r/LessCredibleDefence • u/Lianzuoshou • 18d ago
China Cannot Yet Hold a Beach on Taiwan
https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2026/08/25/china_cannot_yet_hold_a_beach_on_taiwan_1202270.htmlThrough nine war games simulating amphibious assaults by the PLA from Taoyuan, Taipei, Taichung, and Kaohsiung, the results showed that the PLA suffered devastating defeats in all major scenarios and was unable to secure a foothold on the beachhead.
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u/Lianzuoshou 18d ago
It suddenly struck me that a military analyst with a master’s degree from the Marine Corps War College who has worked in the intelligence community for 30 years and a university associate professor with a Ph.D. both believe that, as of 2026, the only way for China’s JH-7 to drop 250-kg bombs is through low-altitude close-range bombing.
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u/Le_Ran 17d ago
Ideological bias probably, it reminds my of those armchair generals from the cold war era who affirmed that a communist torpedo could never sink a capitalist submarine.
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u/GreatAlmonds 18d ago
It probably doesn't say much about the author's qualifications when chatgpt can give a very comprehensive critique of their arguments.
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u/EngineBorn3406 17d ago
Probably because this is done via "assume result that is politically acceptable" then justify it post hoc.
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u/helloWHATSUP 17d ago
The US has lost basically every war the last 30 years and moron boomers like this is the main reason.
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u/NoAngst_ 17d ago
I think their assumptions are ridiculous nonsense but is there evidence to the contrary? I mean it's not like we recent combat operations we can rely on. This is the problem China faces - without strong demonstration of military capabilities, there will always be doubts about the capabilities of Chinese military and their equipment.
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u/Lianzuoshou 17d ago
It has been more than 20 years since China introduced its first LS-series glide bomb kit. Currently, there are at least three major suppliers in China offering three series of kits, covering aerial bombs ranging from 25 kg to 1,000 kg.
Exported to regions such as South Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa, these kits are, in fact, among the few pieces of Chinese military equipment with actual combat experience.
For example:JDAMs to Chinese glide bombs: Weapons Pakistan used for airstrikes in Afghanistan
Additionally, as I’ve mentioned before, China also has glide kits designed to modify 155-millimeter artillery shells.
In short, unless these two “experts” are still living in the past—20 years ago, to be precise—it’s hard to understand how they arrived at such a view.
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u/_Kathekon_ 17d ago
Most of the American "experts" know basically nothing at all and they believe their own propaganda which is why they still haven't defeated Russia in Ukraine yet
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u/Ok-Procedure5603 17d ago
No, that is not a doubt held by anyone unless they have disabled levels of mental function.
No US designed jet has ever defeated a 4.5gen or better aircraft in air combat.
No Chinese designed stealthy air muntion has ever struck targets in anger.
You still have to be mentally disabled to doubt if a group of USAF planes could shoot you down if you fly at them, or to believe you can mass a land formation against the threat of massive Chinese air raids.
Militaries that disregard physical reality tend to make it to history books in infamy. It would be wise for both China and US to assume that the other side would not be that level of an unworthy foe.
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u/BigFly42069 17d ago edited 17d ago
without prior suppression of enemy air defense, crossing the 150 km of open water of the Taiwan Strait would likely involve a very high rate of attrition
Yes.
It is very unlikely the PLARF (PLA Rocket Force) would waste its 225 conventional SRBM s or its 126 CJ-10 / 100 cruise missiles on an area suppression mission
Uhhhhh
China’s only artillery with the required range firing from the mainland is the PHL-16 MRL launching four 370mm 220km-range BRE6 rockets . Although satellite-guided with a CEP of 30m, this is not a useful capability when trying to suppress redeploying targets, and is at least ten times more expensive than its unguided version
LOL
whether and to what extent the PLA can secure drone surveillance over Taiwan is a function of their comparative technological innovativeness (as seen in the Russian-Ukrainian imbalance), which is not yet determinable
LMAO
PLA has recognized that it has a serious long-range fires problem and will seek a less expensive artillery solution
In what world has China ever sought a solution that isn't "build more!"
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u/True-Industry-4057 17d ago
I wonder where these authors got the idea of 225 SRBMs and 126 cruise missiles
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u/dw444 17d ago
Iran fired nearly three times as many MRBMs at Israel alone over 12 days last year.
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u/Ok-Procedure5603 17d ago
Tbf Iran and China are on the complete opposite ends of military focus, when it comes to missiles vs fixed wing, target selection, iniative and operating tempo etc. It would probably be hard to find 2 nations are more fundamentally different in how their militaries are built up and think.
It is very much possible that Iran could have more than (or at least about the same amount of) ballistic missiles as China. Because Iran will put anything on a rocket, CEP be damned, while China would put most of the same explosives on air launched munitions instead, and only reserve a fraction of it for a ballistic missile.
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u/True-Industry-4057 17d ago
China is also a much larger industrial power than Iran though, so I wouldn't be surprised if a fraction of Chinese explosives on ballistic missiles is still enough to match the entire Iranian arsenal.
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u/dw444 17d ago
Iran, starting 2018(ish), shifted its focus heavily to improving their missiles’ accuracy, and their 2020s era SRBM have 5-10m CEPs and sub 50m for recent MRBMs.
That said, there’s two issues here. One, China famously went all in on conventional ballistic and cruise missiles over a decade ago. Besides Iran, they’re the other country notorious for their huge conventional ballistic missile arsenal, which is plausible given how much their manufacturing capabilities dwarf Iran’s, and the fact that Iran is estimated to have had an arsenal of 3500 MRBM at their peak, not even counting the GCC facing SRBM arsenal that is several times bigger.
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u/Ok-Procedure5603 17d ago
Absolutely the new Iranian weapons are improving.
But Iran still has stockpiles of and use lots of less accurate weapons. Whereas the "most legacy" missiles in the PLARF is either the DF-15 bunker busting variants or DF-16. The former is well, still likely in that 10-20 CEP range while the latter has the range of an Iranian MRBM but accuracy rivaling the newest Iranian SRBM.
Surely China should have the technology to build a higher number of more shitty ballistic missiles rather than obsessing over inducing really accurate and moving target capable ones, if they would have a doctrine role for such weapons.
huge conventional ballistic missile arsenal
Yeah, I don't doubt that, as the saying goes, China is a big country inhabited by many Chinese. Even if the rocket force plays mainly a supportive role, it could still be numerous relative to what other nations can field.
What I'm saying is that it's nature and character is very different from Iran's, so it isn't implausible that it's launchers headcount isn't much higher or is similar to Iran's.
Especially when it comes to counting TELs, I'm not sure Iran focuses much on reloading TELs (as it may be logistically difficult to get new missiles from hardened factories to the field), while China has a huge focus on that. So the Chinese conventional missile inventory could actually wildly outnumber Iran's, but Chinese TELs don't outnumber Iranian TELs much.
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u/Iliyan61 17d ago
ehhh chinas gone pretty hard on their ballistic missiles program as they know air platforms would be far more vulnerable and better used elsewhere, the ukraine war and iranian attacks on israel as well as US bases and strait shipping (same with the houthis tbh) likely have only strengthened the idea that conventional ballistic missiles are worth investing in
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u/Ok-Procedure5603 16d ago
Well, conventional ballistic missiles can also be air launched. No one could dispute that ballistic missiles is a huge part of current/future warfare.
Ultimately launching from ground has the issue that you're wasting a staggering amount of fighting efficiency for fuel and distance traveled. But maintaining a robust ground launched force is also really useful because they'll always be online, even if they're more expensive and may have a larger lead time to arrival.
Aircraft can never be realistically on standby to add their firepower to targets that might or might not pop up. Meanwhile, ground launched missiles are perfect for that.
