse, but this isn't a goal. Army will eat on priority basis in any scenario.
No one advocated indiscriminate bombing. Stop the gaslighting.