The U.S. Approach To A Hypothetical Invasion Of Taiwan

Size comparison

The United States military is acutely aware of the possibility that the People's Republic of China on the mainland (the PRC), might try to invade and conquer Taiwan, something that the PRC has repeated threatened to do, although a military conflict with between the Philippines and the PRC in which the U.S. might become embroiled seems more likely in the short term and has resulted in more incidents of low intensity warfare in the last two or three years. I've also explained, elsewhere, why the PRC's reliance on international trade in a wide variety of goods and services to support its economy makes an invasion of Taiwan a much more costly option for it, than a globally unpopular war would be for Russia, whose international exports are dominated by oil and gas, or North Korea, which is very isolated economically from the rest of the world. Further background is available below.

Indeed, the threat of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan is the single largest rhetorical justification used by the U.S. Navy, and to a lesser but still great extent by the U.S. Marine Corps and U.S. Air Force, for U.S. military expenditures.

The U.S. Strategy

The U.S. doesn't have any major military bases in Taiwan, unlike its military bases in Japan, South Korea, Hawaii, Alaska, three U.S. territories in the Pacific, and a smaller U.S. military base in the Philippines (which was once a much larger presence), presumably, in order to formally honor its "One China" policy.

But the U.S. has sold a lot of sophisticated U.S. military equipment to Taiwan, and together with its allies, can marshal considerable naval and air forces in the region.

Basically, the plan is for the U.S., Taiwan, and its allies to direct large numbers of anti-ship missiles and when the opponents are very close, Taiwanese artillery and allied naval gun shells at invading Chinese ships and boats, deployed from land, from surface ships at sea, from every manner of aircraft from long range stealth and conventional bombers, to carrier and land based fighter aircraft (some making the trip with the help of aerial refueling), to maritime patrol aircraft, to C-130 and C-17 military transport planes carrying missile launching cargo, to long range drones, to nuclear attack submarines, with the nuclear attack submarines also launching torpedoes. It would use U.S. satellites, high altitude spy planes, surveillance drones, and U.S. signals intelligence resources to identify targets (as well as any human intelligence resources within China available to the U.S. or its allies). Containerized anti-ship missile batteries will soon make it possible for cargo ships, amphibious transport ships, and merchant ships to also carry and deliver anti-ship missiles with ranges in the hundreds of miles.

Long range bombers, maritime patrol aircraft, C-17s, and fighter aircraft that use aerial refueling tankers, can travel thousands of miles and make the trip in about 12-13 hours from Hawaii. The trip from based in Japan or South Korea or Guam or American Samoa or the Northern Marina Islands would be shorter. Surface ships and submarines not already in the area can take several weeks to arrive, rendering them almost irrelevant in a fast developing naval battle, without a great deal of advance warning from satellites and other intelligence that she China mobilizing.

The aircraft and ships and ground batteries firing anti-ship missiles don't have to get particularly close. The aircraft can stay at high altitudes. Even the shortest range fighter and helicopter carried anti-ship missiles have a range of 18-20 miles. Most have ranges from 100 to 600 miles, and the aircraft can get just within range and turn around if the risk of air defenses is great. Modern torpedoes have a range of about 24 miles, although a longer range provides a target a greater opportunity to evade it.

The U.S. and its allies could deposit of small force of mostly light ground troops in the lead up to an invasion and during an invasion, but for the most part, Taiwan would have to rely on its own troops and reserves, and pre-placed equipment for its ground forces, to repel any Chinese troops that managed to cross the Taiwan strait by sea or by air.

The mission of Taiwan and its allies is easier. It need only destroy or mitigate the harm from incoming ships, aircraft, drones, missiles, and naval gun shells (the Taiwan strait is too wide for cannon artillery or all but the longest range artillery missiles on the mainland to cross) with a mix of anti-ship and anti-aircraft weapons. They don't need to board ships of the People's Liberation Army Navy (PLAN), and don't have to deliver troops or their equipment in an amphibious invasion. PLAN submarines are effective ways to deny access to the ships of Taiwan and its allies and merchant ships bound to Taiwan, but most are fairly short range coastal submarines that have almost no effectiveness against the aircraft of Taiwan and its allies, and pose only a manageable threat to surface warships of Taiwan and its allies that are not in the Taiwan strait or too close to the island of Formosa.

A carrier with F-35C fighter aircraft, for example, need only be close enough for its fighters to fly to the edge of their 700 (non-nautical) mile combat radius which in turn must be within 150 to 700 (non-nautical) miles of the target of their anti-ship missiles. So, the carrier can strike a ship in the Taiwan strait that is 850-1400 miles away from its, for example, from the vicinity of the Northern Marina Islands, or Tokyo, or South Korea, or the southern most islands of the Philippines. 

A carrier group at that distance would also have a decent chance of intercepting long range missiles bound towards it from mainland China, and the range of these anti-ship missiles is greater than all but the most potent anti-aircraft missiles in China's arsenal and would have to be timed to strike the aircraft delivering the missiles only just as the aircraft is about to launch its air to ground missiles or is just returning from doing so. And, of course, if an F-35 is hit by a Chinese anti-air missile, only one pilots life, at most, is lost, and there is a decent chance that the pilot could eject and be recovered by a search and rescue team. The number of Chinese ground troops killed every time a Chinese warship or worse yet, a Chinese troop carrying ship, is sunk, would be profoundly greater.

Certainly, Chinese troops that do manage to reach the Taiwanese shore by sea, or by helicopter or transport plane or as paratroops, as elite soldiers in an massive all volunteer military of professional Chinese soldiers are, on average, going to be better trained and more skilled soldiers, than Taiwanese ground troops at the vanguard of a massive but not terribly ready or elite reserve force. But the Taiwanese troops know their territory, have the support of the locals, have been training for this mission and this mission only, are fighting to protect their homes, and will locally outnumber the modest number of Chinese troops that manage to cross the strait at least at first, if the efforts to Taiwan and its allies to destroy incoming troop carrying ships and transport aircraft is reasonably successful.

Also, in an era of Chinese demographics where one child families are the norm, even in this nation of 1.4 billion people, the lives of young men serving as soldiers in the PRC's military are no longer cheap and expendable. And, China has not fought any actual hot conflict in which its any significant number of its soldiers and sailors have lost their lives in the living memory of the vast share of the Chinese people. They haven't had much of a chance to come to see these losses as a necessary price to meet its geopolitical objectives, which it has mostly achieved with trade, aid, and diplomacy.

For all of China's bluster, one can seriously doubt whether China really has the stomach to lose the lives of hundreds of thousands of young men, most of its navy, a substantial share of its air force, and many of its coastal military resources, when it can already extract much of what it wants Taiwan for economically as opposed to culturally or politically, through trade. 

China has nuclear weapons, but those too are less potent of a threat in a Taiwan invasion. Using on nuclear weapon on the island of Formosa pretty much defeats the purpose of conquering it and would make it an international pariah. But missile defenses are effective enough that ICBMs aimed to the U.S. or its allies might be completely or almost completely thwarted, with any successes threatening massive nuclear retaliation against it.

The Historical And Geopolitical Context And Background

The island of Formosa is about 100 miles from mainland China across the Taiwan Strait. 

A typical naval warship can make the trip in about four hours, a very fast one might make it in two or three hours. A helicopter or slower drone could make it in forty-five minutes or less. A subsonic missile or fighter jet or military transport plane can make the trip in ten to fifteen minutes. A supersonic jet fighter can make the trip in five minutes. A hypersonic missile can make the trip in less than two minutes.

The PRC claims the island of Formosa upon which Taiwan is situated is a rebel province which is part of its territory, along with the strait between Formosa and the mainland, despite the fact that the regime has never had any control or authority on the island, and the fact that no mainland Chinese regime has had any control or authority on the island since 1895. The modern Chinese state dates only to the revolution in China in 1911.

Meanwhile, Taiwan, even more laughably, claims to be the legitimate government in exile of mainland China, a territory it lost any remnant of authority or control over from its inception when its regime retreated there after losing the civil war in China that persisted from the end of World War II in 1945 which left a power vacuum there, until the victory of the Maoists and defeat of the Nationalists in 1949, 75 years ago. The Kuomintang party abandoned its claim to be the sole government of mainland China in 1991 in the same year that it ended "emergency rule".

Imperial China ruled the island of Formosa from 1662 when it ousted the Dutch and large numbers of people from mainland China migrated there, until 1895 when the island was conquered by the Japanese Empire. The Japanese ruled it for half a century until the end of World War II in 1945. 

