What if 'China Attacks Taiwan!'

In surveying the landscape of international politics, the Taiwan Strait stands out as an area with grave potential for seismic instability. Beijing argues that Taiwan remains a province of China, while Taiwan steadily establishes de facto independence and contemplates the formal announcement of national autonomy. Such a declaration would cross China's political "red line" and push Beijing to the use of force. The United States, meanwhile, clings to a policy of "strategic ambiguity," recognizing only one China, with diplomatic ties to Beijing and withholding diplomatic recognition from Taiwan. The United States argues that any Chinese military aggression against Taiwan would be a serious threat to American interests, but so far has stopped short of extending formal security guarantees to Taiwan, fearing that such agreements would embolden Taiwan to formally declare independence and trigger a conflict with China. The Bush Administration does appear to be edging toward a more assertive position in support of Taiwan than was the case during the Clinton era, however. President Bush in April 2001 publicly stated that the United States would do "whatever it took" to defend Taiwan in the event of a Chinese attack.[1]

Despite the intractable political dilemma, many commentators and observers dismiss the potential for a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. They argue that China's public comments on reserving the right to use force to cut the Gordian knot amounts to little more than bluff and bluster because China will lack the military means to attack and occupy Taiwan for at least ten years. This confident assessment lends itself to the United States resting comfortably on its current policy position of strategic ambiguity and dismissing the potential for a military conflagration in the Taiwan Strait that could bring American and Chinese forces into direct combat.

What if the prescience of these analysts is less than perfect? This article constructs a devil's advocate analysis to weigh against the analyses that see little prospect for major Chinese military action against Taiwan. It suggests that the Chinese could use strategic surprise to compensate for shortcomings in military capabilities and orchestrate a successful military campaign to take control of Taiwan. The Chinese could do so by readily deceiving outside observers about the scope of their sealift and airlift capabilities, which would fundamentally undermine the linchpin assumptions of sanguine analyses about Chinese force projection capabilities. The Chinese also could use massive barrages of surface-to-surface missiles armed with weapons of mass destruction to profoundly disrupt Taiwan's air force, air defenses, and other measures to counter Chinese amphibious and airborne assaults in a coordinated campaign to occupy Taiwan. What the Chinese military lacks in technological sophistication could be compensated for in military mass, contrary to the assertions of the optimists.

This sort of devil's advocate analysis has significant implications for US policy. American policymakers can better protect national interests if policy and military options are thought through long before the outbreak of a cross-Strait conflict than if they wait and are caught off-guard by a Chinese surprise attack.

Surprise attack is the use of military force against an unsuspecting and ill-prepared adversary. The aim of surprise attack is to strike before an adversary is able to bring his defenses to full strength and to deny him the ability to marshal the resources needed for counterattack.

Surprise attack is a particularly attractive strategy for a nation-state that needs to compensate for military inadequacies or shortcomings. Clausewitz said of surprise that "whenever it is achieved on a grand scale, it confuses the enemy and lowers his morale; many examples, great and small, show how this in turn multiplies the results."[2] Surprise acts as a force multiplier that enhances the military effectiveness of a potentially handicapped aggressor. As Michael Handel explained of the value of strategic surprise, "In compensating for the weaker position of the attacker, it will act as a force multiplier that may drastically reverse the ratio of forces in the attacker's favor."[3] Although Handel used force ratios as a measure of capabilities, another measure is the technological sophistication of weapon systems. A nation-state might turn to surprise attack to multiply the combat effectiveness of its arms that are technologically inferior to those of its adversary.

Deception operations go hand-in-hand with surprise attack. In many instances, surprise attack is facilitated by deception operations designed to mislead an adversary's intelligence collection and analysis. Handel defined deception as "the deliberate and subtle dissemination of misleading information to an intelligence service by its adversaries."[4] In his book Intelligence Power in Peace and War, Michael Herman elaborates:

Deception operations will deny an adversary an unambiguous warning or indication of impending war. Without unambiguous warning, nation-states may be reluctant to shift to a wartime footing, thereby presenting an aggressor with a window of opportunity to levy the first blow in combat and exploit momentum in the conflict's initial stages.