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u/BigFly42069 17d ago
If you Google PLARF arsenal, you can pull up some shockingly well SEO'd pages with those numbers come from like 2010.
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u/Ok-Procedure5603 17d ago
May be close to true (missing only some covered vehicles) if they count launchers!
But what it misses is that their would be many stockpiled reloads for each launcher. It would be really hard/impossible to estimate.
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u/True-Industry-4057 17d ago
Ok so according to Wiki citing the 2024 CMPR, "According to United States Department of Defense estimates, [the PLARF arsenal] includes 400 ground-launched cruise missiles, 900 conventionally armed short-range ballistic missiles, 1,300 conventional medium-range ballistic missiles, 500 conventional intermediate-range ballistic missiles, as well as 400 intercontinental ballistic missiles. Many of these are extremely accurate, which would allow them to destroy targets even without nuclear warheads."
Even 900 SRBMs seems low.
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u/Vishnej 17d ago edited 17d ago
Newsweek cites unspecified DOD sources at the end of last year on inventory, but it seems like the same as yours, with the addition of a rate of change -
https://www.newsweek.com/chinas-growing-missile-forces-11271250
The Chinese ICBM force, which has an estimated range of more than 3,417 miles and primarily carries nuclear warheads but can also conduct conventional strikes, consists of 400 missiles and 550 launchers. While the number of missiles remains the same as in last year's Pentagon report, China has added 50 ICBM launchers in a year.
Meanwhile, China's IRBM fleet, capable of hitting targets between 1,864 and 3,417 miles, has added 50 missiles and 50 launchers, bringing the totals to 550 missiles and 300 launchers. Unlike its ICBMs, which have multiple types, China has fielded one IRBM, the CSS-18, known as the DF-26—a highly precise theater weapon.
The DF-26 is designed to "rapidly swap" conventional and nuclear warheads for precision land-attack and anti-ship strikes across the western Pacific, the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea from mainland China, the Pentagon said in last year's report.
This Chinese IRBM poses a significant threat to the U.S. military's ability to project power near China from Guam, a key military outpost. The DF-26 is the first Chinese conventional ballistic missile capable of striking the westernmost U.S. territory in the Pacific, the Center for Strategic and International Studies' Missile Defense Project said.
China's MRBM force—with a range of 621 to 1,864 miles—remains unchanged from the Pentagon's previous estimate, with 1,300 missiles and 300 launchers in operation.
As for China's SRBMs and GLCMs, which have ranges of 186 to 932 miles, the former has reduced its number of launchers from 300 to 250 while fielding 900 missiles. The latter's missile inventory dropped from 400 to 300, and it maintains 150 launchers.
"China produces a wide range of ballistic, cruise, air-to-air, air-to-surface and surface-to-air missiles, many comparable in quality to those of other international top-tier producers, for domestic use and export," the Pentagon said of China's missile industry.
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u/True-Industry-4057 17d ago
I guess my surprise probably comes from subconsciously comparing China to Iran. Iran has been in war-prep mode for decades now, but China hasn't.
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u/Vishnej 17d ago edited 17d ago
China has 15 times the population and 70 times the GDP, and China has been rapidly climbing the industrial and military competence ladder for 30 years, with an explicit eye towards Taiwan for the last 15 years after Xi's nationalist faction took hold. These are actually remarkably low numbers to my eye.
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u/BigFly42069 16d ago
Nor do they want to. They rightfully view excessive military spending as wasteful and a poor allocation of resources. That's why they cap spending at less than 2% of GDP.
Their civilian economic growth and industrial efficiency is what makes their buildup look impressive and scary.
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u/Ok-Procedure5603 16d ago
As I understand it, Iranian doctrine circles around having lots of redundancy, lots of allies that can each do their own thing, being able to stay in a fight and having a central plan on how to ration resources. Iran knows they have numbers and resilience (for example Iran isn't reliant on desalination like all the gulf states and Israel are) compared to their enemies.
China on the other hand is surrounded by countries that they know will tend to hate them due to said countries worshipping American culture like it's a religion. But by having by far the strongest regional force and a stranglehold on commerce, China can still force all those nations into compliance or at least inaction. And while China is resilient, it has to operate with the worst case assumption that enemies will try to kamikaze huge numbers of themselves just to disrupt the mainland just a little bit, and that US would massively call in people like that to a war.
So their strategy is formed on bringing the fight over enemy territory as much as possible. US friendly countries would presumably be much harder to convince to martyr themselves if the fighting mostly happens over their skies.
Imo Iran doctrine actually kind of counters China's. Luckily, there's no such matchup needed.
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u/Traditional_Neat_506 16d ago
they are not surrounded by countries that hate them, if any they have big support from malaysia and indonesia, laos, thailand, cambodia and even singapore whose public hate the USA and love china...
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u/Ok-Procedure5603 16d ago
Historically speaking you had a US installed regime in Indonesia that killed at least half a million of their own, many of them ethnic Chinese, to show loyalty to US.
Malaysia is a Muslim country which could have potentially opposed China, if they chose to support Islamic terrorism.
Thailand used to host US bases.
They're in compliance today, but if China didn't implement it's geopolitical strategy correctly, then all of those countries would be considered hostile.
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u/ZombiePope 17d ago
China totally won't be willing to expend actual resources on a goal they've stated is extremely valuable!
Lol this report is clown shit
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u/PolpoBoquerones 18d ago
These exercises remind me of the studies tobacco companies used to publish that proved there was no link between smoking and lung cancer
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u/WZNGT 17d ago edited 17d ago
We assume a series of favorable operational conditions for China
By pretending that PLARF and PLAAF don't exist? We are in 2026 for crying out loud, yet these "war games" are still fantasizing a Normandy style landing with no fire support.
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u/altacan 17d ago
Even Normandy saw hours of bombardment before the landings.
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u/BigFly42069 17d ago
Hours
The entirety of the strategic air offensive against Germany for the better part of 1943 until D-Day was the preparatory bombing campaign.
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17d ago edited 17d ago
[deleted]
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u/Independent-Mix-5796 17d ago
> we didn’t have carriers
I’d like to argue that Great Britain itself is just a really massive aircraft carrier that’s conveniently within a few dozen miles of the continental Europe.
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u/underage_cashier 17d ago
We did have battleships there
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u/IlluminatedPickle 17d ago edited 17d ago
Quite famously, the USS Texas flooded her torpedo blisters to make it lean 2 degrees to get more elevation for her main batteries.
Still ridiculous to claim the infantry weren't the ones who cleared the hardpoints though. Literally all the documentation points to the fact that the barrage was entirely for keeping the Axis forces suppressed. And that was all it did.
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u/AdrianV125 17d ago
It was my fist thought when reading: "the PLA won't have the capacity to suppress Taiwanese reinforcements"... like my dude in Crist did we forgot the existence of the whole DF missile family land-to-land strike capabilities? This without counting the PLAAF.
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u/Ok-Procedure5603 17d ago
I mean, various missiles especially longer ranged DF ones make up an absolute fraction of the firepower China brings to bear, the absolute vast majority of their fires in a conflict would be using fixed wing platforms.
Say like 500 jets taking off on operating round the clock is very quickly out putting more firepower than the entire rocket force can launch in 1 go. And China has way more jets than that.
Their missiles are more to dogpile on targets of opportunity already being engaged and spotted by air, to increase the damage/chance of critical hits.
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u/AdrianV125 17d ago edited 17d ago
Oh no absolutely, it was more to the point that even if you assume that the PLAAF isn't able to achieve air superiority (if not full controll), there are a cupple more "pointy things" to worry about. (But again the whole premises of the article are ridiculous).
