Pentagon, Chinese analysts agree US can’t win in Taiwan Strait
US mulls ‘scorched earth’ strategy for Taiwan instead of defense
By
DAVID P. GOLDMAN
DECEMBER 6, 2022
China has greatly expanded its satellite surveillance of the Western Pacific in recent years. Image: Anadolu Agency
China’s satellite coverage in the Western Pacific has doubled since 2018, the Pentagon reported last week in its annual assessment of the Chinese military. That gives China the ability to detect American surface ships with an array of sensors that can guide its 2,000 land-based missiles to moving targets, including US aircraft carriers.
The Defense Department’s
November 29 report “Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China” reflects a grimly realistic rethinking of China’s military capacity in its home theater.
China hawk Elbridge Colby, a prominent advocate of a Western Pacific military buildup to deny China access to its adjacent seas, tweeted on November 6, “Senior flag officers are saying we’re on a trajectory to get crushed in a war with China, which would likely be the most important war since WWII, God forbid.”
The strategic takeaway is that the United States cannot win a firefight close to China’s coast, and can’t defend Taiwan whether it wants to or not. That view in the Joe Biden administration’s Department of Defense (DOD) persuaded the president to discuss “guardrails” against military confrontation in his November summit with his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping.
Republican hawks appear to have come to the same conclusion. The United States will enact a scorched-earth policy in Taiwan, destroying its semiconductor industry, if the PRC seizes the island, former Trump national security adviser
Robert O’Brien told a conference at the Richard Nixon Foundation on November 10, reports army-technology.com.
“If China takes Taiwan and takes those factories intact – which I don’t think we would ever allow – they have a monopoly over chips the way OPEC has a monopoly, or even more than the way OPEC has a monopoly over oil,” O’Brien said.
A
much-read paper by two Army War College professors published this year proposes that “the United States and Taiwan should lay plans for a targeted scorched-earth strategy that would render Taiwan not just unattractive if ever seized by force, but positively costly to maintain.”
“This could be done most effectively by threatening to destroy facilities belonging to the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, the most important chipmaker in the world and China’s most important supplier.”
O’Brien evidently agrees with the Pentagon’s assessment that the US can’t win a war in the Taiwan Strait, proposing – apropos of the Vietnam War’s most celebrated sound bite – to destroy the island in order to save it.
Anti-ship missiles are the 21st-century equivalent of the torpedo and dive bombers that banished the battleship from military budgets after the 1941 sinking of the
Bismarck by the British and the sinking of the
Repulse and the
Prince of Wales by the Japanese. Surface ships, including aircraft carriers, can’t defend against modern missiles that can downlink guidance data from reconnaissance satellites.
The DOD report states that the PLA Rocket Force’s “conventionally armed CSS-5 Mod 5 (DF-21D) ASBM variant gives the PLA the capability to conduct long-range precision strikes against ships, including aircraft carriers, out to the Western Pacific.”
China tested these weapons thoroughly, the Pentagon report adds:
Key to the effectiveness of anti-ship missiles is satellite intelligence and electronic warfare measures. As the Pentagon reports:
Most important:
Satellite signals can be jammed or spoofed (misdirected to show incorrect coordinates), but
China’s military has improved quality as well as quantity, according to the Pentagon:
Overall, the Pentagon’s readout on China’s missile and satellite capability is virtually identical to the estimation of Chinese analysts, for example, the widely read military columnist
Chen Feng in the prominent Chinese website “The Observer” (guancha.cn). In a November 27 report, Chen explained why an array of small satellites can achieve precise real-time target location:
Synthetic aperture radar, Chen explains, “is not applicable to moving targets, but most of the intelligence can be interpreted from still images, and the similarities and movement can be inferred from differences between the before and after still images can also be inferred from the movement.”
A lead satellite may detect a suspicious object, and follow-up satellites “can be switched to a detailed investigation mode, and relay the results of detailed investigation.” Other satellites with electromagnetic rather than optical sensors can conduct real-time triangulation.
In addition to its satellite ISR capability, Chen says, the other half of China’s reconnaissance capability consists of “unmanned aircraft, unmanned boats, submarines, and networked land-based radar, and undersea hydroacoustic monitoring.”
China, Chen concludes, does not yet have global ISR capability, “but theater coverage has been achieved.”
In the past, the US Navy has insisted that a combination of electronic warfare measures and anti-missile defenses can defend US capital ships against Chinese attack. This year, the navy’s top officer Admiral
Jonathan Greenert told reporters that a combination of spoofing (feeding false position coordinates to an incoming missile), masking electronic emissions, and anti-missile systems like Aegis can defend US carriers.
But as
Gabriel Honrada reported on August 14, US anti-missile systems like Aegis or Patriot aren’t effective against missiles honing in from a high trajectory. China’s DF-21 and other anti-ship missiles are designed to ascend to the stratosphere and strike vertically.
Electronic countermeasures, moreover, are less effective against multiple sensors. China’s tiered system of sequenced optical, as well as electromagnetic reconnaissance combined with air and sea drones, is getting harder, if not impossible, to spoof. And China’s missile force is so large that it can inflict devastating damage even with a high error rate.
Apart from its formidable inventory of conventional missiles, China has developed hypersonic glide vehicles that hug the ground and maneuver at the speed of intercontinental ballistic missiles, or several times the speed of sound. No conventional missile defense can stop HGVs.
Apart from its missile force, China has about 800 fourth-generation fighters deployed at its coast and close to 200 fifth-generation (stealth) fighters. As the Pentagon report notes, China has corrected the most important deficiency in its domestic warplane production, namely jet engines:
A noteworthy observation in the new Pentagon report is that China now has only 30,000 marines, compared with a US Marine Corps of about 200,000 including reserves. Only 200 Chinese marines are deployed outside the country, at China’s sole overseas base in Djibouti. China has about 14,000 special forces versus an American count of about 75,000. This isn’t consistent with the report’s claim that China wants to “project power globally.”
China’s satellite coverage in the Western Pacific has doubled since 2018, the Pentagon reported last week in its annual assessment of the Chinese
asiatimes.com
