Military, aerospace and other defense experts participating in a discussion of a new report from the Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS), “The First Battle of the Next War: Wargaming a Chinese Invasion of Taiwan,” said Taiwan and its allies need to make invasion too costly for China to sustain.
The discussion was part of a CSIS project that designed a war game to model a Chinese amphibious invasion of Taiwan in 2026.
“Although Taiwan survived as an autonomous entity, in most scenarios losses to the United States, Taiwan, Japan and China were enormous,” CSIS expert Mark F. Cancian, a senior adviser with its International Security Program, said.
By the time ports and airports in Taiwan are captured by China, its amphibious fleet is effectively destroyed in most of the war-game scenarios, Eric Heginbotham, principal research scientist, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Center for International Studies, said.
“In other words, China usually achieves too little, too late to gain overall success in the operation," Heginbotham said in the discussion. "Now that is pretty much the end of the good news here,” he said.
Matthew Cancian, a senior researcher at the U.S. Naval War College, said four critical conditions are necessary for a continuation of Taiwan's economy. First, Taiwan must resist an invasion, he said in the discussion.
“Second, the U.S. must quickly commit its own forces to direct combat operations against China," Cancian said. "If there's no U.S. commitment whatsoever, we estimate that it would take about two or three months for China to conquer Taiwan if Taiwan resisted to the best of its abilities, but that that success on China’s part is inevitable.”
The third condition was that the United States must operate out of its bases in Japan. And finally, the U.S. must have sufficient stockpiles of long-range anti-ship munitions to make it a much simpler task with fewer U.S. casualties, Cancian said.
Lt. Gen. David A. Deptula, U.S. Air Force (Ret.), the dean of the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, said his big takeaway from the report on the war games is that they need to get creative about deterring China from invading Taiwan.
“And I’ll offer an example," he said, "assisting Taiwan in acquiring an abundance of surface-to-surface missiles with the range to reach Shanghai and threaten its destruction. The risk of losing their cultural and financial capital would weigh heavily on Xi Jinping and crew.”
Deptula said the option of the U.S. attacking the Chinese mainland with its stealth bombers should not be taken off the table.
War games allow decision-makers to look at how some of the human decisions in a potential conflict could unfold and the choices within it, according to Becca Wasser, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) Defense Program. They also provide a safe-to-fail environment for testing new strategies, operational concepts and tactics.
When experts saw a return to great power, competition and China’s growing military modernization, that did not mean the United States was failing in the war games. It meant that the United States was not winning as handily as it did in an earlier era, Wasser said.
Taiwan needs to become small and mobile, as large weapons systems stand out and don’t survive the battlefield, according to William S. Murray, a professor at the U.S. Naval War College
Taiwan needs systems that are lethal against invading ships, amphibious ships or whatever commercial ships are pressed into service by the People's Liberation Army, he said. They should also be lethal against aircraft.
“What I advocate in there is that Taiwan should become a porcupine," Murray said, "and what I mean by that is, Taiwan should become so difficult to subjugate that it’s not worth the effort, just like a porcupine rarely gets attacked in the wild.”