After World War II, there was a civil war in China between the Maoist Communists and the Chinese Nationalist Party led by Chiang Kai-shek. The non-communist Chinese Nationalist Party eventually lost that civil war and relocated to the island of Formosa in a mass migration of its remaining loyalist in 1949 (the same year that the Maoist PRC regimes was declared by Chairman Mao), filling the post-World War II power vacuum caused by the collapse of Imperial Japan's rule there. The following year, in 1950, now 74 years ago, the PRC conquered Tibet.

Chiang Kai-shek ruled Taiwan as a de facto dictator for twenty-six years until 1975, with U.S. backing against expansion of the Communist PRC as part of the Cold War, running the economy on a capitalist model.

The PRC claimed the island as its territory, even though no mainland Chinese government had ruled there since early 1895, and in 1971, after three-quarters of a century in mainland China had no control or authority there, and despite the fact that the PRC regime had never had control or authority there, in 1971, the U.N. recognized the PRC's claim to the island and expelled Taiwan from the U.N. The PRC terminated its diplomatic relationship with Taiwan in 1978. Today, following the U.N.'s lead, only 13 countries, including the U.S., have formal diplomatic ties with Taiwan. The PRC and Taiwan had their first formal talks with each other again in 2014, thirty-six years after breaking off diplomatic relations but have not reestablished diplomatic ties. Per the BBC link below:

Today, only 12 countries (plus the Vatican) officially recognise Taiwan. The US decision to switch diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing in 1979 was the turning point. And a richer, more powerful China exerts pressure so more countries do not recognise Taiwan or lend it support. But America remains the island's strongest ally, sells arms to it and has vowed to help in case of a Chinese attack.

The U.S., however, continued to be a strong ally to Taiwan and its military guaranteed its independence from the PRC, and under its influence, Taiwan eventually reformed itself, carrying out land reform to address the feudal era inequalities that led to the Maoist revolution on the mainland, instituting universal public education, modernizing its agricultural and industrial economies, and finally, step by step becoming a democracy. Martial law was lifted in 1987 after 38 years. Four years later in 1991, four decades of "emergency rule" was ended. And, five years after that in 1996, Taiwan had its first direct Presidential election, which the Kuomintang party, the successor to the original Chinese Nationalist Party that had controlled Taiwan for forty-seven years since 1949, won. 

The uncontested rule of Chiang Kai-shek's dominant Kuomintang party finally ended in the year 2000, when the leader of the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party won the Presidential election, only for the Kuomintang party to regain the Presidency from 2006 to 2016, when the Democratic Progressive Party regained the Presidency, in part, over concerns that the Kuomintang party was to friendly with China and might jeopardize Taiwan's independence. The Democratic Progressive Party still holds the Presidency today. China has gradually stepped up its saber rattling towards Taiwan since the Kuomintang Party lost the Presidency in 2016.

Taiwan is now a first world country with a high standard of living in an advanced stage of demographic transition of 23.6 million people (compared to about 1,400 million people in the PRC which is about 59 times a large). Taiwan's economy is best known for its advance computer chip manufacturing which is the global state of the art. Indeed, according to the BBC, "By one measure, a single Taiwanese company - the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company or TSMC - has over half of the world's market."

Despite a lack of formal diplomatic relations, 21% of Taiwan's imports are from the PRC and 26% of its exports are to the PRC.

About 70% of the Taiwanese people are Han Chinese, another 25% or so are from another Southern mainland Chinese ethnicity, about 2-3% of the Taiwanese people are indigenous Formosans who speak sixteen different languages once of which is the ancestral language of the Austronesian family of languages spoken from Easter Island and Oceania, to Southeast Asia, to Madagascar, with a small percentage of people of other ancestries. Mandarin Chinese, and two other Chinese topolects (one of which has several dialects) are the predominant languages of Taiwan. But even Chinese languages like Mandarin which are present in both Taiwan and the mainland have developed distinct Taiwanese accents that are perhaps as distinct from their mainland counterparts as American and Canadian English dialects, in their spoken versions, in the non-logographic written versions of them, and in subtleties of meaning and pronunciation of their shared Chinese characters. 

Over the last thirty years or so, however, the people of Taiwan have increasingly come to identify themselves as Taiwanese, or as both Taiwanese and Chinese. About two-thirds identify as Taiwanese only. Almost a third identify as both, and only one or two percent now identify only as Chinese.

Taiwan's religious makeup reflects the pre-Maoist religious mix of China, with 42% adhering to Chinese folk religion (a close cousin of Japanese Shinto practice), 27% identifying primarily as Buddhist, 13% identifying as Daoist, 7% identifying with East Asian "new religions", 6% as Christian, and the remainder as non-religious agnostics, although these religious movements are not nearly so mutually exclusive as Western religious denominations and sects.

Taiwan controls a territory of about 13,900 square miles, while the PRC controls about 3.7 million square miles, which is about 2660 times as large.

Critically, the PRC of today is not the PRC of 1949. While the PRC doesn't adhere fully to the extreme version of capitalism found in the United States and has high levels of state involvement in the economy, its record economic growth for many decades has been made possible only through market based economic reforms, soft recognition of property and contract rights, and sufficient openness towards ideas from the world outside of China to allow it to gain the scientific and technological knowledge necessary for it to rapidly catch up to the developed world. 

The assimilation of Hong Kong into China has meant even more growing pains for both sides. 

China is still astoundingly authoritarian, but it is also not the raw, unpredictable cauldron of violence that it experienced in the 1970s during the Cultural Revolution. 

Despite being nominally communist, China has its fair share of billionaires and there is a great deal of overlap between its political elites and its economic elites. In other words, China's rules are also among the very wealthiest people in the entire country, which makes a return to an extremely leveling brand of communism that eats the rich unlike to recur there, even if it is quite a dangerous thing to be a billionaire or centi-millionaire in China that can lead to your untimely demise in a usually not officially acknowledged manner if the cross the wrong people or offend the sensibilities of leaders in the Chinese Communist Party.

So far, China has liberalized economically in a gradual manner, rather than all at once as the Soviet Union did in what turned out to be a chaotic and sudden mess that transformed the country from Soviet style communism or crony capitalism run by oligarchs in less than a quarter of a century, with intense societal and governmental pain along the way. This lesson schools Chinese Communist Party leaders to be cautious in their reforms, and had discouraged a relaxation of its authoritarian political model. 

But the expectations of continuous fast economic growth that they have developed for themselves puts pressure on them to adopt policies that work to continue that as much as possible and at some point, China's authoritarian rule will have to be relaxed to sustain that, particularly as China starts to have to rely on new innovations of its own, rather than copying proven global economic and technological models to achieve new economic growth. Also, non-economic freedom is, to some extent, one of the luxuries that people in economically prosperous societies crave and desire. The more affluent the Chinese people become, the more they are going to be willing to face significant personal risk and sacrifice and economic resources to escape authoritarian rule. And, there are enough wealthy Chinese people who have traveled abroad to less authoritarian counties, or who have access to less censored international media, that they can know that it is possible to leave in a freer and more democratic world (and the people of Hong Kong have demonstrated that this can work even for ethnically and culturally Chinese people), that it is an enjoyable and desirable intangible luxury to have, and that there are ways of achieving and sustaining it that they can learn and copy as they did less political foreign technologies. It isn't clear how smooth or rocky the path to that end will be, and in the near term, transitioning from China level authoritarianism to Singapore level authoritarianism, or something like it, may be an intermediate step. But it is hard to see a trajectory in which China becomes more insular and authoritarian, rather than less so, in over the next several decades.

This is all to say, then, that it an invasion of Taiwan can be discouraged for a sufficiently long period of time, that eventually mainland China may eventually catch up with Taiwan (which has only enjoyed more or less full democracy and social freedoms for thirty years or so itself), at which point a merger of the PRC and Taiwan might not be so problematic anymore.

Military Capabilities

Taiwan is quite militarized, with 169 thousand active duty military personnel, 1,657 thousand reserve troops, and a defense budget of $16.2 billion. But this is dwarfed by the PRC's 2,035 thousand active duty military personnel, 650 thousand reserve troops, and $242.4 billion USD defense budget. Taiwan has 26 surface warships of frigate class or larger and 4 military submarines and many smaller naval and coast guard vessels. China has 92 surface warships of frigate class or larger and 59 military submarines and many smaller naval and coast guard vessels and is expanding its fleet rapidly. Taiwan's air force has 405 jet fighters. China has more than 1,628 jet fighters. Taiwan has 650 tanks. China has 4,800 tanks.

Most of the information above is drawn from a BBC background piece and the 2024 World Almanac (hard copy).

