How Xi Misreads the Taiwan Battlefield: Frank Mount
https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2022/11/how-xi-misreads-the-taiwan-battlefield/
EXCERPTS:
In any war between China on the one hand and Taiwan, Japan, the US and their allies on the other, Chinese vessels of all kinds will be prevented from significant access to the Pacific Ocean. The Chinese (and Russian) Pacific fleets will almost certainly be enclosed in their coastal waters.
This is because the First Island Chain running parallel to the mainland from Sakhalin Island in the north down through Japan, the Ryukyu islands, Taiwan, and on to the Philippine Islands and Indonesia, is a natural barrier now being fortified by the Japanese and Taiwanese militaries and the US Marines. The Commander of the US Marine Corps, General David Berger, recently announced that the Marines were changing their policies and missions in reaction to developments in Asia. He said a “new mission” for the Marines would be “island hopping” in the Indo-Pacific armed with anti-ship missiles to meet the growing China threat. (see The Times, London dispatch, Weekend Australian 6-7/11/21). Presumably, they would carry Tomahawk anti-ship missiles and be supported by US specifically designed shallow-hulled coastal patrol vessels, armed with the same Tomahawks, as well as Japanese submarines.
This would make transit through the Chain almost impossible for hostile surface ships and submarines. One of the difficulties for Chinese and Russian submarines is the difference between the relatively shallow waters of the seas between mainland China and the First Island Chain and the vast depths and trenches of the Pacific Ocean east of the Chain. Submarines would have to surface or near surface to transit the Chain either way, making them easily detectable and vulnerable.
Furthermore, at the southern end of the Chain, other US forces along with the navies of Australia, France, Britain and hopefully India and Indonesia could block Chinese and Russian naval and merchant shipping transiting the Malacca Strait and contiguous Indonesian waterways and passages. As a result, China could suffer a serious trade blockade.
China, Taiwan And ballistic missiles: For years it has been widely thought that if China attacks Taiwan it will do so with a barrage of hundreds of land- and sea-based ballistic missiles. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, China openly threatened Taiwan with 350 to 400 medium-range ballistic missiles (today it’s many more, perhaps 1500). This threat immediately led Japan to greatly intensify its pressure on the US to provide it, and presumably Taiwan if possible, with the sort of ABM defence the US had reportedly set up for Western Europe. By 2004 Japan and the US had signed an ABM agreement to provide protection using “sensitive US technologies”. Whatever else, the US continues to supply Taiwan with what it considers to be effective anti-invasion naval equipment. But apart from ABM defences, Taiwan and Japan themselves have some impressive attack missiles and other weapons at hand. Taiwan on its own could cause China a great deal of damage with its home-produced supersonic Yun Feng ground-launched cruise missile (below). It has a range of a thousand miles with a 500-pound warhead. Launched from Taiwan, it is reputedly capable of striking Beijing, Shanghai, Xian and any coastal city as well as the Three Gorges Dam. How many of these missiles Taiwan possesses is not known publicly. Japan has equally potent missiles and, of course, its formidable Self-Defence Force. It has the fourth-largest national defence force in the world backed by the third-largest national economy. It is clear that if China attacks Taiwan it will sufer enormous damage with no guarantee that it will ever occupy Taiwan. Indeed, it has been said that if China looked like occupying Taiwan, Japan would beat China to it with massive amphibious landings on the friendly beaches on the north-eastern corner of the island near Taipei. After fifty years of Japanese colonialism, Taiwan is a very Japanised society.
In the second case, we need to look at the capabilities of China’s currently six SSBNs (and other submarines). China’s current Type 094 Jin-class SSBNs (below) are extremely noisy and were easily detected during allied exercises in the East China Sea in 2021.They were said to be much noisier than Japan’s Taigei-class diesel/electric submarines. Even more revealing was a US Office of Naval Intelligence report that declared the 094 to be noisier than the Delta III SSBN first launched by the Soviet Union in 1976 (see CSIS Washington Paper, 4.8.21). So, by the time China’s 095 submarines, now in development, and others, reach the stealth levels of the proposed Australian SSNs, which should be at least the equal of the current US Virginia-class SSBNs, Australia will not have lost much. It should be remembered that one of the major missions of our SSNs would be following and countering China’s 095 SSBNs. There is another important point in assessing China’s capabilities: if the Type 094 is noisier than a 1976 Russian SSBN how potent are China’s seventy-odd ageing submarines?