Nation-states have repeatedly defeated the best efforts by modern intelligence organizations to clearly perceive the political-military intentions and capabilities of adversaries before the onset of combat. The history of warfare, littered as it is with examples of surprise attack and their enabling deception operations, attests to this stubborn reality. Cases of surprise attack by an adversary--and of intelligence failure on the part of the victim--include the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, the North Korean attack on South Korea and the subsequent intervention of China, and the 1973 Middle East war.

The reasons for one's vulnerability to surprise attack and intelligence failure are many. As Ernest May concluded from an exhaustive study of intelligence assessment before the world wars, intelligence agencies are

Abraham Ben-Zvi similarly concluded from a review of surprise attacks that states fall victim to their own preconceived notions of their adversaries: "Oblivious to the asymmetry of motivation that existed between the parties to the conflict, they remained aloof to the possibility that their opponent, while militarily weaker, might be willing to accept greater costs and risks than expected."[7] Richard Betts observes that in many cases "hesitancy in communication and disbelief on the part of leaders were reinforced by deceptive enemy maneuvers that cast doubt on the data."[8]

With such a long historical record of surprise attack and enabling deception operations in warfare, one wonders how potential victims can avoid these calamities. One way is to apply a devil's advocate analysis to a conflict-prone situation. The goal of a devil's advocate analysis, as Robert Jervis observes, is to increase the chances that policymakers "will consider alternative explanations of specific bits of data and think more carefully about the beliefs and images that underlie their policies."[9] Jervis wisely adds that "those who listen to the arguments are in a good position to learn what perspectives they are rejecting, what evidence they should examine more closely, and what assumptions need further thought. As a result, fewer important questions will be overlooked because everyone agrees on the answer."[10]

As perceived by the West, the Chinese military is impressive in size, but underwhelming in technological sophistication. The Chinese have an active force military of about 2,470,000 personnel, with some 7,060 main battle tanks, 4,800 infantry fighting vehicles and armored personnel carriers, 65 submarines, 20 destroyers, and 3,520 combat aircraft. The Chinese military dwarfs the size of Taiwan's armed forces with its 370,000 active-duty troops, about 750 main battle tanks, 1,175 infantry fighting vehicles and armored personnel carriers, 4 submarines, 12 destroyers, and 668 combat aircraft.[11] The bulk of China's order-of-battle, however, consists of obsolescent Soviet-styled and Soviet-built equipment. Even the most modern Chinese weapons are inferior one-for-one with the Western-built equipment supplied to Taiwan. China's 50 Su-27 aircraft, for example, could be countered by Taiwan's F-16s and Mirage 2000s. Taiwanese pilots are also better trained than their Chinese counterparts; they receive double the flight hours per year for training.[12]

Outside observers also assume that they have a good handle on the size and scope of the Chinese ballistic missile program. Respected estimates of Chinese tactical ballistic missile inventories are at about 240 ballistic missiles, including 200 CSS-6/M-9 missiles with a range of 600km and 40 CSS-7/M-11 with a range of 120-300km,[13] both of which are capable of hitting Taiwan from the mainland. Many observers envision the use of Chinese ballistic missile strikes as a means to harass Taiwan and scare off foreign vessels from visiting Taiwan's ports or to raise havoc with the Taiwanese stock market, but they neglect the notion of integrating ballistic missile capabilities into a major Chinese military campaign to overrun Taiwanese defenses and occupy the island. In this vein, for example, Denny Roy argues that "although presently incapable of capturing Taiwan by invading it, China could seriously harass and undermine its economic well-being through operations short of invasion."[14]