Unlike the United States and Russia, which have large "blue sea Navies", China's ships rarely venture more than 400 miles from its Pacific Coast (although China has deployed as many as a dozen naval ships to suppress pirates in the Indian Ocean right up to the Persian Gulf and Red Sea, and has an ample merchant and fishing fleet that is sometimes pressed into paramilitary service), and Taiwan's navy stays even closer to home.

Where To Worry About China?

China's military is probably more of a threat to Filipino fishermen and merchant ships in the East China Sea than to Taiwan, which it would face far more severe consequences for invading than it would in an insidious, low intensity campaign to gain de facto control of waters that belong to other countries or are international waters.

China has the military might to launch a land invasion of North Korea, for which the world would thank it (even, eventually, the liberated North Koreans). Russia or Mongolia or Kazakhstan would be very angry but not very weakened by losing a lot of land with few people on it, and would receive little international support to defend themselves. An attempted land invasion of India would yield mostly uninhabited frigid mountains that have never been exploited for their mineral resources, at a high cost.

China has no need to invade Laos or Vietnam, which are already in its sphere of influence. It has no reason to invade the other "stans" on or near its border or Burma, which would be more trouble than they would be worth.

Invasions of South Korea or Japan would be too costly for it to attempt, not just militarily, but in the collapse of the international trade based economy upon which it relies for its prosperity.

China Is Unlikely To Start A War

With Russia knocked down a peg by its disastrous performance in the Ukraine War, Afghanistan fallen to the Taliban, none of the usual candidates in the Middle East coming forward publicly to try to pounce on Israel in the face of its intense response to an Iranian supported Hamas massacre and Hezbollah rocket attacks from Lebanon, and North Korea lobbing nuclear ready missiles in tests but taking no conventional warfare steps and its leader shaking hands with South Korea's leader, all attention has turned to China.

As a country with 1.4 billion people, a gross national product that is 76% of the size of the U.S. GNP, and decades of intense economic growth, China's has had the resources to fund a large and advanced military, without even seriously militarizing its society with large numbers of soldiers relative to its population or seriously straining the ability of its government to pay for it. 

China's merely regional aspirations also allow it to concentrate its military resources. China hasn't tried to mimic the United States and Russia by deploying a large blue sea navy far from its coast, or by trying to serve as a "global policeman". China has some blue sea navy capabilities with modern aircraft carriers, surface combatants, and longer range than coastal submarine, it has long range missiles (some of which carry nuclear missiles), and it even has some reasonably long range military aircraft. But China has shown little interest in flexing its military muscles further from home than the Philippines, Southeast Asia, the Western Pacific Ocean, and the East China Sea. 

China certainly has no plans to invade any country in the Americas, or to repeat the mistake that Japan made in World War II when Japan attacked Hawaii in 1941.

There is no indication that China has any intention of starting hostilities to the North, with Russia or Mongolia or on its borders with the former Soviet Republics in Central Asia. 

Despite some border skirmishes over worthless, almost uninhabited mountain territory on its border with India, this conflict seems to be more about pride and honor than anything substantive. China shows no indication that it wants to seize meaningfully inhabited parts of Pakistan, India, Nepal, Bhutan, or Myanmar. China seems to have bitten off as much as it can chew when it conquered Tibet and now thinks better of any other campaigns to repeat that experience.

China could easily have conquered the communist regimes in North Korea, Cambodia, Laos, or Vietnam outright, but appears to be content to merely leave them as tributary states in its sphere of influence that emulate it and kowtow to it. 

In part, China appears to have concluded from the troublesome resistance its has received from ethnic minorities in semiautonomous regions like Inner Mongolia, and from ethnic minorities like the Uyghurs, the Tibetans, and the Manchurians, that it prefers to be a nation-state dominated by a Han Chinese core to being a sprawling multi-ethnic, multi-lingual, multi-cultural empire.

China doesn't really want to have to absorb Japan or North Korea or South Korea or Vietnam or Laos or Cambodia or the Philippines or Indonesia or Thailand, let alone Australia or New Zealand or Papua New Guinea. 

China isn't even grumbling about trying to unify Chinese diaspora populations in Western influenced places with large Chinese minorities, like Singapore or Malaysia. It swallowed up Macao easily enough, when its 99 year lease expired, but has found that even trying to absorb Hong Kong without destroying what makes it valuable has been highly challenging, even when the British handed it over without a fight when its 99 year lease expired.

China has a large and technologically advanced Army ground forces with no place to go. It has state of the art tanks and anti-tank forces, but no plausible conflicts, other than an invasion of Taiwan or a campaign to put down North Korea's regime if it gets out of hand, to use it. 

It is conceivable that China might need to fight a counterinsurgency conflict in its own territory, or to aid one of its tributary states in doing so. But there is no way that any plausible insurgent force in these places could acquire "near peer" conventional military force weapons to its own forces in any meaningful amount in the foreseeable future.

The United States also has large, technologically advanced ground forces in its Army and Marines, but unlike China, it has used those ground troops as expeditionary military forces to fight foreign wars on a regular basis since at least World War I. China hasn't been involved directly in a foreign war on an expeditionary basis since World War II, even though it supported proxy Communist regimes in Korea and Southeast Asia.

Since the 1980s, China's military ambitions have focused largely on regaining control of Taiwan (which itself arrogantly claims sovereignty over mainland China, an ambition that has been futile for seven decades) and expanding its dominance in the portions of the seas near it, some closer to the Philippines and Japan than to its own coast, that the rest of the world considers to be international waters.

Taiwan is attractive because it is very close to mainland China, and it is predominantly ethnic Chinese, which makes it feel to the People's Republic of China like a territory that it could assimilate in a manner similar to its current effort to reintegrate Hong Kong into the People's Republic of China. 

The prospect of a military conquest of Taiwan is also attractive to China's military leadership, much as it is the military leadership of the United States, because it justifies immense expenditures for naval forces, air forces, and ground forces who can participate in an amphibious assault on the island of Formosa.

If China's barriers to this conquest were primarily military, it would have happened long ago. The People's Republic of China has something like 70 times more people than Taiwan does, vastly more economic resources, and can focus on this single front without fearing distractions from some other conflict at the same time. Taiwan's economy is more technologically advanced and developed than China's but that gap has fallen steadily, and when it comes to military technology, they are close to parity with China potentially having the edge at this point. Even if China had to incur three or even ten times the casualties as Taiwan did in an offensive war against it, ultimately, China has a greater capacity to bear those losses than Taiwan does. 

This said, however, one of the reasons that the last significant amphibious assault in the history of the world was seventy years ago in the Korean War is that military technologies have shifted in a way this makes this strategy which has always been extremely challenging and costly, even more difficult to carry out effectively. It is just too easy with modern anti-ship missiles, submarines, sea mines, and more to sink amphibious assault surface combatants with hundreds or even thousands of ground troops on them before they even reach the shore. And as military technologies mature and advance, the balance continues to shift, again and again, against warships and toward military forces that want to stop warships. Ukraine has managed to seriously bloody Russia's Black Sea fleet, despite not having any real navy to speak of at all.

Taiwan does have the United States, with the worlds largest and most advanced military force and nuclear weapons as it patron. But a reasonable Chinese military strategist could wager, and would probably be correct, that the United States, while it would provide as much support in conventional warfare to protect Taiwan as it could, would not be willing to start a global nuclear war with China to protect Taiwan's sovereignty, something that Taiwan itself blows hot and cold on in its own domestic politics. Likewise, while China would very much like to have Taiwan as a jewel in its crown, it seems unlikely that China would risk starting a nuclear war with the United States to get it. Nuclear missiles are blunt instruments that serve few legitimate military purposes in the hands of rational military leaders in positions of high command. And, unlike the leaders of North Korea, China's leaders have consistently shown themselves to be calculating and rational, rather than insane and reckless, for the last half century or so since the Cultural Revolution ended.

Instead, the main barrier to a Chinese invasion of Taiwan is that fact that both countries "live in glass houses." Modern China's economy and prosperity is rooted in its export oriented manufacturing base, which is increasingly moving up the chain of technological sophistication. Taiwan, likewise, has an export based commercial economy that, most famously, it the global center of advanced computer processor manufacturing. China and Taiwan even have significant and strong trade ties with each other.

Unlike Russia, which has survived global economic sanctions and boycotts with only minor cuts and bruises so far, because the only exports that are very important to the health of Russia's domestic economy are natural gas and oil, both China and Taiwan have economies which are heavily reliant on international trade, much of it with rich Western countries. 