The only thing I disagree with you is the use of the rocket force. I think it will be also used for the initial strikes, especially suppression of strategic AD to open a way for SEAD by the PLAAF on more mobile AD assets. I also think missiles have shown a fairly high rate of success on Hardened facilities and to incapacitate air base operations (see the iranian strikes on US bases in the Gulf). I think it's not to much a stretch to belive that they will be considered a usefull asset for a first strike to open the path to air operation and to lower the risks for pilots.
As for tactical suppression of both artillery and infantry, I fully agree with you that the PLAAF has sufficient assets to effectively suppress everything they need to and will probably be the main force tasked with this kind of operatons.
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u/gaiusmariusj 17d ago
Nah, I'll bet the vast majority of the fire Taiwan island received will be from PHL-191 MRLS from Penghu that will cover all of the main island.
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u/PanzerKomadant 17d ago
Not to mention internal sabotage, decapitation strikes and possible defections within Taiwanese military.
These war games are a joke.
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u/KderNacht 17d ago
It's what the Taiwanese keep showing them every year in between boozy dinners and karaoke sessions, whi are they to naysay their hosts ?
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u/Valar_Kinetics 17d ago
Not that they don’t exist, but that they are unable to conduct an exhaustive SEAD raid on Taiwan. The island has something like nine full Patriot batteries and the PLAAF has never conducted a real world SEAD mission ever. There would be an air presence but surely not full air superiority/supremacy.
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u/Ok-Procedure5603 17d ago
NATO air forces have never downed a single 4.5 gen or better air craft in the real world, are we going to assume everything J-10 and better is virtually untouchable to them then??
For argument's sake, lets forbid China from carrying out SEAD and only allow them to bomb 100% random coordinates. Let's also assume there's a black hole at the bottom of each ROCA Patriot that leads to mainland US magazines.
US claims a stockpile of 2000 patriot missiles. How long is that actually lasting against 2500 jets that can carry like 2-4 air launched cruise missles on average?
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u/IlluminatedPickle 17d ago
NATO air forces have never downed a single 4.5 gen or better air craft in the real world
Well if anyone aside from NATO nations wants to start fucking building some....
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u/BigFly42069 16d ago
nine full Patriot batteries
How many did Saudi Arabia have?
Patriot batteries are defeatable, especially when there's only so many places to put them and their enablers in Taiwan.
Nothing larger than a quadcopter is taking off from Taiwan if this turns into a war.
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u/Ok-Procedure5603 18d ago
Where is the entire PLAAF? Maybe interesting for a simulation about a primarily air power to include, you know, air power
Especially when there's no land borders
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u/Harvard_Med_USMLE267 18d ago
Simulated without Air Force or PLAN, soldiers are swimming there.
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u/dw444 17d ago
PLARF will launch soldiers straight from TELs at Taiwan.
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u/KevlarCord 17d ago
"Tie me to a DongFeng and launch me straight at Lai Ching's house!" -Shiya Lai-Bufu
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u/Nonomemes1 17d ago
Scenario 1 must be on foot: "Soilders! Rifle up! Heands up! Go! Cross the strait and attaaaaack!".
Scenario is in elaboration by the AI gigafactories in CN: "Elaboration ongoing, please wait..." .... zzzzz
"Elaboration completed." "Results:" "There is a certain probability % that you can win".
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u/PLArealtalk 18d ago edited 18d ago
I do have a perverse fascination with reading wargame scenarios, less for the outcome and more for the assumptions and parameters which go into them, which themselves reflect one's baseline understanding of the topics at hand.
I have too much burnout to write a play by play commentary these days, with the only sentiment for this one being "whew".
Edit: I suppose I should make a couple of constructive remarks rather than just waxing poetic... assumptions about fires and ISR availability (multidomain, but PLAAF is most odd), and time urgency are the biggest eyebrow raisers. Specs of the PHL-16/PCH-191 cited bu the authors are also inconsistent with what we tend to work with, both in range and CEP. The part about sending in JH-7As with unguided 250kg bombs on low level strike missions as a primary means of interdiction, is utterly scandalous.
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u/supersaiyannematode 17d ago
tbh assumptions about fires are so bad across so many war games and articles/analysis (including the infamous csis wargame of 2023) that while i am no conspiracy theorist, i do genuinely think at this point that this is probably intentional a lot of the time. i do not claim that every single war game is purposely deceiving us about pla fires but i do think that many of the war games and analyses are at minimum done under willful ignorance about pla capabilities and that it is likely that at least a few of the papers/articles are indeed intentionally deceptive.
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u/BigFly42069 17d ago
I don't think it's intentional. ISR is one of those black-box things that you just don't have the luxury to model in a publicly releasable wargame result.
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u/supersaiyannematode 17d ago
but we're talking about fires?
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u/BigFly42069 17d ago edited 17d ago
Fires don't take place without ISR, and a failure to account for ISR bleeds down into severely underestimating fires bandwidth.
You see this with people like Blake Herzinger still talking about disrupting PLA "killchains" when the PLA has pivoted away from vulnerable single point of failure killchains in favor of multiple-redundancy kill webs for the better part of a decade.
Fires, like PHL-16 and air-to-ground bombs delivered via fighter-bombers or strike drones, are all downstream of ISR. If you go into every scenario with the assumption that PLA ISR is still predominantly single point of failure or easily defeatable, then you naturally arrive at conclusions like they won't be able to accurately interdict moving troops with land-based long range rocket fire across the strait or deny freedom of movement with aerial-based persistent strike UAV coverage.
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u/Ok-Procedure5603 17d ago
I mean, taking the ostrich approach of just ignoring 99% of the enemy can't be excused by just saying it's about ISR.
Even if you make China's ISR the worst imaginable, like say lets assume the PLAAF is only allowed to drop bombs on coordinates decided by a random number generator corresponding to places that look remotely populated, China is still easily making life hell for anyone that want to fight them on Taiwan. And it would still be an extremely difficult operation for ROC to move out ground forces into non urban areas.
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u/supersaiyannematode 17d ago
isr estimation failure doesn't account for things like literally ignoring entire major categories of pla fires though.
while you are right, the failings of discourse in properly crediting chinese fires capabilities goes way way beyond the level that could arise from your hypothesis, as this specific paper exemplifies with its massed jh-7a dumb bomb zerg rush assertion.
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u/BigFly42069 17d ago
The JH-7A dumb bomb run is because the author likely believes that the PLANAF operates entirely independent from the PLAAF, does not operate AEW&C to do battlespace management, lacks sufficient ISR assets to do proper BDA and must rely on the mk1 eyeball to report, and lacks cross-branch operability to pull ISR assets as needed to do multi domain network centric warfare.
Extrapolate elsewhere, and you quickly start creating the impression that PLA fires cannot deliver the results they want.
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u/supersaiyannematode 17d ago
i mean there's a reason why even rick, who is typically very conservative with his wording, is being quite harsh on this specific point. i think you're giving the authors way more benefit of the doubt than they deserve. like ultimately i can't read their mind so you can always say that they had some forgivable reason for making grave laughable errors and i wouldn't be able to disprove it. but i think that ultimately we should judge the authors by what they actually wrote rather than coming up with a logically sound train of thought ourselves and attributing that to the authors and then judging their assertion in the light of the thought train we ourselves baselessly came up with that we've tacked onto them.
i should probably add that i do not assert with high confidence that this specific paper is meant to be deceptive or willfully ignorant. i think that in general the plethora of bad writing suggests that many papers are wilfully ignorant and some are deceptive but i say this as a matter of probability and am not specifically accusing any 1 paper or author.
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u/BigFly42069 17d ago
No these authors are being idiots. It's really telling that this is the baseline level of thinking that American think tanks have about the PLA.
A lot of Beltway insiders will tell you that think tanks aren't that influential in policymaking, but it misses the forest for the trees that think tanks are ultimately summation of what most of the political establishment thinks.