Most significantly, many observers judge that Chinese military lift capabilities are too limited to project the forces needed for a successful invasion of the island. Michael O'Hanlon, for example, assesses that China's 70 or so amphibious ships could move no more than 10,000 to 15,000 troops with their equipment, including some 400 armored vehicles, while another 6,000 troops could be moved by airlift.[15] The well-respected International Institute for Strategic Studies estimates that "it would take approximately 800-1,000 large landing craft nearly two weeks to transport the required 30 infantry divisions to Taiwan. At present the Chinese Navy could move one, or perhaps two divisions."[16]

Outside observers judge that Chinese sealift and airlift are so limited that there is no near-term threat to Taiwan of Chinese invasion. O'Hanlon, for example, confidently assesses that China will pose no substantial threat to Taiwan for at least ten years.[17] Roy asserts that for at least ten to 15 years, "The physical conquest of Taiwan will remain a daunting prospect."[18] David Shambaugh argues that China "remains at least five to seven years away from having the necessary capability to mount a full blockade and amphibious attack against the island (both of which would necessitate air dominance and sea-denial capability)."[19]

Conventional wisdom also assumes that any near-term Chinese attempt to invade Taiwan would be an irrational act because China needs much more time to procure and deploy more technologically sophisticated weapon systems. This assumption overlooks the political and historical wisdom revealed by Richard Betts in observing, "The probability of armed conflict depends not only on the actual dangers of war to the attacker, but also on the perceived dangers of peace."[20] Beijing does not have the combat power needed to replicate a US Marine Corps-style amphibious assault on Taiwan, but Chinese leaders may fear that they will never have sufficient time to develop such capabilities. Time is eroding Chinese interests by allowing Taipei the luxury of strengthening its economic and political linkages to the world while improving its military qualitatively with modern and technologically sophisticated weapon systems from the West, particularly from the United States.[21]

Counter-intuitively, the bolstering of Taiwanese military capabilities may be decreasing Taiwanese security. As Betts explains, "Defenders may assume erroneously that their military strength inhibits the enemy, not recognizing that consciousness of weakness may impel him to compensate with audacity in order to redress the balance."[22] Beijing may be feeling pressure to move militarily sooner rather than later, worrying that the gap between Taiwanese and Chinese military capabilities and Taiwan's integration into the world at large will only grow with time, particularly if Taiwan receives protection under a US theater ballistic missile defense system.[23]

A devil's advocate analysis assumes that under these conditions, Chinese civilian authorities have tasked or will soon task military planners to be prepared to execute a military campaign to conquer Taiwan. In anticipation of the order, the Chinese military may have had in place a prolonged, sustained, and clandestine effort to bolster those military assets needed to project power across the Strait. The Chinese--particularly with the recent publication of the Chinese military White Paper--have encouraged the West to believe that Beijing is increasing its military transparency to the outside world.[24] What the outside world knows of Chinese military assets, however, may be just the tip of the iceberg.

The Chinese undoubtedly are aware that outside observers look to Chinese inventories of sealift and airlift assets to gauge China's ability to launch an invasion across the Strait. With this in mind, the Chinese could conceive of and execute a deception campaign to reassure outside observers that their estimates of China's sealift and airlift assets are on the mark, while the Chinese military clandestinely acquires and exercises the lift assets needed to increase their capabilities to send sizable forces across the Strait.

There is evidence that the Chinese place a high priority on surprise and the enabling features of denial and deception in their military planning. Mark Burles and Abram Shulsky judge from reviewing the history of the Chinese use of force that "a key characteristic of Chinese use of force in actual conflict has been the importance of the element of surprise."[25] According to the US Department of Defense, a 1993 Chinese National Defense University treatise also suggests that the Chinese military recognizes the value of conducting deception operations, especially in a crisis involving Taiwan, to create ambiguity about Chinese intentions and to force Taiwan's political and military leadership to misallocate resources. The Chinese report argues that deception is intended to induce the enemy to reach erroneous conclusions about the activities and objectives and adds that camouflage and deception can disperse the enemy's troops, waste their firepower, and disrupt high-technology weapons.[26]

