It's simple: blow up the substations and power plants, cut the undersea cables—don’t forget, this is an island.
PLA Strategy in a Taiwan Contingency
- Thread starter pugachev_diver
- Start date
plawolf
Lieutenant General
The first thing to go down when AR start will be the internet and power all across Taiwan. China will be extremely disciplined and careful to limit collateral damage, but it won’t be idiots either to allow Taiwan to establish free fire positions just because they are hiding behind civilians.
You are also being hilariously optimistic in thinking Taiwan’s high value military assets will survive long enough in the event of AR to redeploy to population centres.
Taiwan isn’t Ukraine and China isn’t Russia. Trying to use the Ukraine war to predict how things will go during AR would be like using the Iran-Iraq war to predict Desert Storm.
Chinese UCAVs and drones will make hiding in urban areas largely pointless. Anything that moves out into the open to get ready to fire is very likely to be quickly detected and engaged before they can fire. Even if they do manage to fire, that will immediately draw the attention of all PLA assets in the area, so the firing platform is extremely unlikely to survive to fire again.
Even if you just hide stuff in underground car parks there is no guarantee they will be safe from Chinese suicide drone swarms.
Who said that it needs to be launched from the Mainland.
I once found a better map, but out of 14 undersea cables in Taiwan, the majority route to Shanghai and HK (naturally, since they are much more important cities financially which usually requires the fastest communications connections), a small number connect to Japan, US, Korea, and Philippines. You don't even need to cut the cables, just disable the routing in China. It would probably create an even worse mess. The Taiwan authorities know of this vulnerability which is why they discuss Starlink, but Tesla Gigafactory Shanghai.
Yes, it would be expected that air superiority would not be an issue in the early stages, but there are some advantages in local sabotage, ie. time to target/detectability/mobility/vulnerability from aerial bombing, etc.
See Siege of Changchun as an example.
Right, that's why it is probably one of the main tasks of the maritime militia to act at least for spotters / signal relays for FPV drones, for places like Penghu. They may even be directly involved in being the launch platforms for short range drones.
Over time, I can definitely see platforms like:
Could become critical in supporting such effort. Especially in places like Penghu, Orchid or Green, where the opposing shore based firepower is unlikely to be concentrated.
You could also see other platforms like:
Although we don't know how long these can loiter in the area to provide signal relays and such, or if there is sufficient onboard power for datalinks with dozens of drones.
The truth is, when war breaks out, If the PLA is willing to do so, the people of Taiwan will most likely have to temporarily say goodbye to modern life. Secondary disasters caused by the collapse of the city are far more serious than the collateral damage caused by attacking military equipment hidden in civilian facilities.
Taiwan's power system has little redundancy (reserve capacity always <5%) and most of Taiwan's electricity is generated in the south and transmitted to the north through a few transmission nodes. Once a few missile hit the main power generation and substation equipment, Taiwan's power grid will immediately collapse (in fact, Taiwan's power grid often collapses, for example, in 2017, one person's operating error caused a blackout across the island).
Power outages lead to communication failures, which in turn affect remote power transmission and control capabilities, creating a vicious cycle. Logistics and transportation are severely congested due to traffic light failures&gas station pump outage, public transportation is completely paralyzed. Failure of the cold chain system leads to rapid food spoilage, water supply interruptions, and almost complete medical shutdowns. The entire social and economic activities will be shut down for at least 48 hours after T+6 to T+8 hours. If the attacks continue and power is not restored, the city's food reserves will be depleted within 3-5 days, in other words, Gazaization, how many people will die as a result?
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Indeed, two major learnings in this decade: Drones in Ukr-Rus war and local sabotage Lebanon and Iran. Would be surprising if China already doesnt have multiple assets and their back ups at critical points.