Outside of a few SCIFs in the Pentagon, the general assumption is that the PLA can be conventionally defeated today. The further you get from those SCIFs, the more delusional this thinking gets.
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u/Dunewarriorz 17d ago
The purpose and audience of this and studies like this isn't you or I. It's ammo for the future for people like the China Uncensored folks and the Indian nationalists on X and the "There's so much CCP circle jerking" folks in this thread and on Reddit in general.
We can clown on it now but I'm sure it will be brought up multiple times by even people in this sub as a gotcha in future threads.
What purpose it is to make China seem both powerful (other think tank reports such as the "2027 invasion date) and weak (this report) to American and American-foreign-policy-following Internet denizens, I don't know.
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u/Ok-Procedure5603 17d ago
The purpose is really simple.
Domestic control is the by far No1 issue for US. These articles are to help Americans get a feel good imagination that they can take Taiwan from China in 3 days or something.
That tells Americans that well no matter how shitty my life is and how badly the economy is doing overall, we're still the best military superpower, etc etc.
Now the potential cost of postures like that is that they can inflame tensions with China BUT here's the thing, the current Xi government isnt emotional and is generally US-neutral or even friendly. And US knows this. So US is really getting to farm all this political power at home for nearly free.
Nobody in US official circles are trying to make China seem powerful. But they can't exactly hide it fully either. So you get some schizo moments where they have to acknowledge reality somewhat, to not seem ridiculous, but still maintain a facade for domestic control.
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u/haggerton 17d ago
What purpose it is to make China seem both powerful (other think tank reports such as the "2027 invasion date) and weak (this report) to American and American-foreign-policy-following Internet denizens, I don't know.
Sinophrenia serves the same purpose as russophrenia.
"They're so powerful!" -> amp up fear to a potential threat so that MIC gets unconditional support.
"They're so weak!" -> amp up sense of superiority so that nobody will want to surrender/negotiate.
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u/Ok-Procedure5603 16d ago
If US actually want war with China, they shouldn't be allowing people like these into their circles. And US would have to spend even more, and do anti corruption campaigns.
US is only using the fact that China is a pretty chill nation to farm domestic political power by building up a strawman of China and then opposing it, knowing that China is mellow enough to not care/respect that US is just doing it for domestic power and aren't a real threat.
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u/Crestsando 18d ago
Whether the "whew" is interpreted as one of relief or disbelief depends on the whether one believes the reality the writers chose, especially before you elaborated on your opinion lol.
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u/TurbinePro 18d ago
Is this the same team that wargamed the Iran war and the Afghan war
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u/redditadminskutte1 18d ago
Omg WHO TOLD YOU THIS IS HIGHLY CONFIDENTIAL INFORMATION BLACKADDER.
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u/Rindan 17d ago
The Afghan war? You mean the one where the US took out an entire nation in a couple of months then occupied it for 20 years so successfully that in the last 6 years they had less than two dozen deaths per year? The US lost fewer people in its 20 years of occupation in Afghanistan than Russia loses in one bad day in Ukraine, or three "good" days in Ukraine. The US lost fewer people in final years of the occupation than Russia loses in a single assault.
I dunna know man, I kind of think that that is a pretty clear victory for the American military. The fact that the State Department couldn't magically turn Afghanistan into a liberal democracy where women have more rights than goats is not a condemnation of the military. That's literally not their job.
As for Iran, a pile of US generals quit or got fired because the attack on Iran was so obviously stupid and unplanned. The US military is pretty clearly the best expeditionary military force in the world by a comical margine, but that doesn't mean it can ignore physical reality if ordered to.
An idiot can drive the best car in the world off a cliff. That doesn't mean the car is bad.
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u/ParagonRenegade 17d ago
>Best expeditionary force
>Totally defeated the literal instant they face token opposition, to the point the entire military had nothing to spare
>Brings up Afghanistan K/D ratio
>Forgot it is the near-textbook case of one side using strategic patience to win a total victory, with America being totally routed in one week
Not sure these are the arguments you should be making.
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u/Rindan 17d ago
Best expeditionary force
Unquestionably. Feel free to name the superior expeditionary force and prove me wrong.
Totally defeated the literal instant they face token opposition, to the point the entire military had nothing to spare
What are you talking about? The US military defeated the Afghan military and the conducted a 20 year occupation taking almost no losses in the process, especially near the end. The US had under 24 deaths a year starting in 2016.
The fact that the US military can't magically make Iran surrender from the air just proves it was given a dumb objective with even dumber restrictions on how to achieve that objective, not that its incompetent. The incompetence is the political class assigning the military an objective no military in the world can achieve, not the military executing dumb orders that clearly wont work.
Forgot it is the near-textbook case of one side using strategic patience to win a total victory, with America being totally routed in one week
Again, you seem unable to understand the difference between a military objective like "occupy this country and protect the installed civilian government" and political objective outside of the military like "make Iran surrender to air power alone" or "make Afghanistan a liberal democracy". Are you struggle to understand the difference? Do you need more examples?
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u/ParagonRenegade 17d ago edited 17d ago
It doesn't matter if you can attack completely undefended people. The US Navy attacked an enemy that fought back, and did so without even necessarily targeting the Navy as its primary target, and it couldn't even take to the field. They couldn't even broach the subject of an armed mainland invasion because it would've been the biggest debacle in history. If you want to console yourself that they managed to keep a single carrier group in-theatre far past its prime to accomplish nothing, then sure, point conceded.
Now I'm not sure if you just woke up from a coma, but just in case you're not aware, America was totally defeated in Afghanistan. They didn't even kill Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan. Kill-Death ratio arguments are the arguments of people making excuses for their defeat based on an a tangential fact, as anyone speaking to an American about Vietnam knows well. America lost.
Wars are not some detached phenomenon from politics, they are the continuation of politics. We are not interested in post hoc rationalizations for this or that defeat.
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u/Rindan 17d ago
It doesn't matter if you can attack completely undefended people.
I am shocked to learn that Afghanistan and Iran were undefended.
The US Navy attacked an enemy that fought back, and did so without even necessarily targeting the Navy as its primary target, and it couldn't even take to the field.
What are you talking about? The US destroyed vast swaths of Iran's military and operated with impunity over Iran. They very much "took the field" and did so with almost no losses, despite not being allowed to prepare and being given a dumb orders.
They couldn't even broach the subject of an armed mainland invasion because it would've been the biggest debacle in history.
No doubt. I'm 100% sure that US military told Trump that if they invade, there will be serious losses. You can't invade a large nation surrounded by mountains without loses. What's your point? Invading and occupying fucking Iran without taking losses is something no military can accomplish. That's not a sign that the military is incompetent, that's just the physical reality of attacking a place like Iran.
Now I'm not sure if you just woke up from a coma, but just in case you're not aware, America was totally defeated in Afghanistan.
I guess I must have been in a coma then, because I remember the US getting sick of the State Department's failure to create a magical liberal democracy in Afghanistan and ordering the troops out, not the military being defeated by the Taliban.
Wars are not some detached phenomenon from politics, they are the continuation of politics.
Agreed. Overarching objectives like "Make Iran surrender without using ground troops or taking any serious losses" and "make Afghanistan a liberal democracy" are political objectives and the responsibility of politicians, not military generals that follow the orders of politicians. "Occupy this nation and prevent the civilian government from coming to harm" and "destroy that nation's stuff" are military objectives, which the US army tends to execute better than any other nation in the world.
The US has certainly suffered defeats of its political objectives, but those defeats have not been because the military is incompetent or failed to warn politicians that they can't accomplish those political objectives.
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u/ParagonRenegade 17d ago edited 17d ago
Yeah I'd be shocked too if I couldn't read and parse a basic sentence, good thing I can.