Additionally, the Chinese see surprise as a way to overcome more technologically sophisticated adversaries. As Michael Pillsbury's impressive research reveals, a theme that exists in Chinese strategic writings is "the requirement for 'the inferior' to preemptively strike the 'superior' in order to paralyze his nerve centers and block his logistics. Chinese military books and articles on US weaknesses date back at least to the Gulf War in 1991 and continue to appear, drawing on analysis of that conflict."[27]

The manufacture of air- and sealift assets presents no formidable technological obstacle to the Chinese, a fact that eludes the conventional wisdom. The Chinese have the indigenous capability to manufacture both aircraft and ships capable of ferrying troops across the Strait.[28] The Chinese are also fully able to take active measures to ensure that clandestinely procured air- and sealift assets go undetected by the West. A US Department of Defense report observes that "the Chinese are proficient at using camouflage, terrain masking, underground facilities, decoys, and other forms of denial and deception to conceal military activity and inhibit timely warning."[29] The Chinese political objective of reunifying Taiwan to the mainland should be more than sufficient incentive to devote the economic resources needed to support such a clandestine effort to build and hide substantial military lift assets.

With little difficulty, China could increase the production lines of their transport aircraft and keep the additional aircraft in warehouses and underground shelters to hide them from overhead satellite detection. Chinese conscripts could receive jump training over a sustained period without detection by the outside world. Such efforts could substantially increase the number of troops that China could send over the Strait for airdrops on Taiwan.

Likewise, the Chinese could undertake clandestine efforts to build up their sealift capacities. The manufacture of sea-going barges is hardly a technological achievement beyond their grasp. They could undertake efforts to substantially augment their sealift assets while taking care to keep the naval assets under massive nettings in isolated harbors away from main naval bases that attract the most attention from prying Western eyes.

The Chinese could also be increasing their production of ballistic missiles well beyond the scope assumed by the West. The importance that the Chinese attach to ballistic missiles in compensating for the inadequacies of their air force was evident in the 1996 Taiwan Strait crisis. Ballistic missile batteries--which were nearly impossible for the United States to detect in the open desert during the 1991 Gulf War--could easily be concealed in the rugged terrain along the extensive Chinese coastline.

What might a campaign against Taiwan that uses these clandestinely developed military capabilities look like? The Chinese could seek to lull the Taiwanese and the Americans into a sense of political security to lessen the military preparations to defend the island. The Chinese might engage in a steady stream of diplomatic activity to portray an image of satisfaction with the status quo and a heavy political commitment to nurturing the political dialogue with Taiwan. As Handel observed from his study of strategic surprise, "The attacker takes care to maintain a facade of routine diplomacy, lulling diplomats of the intended victim into suppressing the military warning signals through optimistic political interpretations."[30] Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, for example, undertook such activities to lull the Israelis into a sense of security prior to the outset of the 1973 Middle East war. Similarly, the Chinese could surround cross-Strait visits and talks with great fanfare and publicly claim that these endeavors herald a new foundation for cross-Strait relations. In such an environment, few statesmen on Taiwan or in the United States would be calling for increased military vigilance.

In such a political atmosphere, the "routine" exercising of Chinese naval assets and increased air, air defense, and ground force activity might attract no exceptional attention. The Chinese have made Taiwan and the United States accustomed to seeing large-scale annual exercises over a period of several years. Increased Chinese military activity could be perceived by the outside world as normal. Politicians, moreover, could caution against any increased alert posture of Taiwanese and US forces, worrying that such measures would undermine the warming political and diplomatic activity the Chinese had demonstrated. In this hypothetical scenario, however, these military exercises would represent the movement of the Chinese military to a wartime footing and the foundation for a massive military assault on Taiwan.