In an all out war, the sophisticated high tech factories that make that export based economy possible would be completely wiped out for decades in Taiwan, although the heavy capital investments of mainland China would be harder to really devastate. But it also isn't just physical capital investments that matter. You can't manufacture world class computer processors with unwilling serfs. The prime exports of both economies require the voluntary, and indeed, enthusiastic participation of legions of sophisticated engineers, factory managers, technicians, financial and managerial professionals, and more generally a health, decentralized, reasonably economically free commercial sector and social class. All it would take for China to kill the goose that lays Taiwan's golden eggs would be quiet work to rule, "quiet quitting" type behavior from its managerial, professional, administrative, and technical classes. No flashing explosives or armed resistance would be necessary.

Equally important, if any significant part of the developed world decided to boycott Chinese exports because of a Chinese invasion and conquest of Taiwan, as part of a general mobilization against it akin to the general mobilization against Russia that took place in the immediate wake of its invasion of Ukraine, the impact this would have on China would be far more severe than the impact these sanctions had on Russia.

China wouldn't lose all of its trading partners. It could still keep selling its ware to the communist regimes of Southeast Asia and to Russia, for example. But its trade to those countries is already close to maxed out, because it is a leading global exporter. There is no place it could sell its wares that could replace its immense exports to developed Western capitalist countries around the world, if it lost access to those markets, which it likely would, at least in the medium term.

The economic blowback that China would experience in reaction to an invasion of Taiwan from the developed Western capitalist countries of the world would be at least as bad as the Great Depression was in the United States, if not worse. Hundreds of millions of ordinary Chinese people would lose their jobs and would be trust into abject poverty. Factories up and down China's densely populated eastern coastal regions would be shuttered. People who managed to hold onto jobs might see their incomes cut in half. The massive progress China has made in the past couple of decades in eradicating extreme poverty globally would be undone.

In an economy already heavily driven by extravagant public works projects, there would be little room to boost an economy facing collapse from a sudden interruption of its export trade with more spending on public works and infrastructure. A loss of access to supplies of imported raw materials would further cripple Chinese manufacturers ability to export goods even communist or formerly communist countries that continued to support China, and to manufacture goods for domestic consumption. Imported comforts would dwindle to the consternation of Chinese business elites that now snap up second homes in Vancouver and foreign educations and travel for their children and have acquired expensive and exotic tastes. 

Also, despite its vast population, now more or less tied with India, in China, lives are no longer cheap. The average Chinese woman has less than one child in a lifetime. Many young men in China are not just only children, but are also the only grandchild of four grandparents. A historical preference for boys as China experienced its demographic transition in the face of its one child policy have left China with a surplus of military service aged men, although it has barely tapped it since it has so many young men relative to the needs of its military. 

China is far removed from places with the demographics of places like the Gaza Strip, where almost 50% of the population is under the age of eighteen, couples tend to marry in their early twenties, and women generally have many children in their lifetimes. Too many mouths to feed and too few jobs to support them isn't a problem that China has at the moment. Every young adult man and woman is precious in the eyes of modern China, so each life lost in a war to take Taiwan would have an amplified social impact. China is not psychologically prepared to lose the millions of lives and hundreds of sunken ships that it would have to expend to take Taiwan.

Given the current situation of China and Taiwan, the only way it would make sense for China to conquer Taiwan would be if it could accomplish this in an almost bloodless fait accompli in a matter of days, which the Taiwanese people collective gave up and accepted as inevitable at the outset, much like the sudden, nearly bloodless Russian conquest of Crimea in 2014 that was basically over before the world had time to react to it, or come to Ukraine's aid.

But while the Taiwanese people do predominantly speak a Chinese topolect, and do have strong cultural ties to mainland China, the similarities between Crimea and Taiwan end there. Modern Taiwan's is the product of a society of Western leaning exiles from the Maoist Communist revolution in mainland China. The Chinese speaking people of Taiwan are the majority and have been in opposition to the communist regime of mainland China from the start, unlike the Russian speaking people of Crimea who were a minority in Ukraine and felt cultural and political kinship with their post-Soviet co-ethnics in Russia proper. 

There is no reason to think that Taiwan would accept their new Chinese overlords quietly or peacefully with resignation and obedience to the new regime. This would be a war of people with nowhere else to go in Taiwan defending their home, who have been preparing for this fight for much longer than the Ukrainians prepared for a Russian invasion, and with all of the ferocity of the Ukrainians defending their territory. And, like Ukraine, the Taiwanese would have ample military and economic support from Western-leaning allies including the United States, Japan, South Korea, and Australia with technologically modern military forces. So, the only scenario that would make the price that China would have to pay to take Taiwan simply isn't a plausible possibility.

Thus, the only ground war that China has shown any interest in fighting would be far too costly to China, even if it wins, to make the fight worth it to China. And, because China's leadership is rational and pragmatic enough to realize this fact, it is extremely unlikely that China will invade Taiwan.

Really the only military actions that it seems plausible for China to undertake in the near future is a continuation of its low grade, gradual efforts to use its naval and air power, and ground troops on artificial islands, to extend its dominance in the international waters of the East China sea and the Western Pacific as far as the international waters near the Philippines. The prizes here are fishing territory, oceanic mineral resources, greater control of the East Asian shipping industry, and national pride at a modest military cost. And, these are prizes which the allies of Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan are unwilling to exert the level of overwhelming trade, diplomatic, and military power necessary to completely thwart China from achieving these aims.

Tanks Haven't Been Effective Against China For Eons

The U.S. Army's M1 Abrams tanks will "not be effective" or able to "dominate" on the battlefields of the 2040s, especially in the context of a potential high-end conflict against China. This is the conclusion of an official advisory body that is also calling for an Abrams replacement effort that could include a next-generation M1 derivative, as well as lighter 'tanks' armed with larger caliber guns and hypersonic anti-tank missiles, and uncrewed ground vehicles.

The Army Science Board, a federally-sanctioned independent group of experts that advises the Secretary of the Army, recently published an assessment about the future of the M1 tank. It also outlines the need for one or more types of "5th Generation Combat Vehicle," or 5GCV, to meet operational demands in the 2040s. The origins of this study trace back to 2019 and the final report is dated August 2023. . . . 

The Army currently has around 2,500 M1 Abrams tanks in service today, with thousands more in storage that could potentially be refurbished and returned to service, if necessary. The original M1 entered service in the 1980s and significantly more capable variants have been introduced since then.

The Army Science Board study is blunt in its core conclusions about the future of the M1, stating early on:

Based on our findings, The M1 Abrams will not dominate the 2040 battlefield. All of the M1’s advantages in mobility, firepower, and protection are at risk. The M1A2 SEP V3&4 upgrades will improve effectiveness but will not restore dominance. Near transparency in all domains will significantly increase the lethality our forces will experience. China and Russia have studied our forces and doctrine and are fielding countermeasures. We will continue to have to fight outnumbered, exacerbated by a low MBT operational readiness rate and an aging fleet.

From here.

Forget 2040! 

Tanks are not effective against the People's Republic of China in a major conventional war now, were not effective against the People's Republic of China in a major conventional war at any time in my lifetime, and will indeed, also not be effective against the People's Republic of China in a major conventional war in 2040.

So far as I know, a D-day style invasion of mainland China is not and has not been at any time in recent history, a part of U.S. strategy for engaging the People's Republic of China in a conventional war. If it was, it shouldn't have been. It simply makes no sense to try to conduct a land invasion of a country that currently has 1.4 billion people with a large and modern military on land that is indisputably Chinese territory. 

This is as absurd as the conservative fairy tale movie "Red Dawn" about a Russian invasion of the U.S. by land from Mexico. It makes absolutely no sense.

But Taiwan you say!

Nope.

If any significant number of Chinese tanks make it to the island of Formosa, and infantry carried anti-tank weapons and anti-tank mines aren't enough to thwart them, then the cause of defending Taiwanese autonomy from the mainland Chinese aggression is pretty much a lost cause that U.S. main battle tanks won't help.

Furthermore, unless U.S. main battle tanks are prepositioned on the island of Formosa, they are useless anyway. The U.S. has no way to deliver any meaningful number of its 70+ ton main battle tanks there in time to be useful from anyplace that it has a meaningful number of them in place.

I've railed repeatedly about the extent to which surface warships are sitting ducks and are extremely vulnerable to all sorts of threats. But that goes tenfold for slow, basically unarmed, unstealthy military transport ships less than two hundred miles from the coast of mainland China bringing heavy U.S. tanks to Taiwan. Never mind that it would take weeks for each delivery of U.S. tanks to arrive from the nearest base that has any significant number of U.S. tanks. Yet, a battle to gain a foothold for PRC ground troops on the island of Formosa is likely to have completely run its course in a week or two.

