There was a funfair atmosphere when Tainan Air Base in south Taiwan opened its doors to the public one Saturday morning in October. Multicoloured banners fluttered in the breeze, children pushed to get a front row spot and a “flying tigers” team of pilots looped their planes overhead.
But the motivation behind the display is deadly serious. Concerns are building in both Taipei and in the US — the unofficial guarantor of the island’s security — that China could be moving closer to launching the attack which it has been threatening for 70 years.
“Militarily, the other side has been doing [its] homework for a couple of decades. The threat is real,” says Enoch Wu, a Taiwanese former special forces officer who is running for parliament in Saturday’s election. “The [People’s Liberation Army] will achieve a certain credible capability to give that option to Beijing and say, here is that button you can push.”
While US officials do not yet consider it likely that China would use military force, they say the prospect is becoming less remote.
In the past decade, the PLA has dramatically expanded its presence and capabilities, undermining the US military’s freedom to operate in Asian waters and airspace. This has been accompanied by more aggressive rhetoric from Beijing.
The issue has taken centre stage in Taiwan’s election. Tsai Ing-wen, the incumbent president who has been more focused on defence than any of her predecessors over the past 30 years, is framing the race as a battle to defend Taiwan’s sovereignty and democracy against its authoritarian neighbour.
Washington is keen to bolster Taiwan’s defences to a level that would act as a strong deterrent. But beyond Taiwan’s shores, the tilt in the balance of power in the region underscores the growing competition between the US and China. Defence experts in both countries see Taiwan as the most likely point over which the two might one day clash militarily.
Ni Lexiong, a defence expert at Shanghai University of Political Science and Law, says China would not rule out the possibility of a protracted war with the US. “No one has the answer of how to avoid this, which is why I think there have not yet been open hostilities,” he adds. “It is to a large extent an issue of psychological warfare. What risks are the two sides willing to take and do they dare end in mutual destruction?”
Beijing outspends Taipei on defence by a factor of 15 — Taiwan’s budget is expected to hit $11.9bn in 2020. Over the past decade, China has built and deployed intermediate-range missiles with which it could target US aircraft carriers and military bases in Japan and Guam, the two locations the US would be most likely to use if it intervened in any conflict.
Even if the US were to supply Taiwan with the latest radars, fighter aircraft and stealth technology, Taiwan would be unlikely to hold out for long against a PLA attack without outside help. Taipei believes the PLA’s goal is to build up its military resources to the point where an offensive would be achievable in the next few years.
“We can debate whether it’s 2020 or 2022, but we know it’s not 2049,” says Mr Wu, who served on Ms Tsai’s national security council until last summer.
Ever since the Kuomintang, China’s former ruling party, fled to Taiwan in 1949 after losing the civil war, the Chinese Communist party has threatened to invade if Taipei ever moved towards formal independence. But while the previous generation of CCP leaders focused on wooing KMT politicians — with limited success — President Xi Jinping, who is also head of China’s army, has ratcheted up the pressure on Taipei.
“General Secretary Xi has stated that the Taiwan question ‘should not be passed down generation after generation’,” says a senior US administration official. Noting that Mr Xi refused to rule out the use of force in a speech last year, he adds: “Xi may be painting himself into a corner with regards to his own legacy.”
Mr Xi’s uncompromising stance has been accompanied by some sabre-rattling. In February, the PLA’s air force released a music video of a song called “My War Eagles are Circling the Treasure Island” featuring aerial footage of Taiwan.
In August, PLA fighter jets crossed the median line in the Taiwan Strait for the first time in 20 years, a move Taiwan blasted as provocative.
The following month, a Chinese Twitter account which Taiwanese officials believe to be government-backed replied to a post by Taiwan’s president saying: “once we have dealt with Hong Kong, we will settle the scores with Taiwan, military unification is unavoidable, we’ll keep the island but won’t keep the people except for [Taiwanese pop star] Jay Chou”.
According to Taiwanese and US officials and military researchers, China would launch an assault on Taiwan with cyber attacks aimed at crippling communications inside the island and with the US.
If successful, such attacks could rob Taiwan’s military commanders of the means to receive intelligence and pass on orders, and destroy the electronic targeting systems needed for missile defences.
Ian Easton, an expert on the PLA at Project 2049, a Washington think-tank, and author of a book on a potential Chinese invasion of Taiwan, says the PLA’s satellite and space capabilities have advanced to “remarkable” levels. “They have the ability to knock out the eyes and ears of the US and Taiwan forces,” says Mr Easton.
Cyber attacks would be followed by missile strikes and bombing raids to destroy as much of Taiwan’s air force and navy as possible and to wreck transportation, power and industrial infrastructure.