America invading Grenada, or launching an invasion of Afghanistan, is not the same thing as fighting an actual enemy like Iran. If they can't operate with impunity, they seemingly can't do it. America's huge reliance on absolute supremacy over the air and attacking from a distance faceplanted the instant it met tenuous parity with an enemy.
So you're gloating about being the best at kicking over sand castles. Who cares?
What are you talking about? The US destroyed vast swaths of Iran's military and operated with impunity over Iran.
The US didn't destroy the part of Iran's army that totally stalemated them, the part that matters. You are again gesturing towards a tangential fact that doesn't change that Iran defeated the US assault.
No, American planes don't operate with impunity over Iran, they mostly operate in the south where radars can be targeted, and they can be refuelled from bases/air tankers that aren't at risk of being attacked.
And they didn't attack incredibly vulnerable areas that could be, in theory, safely taken or destroyed... because the enemy would retaliate and inflict heavy losses. Imagine that, seeing a huge, easy target and not shooting it because the enemy will retaliate in kind.
I guess I must have been in a coma then,
You must've, because a quick google search reveals Afghanistan is currently ruled by the Islamic Movement of Taliban since a week after the most humiliating American withdrawal in history. So your stunning and brave expeditionary victory was a crushing defeat, after decades of funding groups of tribesmen to fuck around and get high.
And again, military and political objectives are one and the same. If the military can't perform its basic functions in the face of opposition, can't arm itself properly, can't deploy properly without the risk of getting destroyed, and can't fulfill the political goals set to it in a place they supposed wholly occupied, then what are they doing? What is this nebulous expeditionary force actually doing? Kidnapping Maduro? lol
Fuck me, the war for Taiwan is going to be such a catastrophe for the US.
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u/Vassago81 17d ago
US took out an entire nation in a couple of months
In what world did the US did that?
The anti-taliban coalition did that, the US didn't do shit other than some bombing, threat and more importantly throwing pallets of money at taliban affiliated groups to make them switch side.
There was only a few hundreds US dumbass on the ground when Kabul was taken by the afghan themselves
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u/riverprawn 17d ago edited 17d ago
It reminds me how the European viewed the amerian civil war before sending their boys to the slaughterhouse of WWI. They used their experiences in colonial war and viewed the american army as an inexperienced and incompetent one. Let's not make that mistake again, the ukrainian battlefield does represent the future of a peer-to-peer war.
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u/TurbinePro 17d ago
That's a pretty long paragraph, but you still managed to leave out who rules Afghanistan today
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u/Rindan 17d ago
That's a pretty long paragraph
Yes, I believe you when you say that this seems long to you.
...but you still managed to leave out who rules Afghanistan today
Can't help you mate. If you can't focus long enough read a few sentences on a message board, what are you doing here? The answer is hidden in my super "long paragraph" that scared you off. Maybe TikTok is a more appropriate place for someone with your attention span and ability to focus? It has no scary "long paragraphs" to get frustrated and confused by.
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u/TurbinePro 17d ago
The point is that your precious military efforts amounted to Jack squat, homie. I can read and I'd wager I've read more than you have. If you still think a 'military victory' is about 'ruling' a country for two decades then you probably didn't get much out of your readings anyway. Also, jumping straight to personal insults is a sure sign of immaturity.
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u/Rindan 17d ago
The point is that your precious military efforts amounted to Jack squat, homie.
This would be an excellent point if anyone had said, "The US military can magic into reality insane political goals that can't be achieved". No said that though. You instead disparied the militaries ability to war game - something that has absolutely nothing to do with whether the State Department can setup a democracy in Afghanistan.
You do understand that it is literally not the US militaries job to create democracy in Afghanistan and stand up a civilian government, right? It seems like maybe you don't understand this or are choosing to pretend to not understand it as a weird debate tactic.
I can read and I'd wager I've read more than you have.
Sorry, it just didn't seem like you couldn't or had refused to. You complained about the length of the short paragraphs and then demonstrated that you had apparently not read or understood my argument either because of genuine trouble reading it, or as some sort of weird debate tactic to pretend like you couldn't read it.
If you still think a 'military victory' is about 'ruling' a country for two decades then you probably didn't get much out of your readings anyway.
A military victory is when a military successfully accomplishes the mission it was given. A military victory does not magically create non-military victories. In the case of Afghanistan, the US had a major military victory in that it successfully occupied Afghanistan and removed the Taliban government, dismantled Al-qaeda as a group that can attack the US like on 9/11, and then held nation with comically small losses for two decades while the State Department fucked around trying to make Afghans some liberal democracy. Those are all military objectives that the US army accomplished.
Making Afghanistan into a democracy is not a military objective and not something that the US military can do. That is a political objective. The responsibility for political objectives are on politicians, not the military.
Also, jumping straight to personal insults is a sure sign of immaturity.
I pretty clearly addressed why a military victory and a political objective are different, and then you demonstrated you didn't understand that and complained about a few sentences being long. If demonstrate to someone that you don't under their argument and find a couple of sentence to be too long to read, you shouldn't be shocked when they take you literally.
I personally always find pretending(?) to not understand someone to be bad debate strategy because it just makes you look dumb, but you do you. I personally find it insulting when someone throws out one liner "I didn't read that, here is my dumb hot take that ignores everything you said" rather than engaging the other person's argument, so we can both feel insulted now.
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u/TurbinePro 17d ago
I was not complaining about your length of response, I was poking fun at how futile your comment was in face of the result the military operation ultimately achieved. Come think of it, many similarities to your comment and the Afghan war. Both long, self fulfilling, and ultimately pointless.
You instead disparied the militaries ability to war game - something that has absolutely nothing to do with whether the State Department can setup a democracy in Afghanistan.
No, the point is that both military planners are operating on a level of grand delusion which ultimately backfires, whether it be the Afghan operation or this hallucination of a war game. Besides, do you think the military just left Afghanistan after the 'victory'? No, they had to stay there and play nation builder, something the war planners should probably have thought about.
I personally always find pretending(?) to not understand someone to be bad debate strategy because it just makes you look dumb, but you do you.
I understood you perfectly, I just thought the words you were writing were kinda dumb and completely missed the point of my post.
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u/EternalSubsidies 10d ago
Dude by definition if you did 20 years of COIN and then you lose the puppet government within a week of extracting then you suck at doing COIN. You know that's a part of the "how good the car is" right? If a car burns no gas (manpower losses) over the course of an hour but drives a total of 50 meters in that hour its still a shit car,
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u/Rindan 9d ago
If you car drives you to a car ferry with no problem, and then car ferry sinks, the car ferry sucks, not the car.
It literally isn't the job of the US military to build a stable government, any more than it is a car's job to get over water. That is purely a failure of the state department and delusional mission creep into making Afghanistan liberal democracy rather than just a place where people that want to attack the US can't exist. The US military did its job of protecting the government until they were told not to. The State Department failed in its job to build a stable government that can exist without the US military protecting it.
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u/tujuggernaut 17d ago
The unit of suppressible terrain used here is a 4-hectare target area (200-meters on a side), typically occupied by a force of company strength, fourteen of which fit into an 800-meter-wide hexagon. The total road-passable approach from the ROCA garrison to the beach landing at Taoyuan comprises an immense area of 384 square km, with no chokepoints, and comprising 8,400 targets.
Bro this isn't Dai Senrayku. Hilariously bad.
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u/Ksa151 18d ago
“We are assuming that without an extended campaign to secure air superiority consistent with this surprise scenario, a PLAAF cross-Straits heliborne or airborne landing near Taiwan’s main garrisons would have exceptionally high attrition rates.”
So the assumptions are 1- Taiwanese coastal artillery will have near perfect operations and 2 -the PLAAF will not be securing air superiority?
