Taiwan mobilises to thwart invasion
Everything from cyber attacks and blockades to fullscale war is being prepared for, writes.
On Friday, Taiwan’s top military brass gathered in secure rooms within the fortified walls of the sprawling ministry of defence to prepare for war with China.
Computer screens in front of them likely displayed the island nation’s F-16 fighter jets taking to the skies, precision-guided cruise missiles blasting China’s west coast ports, and its Tuo Chiangclass corvettes, dubbed ‘‘aircraft carrier killers’’, deployed to pick off high-value targets in the Taiwan Strait.
But outside the gated compound all was quiet. Welcome to Taiwan’s virtual war room, where decorated generals and officers this week are being tested against the most chilling scenarios – from a full-scale invasion to cyber attacks and blockades of critical infrastructure.
The highly classified annual ‘‘Han Kuang’’ military drills come under the shadow of very real threats from Taiwan’s hostile superpower neighbour.
Recent months have seen an uptick in warmongering rhetoric from Beijing matched by intensifying air force and naval activity around the island 180km off the Chinese coast.
China’s air force has made sorties into Taiwan’s air defence identification zone on a near daily basis since last September, hitting a record high of 25 fighters, including nuclearcapable bombers, on April 12.
The daily screech of jets has alarmed the United States and nearby Japan, prompting Washington to warn China it would be a ‘‘serious mistake’’ to take Taiwan by force.
While there are no signs of an imminent Chinese attack, China appears to be setting the stage to make good on a long-promised threat to annex the island, by force if necessary.
The Chinese Communist Party has never ruled Taiwan – a democracy of 23 million, which functions like any other nation with its own government and military – but it claims the island as its own territory.
Military strategists warn Taiwan does not have the luxury of time to practice defending its shores.
China could invade within the next six years as Beijing rapidly steps up its challenge to American forces in the Indo-Pacific, Admiral Philip Davidson, the outgoing head of the US Indo-Pacific command, predicted in March.
His warning is likely to weigh heavily on Taiwanese military chiefs over the eight-day Han Kuang war games, where computer simulations switch between mock threats of conventional beach landings and aerial assaults to electronic attacks and psychological warfare.
In July, the military will shift to live-fire exercises – landing fighter jets on highways and testing its tanks and artillery for combat readiness – to project a more overt show of force to deter Beijing from aggression.
Taiwan is not only crucial to the global supply chain of semiconductors but also lies at a strategic point of international trade routes.
Control of Taiwan would grant China its much-desired open access to the Pacific coastline, presenting a challenge to Washington’s free and open IndoPacific strategy.
Global leaders are also being forced to consider the worst-casescenario of a Chinese invasion that could draw the Indo-Pacific region and the West into armed conflict with China.
Joseph Wu, the Taiwanese foreign minister, said this month that Taiwan ‘‘will fight the war if we need to fight the war’’, pledging that ‘‘we will defend ourselves to the very last day’’.
But Rupert HammondChambers, president of the USTaiwan business council, said he did not foresee an impending ‘‘D-Day-style’’ invasion.
‘‘My own view of what’s going on right now is that Chinese operations around the island are primarily focused on psychological operations,’’ he said.
This had the twin goal of trying to ‘‘up the pressure on the people of Taiwan’’ and to ‘‘test the mettle of the US government’’ during the transition to the Biden Administration.
Analysts have cautioned that China could also opt to target Taiwan’s infrastructure and economy or seek to cut off its energy supplies.
‘‘To me the path for them is much more blockade, potentially taking an outlying island, something that ups the ante significantly but is not actually them shooting at Taiwan,’’ he said.
‘‘I think that creates much more political problems for the US and Japan on how to engage than starting to mobilise forces.’’
Kitsch Liao, a Taiwan defence analyst, said this week’s drills – which pit joint staff members against a hypothetical enemy ‘‘red team’’ of advisers and retired officers – will be key to training wartime decisionmakers and predicting the pressures of battle.
The exercise also trials Taiwan’s war plan to protect its air force and deploy its navy for ‘‘decisive engagement against [China’s] amphibious landing group’’, said Liao.
Oriana Skylar Mastro, a Stanford University expert on the Chinese military, said Beijing did not view the current conditions for invasion as favourable but she cautioned the international community against losing a ‘‘sense of urgency’’ to take timely measures to avert a military move in possibly 6-7 years.
Pentagon data estimates China’s defence expenditure is about 25 times larger than Taiwan’s and its active ground forces of 1,030,000 dwarf the latter’s 88,000. It is widely believed that without outside help, Taiwan could only withstand a full attack for days not weeks.
But despite its military dominance, China’s forces in recent memory have rarely been put to the test on the battlefield. ‘‘The main factor that imposes caution on the Chinese is that they don’t know how well they are going to perform,’’ said Mastro.