Against FOUR targets. Power distribution and communications networks, by their nature, are extremely robust targets requiring direct action against SEVERAL HUNDRED nodes simultaneously.
It would seem, from our experience, that simply telling those involved the date and time, and giving them the means of achieving their objective, is a pretty effective plan.
Uh-oh, the plan just changed--there's been a delay imposed by changed circumstances. Better hope your teams got the change to their orders. What's that? They didn't? Hey, guess what? About all you accomplished was to alert the Taiwanese.
Ya' see, we tend to over-think this stuff.
No, the problem is that you underthought this stuff by a wide margin.
In this day and age maybe we don't have to defeat the enemy, just mess with them enough to lower their morale, or create an insurgency.
Which explains why we're now all radical Wahabbist Muslims under the benevolent leadership of Osama bin Laden, the New Salah-al-Din.
You might not be able to blow up all of their bridges, but plan on doing so. If half of your operatives get caught, you still have seriously crippled your opponent.
Blowing up a bridge is a nontrivial enterprise. Blowing up dozens of bridges is best done by a force of B-2 and F-117 aircraft. If you're using people on the ground, it takes a LOT of people to take down ONE important bridge.
You try to take down all major communications towers, but even if you are only partly successful, they are still hindered. Heck, they might not even realize it is an attack...
When your attack plan hinges on your opponent being as moronic as you want and need them to be, that's a sign that you need to go back to the drawing board.
There is no physical difference between the Mainland Chinese and the Taiwanese Chinese.
There are significant cultural differences that would be strikingly obvious.
I still say that I would, at the least, use unconventional methods to soften up, or even out right defeat, Taiwan before trying the strictly military option.
That's nice. If it works, then it works. However, it has a very high chance of spectacular failure. There is no mitigating that risk. Governments are, by their nature, extremely risk-averse.
That's right. Taiwan is so different culturally that the only way to compare the peoples of both is to compare apples to oranges. PRC Chinese refer to Taiwanese as "bannanas" because they are yellow on the outside and white on the inside, in other words they compare Taiwanese to Americans. It is not all like that. Most Taiwanese (86% of the population) descend from the Hoklo and Fujian (ethnic minorities from China).
Other Taiwanese descend from Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese while the aboriginals there are Indonesian and other pacific islanders. 14% is made of the Han Chinese, which are primarily those who came over with Chiang Kai-shek and those that immigrated from China to Taiwan (not to mention the thousands of refugees they get from China each year seeking freedom).