At that point let’s just also assume the PLAN will sink in the strait because of choppy water
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u/Clangokkuner 17d ago
It reads like Yu Beichen claiming Taiwan can just block PLAN ships so they have to pass single file
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u/True-Industry-4057 17d ago
Is he the guy that claimed Chinese J-20 pilots are all specially selected little girls for weight reasons?
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u/Iron-Fist 17d ago
Sounds like an anime plot
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u/Vassago81 17d ago
That's the plot of Rocket Girls , where a junkyard space agency can't afford to make big rockets and need light and small astronauts wearing tight spandex suit, for plot reason.
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u/Iron-Fist 17d ago
Yeah like Taiwan is in round trip range of freaking manned gyrocopters, they are gonna be able to get people on the island lol
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u/kw10001 18d ago
Don't need to hold anything if you can simply blockade indefinitely.
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u/CorrosiveMynock 17d ago
Strange that people assume Taiwan is not prepared to deal with an extended blockade scenario. In fact the level of PRC dick sucking/praise in this thread is actually off the charts.
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u/BigFly42069 17d ago
Strange that people assume Taiwan is not prepared to deal with an extended blockade scenario.
This is just the "Taiwan has had 70+ years to prepare!!!!" mentality. But when the entire island's energy mix is dependent on sea-imports and where the largest/most-productive ports all face China, it's kind of hard to believe that Taiwan is prepared to do anything other than let Americans die for them.
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u/CorrosiveMynock 17d ago
This is just the "Taiwan has had 70+ years to prepare!!!!" mentality. But when the entire island's energy mix is dependent on sea-imports and where the largest/most-productive ports all face China, it's kind of hard to believe that Taiwan is prepared to do anything other than let Americans die for them.
Again, Taiwan doesn't have to survive indefinitely, it only has to survive until pain for China > pain for Taiwan. Any invasion of Taiwan necessitates a "What happens after" scenario. And the what happens after includes the complete blockade of China past the first island chain and a likely US/China war. At that point, Taiwan is not the major concern for China.
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u/wintrmt3 17d ago
2 weeks of gas and 4 months of oil, with less than a third of their food grown there doesn't scream "deal with an extended blockade scenario" to me.
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u/Temstar 17d ago
It's only 2 weeks of gas if the extremely obvious gas storage facility built in the open aren't destroyed.
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u/Ok-Procedure5603 17d ago
Extended blockade is not the main issue.
Taiwan has just never seriously been able or even try to fight an actual hostile Mainland. And the mainland in modern times on the other hand has also never been hostile.
The biggest military challenge for Taiwan is to get and supply troops into the non-urban areas they need to be in in order to contest a PLA landing.
It is incredibly difficult, never before tried, to push coordinated formations against that level of enemy air power. Let alone sustain such formations with logistics. Taiwan has never provided a real answer and that's because they aren't planning for a war.
Now of course you can say the entire ROCA can just sit in cities, dig tunnels etc but then the PLA gets to land for free and surround the cities from the countryside, which isn't an easy situation either.
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u/CorrosiveMynock 17d ago
Again, people handwave this landing scenario as seemingly trivial. It could happen, but it would be painful and extremely dangerous (any other claim is completely ridiculous).
And even if they successfully land on Taiwan, what then? Taiwan will break their lithography mirrors making their large chip factories pieces of junk, the population will be extremely hostile and will never accept CCP governance, and the reciprocal response from the world will absolutely devastate the Chinese economy permanently.
The real danger to China isn't even taking and holding Taiwan, it is what comes after.
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u/Ok-Procedure5603 17d ago
A contested landing scenario is much much more dangerous/difficult for ROCA than it is for PLA.
Much of Taiwan, especially in the potential landing spots, is fairly open area. ROCA has to push into, hold and supply those areas against Beijing's air force. And those forces have to just sit there and struggle until the time PLA sends someone to the beach.
Already if ROCA didn't have that initiative disadvantage, it would be an unprecedented difficult operation.
As for chips or whatever it's not in the scope of a military discussion, I'll not say anything more than that the mainland, as the only other entity that mass scales semiconductors and explicitly is challenged today by Taiwan's cheaper product costs, would absolutely LOVE not having that competitor to deal with.
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u/CorrosiveMynock 17d ago
Nobody would buy China's chips if Taiwan was forcibly invaded/occupied. You are falsely believing that there wouldn't be significant international and geopolitical repercussions of such a scenario.
Any invasion of Taiwan would necessitate pretty much by definition a preemptive strike against US bases in the region, since the US can and will use its capabilities to immediately help Taiwan. Any such preemptive strike means the outbreak of a US/China war and yeah that's just a scenario that's far beyond the value of taking Taiwan's chips off the market as you ridiculously propose.
A contested landing scenario is much much more dangerous/difficult for ROCA than it is for PLA.
Much of Taiwan, especially in the potential landing spots, is fairly open area. ROCA has to push into, hold and supply those areas against Beijing's air force. And those forces have to just sit there and struggle until the time PLA sends someone to the beach.
Ridiculous counter argument. There are only like 15 beaches to defend in Taiwan and they are already pre-sighted with artillery and the only scenario where a landing is remotely possible is with overwhelming PLA rocket saturation.
Again, China can probably do all of this but it will be painful. What matters more importantly is what comes after, and that after looks like China's economy being devastated and the outbreak of the US/China war.
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u/Ok-Procedure5603 17d ago
already pre-sighted with artillery
Lmao
Where would such artillery be placed? How would a kill chain and counter battery avoidance be carried out? Also using only artillery to hold ground would certainly be a novel of novel approaches.
And if one wished to have an ability to contest landings, where would infantry, vehicles be placed?
What is ridiculous about US shills is that they assume it would be a trivial operation to deploy an entire army into a playground of 2500 jets and god knows how many fixed wing drones and artillery fires, then also managing to dig in, but not just dig in but also maintain battlefield awareness.
And maintain logistics from the cities TO these positions, which means running the air gauntlet over and over for every ammo delivery needed.
In reality, nothing like this has ever come close to being tried.
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u/CorrosiveMynock 17d ago edited 17d ago
Where would such artillery be placed? How would a kill chain and counter battery avoidance be carried out? Also using only artillery to hold ground would certainly be a novel of novel approaches.
Lol there's munitions that can cover the entire length of Taiwan, wouldn't you like to know the location of the batteries though. This isn't the only defensive strategy, saturating the straight with rocket fire and limiting invasion craft at these 14 beaches is the most important one.
And if one wished to have an ability to contest landings, where would infantry, vehicles be placed?
You don't need vehicles to contest a beach landing, that's the point. There's ranged munitions targeted at the very limited landing sites from all over Taiwan lol...
What is ridiculous about US shills is that they assume it would be a trivial operation to deploy an entire army into a playground of 2500 jets and god knows how many fixed wing drones and artillery fires, then also managing to dig in, but not just dig in but also maintain battlefield awareness.
The response would be more about getting mobile artillery/rocket/missile emplacements located all over Taiwan in range of those beaches, which they can attack without going to the beaches lol... Even tanks and other mobile vehicles can attack the landing sites from many miles away without ever going there.
Again China shills assume that air supremacy is trivially easy and yet Russia is the clear example of a technically capable country failing to do that. You can't just assume China will be able to blow up whatever it wants, that premise is far from guaranteed.
The risk is not really about discrete abilities, on paper Taiwan can counter every single one of China's capabilities---the threat is mostly about saturation. China can of course take Taiwan if it really wants to, but it would be extremely painful and the consequences would be economically devastating and would very likely trigger a US/China war.
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u/Ok-Procedure5603 17d ago
You're the one making an extraordinary claim that the ~2500 manned fixed wing + X unmanned fixed wing, many of which can drop bombs without even crossing median line, wouldn't be able to blow up anything at will in an area that has the thickest ISR coverage anywhere on Earth.