When and if China pulls the trigger to try to invade Taiwan, for all practical purposes, anything that can only get there via a military or commercial transport ship doesn't exist. This is one of the important reasons that the U.S. Marine Corps has divested itself of tanks.

These are not new realities that are just around the corner in seven years or a decade. This has been the reality for at least the last half-century or so.

If U.S. main battle tanks are of any use to Taiwan, to South Korea, or to Japan, the only sensible option is to preposition them in those countries and probably to simply sell them to these U.S. allies or to simply give them away to these U.S. allies. The U.S. already has far more M1 Abrams main battle tanks than it has any reasonable military use for. Then, at least, the tanks could be fully integrated into the military forces of the countries defending their own territory against a Chinese invasion.

Also, just to be clear, North Korea's missiles are a threat to its neighbors (and even Hawaii, U.S. Pacific territories, and the Pacific coastal states of the U.S.). Likewise, North Korea's very numerous but outdated coastal submarines could pose a threat to maritime commerce and the warships of the U.S. and its allies in the East China Sea and the Sea of Japan. But tanks are useless against both of these threats.

North Korea has no capacity to launch an amphibious invasion of Japan or Taiwan (even with Chinese assistance). North Korea's ground forces are a mere biting fly to China. And, even a North Korean invasion of South Korea over the demilitarized zone with North Korea's profoundly outdated tanks and inferior artillery isn't all that much of a threat. 

In short, there is really no plausible scenario in which U.S. main battle tanks under U.S. command would be particularly important in defending any of the U.S.'s East Asian allies from invasions from either the People's Republic of China or North Korea.

South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan all have their own home grown tanks, which are less massive than the M1 Abrams, which were purpose built for their task. Our East Asian allies don't have a strong military need for U.S. tanks period, even as part of their own military forces. Even a majorly upgraded successor to the M1 Abrams that is still basically a main battle tank, could do nothing to change this analysis. A next generation tank is something that the U.S. military does not need, at least for any conflicts in the Asian Pacific region.

Is The U.S. Misreading The Nature Of China's Threat To Taiwan?

An interesting analysis casts doubt on the worst case scenario that is one of the biggest drivers of the U.S. defense budget (especially for the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps), which is the fear that the U.S. would have to help defend Taiwan from an amphibious invasion of Taiwan from the Chinese mainland. 

The argument that this isn't the right threat to be planning for is that while China has a large and modern navy, that its amphibious forces are far smaller (about 100,000 troops at most, perhaps a hundred or two hundred ships, and scores of helicopters) than what history teaches us is necessary for a large and successful amphibious invasion. 

The last significant amphibious invasion in world military history was more than 72 years ago and that too suggests that some skepticism is in order. Perhaps this tactic hasn't be used for generations because it no longer makes military sense.

China's military might be ill suited to a credible mass amphibious assault on Taiwan because that isn't the real or likely threat to Taiwan and other U.S. allies in the region. If so, the right kind of U.S. response to a Chinese threat to U.S. allies in the region might be very different than the one that military planners and lobbyists for defense contractors are currently focused upon.

Unlike Russia, there is no indication that China is prone to take precipitous military action that has a high risk of turning out disastrously. 

Three World War II campaigns are relevant: operations Overlord, Causeway, and Jubilee. 

Overlord was the landing at Normandy on June 6, 1944. About 180,000 British, Canadian, French, and American soldiers disembarked from some five thousand ships and small craft on the first day. 

Operation Causeway planned for four hundred thousand marines and soldiers and six thousand ships and small craft to invade Taiwan; it never happened, deferred by the invasion of the Philippines.

Operation Jubilee was the disastrous raid on Dieppe against the Nazis in August 1942. Approximately 10,500 allied troops, mostly Canadian, were carried in about 240 ships and small craft landing on the northern coast of France. The assault was immediately repulsed by the Germans with substantial British losses. 

The last major amphibious operation under fire was Inchon during the Korean War in late 1950. 

During the 1991 Iraq War, the U.S. Marines lobbied for an amphibious assault from inside the Gulf. That was denied as too dangerous. The Marines instead were used as a decoy force. With today’s precision weapons and ubiquitous surveillance, any amphibious operations would be even more difficult and costly.

While the exact size and capability of the PLA for conducting large-scale amphibious operations is uncertain, in general terms, China’s navy has about thirty thousand marines and a combined seventy large amphibious ships. China has two and is building a third helicopter assault ship that reportedly can carry about nine hundred marines. Taken together, these ships could carry perhaps fifteen to twenty thousand marines, and possibly as many as thirty thousand.

The PLA also has six army amphibious combined arms brigades with a total of twenty-four-to-thirty thousand troops and up to fifteen Special Operations (SOF) brigades. However, as with airborne troops, deploying SOF across the Taiwan straits in helicopters raises logistics problems that restrict their use over such a distance and in uncertain weather conditions.

It can be argued that China’s large shipbuilding industry could turn out the thousands of smaller landing craft essential for an amphibious assault. However, those shipyards build big ships, and making any transitions would be time-consuming, expensive, and difficult to conceal.

From a Chinese perspective, an invasion would be a worst-case option. Greater pressure can be applied by threatening or imposing a blockade against Taiwan, cutting off access by sea and air, and by economic sanctions. Grabbing small offshore islands belonging to Taiwan as leverage is well within PLA capabilities. Leninist doctrine has long called for regime change from within, as China could step up its attempts to use internal Taiwanese politics to effect a change.

And China could destroy or threaten to destroy Taiwan’s infrastructure under a rain of missiles after attempting a Dieppe-like assault to gain a foothold. But a traditional amphibious assault is more problematic.

Taiwan’s geography is unsuitable for those as well as amphibious operations, as it lacks the beaches of Normandy or Luzon. There are only a handful of landing sites on the west coast. Mountainous areas run the length of the 250-mile-long island, some topping ten thousand feet above sea level. While Taiwan does not train for guerrilla war, this difficult terrain would be very suitable for it. And Taiwan lacks the physical infrastructure to accommodate hundreds of thousands of invaders and support their logistical needs, the bulk having to come from the mainland.

Hence, to mount an opposed PLA amphibious assault to seize and occupy Taiwan, China lacks, probably indefinitely, the military capability (power) and capacity (numbers).

A two year effort from 2017-2019 at the Naval War College called “Breaking the Mold” examined alternative means to implement the NDS. For the Indo-Pacific theater, a Mobile Maritime and Porcupine Defense for Taiwan was proposed in close concert with allies. That Japan is increasing defense spending is one indication of greater allied concern, as is the AUKUS program to provide nuclear submarines to Australia.

This Mobile Maritime strategy would confine the PLA to the first island chain running from Japan through Taiwan to Indonesia, the Philippines, and Vietnam. As in World War II in the Pacific against Japan, China would be blockaded and denied access to overseas access and resupply. It would be cut off from its Belt and Road outposts. And by Taiwan adopting a Porcupine Defense to make a PLA invasion too costly to consider, the United States would not have to spend as many resources in deterring and preparing for that contingency.

If an opposed-entry invasion of Taiwan is beyond China’s capacity, and it could be prevented by a Porcupine Defense of the island, what would be the consequences for U.S. strategy? 

If Taiwan is not the immediate or even long-term danger spot the U.S. believes it is, then is it time to ask if U.S. strategy towards China has become overly militarized.

From here. 

Imagined Threats

[F]earmongers cited a cavalcade of deadly threats against which America, apparently helpless despite possessing the world’s largest military, must further arm itself. 

Washington’s enemies?

Russia, which might launch its army across the Bering Strait once it finishes off Ukraine. 

China, set for a maritime invasion of the West Coast after conquering Taiwan. 

North Korea, ready to launch a nuclear first strike after conquering the South. 

And Iran, poised to confront America once it annihilates Israel, Saudi Arabia, and its other enemies. 

Then there are omnipresent terrorists, ready to infiltrate the U.S. and seize control of cities and states. 

Heck, maybe Americans should double or treble military outlays.

From the 1945 blog. 

What Would Happen If China Tried To Invade Taiwan?

A series of war game analyses from a think tank known as the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), concludes that Taiwan with help from the U.S. and Japan would successfully repel a Chinese invasion of Taiwan in a conventional war, but at high costs to all involved.