An important inhibition in the operation of China’s submarines is what are called “doctrinal limitations” imposed by the government and supported by the navy. This doctrine involved the government (Xi Jinping) ordering that warheads, especially nuclear warheads, be stored separately from their delivery systems until needed. This a very challenging demand, especially for SSBN commanders. It has led to speculation that Xi distrusts his naval commanders, fearing that a rogue officer might turn a missile on Beijing. If this doctrine applies to SSBNs, does it also apply to the warheads attached to hundreds of missile systems, including ICBMs, in land-based silos and on mobile launchers? Another inhibition facing the Chinese navy is what the Global Times called “a very serious … lack of skilled submariners”. Finally, we should understand that China currently has, according to US naval sources (see for e.g. CSIS Washington paper 4.8.21 and figures vary) about seventy old diesel or conventional submarines, six Type 093 SSNs and six Type 094/095 SSBNs. To this they expect to add two improved Type 095 SSBNs by 2030 or a little later. China is not building a new SSBN every fifteen months, as was stated recently by one hysterical Australian commentator. By comparison, the US has about sixty-eight submarines of all kinds (the figures vary, as do China’s). Over forty of those are SSNs and SSBNs of the most extraordinary military capability and engineering magnificence if not genius. And those in the pipeline, including the Columbia-class SSBN, are even cleverer, stealthier and more powerful. Clearly the US is not, in this respect at least, in decline but very much the opposite.
Some experts claim that by 2050 submarines will be obsolete because they will then be visible and easy targets as technology will have made the oceans transparent from space. This may prove to be true of today’s submarines, but may not be true of tomorrow’s, depending on advances in submarine stealth and other technology, perhaps not yet even imagined.
Another threat to submarines is underwater drones and tripwires at chokepoints, including the many narrow passages along the First Island Chain. However, anti-drone technology is making rapid progress.
Hypersonic missiles and robotic vehicles: In late 2021, much was made of China’s launch of a long-range hypersonic missile which travelled around the world in an hour or so and narrowly missed its target in China. This reportedly surprised the Americans, who did not think China had progressed so far. It seems the Chinese believe these missiles give them a better and easier way of striking the US than with ICBMs or their equivalent. China may well be ahead of the world at the moment in respect of these missiles. However, hypersonic missiles have been under development in a number of countries for many years including the US, UK, Russia, India, Japan, Australia, France, Germany and North Korea. The US and Australia have had researchers working on hypersonic missile and anti-hypersonic-missile technology for at least the last fifteen years.
In Britain, not only are hypersonic missiles being developed, the UK in collaboration with European and US associates is well down the track, after many years, to putting a hypersonic commercial passenger aircraft into space. It would be a subsonic-cum-supersonic-cum-hypersonic vehicle. This aircraft, built as a successor to the Concorde, would be capable of carrying about 100 passengers from London to Sydney in two and a half hours over the North Pole. At one stage, they were hoping to get it to take off horizontally from a runway and into space by 2020, but now it’s 2030. (Google “Reaction Engines Ltd” and then go to “SABRE”. The SABRE—Synergetic Air Breathing Rocket Engine—is a revolutionary hydrogen-fuelled engine that it is claimed will change the world of aviation just as Sir Frank Whittle’s jet engine did in the early 1950s. You will be fascinated.)
In contrast, China is still striving to safely launch its first home-built commercial airliner, the C919. It looks like a 100-plus-passenger, narrow-bodied Boeing 737. A prototype is in flight, but it is said the Chinese are having problems mastering engineering issues with safety ramifications. It has been scheduled to appear at air shows, but has yet to turn up.