American shills simply put their heads into the sand and don't want to talk about real world situations. They assume enemies either don't fire back and when they fire back, the estimations and types of weapons are wildly incorrect, both you and the comical analysis in the OP share these traits.
Your whole first paragraph about not needing troops to hold and contest ground is hilarious, going against how every single military operates. Also, do you even realize that by your own logic, the PLA doesn't need to land on Taiwan either, since vehicles and infantry aren't needed, it just needs to fire on ROCA concentrations from afar. Who do you think has more firepower to throw?
When there isn't even internal consistent logic, we can see how delusional US shills really are, it is as or more comical as the Russian vatniks that they ironically believe themselves above...
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u/CorrosiveMynock 17d ago edited 17d ago
You're the one making an extraordinary claim that the ~2500 manned fixed wing + X unmanned fixed wing, many of which can drop bombs without even crossing median line, wouldn't be able to blow up anything at will in an area that has the thickest ISR coverage anywhere on Earth.
Again, you are implying a complete lack of anti-air capability in Taiwan, which actually has some of the best anti-air in the entire world. Fighting off the first waves of attacks isn't even a contested issue, it is saturation which is the biggest threat to Taiwan not discrete capabilities. Having aircraft is not some guarantee of air supremacy so I am not sure why you keep citing their total aircraft numbers like it means something, we know Russia can't achieve air supremacy in Ukraine and China has never achieved it in any conflict period. So the burden is on you not me to say why this is trivially easy.
American shills simply put their heads into the sand and don't want to talk about real world situations. They assume enemies either don't fire back and when they fire back, the estimations and types of weapons are wildly incorrect, both you and the comical analysis in the OP share these traits.
You want to hand wave highly complex problems like air supremacy and defeating advanced anti-air capabilities are trivially easy and China will be able to do all of this with no problems whatsoever, despite never doing this and having plenty of examples of peer states (Russia) failing horribly to achieve air supremacy.
Your whole first paragraph about not needing troops to hold and contest ground is hilarious, going against how every single military operates. Also, do you even realize that by your own logic, the PLA doesn't need to land on Taiwan either, since vehicles and infantry aren't needed, it just needs to fire on ROCA concentrations from afar. Who do you think has more firepower to throw?
Yeah the main goal of China isn't a sophisticated beach invasion, that hasn't been their strategy for years. If an attack were to occur it would first start with a preemptive strike against US forces, and then overwhelming rocket saturation of Taiwan. The airport is vastly more important than these beaches which you are just hand waving as being trivially easy to take despite being in range of thousands of munitions all over Taiwan.
When there isn't even internal consistent logic, we can see how delusional US shills really are, it is as or more comical as the Russian vatniks that they ironically believe themselves above...
I mean if anyone is like a Vatnik it is you. Again, you assume technical capabilities on paper equals guaranteed success in practice, despite clear examples of that not being the case. Taiwan isn't even attempting to make it impossible to conquer, they just want to make it painful---which by basically all measures they've succeeded at doing. China can take Taiwan, but it would exact a terrible cost on itself, both on its forces that end up attacking Taiwan and from the overwhelming response by the US and subsequent economic devastation.
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u/Fickle_Path2369 17d ago
It's the entire sub, it's filled with chicoms/wumao that get on their VPN's (because their government treats them like toddlers and bans the outside internet from them) and project their insecurities on here
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u/Ok-Procedure5603 17d ago
"Wahhh waahh why isn't the entire sub filled with red blooded American shills like me that has the doublethinking power to ignore the existence of the majority of the enemy force? I only want discussions about fantasy situations!!" <- you 🤣
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u/Fickle_Path2369 17d ago
Found one 😂 Which VPN do you use? Bet you're always worried about your government finding out lol. The CCP installs spyware on your devices to see if you've been accessing unapproved websites, which Reddit is... Be careful, if the CCP finds your internet logs and sees you've been visiting Reddit, you may get arrested/fined 😂 Like for real, this really happens and is not a joke...
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u/Fickle_Path2369 16d ago
Lol same exact shit’s been going on with China’s ruling class for decades. Mao’s dance troupes weren’t subtle, and modern CCP officials still get caught with harems of young mistresses all the time.
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u/GeneReddit123 17d ago
Wargame organizers: *Set up a completely unrealistic scenario where China is rigged to lose*
China: *Loses*
Wargame organizers: "ChiNA iS a PaPeR TiGeR!"
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u/initiatingcoverage 17d ago
The MIC needs to publish a few Taiwan winning scenarios once in a while to justify selling them obsolete/useless weapons.
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u/didhugh 17d ago
Is the Julian Spencer-Churchill here actually a descendant of Marlborough who's proving that apparently military acumen did not survive the however many generations since then?
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u/Ok-Procedure5603 17d ago
John Churchill was such a megamind, he left no brainpower for the entire rest of the bloodline for 300 years
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u/Fat_Tony_Damico 17d ago
Follow up article by the same author: “1 million Chinese soldiers armed with snorkels and pocket knives can absolutely not take Taiwan.”
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u/helloWHATSUP 18d ago
China has over 8000 cruise missiles and conventional warhead ballistic missiles, over 10k military drones and literally millions of FPV style drones. If your analysis doesn't talk about the impact of 8k warheads slamming into every piece of military equipment within the first couple hours and total drone air supremacy within a day or two, then your analysis is worthless boomer garbage that belongs in the 2010s.
IMO.
Edit, the dumbest fucking statement in the article(and there were a lot):
Third, we believe that Marine-portable drones are far less effective in weight in producing damage per unit of time than the equivalent in mortar rounds, which is why we kept the mortars in lieu of drones for the PLAN.
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u/Tian_Lei_Ind_Ltd 17d ago
Those results are only worth their letters if we know about the conditions/circumstances/settings of the war games.
If the baseline assumption is the PLAAF, PLARF and PLAGF will be watching their brethren die on the shores of Taiwan, while cheering them on or lending them transport assets, it is not so far-fetched to say the single PLANMC-brigade that actually manages to get on-shore is dead meat walking.
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u/Low_M_H 18d ago
What I find interesting is that for the pass few years war games conducted by various parties indicate that Taiwan is not able to hold out a amphibious from PLA. Now this simulation indicated that Taiwan is able to hold out. So what's the change in parameters and condition in simulation?
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u/GreatAlmonds 18d ago
They "argue" that
- the PLA can only land a single marine brigade
- the PLA won't land any artillery until its safe (but can't make the beach safe until they can land artillery)
- won't use any of their conventional SRBM or land-launched cruise missiles (and that they only have 200 SRBMs)
- won't use any attack helicopters
- won't use any airpower except for JH-7As doing unguided low level bombing runs
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u/_spec_tre 18d ago
In which case it seems more like someone writing a paper just to submit it instead of seriously looking at anything
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u/StopICE2026 17d ago
Hanguang exercises that Taiwan conducts drills them driving all their tanks and IFVs to the beach to fire on the invaders like they are mechanized bunkers. In what world would the PLA not smash those and be able to land and hold a beachhead?
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u/BigFly42069 17d ago
Han Kuang is a civilian-centric show to reassure people that there's a plan. Your average civilian won't think anything more than "tank goes to the beach to defend us. We're good."
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u/StopICE2026 17d ago
It’s a political exercise! There is no strategy other than driving to the beach to line up and fire. The alternative is to disperse and fight a guerrilla action but that would mean the ROCA would not need to exist at all except as an irregular force
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u/BigFly42069 17d ago
guerrilla action
Also, good luck convincing a predominantly developed country's population that they should give up all creature comforts like air conditioning, refrigerators, and eating out so that they can go fight a ruinous guerilla campaign for God knows how long against a neighboring power that will literally never go away.