The Chinese might judge that the initial stages of their military campaign should concentrate on Taiwan's center of gravity in its command, control, communications, computers, and intelligence system. The operational concept would be to destroy the Taiwanese military's central nervous system and cause the air, naval, and ground force limbs to go limp. The Chinese could fire massive "bolt out of the blue" surface-to-surface missile barrages to saturate areas in which critical Taiwanese civilian and military infrastructure is located. Barrages of hundreds of missiles would be required to compensate for missile inaccuracies. Targeted facilities could include service and command headquarters, civilian and military residences and offices, and government facilities. The Chinese might aim at toppling buildings to trap and kill as many civilian and military leaders as possible in one fell swoop.[31] Such missile barrages would represent a military effort to "decapitate" Taiwan's leadership and significantly erode Taiwan's ability to orchestrate defenses against the unfolding Chinese campaign.

The Chinese might be more willing than their Western counterparts to integrate the use of weapons of mass destruction into their surprise attack to magnify the psychological blow against their victim. China's leaders might reason that an ambitious military campaign against Taiwan in and of itself would make Beijing an international outcast, and therefore the use of weapons of mass destruction would only marginally contribute to its ouster from the international community. The Chinese might argue that the use of weapons of mass destruction in combat would set no international precedent because they were used against a renegade province in an "internal affair," not in an international conflict. In addition, the Chinese are less adverse than many in the West to using brutal violence against their own citizens for political objectives--particularly if they challenge the authority of the state--as evident in the 1989 Chinese crackdown on student protesters in Tiananmen Square.

China could fire a handful of ballistic missiles armed with tactical nuclear warheads to increase the odds of killing Taiwanese civilian and military leaders. Some research suggests that the Chinese see military utility in the battlefield use of nuclear weapons. For example, Alastair Johnston observes that "in contrast to US proponents of the assured-destruction concept of deterrence, most of the Chinese strategists who write on nuclear questions explicitly reject the notion that nuclear weapons have overturned Clausewitz's axiom that warfare is the continuation of politics."[32] Johnston suggests that "the predominant view appears to be that the nuclear revolution does not by itself eliminate the possibility that states (including China) can use nuclear weapons in wartime for achievable political ends."[33] One can speculate that the Chinese might integrate the use of tactical nuclear weapons delivered by ballistic missiles into the battle plan for taking Taiwan rather than adopt the Western conception of nuclear weapons as weapons of deterrence and last resort.

Ballistic missile warheads also might be loaded with a variety of persistent and non-persistent chemical agents to incapacitate Taiwan's air and air defense forces on the ground in order to gain air superiority. The Chinese could lob persistent chemical warheads on Taiwan's surface-to-air missile sites to impede Taiwanese air defense crews from operating their systems. Less-persistent agents could be fired on Taiwan's main air bases to impede Taiwan's efforts to get pilots and their aircraft airborne. These efforts would give the technologically inferior Chinese air force a window of opportunity to make sorties with conventional munitions against air and air defense force installations as well as against naval and ground forces.

The Chinese fighter aircraft could also exploit this opportunity to escort Chinese transport aircraft ferrying airborne troops across the Taiwan Strait. Chinese airborne drops could concentrate on Taiwan's main and secondary air force operating bases. Airborne drops could be timed to coincide with the evaporation of the non-persistent chemical agents targeted against the airbases. These troops would secure the perimeters around the intact runways to enable larger, troop-carrying aircraft--perhaps even Chinese commercial aircraft seconded to the military--to land and rapidly reinforce the lightly armed airborne soldiers.[34]

China possesses airborne forces that could serve as the seedbed for nurturing more substantial airborne and airmobile forces than currently suspected by the outside world. According to the US Department of Defense, China's 15th Airborne Army consists of three airborne divisions, each with about 10,000 troops.[35] And since the 1991 Gulf War, China has been devoting considerably more resources to the development of special operations forces.[36] As China downsizes its huge conscript military, it is focusing greater attention on more readily dispatched combat troops. China has about 14 divisions designated as "rapid reaction" units. These are combined-arms units capable of deploying without significant train-up or reserve augmentation.[37] Chinese airborne troops dispatched in an initial wave could secure Taiwanese airbases for the ferrying--in both Chinese military transport and commercial aircraft--of such "rapid reaction" airmobile troops.

