In late March, a Taiwanese data analyst posted on social media about an odd satellite image: It appeared that the Chinese military had erected at one of its remote military bases in Inner Mongolia a series of roads that perfectly re-created the roads around the presidential palace in Taipei. The revelation only appeared to underscore the seriousness with which Chinese officials are proceeding with President Xi Jinping’s directive to be ready to invade the independent island by the late 2020s. As part of the research for his new book, World on the Brink: How America Can Beat China in the Race for the 21st Century, Dmitri Alperovitch journeyed to Taiwan, talked with multiple high-level officials and national security planners in Taiwan and the United States, and walked the possible invasion terrain to imagine just how such an invasion might occur. His scenario, excerpted here and which he imagines taking place on November 13, 2028, serves as the new book’s prologue.
Courtesy of Hachette Book Group
The winter season in Taiwan—lasting from November till March—is great for surfers. It’s no Bali or Hawaii, as the size of the waves and their consistency may vary, but the Northeast Monsoon, which brings in the cold China Coastal Current water into the Taiwan Strait, where it meets the warm Kuroshio Branch Current coming from the south, is known to form some significant waves. The Taiwan Strait is only about a hundred meters deep—shallow enough that during ice ages and the time of glaciers the island of Taiwan was physically connected to the Chinese mainland; but even in the modern era the 200-mile-long passage—which varies in width from about 100 nautical miles down to just 70 nautical miles and is one of the most vital shipping routes in the world—is known for frequent storms, large swells, and blinding fog and is bedeviled by annual summer typhoons from roughly May to October. Between the typhoons in the summer and the stormy high-wave winter season, there is no predictably perfect and easy time to launch a large-scale amphibious invasion of Taiwan, especially with the strait registering about 150 days a year of winds above 20 knots, rough seas for amphibious ships and landing craft. Any landing on Taiwan’s windy, shallow, and rocky beaches during that time is fraught and risky. Which is why, in the end, China decided to forego a beach landing and attempt an air assault on the island’s port and airfield facilities, the seizure of which would allow for rapid arrival of follow-on troops and logistical supplies to facilitate a successful occupation.
The operations planners in the People’s Liberation Army had had years to deliberate their invasion strategy, adjusting year after year as China’s own military capabilities grew and advanced. In the end, due to the unpredictability of the rough Taiwan Strait waters and the heavy fortifications the Taiwanese had built up around potential beach landing sites, the PLA came up with an innovative invasion plan—the opening stages of which they’d practiced repeatedly as the late 2020s unfolded. For several years, China had engaged in full-scale military exercises—loading up vast armadas of military and civilian ships with tens of thousands of troops, equipment, and matériel and heading toward Taiwan, always stopping just short of the 12-nautical-mile limit that marks the start of the island’s territorial waters. They figured they could practice with some impunity, because they knew Taiwan could never afford to respond aggressively. One of the island’s greatest defense dilemmas had long been its inability to respond to hostile provocations and threats with force—lest it be accused of instigating a conflict. US officials had warned Taiwanese leadership for years that under no circumstances could they fire the first shot—they had to take the Chinese punch before retaliating. Portraying China as the aggressor would be a critical step in building the international case that Chinese leader Xi Jinping was alone responsible for starting any war. The stakes couldn’t have been higher: After all, even if the Taiwanese fired first at the PLA armada after it crossed Taiwan’s territorial boundary, Beijing could still dispute the shooting as unprovoked and claim that it occurred in international waters—muddying the geopolitical waters such that Taiwan risked losing key moral and diplomatic support around the world. Too many countries wanted the excuse—they would only be too eager to continue trading with China, the world’s second largest economy, irrespective of the conflict. If Taiwan was to survive and rally the world to its cause, it couldn’t afford to offer that excuse.
The final Chinese PLA plan counted on precisely that Taiwanese restraint when China’s ships entered Taiwan’s waters and closed in on the vital northwestern coastal Port of Taipei, a modern facility completed in 2012 that boasted 4,500 feet of so-called berth space, a substantial amount of space available for cargo offloading. There the PLA planned to leverage existing infrastructure to rapidly unload hundreds of thousands of troops and thousands of tanks, armored vehicles, heavy engineering equipment, weapons, munitions, and the logistics supplies needed for the conquest of the island. While Taipei wasn’t the largest port in Taiwan, the rapid capture of its docks was essential to the success of the operation, since other Taiwanese port facilities were too far away from the capital city. That distance and Taiwan’s extensive array of steep mountains and winding rivers made the rapid transport of a large PLA armored force from any other port or beach to the capital all but impossible.
The operational plan called for moving eight modern Type 075 Yushen-class amphibious assault ships, each with more than 30,000-ton displacement, right up to Taiwan’s maritime border, while being protected by PLA Navy (PLAN) guided-missile destroyers. Xi Jinping’s regime had rapidly constructed the Yushen ships specifically with this mission in mind; each was a highly capable delivery platform for air assault operations, carrying a mix of up to 28 attack and heavy transport helicopters and 800 troops. In the early morning hours, once the final order was given, 200 Z-8 and Z-20 transport helicopters, all backed up by Z-10 attack gunships, would take off from the ship landing docks and head for the Taipei port, as well as the Taoyuan International Airport, 10 miles south, and the smaller Taipei Songshan Airport, located right in the center of the capital city, just three miles north of the Zhongzheng government district. The plan called for helicopters to make the journey in 10 minutes. (Ironically, these aircraft were built based on legally acquired Western technology—the Z-8 came from an original French-licensed design and the Z-20 from the UH-60 Black Hawk, which America had sold to China in the 1980s. The Z-10 was built with Pratt & Whitney engines and assisted by European Airbus and AgustaWestland transmission and rotor installation designs.)
The heliborne brigades of the PLA Air Force (PLAAF) Airborne Corps, China’s equivalent to the United States’ 101st Airborne Division, would assault, capture, and secure the port and airport facilities, in preparation for follow-on forces with armored vehicles that would land at the airfields on the Chinese Y-20 and Russian-made IL-76 troop transport planes. As those transport planes descended, dozens of large roll-on/roll-off (RORO) ferries and vehicle transport ships—all built with “national defense requirements” and appropriated from Chinese industry by the PLAN—would rush into the captured port and unload tens of thousands of troops and hundreds of additional tanks and infantry fighting vehicles. Anticipating that the Taiwanese might manage to destroy the port’s infrastructure ahead of the Chinese landing, the PLA has spent years practicing rapid offloading of these vessels in ports with minimal cargo handling infrastructure, such as a lack of pier-side ramps or tugboat support. Simultaneously, PLAAF land-based missiles, rockets, and bombers, along with attack aircraft deployed from two Chinese carriers positioned off Taiwan’s eastern coast, would pummel Taiwan’s air bases in an attempt to take the island’s relatively small air force out of commission before it could get into the fight—destroying runways, fuel depots, and maintenance infrastructure and targeting the island’s prized fleet of F-16 fighter jets. Mainland-based precision-guided ballistic and cruise missiles, together with long-range, truck-mounted PHL-16 multiple rocket launchers and kamikaze drones, would all target stationary radars, fixed weapons platforms, critical command, control, communications nodes, naval facilities, energy infrastructure, and TV and radio transmission towers to sow chaos and impede the highly centralized decisionmaking of the Taiwanese military. American-built Patriot air defense batteries, as well as Taiwan’s indigenously developed Sky Bow systems, troop barracks, and anti-ship batteries were also high priority targets.
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