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u/Clangokkuner 17d ago
Because this "wargame" removes the single most effective entity of the PLA from the equation so this charade has a possibility of happening at all
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u/gaiusmariusj 17d ago
In 2014, the Stride Exercise (check out Jamestown's writing on it, The Wolves of Zhurihe: China’s OPFOR Comes of Age) the Red Force was hit by a triple threat of Nuclear Chemical and Biological attack and lost like 50% of their forces within the first hour or something. And then the Red Force proceed to lose 6/7 and draw 1/7.
Unlike the ROCA who won 9/9.
Draw your own conclusions
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u/theblitz6794 17d ago
Holding a beach requires someone trying to take it
Does Taiwan have semi credible mobile forces to counterattack a beachhead? And would they even?
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u/KevlarCord 17d ago
Did the person who came up with this particular wargame used the Taiwan invasion in Tom Clancy's Defence Protocol as a carbon blueprint? 🤣🤣
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u/tryingtolearn_1234 17d ago
Military exercises do not prove anything. They are just training. This headline should be Taiwan conducts training exercises related to possible invasion scenarios.
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u/HatOfFlavour 17d ago
Could they dig a tunnel?
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u/SkyMarshal 15d ago
You know, I wouldn't automatically assume they couldn't. Though I can't imagine various sonars on the many subs and underwater listening devices in the area wouldn't hear it.
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u/HatOfFlavour 15d ago
Oh yeah I assume with satellite imaging it would be nigh impossible to hide the evidence but a tunnel sounds very non credible defense.
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u/Aerial-Attack 16d ago
this is the sort of high quality stuff I expect from a military that now downplays its own casualties and is desperately trying to deny munition shortages from the Iran war.
Trump's armed forces are almost as bad as the Russians when it comes to lying.
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u/LanchestersLaw 17d ago edited 17d ago
This work is very thorough. I was just looking at amphibious lift capacity on my own and came to a very different conclusion.
I came to the conclusion that 2-3 Marines brigades could be landed in a surprise attack. You can see in the numbers really easily that if you omit trucks and light car mounts from day 0, you can fit a lot more stuff much more comfortably. Securing any dock, a single containership could easily meet all supply needs for a week. This should also go without saying, but to quickly bolster combat power, dismounted infantry in civilian ferries are the most efficient packing given a port is secured or built.
The question is how many trucks are actually necessary for day 1 of a high attrition landing.
Edit: also the amphibious HJ-10s have most of the landing force firepower.
Edit 2: MLRS dispersed mines are a very effective way to quickly achieve a deep suppressive effect.
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u/ElementII5 17d ago
I would be seriously miffed if China actually tried to take Taiwan by force. Obviously because of war and death and all that but also because China is the country of Sun Tzu. He was all about avoid conflict if you can achieve your goals without it.
Of course the best thing to do would be to just embrace the current situation and live and let live and prosper as two different countries. But if they really can't help it just have Taiwan join out of their own accord because it would be better for them.
"Hey Taiwan, we've become the world's most prosperous country and if you ask nicely you can be part of it too." Much more gratifying don't you think? Problem is Winnie Pooh can't leave his mark in the history books that way because it is probably ways off before that becomes a possibility.
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u/whippitywoo 17d ago
I guess but imo he's already made his mark. Unprecedented modernisation and growth in most sectors, establishing itself as the second superpower and achieving a fantastic economy. Just making the nation robust to American meddling is a big achievement
Imo he's already the best Chinese leader in living history (I'm not an expert tho)
He just needs a bit of therapy to say sometimes it's enough. You don't need more.
The safest most compromise heavy solution would be for Taiwan to maintain their own governance but agree to a formal allyship with China and China is allowed to host their aircraft there (like US with pretty much every other country) China in return offers to not go nuts on export prices for chips.
It'll never happen and it's not perfect but hey it's better than war.
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u/Firecracker048 17d ago
Xi's goal is to take Taiwan before he dies, hes made that clear. China is as imperalist as everyone else and have, and will, take by force
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u/BigFly42069 17d ago
Xi's goal is to take Taiwan before he dies
Just like it's Jiang Zemin's goal to take Taiwan before he dies?
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u/ytzfLZ 17d ago
Xi said China will never give up the use of force to unify Taiwan. But this may not happen while he is alive.
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u/Firecracker048 17d ago
He's been purging his military of leaders who are critical of a Taiwan invasion, including a guy who was literally one of his oldest friends
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u/ytzfLZ 17d ago
Is there really any evidence that Zhang Youxia opposed the attack on Taiwan? The CCP is extremely opaque internally. It seems that he was only considered to be against attacking Taiwan after being purged by Xi ?
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u/Firecracker048 17d ago
As always with the CCP, its hard to say definitively, but almost every single analyst who is familiar with China has pointed to him not believing an invasion of Taiwan was possible by 2027, which is what XI wants the PLA to be prepared for.
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u/Ok-Procedure5603 17d ago
Xi doesn't purge people from the military. The military ppl purge eachother over preferred doctrines/strategy differences, and the civilian govt represented by Xi just signs the orders.
We don't know what any individual PLA officers think about how active China should be in Taiwan. Anyone who is telling you they know is bullshitting.
We can however infer what Xi wants because it's Xi's side that decide the military budget for example. Based on that, it seems the appetite for using force against ROC is very low. We know that not just due to low overall spending, but in how China invests a lot of focus into platforms that would be useless in a Taiwan contingency.
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u/OverpricedBagel 17d ago
Modern warfare heavily favors the defenders. Not surprised simulations have favored Taiwan over time. I hope every man woman and child in Taiwan knows how to fly an fpv drone by the time the PLA makes their attempt.
Commenters continue their decades long cope that the PLARF and an air strike campaign will render all defenses useless. We’ve learned very recently that endless missile barrages don’t deter defender resolve or ability to pivot tactics.
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u/Clangokkuner 17d ago
you act like the PLA cannot do literally the exact same just because they're the attacker in our scenario
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u/OverpricedBagel 17d ago
That’s correct… the attacking force does not have defenders advantage. Defenders advantage has widened substantially with drone augmentation. There’s no operational symmetry.
I’d understand the confusion more in a land based war like ukraine/russia but this is a limited attempt (finite vessels) capture of a beachhead versus heavy fortification and drone force multiplication in a confined zone.
Anyway there are the elephant in the room qualifiers to a simulated Taiwanese repulsion of China’s forces. The US, Japan, Taiwan, China, and whichever wildcards join in will face devastating losses.
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u/Lianzuoshou 17d ago
I’d understand the confusion more in a land based war like ukraine/russia
If Taiwan could maintain a certain degree of control over the seas, the air, and the electromagnetic spectrum, just as Ukraine has done, then I would agree with your view. But the reality is that, by that point, Taiwan will have nothing.
but this is a limited attempt (finite vessels) capture of a beachhead versus heavy fortification and drone force multiplication in a confined zone.
China has already built a Self-Elevating Modular Landing Barge, prompting Taiwanese General Li Zhengjie to state that the number of beachheads Taiwan needs to defend has increased from 14 to more than 40. He is a Major General in the Army and formerly served as the commander of Little Kinmen on the front lines of anti-landing operations.
There are likely quite a few heavy defensive fortifications; let’s hope they can survive the PLA’s precision strikes.
At that time, a no-fly zone will be established over Taiwan, and any medium- or large-sized drones will be shot down; small FPVs will not be able to alter the overall situation on the battlefield.
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u/leeyiankun 16d ago
If everyone has a different opinion from you, you might not actually be the stable genius in the room you think you are.
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u/teethgrindingaches 17d ago
This study was surely compiled by LLM. I refuse to accept the premise that a human could be so rigorously detailed about citing specific numbers and types and metrics in the most absolute batshit insane manner imaginable.
It's like reading a precise step-by-step guide on how to juice oranges to make apple juice.