“The United States and Japan lose dozens of ships, hundreds of aircraft, and thousands of service members. Such losses would damage the US global position for many years,” the report said. In most scenarios, the US Navy lost two aircraft carriers and 10 to 20 large surface combatants. Approximately 3,200 US troops would be killed in three weeks of combat, nearly half of what the US lost in two decades of combat in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“China also suffers heavily. Its navy is in shambles, the core of its amphibious forces is broken, and tens of thousands of soldiers are prisoners of war,” it said. The report estimated China would suffer about 10,000 troops killed and lose 155 combat aircraft and 138 major ships.

“While Taiwan’s military is unbroken, it is severely degraded and left to defend a damaged economy on an island without electricity and basic services,” the report. The island’s army would suffer about 3,500 casualties, and all 26 destroyers and frigates in its navy will be sunk, the report said.

Japan is likely to lose more than 100 combat aircraft and 26 warships while US military bases on its home territory come under Chinese attack, the report found.

Via CNN. 

This narrow military analysis, however, doesn't begin to address how the diplomatic, political, and economic dimensions of such a conflict would influence its outcome. (This link also states that: "In the CSIS game, the U.S. lost 200 aircraft, 20 warships, and two aircraft carriers.").

The total toll predicted is about 200 major warships, about 500 aircraft, close to 20,000 people dead, and tens of thousands of Chinese POWs in Taiwan.

Excluding submarines, China has 86 warships in the aircraft carrier/cruiser/destroyer/frigate class. The United States has 124 and would lose 22. Japan has 49 and would lose more than half of them. Taiwan has 26 and would lose them all.

Basically, almost every warship involved in the conflict would be sunk in the course of a three week long war.

Military Transport Submarines Make Sense

Unlike Ukraine—with porous borders ripe for foreign weapons shipments and aid—Taiwan will be “very hard to arm” during a conflict, says Blake Herzinger, a Pacific security expert. The island sits about 100 miles east of China and is within range of its missiles—along with U.S. forces that would presumably respond from Japan and elsewhere in Asia.

From the Ruck. 

One solution to this problem could be a military transport submarine.

Submarines aren't immune to anti-submarine warfare tactics, but it is much, much harder to sink a submarine than it is to sink a lightly armed military transport ship and is only marginally slower. The fastest submarine ever built, the Soviet K-222 had a top speed of 51 miles per hour. A speed of 23 miles per hour traveling nearly silently, or 40 miles per hour at the expense of stealth, would be more common.

A submarine can be built to be 10,000 to 20,000 tons (only a portion of which can carry cargo, of course), which while smaller than a commercial freighter, can carry vastly more cargo than a C-130 (about 20 tons), or a C-17 (about 80 tons with a much longer range). I've previously considered the idea here. Historically, capacities of 95-800 tons have been used in practice, although cargo in the tens of thousands of tons are well within the reach of current level technology. Colombian drug cartel submarines can carry about 200 tons. Well developed designs for cargo submarines carrying 6,000 to 11,000 tons of cargo have been serious considered in the past.

The idea isn't entirely conceptual either. The Russian merchant marine has built some nuclear powered transport submarines to deliver freight under the ice pack on the Arctic Ocean.

The basic concept is that the military frequently would like to have the capacity to supply substantial amounts of supplies and equipment by surprise or in blockaded coastal areas.

This could be smuggling supplies to a friendly nation, like Taiwan. This could be delivering supplies in support of a hostile D-day style invasion force. This could also create a capacity to evacuate civilians, injured soldiers, or soldiers who need to be rotated out of a combat zone, away from an interdicted area.

It wouldn't be cheap, but if one used an air independent propulsion diesel-electric power supply, designed it to withstand depths more shallow that nuclear attack submarines and ballistic missile submarines, and the cargo submarine was only minimally armed, it would also probably be cheaper than a nuclear attack submarine.

More Surface Warships Still Don't Make Sense

More destroyers is not the right response to concerns about China invading Taiwan or seizing control of the Western Pacific. 

Anti-ship weapons delivered from ground based batteries, aircraft, submarines, and ad hoc (basically disposable) freighters converted into arsenal ships all make more sense as ways to address this threat.

An Arleigh Burke–class guided-missile destroyer costs approximately $2 billion to build, not including its weapons or operating costs. It could be damaged, disabled, or sunk by a range of Chinese antiship cruise missiles or ballistic missiles. Conversely, a Chinese Type 52 or Type 55 destroyer could be disabled or sunk by a U.S. Long-Range Antiship Missile (LRASM) or a Naval Strike Missile costing approximately $2 million. The math for mines and torpedoes is of the same order of magnitude. While delivering these weapons requires costly assets, surface vessels are among the most cost-ineffective options.

Air power’s primary benefit is being able to deliver large quantities of weapons over extended time periods. For example, B-1 Lancers can deliver 24 LRASMs at a time. Even assuming a low sortie rate, a single B-1 could quickly surpass a warship’s offensive firepower. The addition of other aircraft, such as other bombers, P-8 Poseidons, and tactical aircraft if in range, would allow air power to deliver punishing blows against an adversary. . . .

The United States should do everything in its power, including subsidies or other methods if politically and diplomatically acceptable, to encourage Taiwan and other allies to purchase large numbers of antiship weapons. . . .

the Navy should invest in ways to cheaply increase the missile capacity of sea-based assets. Practically, this means exploring the potential to rapidly purchase and convert merchant ships, particularly from the Maritime Security Program, into missile carriers.

From here.

The Missions of the U.S. Military

The U.S. military has multiple missions, but for the most part, they are buried in jargon and euphemism. Much of this is done for the purpose of justifying force levels that don't really make sense with modern priorities.

Very little of the expense or focus is on defending the United States against invasion, either by land from Mexico or Canada, or by air and sea. Neither Mexico nor Canada has the capacity or inclination to do so, and the U.S. National Guard alone is probably up to the task of discouraging or defeating such an attempt. Russia could conceivably invade Alaska and likes to challenge U.S. airspace there, but has shown no strong impetus to seize Alaska. Neither Russia nor China nor any other country in the world that is not a strong U.S. ally has the military capacity to launch an amphibious or airborne assault on the U.S. with a significant number of ground troops. The U.S. Coast Guard is sufficient to keep pirates and smugglers in check.

The U.S. Department of Defense has a number of primary missions:

* Defending our allies (especially Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, New Zealand and Australia) from China and North Korea. This is primarily a U.S. Navy mission. The U.S. Army supports this mission from South Korean bases. The U.S. Marine Corps supports this mission from U.S. bases in Japan. The U.S. Air Force also supports this mission. All of these nations have advanced militaries of their own to assist in this effort, and the Philippines isn't entirely adverse to entering a Chinese rather than an American sphere of influence.

* The U.S. Army is charged with assisting our NATO allies in defending themselves against Russian aggression, although it declined to do so in the case of Russian seizure of territory in the Ukraine. The U.S. Air Force also supports this mission. Other NATO members have very advanced militaries of their own to assist in this effort. A Russian led invasion of Finland, Poland, Germany, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Moldova, or Romania by Russian forces seems unlikely. Would NATO really step up to bat to defend Estonia, Lithuania or Latvia or Belarus? (None of which seems likely.) Also, Russia is considerably less formidable militarily than the Soviet Union was. It has barely more than half of the economic resources of the Soviet Union, has half the available conscripts, has seen a serious economic setback in the post-Soviet era, has had to devote resources to internal military conflicts, and has cut itself off from many of its key defense contractors by entering into military conflict with the Ukraine.

* The U.S. military might ally itself with Israel in defending Israel against attacks from its enemies but has not done so in multiple previous invasions. Israel has its own advanced military to assist in this effort.

* The U.S. Army had led regime change, peace keeping, and counterinsurgency operations in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Kosovo, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Kuwait, Somalia, and various places in the African Sahel, sometimes with Marine Corps involvement as well. The U.S. Air Force also supports this mission. The U.S. Navy provides air bases and missile launching stations in support of ground operations by U.S. forces and our allies in the Middle East and North Africa.

* Defending the oil trade in the Persian Gulf from Iran. This is primarily a U.S. Navy mission. The U.S. Air Force has resources that could support this mission but is rarely tasked to do so.

* Preventing other countries (especially Russia and China) or pirates from interfering with civilian traffic (mostly freight) in international waters. This is primarily a U.S. Navy mission. The U.S. Air Force has resources that could support this mission but is rarely tasked to do so.

* The U.S. Navy and Marine Corps are charged with evacuating Americans and our allies from war zones and disaster areas, and sometimes with providing additional disaster or humanitarian aid. The U.S. Air Force also has resources that could support this mission but is rarely tasked to do so.