In the world of robotic vehicles, including drones of various kinds and anti-drones that can strike down swarms of drones, you will find America’s hypersonic Lockheed Martin SR-72 (above) small UV “spaceship” which is designed to be capable of reaching any point of the globe within sixty minutes. From film I viewed it seemed to be at test or prototype stage. (Go to “The Fifty Military Vehicles of the Future” at the History10 website to see some of the robotic and other weapons the US and other countries have been developing.)
China’s false claim to Taiwan: I want to briefly expand on what I said in the April 2021 edition of Quadrant about China’s claim to Taiwan. There it was pointed out that no mainland Chinese regime had ever ruled Taiwan. Some people have argued that Taiwan was colonised by China during the Manchu rule of the Qing Dynasty, the Manchus having driven down from the north, brutally conquering the Han Chinese Ming Dynasty in 1644. However, the Han, who rule China today, never considered the Manchus to be Chinese, just Manchurian barbarian tribes. In 1895, the Manchus ceded Taiwan to Japan in perpetuity, having lost the first Sino-Japanese War. Japan subsequently Japanised and modernised Taiwan into a prosperous state. When Japan lost the Second World War, the United Nations, which was formed at the 1945 San Francisco Conference, asked the mainland Chinese government of Chiang Kai-shek to temporarily (which I forgot to say in the April 2021 Quadrant) administer the island until post-war negotiations could decide its future.
At the same conference in 1945, the UN asked Chiang Kai-shek’s government to temporarily administer all of Vietnam prior to post-war negotiations to settle its future. But the French immediately reacted and retook control of all of Vietnam with the help of British Indian troops who occupied Saigon and surrounding districts in the south.
The 1951-52 San Francisco Conference was unable to decide the future of Taiwan. It agreed to leave the matter to the United Nations, which it said should settle the issue under the conditions of the UN Charter which was based on the principle of self-determination. After the conference, Chiang Kai-shek, whose government had retreated to Taiwan after its defeat by Mao’s communists in 1949, simply continued on, claiming to be the legitimate ruler of all China. Mao’s Communist China never seriously challenged the UN decision and Xi Jinping won’t take it to the UN today, for obvious reasons.
So, no mainland-based Han Chinese regime has ever ruled Taiwan and consequently has no historical or any other claim to it. In truth, its motivation is not historical but regional and now global-strategic. The Chinese High Command knows that if it takes control of Taiwan it will have punched a devastating hole in the First Island Chain, giving its navy access to the North Pacific during any conflict, thereby enabling it to surround Japan and threaten South-East Asia, its sea and air lanes, and ultimately Australia and the Pacific Islands, where it is already involved in more than diplomatic activity. From the Solomons, for example, China could in the long run attempt to cut links between Australia and the US as Japan attempted in the Second World War.
Xi Xinping: This paper cannot conclude without a further comment on Xi Jinping. Xi is a product of the 1966–76 Cultural Revolution. During that decade all Chinese educational institutions were closed, and Xi went from fourteen to twenty-four years of age (below). The only education he received during this formative period was in CCP seminars studying little more than Marxism-Leninism and revolutionary Mao Zedong Thought. Xi and his Cultural Revolution associates and peers have no idea how to run a modern, open international banking system and economy. Xi is not an intellectual, but a very astute political operator who knows what he wants and how to navigate and manipulate the local political “geography” to get it.
It seems that Xi’s aim is to usher in some form of Cultural Revolution of his own against all forms of capitalism and Western consumerism while using the prosperity, economic and therefore military strength brought about by Deng Xiaoping’s opening to the West to attack the West and dominate the world—including Russia.
We know that all members of the CCP as well as students, teachers and others in school and tertiary institutions have to study every morning thirty minutes or so of Xi Jinping Thought. We also know that religious institutions, including Catholic ones, are obliged not only to study Xi Jinping Thought but to remove religious pictures and other icons of their faiths and replace them with images of Xi.