While Taiwan's military would be struggling to recover from ballistic missile strikes, tactical nuclear weapon detonations, chemical strikes, and airborne assaults, the Chinese would be mounting amphibious assaults against Taiwan's beaches....

Any military coup de main by the Chicoms in regard to the ROC on Taiwan would be, if they run true to form, masked as final intervention in a "political crisis", a "crisis" painstakingly constructed to give them the appearance of "legitimate response", thus making it as easy as possible for putative opponents not to fight.

In turn, for this to work they need a semi-legitimate Fifth Column on Taiwan, who would for call for mainland intervention in the manufacutred "crisis."

Regards to all. S&W R.I.P.

What crap! All I read is CHINA COULD, not that CHINA CAN! Its 100 miles across open seas to Tiawan. And don't think for a second that Taiwan is not ready to completely obilterate a Chinese invasion force, not to mention they would also have to fight the US! China is like the Arabs, all talk and flex! Granted in the long run China COULD win, but pay heavily militarily and economically! They know that without stealing our military secrets, they are worthless!

First you say: "What crap! All I read is CHINA COULD, not that CHINA CAN!". Then you go on to say "Granted in the long run China COULD win,"

So I take it you really mean this essay may not be "crap" after all. Is that correct?

"Granted in the long run China COULD win, but pay heavily militarily and economically!"

Merely by the way, except under a political charade as outlined in #3, with potential opponents somehow politically and diplomatically subverted into not fighting, I personally don't think the ChiComs' have much chance of "winning", even "in the long run."

But again, that is not the question.

Another aspect of the current situation was mentioned, quite trenchantly in my opinion, by Poohbah quite some time ago—that is, from one point of view what the ChiComs may actually be doing is working on the first civil war in recorded history using nukes.

Best regards. S&W R.I.P.

To tell the truth, I half expected them to do it during Clinton's last years in office, maybe during that period when he pulled every aircraft carrier out of the Pacific for the attack on Yugoslavia, and was down to a few last cruise missiles.

Now that Bush is in office, it's a good deal less likely. The only thing that could really deter them is wondering what we might do in response. Keep in mind that they now have a dozen or more ICBMs targeted on American cities, which forces us to be very careful what we do. Also they could probably destroy a carrier fleet in the area with nukes, although of course that would risk a devastating counter-blow.

No one wants a nuclear exchange, so it's something of a stand-off. In that situation, as we saw with the USSR, a great deal depends on the known determination and resolve of the United States. I think our resolve is a lot better KNOWN now than it was last year. The Chinese have always suspected that we are paper tigers, but I trust they are less sure about that than they were in the days when they were paying the DNC for clinton's election campaigns.

Taiwan gets screwed, blued and tattoed every time a typhoon rolls through the area!

They might cause heavy casualties to a Chinese invasion, but 1.25 billion people is a heavy wave!

The only thing that keeps China from crossing that 100 miles is the USA's "Big Stick", the US Navy and Nuclear retaliation!!

Why does the U.S. care whether Taiwan is part of China or not? Isn't it about time for us to stop playing these kinds of games defending other countries? Yeah, Chinese are commies, but they ain't gonna come to our doorstep. The Cold War is over.

It goes back to WWII and maybe futher, we had Marines and Navy there from around 1900!

But the Taiwan thing is after "The Flying Tigers" or "AVG" (The American Volunteer Group) had finished helping Ch'aing Kai Sheck [sic] fight the Jap's, he/they were confronted by Mao and the commies. They managed to retreat to Taiwan and we swore that we would always be there!!

Are you saying that America should turn Her back on a friend?

I hope not, we are what we say we are, unless we're lying!!

I say stand tall for Taiwan!!

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What if . . . "China Attacks Taiwan!"

RICHARD L. RUSSELL

© 2001 Richard L. Russell