* The U.S. military, while it has a long history of intervention in Latin America and the Caribbean has done so overtly only a few times in recent history, mostly briefly and sporadically, in Grenada and Panama. The U.S. Air Force has also supported this mission. This mission is not very central to U.S. foreign policy and military priorities.

It is fair to say that acquiring new U.S. territory through conquest is not a significant objective of the U.S. military.

Many of the places that are vulnerable to ground wars of conquest are places that the U.S. does not have a strong national interest in defending. Would the U.S. really care if there was another Iran-Iraq war? Would the U.S. intervene in a ground war invasion of Kashmir? Would the U.S. defend one Arab monarchy against another? The U.S. has shone no interest in intervening militarily in areas that are already under a de facto Russian or Chinese sphere of influence.

There is no likely scenario in which U.S. ground troops would have any sustained non-permissive presence in the territory of a non-allied nation in East Asia, Southeast Asia, South Asia, North Asia, or Central Asia.

There is no likely scenario in which U.S. troops conduct an amphibious invasion of a military near peer enemy nation. The only countries where an amphibious invasion of an enemy nation is plausible are countries that are decidedly inferior to the U.S. militarily.

While quite a few countries have "near peer" military capabilities, all but a handful of them are strong allies of the United States.

Endings

Yesterday was the end of my colleague Matt Nelson's life.

A week earlier was another ending, the death of my father, whose funeral was last Friday.  At the funeral, I was reminded of the death of my relative (maternal great-uncle?) Gordon's recent passing at the age of 101.  He survived his wife Erma by 20 years.  Gordon and Erma had lived across the street from the Lutheran church that my mother attended as a child for many decades and were an extra set of grandparents for my brother and I.

Yesterday was the end of the professional football season culminating in the glorious victory of the Denver Broncos in Super Bowl 50 (Super Bowl L for those of you who think they should have stuck to Roman numerals), and likely the end of Denver quarterback Peyton Manning's storied career including the most lifetime wins as a quarter back (200), four tries at the Super Bowl (two wins, two losses), and being the oldest quarterback to lead a Super Bowl team (at 39 years old).  It was a remarkable game.  The Carolina Panthers who were favored to win after losing just one game all season ran some of the most innovative offensive plays in the NFL, featuring lots of quarterback rushing yards, lateral passing and unusual formations.  But, they did themselves no favors with an avalanche of penalties in the second half and were put down soundly by the most effective defense in the NFL (the most valuable player was a Broncos defender and one of the Broncos two touch downs was scored by a member of the defensive team following a turnover) and by the Broncos smart, measured offense.  Lady Gaga proved she could deliver a powerful straight line with the national anthem.  Coldplay's halftime performance was so poor that it will probably hurt their upcoming tour, but was rescued by outstanding performances by Bruno Mars and Beyonce who quite frankly belted not only their own lyrics but also Coldplay's better than their front man. It is the third Broncos Super Bowl in franchise history and oddly reminiscent of the Super Bowl win by John Elway who was himself the oldest Super Bowl quarterback at the time.  Congratulations Broncos! There will be a celebratory parade in downtown Denver from Union Station along 17th Street to Broadway and south to Civic Center tomorrow.

Yesterday was the last day of the East Asian Lunar Year (the lunar calendars used by Jews and Muslims also originate in Asia, even though we more often call it the Near East).  Today is the first day of the year of the Monkey, although celebrations in Taiwan have been muted due to an earthquake that flattened a high rise apartment building, killing several dozen.  About 170 people had escaped alive and another 110 were trapped there or missing as this new year dawned.  The new day will see how many of the rest will live.

Last week was the last pre-primary Republican debate. Tomorrow is the first in the nation New Hampshire primary, in which hometown hero Bernie Sanders is sure to prevail by a large margin among Democrats, and in which Republicans will attempt to cull an overcrowded field.  Hope springs eternal that some of the candidates who are far back in the pack in both Iowa and New Hampshire will decide to throw in the towel at that point, allowing support that has been spread among a variety of "establishment" candidates to coalesce among fewer individuals so that they party can decide who to support for the rest of the contests this spring.

Posting frequency will probably be light here and at sister blog Dispatches From Turtle Island, as I assimilate the endings.

Manufacturing Bubbles In East Asia And Other Musings On China's Future

A Chinese Great Depression Is Inevitable And Coming Soon

Economic growth at average annual rates of 10% or so in China for more than a decade has been one of the dominant sources of a huge decline in world poverty.  China has had a very good run of economic management so good that it has won admirers among right wing politicians in the United States, despite the fact that it has a nominally communist economic system.

This good economic management may have something to do with the fact that 30somethings in their prime are making decisions that in the United States are currently reserved for septegenarians.  Others see China and other booming East Asian economies as the poster child for the benefits of a merchantalist economic policy agenda, or weak intellectual property laws, respectively.  Others have pointed to the ease with which unproductive workers can be punished simply by denying them raises in periods of rapid wage growth, rather than actually having to lay them off or cut their wages.

Consider, for instance, the city of Chongquig in Southwest China as city that was a capital of China once deep in history, where China's economic boom and state sponsored mass migrations of rural Chinese people into urban centers has turned over the course of a generation from a sleepy, rustic and poor provincial capital backwater - a Peoria or Albany of China, into a thriving modern, globalized city roughly the same size as New York City.  Chongquig is no Potemkin village propped up artificially for external consumption. Few people outside China have even heard of it.

The shift of human capital from rural to urban areas that has driven economic growth in China exemplified by Chongquig is critical for China's economy, because its largest urban areas are dramatically more economically prosperous than its smaller cities and rural areas.

The extent to which vast numbers of people can viably live in a very small geographic area is greatly underestimated, so this is not a trend that exponential growth will lead to the inevitable end of any time soon.  By comparison, agriculture's share of the U.S. economy decreases steadily every decade for a couple of centuries before finally pausing and even edging up a bit with the appearance of organic farming.  Fully modernized agriculture doesn't require a very large share of an economy's people, and technology can sustain exponential growth for decades at a time.

China also has homegrown legal system unlike the clones of the British, French, German and Islamic legal systems that prevail almost everywhere else in the world except North Korea and Iran.  Some of this unique legal system is post-revolutionary (i.e. developed since World War II), but some of it has ancient legal roots exemplified by Confucianism.  China's unique legal system's role in the economy makes the applications of lessons learned in other economies only provisionally useful in China, however, and could help explain why it has not collapsed already.

But, China and South Korea are currently both in extreme manufacturing company bubbles.  If I were invested in either, I would get out, or short the stocks, immediately. Because China is such an extreme outlier data point, it presents one of the most predictable drivers of other international economic trends in the medium term.

I went on record two and a half years ago, predicting a Great Depression class economic crash in China sometime between now and December 31, 2023, less than nine years from now, with a manufacturing bubble as one of the proximate causes of the collapse.  The reasoning behind the tail end date was simple.  Every industrialized company in the history of the world has had at least one Great Depression class crash during its period of industrialization but China, and this always happens before it reaches parity with the richest countries in the world.  The year 2023 is a couple of years before a conservative estimate of when China would reach this level of parity if its growth continued unabated.

Recent data tends to suggest that the bubble will pop sooner, rather than later; more likely in this decade than the next.  International economic bodies were starting to sound the alarm by the summer of 2013 (almost a year after my own prediction).  Later that summer, Credit Suisse analysts noted a bubble in Chinese non-financial credit markets.  China has massive amounts of bad business debt that has not been written off yet.  An immense amounts of China's manufacturing capacity was idle last summer, two years after industrial overcapacity in key industries like iron and steel had already been identified as a critical problem with the Chinese economy, a situation which was the immediate impetus for my Chinese Great Depression prediction:

After 34 years of booming economic growth averaging over 9% per year (the longest sustained period of rapid economic growth in human history), China’s credit-fueled, investment-driven growth model is exhausted and increasingly unstable. . . . the Middle Kingdom’s credit boom is well past the point of diminishing marginal returns; and no one can deny that the misallocation is widespread, with capacity utilization now below 60%.

The Consequences Of A Chinese Economic Collapse Could Change The World

The question of what will happen when an economic mega-power like China sees its bubble pop is deeply troubling.

It is possible that at least some of the investments China has made for the long run, like an immense investment in new high speed rail lines and cars (more than $300 billion U.S. dollars equivalent since 2004, about 0.5% of Chinese GDP), will pay off in the long run even after an economic depression, but it is also possible that these investments will wither and spoil in an economic counterpart of military overreach.  (By comparison 0.5% of the U.S. GDP per year would be about $80 billion U.S. dollars per year; the U.S. has spent on average about $2 billion per year since 2009 on high speed rail and also hasn't made major investments in new airports, highways, seaports, spaceports, or other new transportation capacity).