This sort of thing is gradually spreading throughout China. In late 2021, the Global Times, the CCP’s newspaper, carried an article complaining about a serious lack of skilled submariners to operate China’s seventy or so submarines, especially the six nuclear powered ones and the six nuclear armed ones. However, it said, this problem is being overcome because submariners were now being obliged to study Xi Jinping Thought every morning. How far does this run in the Chinese military? The infantry? Does it apply to all sailors, pilots and nuclear missile operators? Is it also now required of all government bankers and executives of government departments, industries and corporations? These are the people who have been among the great beneficiaries of Deng’s modernisation, globalisation and trade liberalisation (which also brought millions of people out of poverty). And then there is the extraordinary surveillance. The eminent Australian China analyst Rowan Callick has estimated that Xi has taken China back many years, perhaps three decades according to some. (see Rowan Callick’s “Why Xi is Dragging Down the Dragon”, The Australian, 27.10.20 and his “Xi Taking China Back to the Future”, The Strategist, 3.9.21).
Final Comments
- Most commentators and strategic analysts in Australia and elsewhere have failed to fully factor in Japan as a major player in the strategic balance of power in North-East Asia and in any conflict or war, including one involving Taiwan. Japan has the third-largest national economy and fourth-largest military in the world. Japan has said it will respond if China attacks Taiwan. Many of the same people who are ignoring the Japan factor in the Taiwan issue are arguing that China could blockade Taiwan and gradually strangle it rather than attack its shores and cause a war. But, again, Japan could respond from an advantageous position.
The Taiwan blockade scenario was recently raised during Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan when China surrounded Taiwan with six naval formations, three to the west and three to the east. This led some commentators to claim it showed how easy it would be for China to blockade Taiwan. However, this was in peacetime when freedom of navigation applied. In a serious, hostile wartime blockade attempt, the Japanese and US navies would sink the Chinese vessels east of Taiwan and the First Island Chain restrictions would operate. Additionally, the Japanese would almost certainly embark on large-scale amphibious landings on the friendly beaches in the north-east corner of Taiwan at Fulong.
- China makes too many strategic and other mistakes (Sun Tzu would be appalled). There are of course the relatively recent historical mistakes like the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. But there are a few from the last fifteen years: invading and militarising the South China Sea islands to which China has no legitimate claims; wolf-warrior diplomacy; the fourteen Demands of Australia; breaking the Hong Kong agreement; defying the World Trade Organisation, and so on. But by far China’s greatest, underlying mistake of the past twenty years has been, like Germany and Japan in the twentieth century, to want too much too soon.
- Quadrant has readers all round the world, among them Japanese and Taiwanese politicians, diplomats and strategic analysts. They read the Quadrant article of April 2021 and the result was striking. In mid-June 2021, Taiwan’s Foreign Minister, Joseph Wu, said: “China was trying to expand itself beyond the first island chains, which includes Taiwan, into the wider Pacific” (The Australian, 12.6.21). On July 7, the Deputy Prime Minister of Japan, Taro Aso, said that Japan would join America in defending Taiwan against a Chinese invasion, treating such an attack as an “existential threat” that “could lead to an attack on Japan’s own territory”. On August 28 the Australian reported that Nobuo Kishi, the then Japanese Defence Minister, had called on the international community to pay greater attention to the “survival of Taiwan”. The report said that “rhetorical escalation came after Japan for the first time directly linked Taiwan’s security to its own in a defence white paper in July”. At about this time, the new Japanese Prime Minister, Fumio Kishida, confirmed a doubling of Japanese defence spending. On December 3, the former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe was quoted in a dispatch from the Times as having said: “Any armed invasion of Taiwan would present a serious threat to Japan. A Taiwan crisis would be a Japan crisis and therefore a crisis for the Japan-US Alliance. People in Beijing, President Xi in particular, should never misunderstand this.”
Following Taro Aso’s statement in July 2021, the Global Times reacted with anger and apparent surprise at the prospect of Japan defending Taiwan. Since then, nothing has been heard publicly from any Chinese authority about the matter.
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