There has been a lot of discussion of the Taiwan vs PRC issue on this thread, so I thought some might find this interesting. TL:DR, a sophisticated war gaming exercise concluded that China does not have the military assets to successfully invade Taiwan currently.
War Game Finds U.S., Taiwan Can Defend Against a Chinese Invasion - All sides would pay a heavy price if ever there were a military conflict over the island
WASHINGTON—In the first three weeks after invading Taiwan, China sank two multibillion-dollar U.S. aircraft carriers, attacked American bases across Japan and on Guam, and destroyed hundreds of advanced U.S. jet fighters.
China’s situation was, if anything, worse. It landed troops on Taiwan and seized the island’s southern third, but its amphibious fleet was decimated by relentless U.S. and Japanese missile and submarine attacks and it couldn’t resupply its own forces. The capital, Taipei, was secure in Taiwanese hands, and Beijing was low on long-range ballistic missiles to counter America’s still-potent air and maritime power.
This complex daylong war game, played out late last week at a Washington think tank, demonstrated how destructive any attempted Chinese invasion of Taiwan could be across the Indo-Pacific—and what a forbidding challenge the island would be for Beijing’s military forces.
The exercise—involving “Red” and “Blue” teams, maps, 20-sided dice and complex computer calculations—seemed less like a simulation than a preview of a possible future. In the real world, as the game unfurled, China launched missiles around Taiwan and near Japan, part of a massive show of military might to protest a Taiwan visit by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
“No one thought this was realistic until the last few years,” said retired Air Force Brig. Gen. Paula Thornhill, one of the participants. In the past, she said, war gamers were sometimes accused of being “warmongers,” but since then, China has increased both its military capabilities and aspirations.
China has pledged to reunify Taiwan, which Beijing considers a renegade province, with the mainland, and hasn’t ruled out using military force. Russia’s unexpected early setbacks in its invasion of Ukraine may have given Chinese President Xi Jinping pause, some analysts say. Others worry Mr. Xi has drawn the opposite lesson: use maximum force and strike Taiwan’s leadership from the start.
The 7-hour war game, simulating three weeks of combat, illustrated what a daunting task it would be for China to launch an amphibious invasion across the 100-mile Taiwan Strait, even with its military advances of recent years.
“Probably the biggest [takeaway] is, under most assumptions, the United States and Taiwan can conduct a successful defense of the island. That’s different from many people’s impressions,” said Mark Cancian, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank, which hosted the game in its Washington offices.
But the cost would be high: Taiwan’s economy would be shattered, and the U.S. military so battered that it would take years to rebuild, with repercussions for America’s global power.
Some U.S. military commanders have pointed to 2027, the 100th anniversary of the founding of China’s People’s Liberation Army, as a possible invasion date.
Becca Wasser, another of the game participants, said 2036 is a likelier time frame. “In 2027, China is unlikely to have the ability to successfully launch an amphibious invasion of Taiwan,” said Ms. Wasser, a fellow at the Center for a New American Security think tank. If so, she said, “that suggests they are going to take another approach.”
Many specialists say the large-scale live-fire exercises China is conducting following Mrs. Pelosi’s visit portend a strategy of blockading Taiwan and squeezing rather than flattening it into submission.
The war games, which specialists said are similar to classified games the Pentagon conducts, were designed to test how various scenarios play out, as well as how the Chinese and U.S.-led sides react to one another’s moves, and the impact of their weapons inventories.
The imagined conflict is set in 2026, and each side is limited to military capabilities it has demonstrated in real life. The opposing teams take turns at maps of the Pacific region populated with game pieces denoting military dispositions, conferring on strategy. They then move to a detailed map of Taiwan. Computers calculate everything from the size of aircraft runways to how long it takes submarines to rearm. The dice introduce an element of randomness.
“This is the only such game that’s in the public domain,” said Mr. Cancian, who spent two years designing the game along with experts from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Naval War College. The game’s creators, he said, wanted to be able to share the results with a broader audience than is possible with classified ones.
The war-game scenario assumes China has decided to attack Taiwan and that the U.S.—which officially has a policy of “strategic ambiguity” about whether it would defend the island militarily—comes to Taipei’s aid. The game didn’t include the potential role of nuclear weapons.
This day’s game, the 17th in a series of 22, began with pessimistic assumptions for the U.S.: It is distracted by a separate crisis in Europe, slowing its surge of forces to the Pacific. Meanwhile, Taiwan’s ability to respond has been hampered by Chinese information operations and sabotage.
China, played by the red team, attacks aggressively, hoping to subdue Taiwan as quickly as possible while staving off an expected American response.
The Chinese military shoots ballistic missiles at U.S. air bases in Japan and an aircraft carrier strike group in the Pacific, destroying several squadrons of jet fighters and sinking the carrier and other U.S. ships. It deploys a defensive picket line of surface ships on Taiwan’s east coast and bombs the island’s infrastructure to interfere with Taiwan’s movement of ground troops. Finally, China lands 22,000 troops on Taiwan’s southeast coast and fights slowly northward, hoping to seize a port or airfield while avoiding cities and the urban warfare that comes with them.
But as the days drag on, the momentum shifts to the U.S. and Japan. Despite horrific losses in ships, aircraft and personnel, American forces bomb Chinese ports, eliminate the picket line of ships and successfully attack Beijing’s weak spot—the amphibious ships its needs to ferry troops and supplies to Taiwan.
A red team player, perusing a map of Taiwan’s daunting geography, muses on a different strategy: “In real life, we would have to try a decapitation strike” against the island’s leaders.
Ms. Wasser, who was also on the red team, said: “Rather than a draw, it’s very much a feeling of—well, nobody won, but nobody lost either.”