Nothing that big can happen in a globally interconnected economy without having intense impacts on much of the rest of the world.  For example, how will the fact that China has been the dominant financier of American's trade deficit and national debt influence the global impact of an economic downturn in China?  What role will Chinese near monopoly on economically critical rare earth production have on the world economy?

In general, a massive economic collapse usually favors political extremism, massive political change, and often militarism.  Intense suffering for the billions involved is also likely. Will we live to see a day where our current bout of wars in the Islamic world, and occasional spillover terrorism to the rest of the world, will seem like the "good old days"?

I doubt that a Chinese Great Depression will actually spur World War III.  But, there are all sorts of reasons why an economically depressed China might turn to military force deployed in ways less disruptive to the economic order it depends upon as a means of mobilizing patriotic spirit, shutting down dissent, and advancing its economic interests.  As explored below, there are a variety of ways that China could use an increased investment in military capabilities to advance its own national interests without taking any steps likely to incur the wrath of its advanced Western trading partners who are the only countries in the world that could be a military match for it.

In a demographically homogeneous country of more than a billion people, life is cheap.  Abortion is more common in China than any other place in world. This appears to have played an important role in China's massive gender imbalances that could also fuel militarism.  China also carries out more executions than any other country in the world (more than 85% of the world total, while making up less than 20% of the world's population), although this is falling with little publicized legal reforms that seem to be mostly driven by domestic forces rather than international pressure.  China's share of executions outside Muslim countries and of executions for non-murder crimes is even greater.  What happens if the view that life, especially the lives of young men which is has in great excess, is cheap, spills over into the military sphere?

And, of course, history has shown repeatedly, that one way to deal with a demand shortage in the civilian manufacturing sector is by injecting Keynesian stimulus into the economy by converting underutilized civilian industrial capacity to producing military equipment, just as the United States used World War II to help lift it out of the Great Depression.

Taiwan, perhaps impressed that China has not entirely strangled the good laying the golden egg in Hong Kong, and recognizing that Chinese communism is far less communist than it was in Mao's Day, is warming towards China.  But, China's ardor could easily become stifling and scary if a burst economic bubble in China moves China back towards more orthodox Communism (with economic innovators run out of power in the face of charges of corruption and decadence, and the most vulnerable of them executed), and simultaneously causes China to take a more aggressive military stance towards its "wayward child" on the island of Formosa.  Yet, both steps are possible, and indeed, likely ways that the old guard of plutocratic leaders who were successful for so long, until they weren't, could try to maintain public support in the face of the devastating collapse of a manufacturing bubble in China's economy.

Then again, true Communism has been a brief historical blip, shorter even than the "oil age".  Even people terribly confused, angry and afraid as the largest country in the world experiences an economic collapse may not see a return to hard core Maoism as an attractive option; the bad taste may be sufficiently fresh to be avoided by the Chinese people in favor of something different.

Perhaps de facto monarchism (the path that North Korea, an economic failed state surrounded by prosperous neighbors has chosen) of some kind might emerge, for example.  The exact formal political character of a "reformed" post-collapse regime may end up being more or less irrelevant.

A Plausible Scenario For Chinese Militarization And Power Projection

In a more plausible scenario, China might use increased militarization, by emulating Theodore Roosevelt in carrying a big stick, to support its diplomatic and economic objectives.

For example, China might use its limited aircraft carrier power that it is currently in the process of realizing, not to make war with the "great naval powers" but to discourage third world countries, for example in sub-Saharan Africa, from disregarding economic agreements with China, much as the U.S. did in its dealings with small countries that were economic partners in Latin America and the Caribbean from about 1890 to 1933, and sporadically since then.  China has already embarked on a policy of making major investments in mining operations in sub-Saharan Africa and Afghanistan, and of using its navy as part of a coalition of anti-piracy forces in the open seas near Somalia.

If Taiwan is lucky, Chinese militarism will start not there, where China might trigger a total war with the United States, but with China's conquest of its troublesome and unstable North Korean neighbor which it could easily crush like a bug if it was so inclined.  There are plenty of pretenses (e.g. unpaid debts owed to China; refugees who flee to China; a nuclear threat) for China to start a war with North Korea any time its leaders are predisposed to do so.  This conflict might resemble the military campaigns of the Axis Powers before World War II proper began that established military superiority, protocols, nation building techniques, and helped to accustom the domestic and international public to a more aggressive approach to foreign policy.

Why North Korea?

Unlike Taiwan or South Korea, no international power would be likely to come forward to defend North Korea's sovereignty if China made war with North Korea, which has no fast friends in the international community other than China, while it has many sworn enemies.  After all, the world community's response to Russia's annexation of Crimea and incursions into Eastern Ukraine have been half measures at best, and Ukraine was a NATO member with many political and economic allies in the West.  If China were to conquer North Korea, much of the world would welcome the change and even the "liberated" North Koreans might appreciate the change once they learned just how bad they had had it under the regime that rules their nation today, even if it meant living under a superstrate of Chinese "carpet baggers" during the "reconstruction" phase of the operation (providing a means of exporting restless young men from China to form this new foreign ruling class in North Korea, in the process).

China might even "nip" the Western trade partners that feed it, although its leaders probably have the sense not to escalate the situation into an all out total war.  Once it defeated North Korea, Chinese leaders might consider looking for a way to make the point that its submarines have the power to sink American surface combatants, if it could do so without providing a total war.

For example, a Chinese general with political backing in the regime might order a Chinese submarine to sink a U.S. warship or aircraft carrier, and then immediately disavow the attack as an act of insubordination or mistake, by apologizing, offering to pay a handsome restitution, and executing the scapegoat sailors on the sub for their "grave error" to appease the U.S. while at the same time demonstrating its military might against a first rank naval force.  China has already recently made a similar point with one of its submarines without firing a shot.

Limited air strikes in third world countries to protect its economic interests, a Chinese conquest of North Korea, and token skirmishes with some first world country's naval forces, could be first steps for China in building up its military credibility in order to establish a tighter hold over regional communist or formerly communist countries aimed at developing a system of modern Chinese tributary states.

Countries like Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, Burma and Mongolia might be the first dominoes to agree to economic arrangement with China that are decidedly one sided in the face of a veiled threat of military intervention.

For example, Laos might agree to put in place immigration laws that encourage its young women to emigrate to China to provide wives for Chinese men who can't find them.  Laos might accept as immigrants from China malcontents and dissidents that China wants to exile but monitor.  Laos might pay Chinese managers high percentage "consulting fees" for purporting to manage their nationalized industries and its major companies.  Laos might accept large Chinese military bases on their soil to provide China with a military buffer against invasion.  And Laos might agree to supply raw materials and foodstuffs to China at below market rates in quantities that leave their own populations with shortages of locally produced resources and foodstuffs.  Laotian negotiators would assent to these unfavorable treaty and contract terms knowing that if they did not, that China might invade their country as it did North Korea, leaving them under the direct rule of a governor appointed by China to rule over them as a territory with no independent political institutions whatsoever.

A country more likely to receive international support, like Mongolia, might receive more favorable terms than a country less likely to receive international backing in the event of a Chinese incursion, like Burma.  China could calibrate the extent to which its relationship with a tributary state amounts to exploitation, to that state's independent military strength and the strength of its foreign alliances.

An actual invasion of any one or more of those states might trigger foreign military intervention of the kind that pushed by an Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in the first Gulf War.  But, it would be very hard to justify the use of military force in support of a would be tributary state, when the threat of military force from China, rather than its actual use, is what pressured a country into agreeing to an unfavorable treaty or economic contract with China or a Chinese company.

In the wake of this kind of pressure applied to other regional tributary states, Taiwan might too decide that discretion is the better part of valor and "voluntarily" follow Hong Kong in becoming an autonomous but subordinate province of China, rather than risking war with a country that has recently demonstrated its military prowess, ideally on terms more favorable than countries that didn't have the United States as their international patron while the negotiations were being conducted.

Once again, of course, if Taiwan's elected political leaders did sign a treaty reunifying Taiwan with China and subordinating itself to the Chinese central government, for all practical purposes, there is nothing that the United States which has devoted so much of its military spending over the last seventy years or so to protecting Taiwan's autonomy, but assent to the will of Taiwan's leaders, even if that assent was secured in part through China's military duress.  U.S. military resources previously justified with the defense of Taiwan would have to find new justifications in the defense of countries like South Korea, Japan, and the Philippines.