Simultaneously, Chinese sleeper cells in Taiwan and airborne forces would try to assassinate Taiwan’s president, premier and military commanders and capture many more politicians and military officials, according to the restricted circulation PLA materials cited in Mr Easton’s book.
“What we are concerned about is whether in wartime our command and control systems can remain unimpeded, whether the country can still be under effective command,” says Wang Ting-yu, a lawmaker from the ruling Democratic Progressive party and head of the legislature’s defence committee.
Once confident Taiwan could no longer threaten it from the air, the Chinese military would try to bring over the troops to conquer and occupy the island.
The PLA currently lacks the capacity in ships and aircraft to transport an invasion force across the Taiwan Strait. According to US military experts, up to 1m troops would be needed to be confident of victory over Taiwan’s 200,000-strong military.
In addition, Taiwan has only 14 beaches suitable for a seaborne invasion, according to Taiwan government assessments — the rest of the 1,200km-long coastline is reefs, small rocky coves, sheer cliffs, mudflats or blocked with wave breakers and concrete piers. “Even those remaining beaches are problematic because they are not deep enough,” says Admiral Richard Chen, former commander of Taiwan’s navy and now a policy adviser to KMT presidential candidate Han Kuo-yu.
Chinese analysts point to Beijing’s construction of so-called Type 075 landing helicopter docks, the first of which was completed in October, as a sign of progress. “If we have control of the skies, after precision bombing, then waves of attacks from these ships could carve Taiwan’s defence into countless pieces,” Mr Ni wrote on social media.
Although western experts believe the Type 075 is of limited use, the PLA could find other ways to bring troops across. “The PLA’s formal air lift capacity is not impressive, but the helicopter force is coming along quickly,” says Rick Fisher, an expert on the PLA at the International Assessment and Strategy Center, a Washington think-tank that does security research for the US government.
He adds that while the Chinese military still lacks the necessary ship capacity, it could make up for the shortfall by requisitioning passenger ferries, large car transport ships and other civilian vessels, many of which are now built to be military-capable. As shown by its use of maritime militia in low-level conflicts with rival claimants in the South China Sea, Beijing has a well-established practice of using civilian ships under military command.
The Chinese military could avoid a beach landing altogether by capturing air fields in Taiwan and flying in troops on commercial airliners, or seizing a port and ferrying soldiers over with large transport and passenger ships.
Taiwan has two air bases with mountain tunnels providing safe shelters for more than 200 aircraft and is developing advanced sea mining capabilities. It is also investing in small missile attack craft to disrupt any amphibious landing. Yet, US officials believe the Chinese military would be able to grab control of the skies and bring troops ashore.
Planners on all three sides assume that Taiwan would have to fight on its own for some time.
A senior US administration official says Taiwan needs to “substantially restructure its forces” to focus less on expensive power-projection items — such as the 66 F-16 Viper jets it is buying from the US — and “focus more heavily on resilient and cost-effective capabilities that will delay or deny military action by China.”
The Pentagon, the US Indo-Pacific Command and Taiwan’s defence ministry will this year complete an assessment of the island’s current defences and war plans. Washington has also stepped up its observation of Taiwan’s military exercises. US officials say there is discussion of low-key joint drills that would ensure the two forces build a basic understanding of how they and US ally Japan would communicate in the event of a war.
“We need to make sure that Taiwan has concepts that do deter Chinese invasion,” says Jack Bianchi, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a think-tank advising the Pentagon. “At least to increase the uncertainty on the part of political and military leaders in China that invasion might be too risky at this point.”
US experts believe that Taiwan’s military could wear any invader down by capitalising on the island’s geographical advantages.
“Taiwan is at root immensely defensible,” says Lieutenant Chip Gregson, a former US assistant defence secretary and former commander of US Marine Corps Forces in the Pacific. “The mountains provide their own terrific defensive advantage. The flat parts of Taiwan seem to be either urbanised or inundated [with rice paddies], that’s not great manoeuvring terrain.”
To make use of that environment, Washington is pushing Taiwan to reform its reserve force, in theory a 2.5m-strong army but one that is undertrained. After years of pushback, there are signs that Taipei is coming on board.
Mr Wu, who is running for the ruling DPP, has made military reform a central plank of his election campaign. He argues Taiwan needs a public debate about how to defend itself properly — something the country’s politicians have long shied away from, fearing it would shake morale.
“You have to accept that there is a risk that we would be fighting on our homeland. Only then can we talk about the army’s role in a potential defence concept and what its mission should be,” he says. “If you don’t define the mission, it’s tough to talk about what sort of training we need. But we need to review what that training should look like to even begin to have faith in our military.”
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