The prospects for Taiwan to defend itself unilaterally against an invasion by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) are more robust than has been previously assumed, as recent articles have highlighted.1 A Chinese amphibious force crossing the Taiwan straits would face withering fire from Taiwan’s excellent Hsiung Feng ship- and shore-launched antiship cruise missiles. The amphibious force that survived would have to contend with Taiwanese mines and coastal defense vessels.2 Moreover, once it reached Taiwan, what remains of the 25,000-strong force the PLA Navy (PLAN) could carry in a single trip would have to contend with the roughly 150,000 troops the Taiwanese could concentrate on the few landing sites on the west of the island. Of course, China’s fleet of amphibious landing vessels will grow, but so will the antiaccess/area-denial (A2AD) system confronting it—and defending large vulnerable platforms will always be harder than attacking them. Economic blockade will not work either. Even assuming historically high kill rates, Chinese attack submarines could sink around 6 percent of shipping to Taiwan; hardly a basis for compelling Taiwanese capitulation.3 The odds, then, seem heavily stacked in favor of the defender. This raises the question of whether Taiwan can be taken, even if China’s A2AD system makes a U.S intervention on Taiwan’s behalf impossible.
Yet, one contingency that does not appear to have been considered is that the PLA might take a leaf from the U.S. playbook on how to perform amphibious operations in a denied environment. What if, instead of sprinting to the mainland, the PLAN made the Pescadores its primary operational objective. (The Pescadores are an archipelago around 40 miles west of Taiwan, between the island and the mainland.) The rationale for doing so is suggested by the U.S. Marine Corps’ evolving expeditionary advanced base operations (EABO) concept. The possession of EABs on the Pescadores, manned by small groups of PLA troops operating a relatively inexpensive mix of short- and medium-range offensive and defensive launchers, would provide the PLAN with a number of advantages. PLA forces can bombard against Taiwan with rockets at lower costs than with short-range ballistic missiles (SRBMs) and cruise missiles. The PLA thereby could create close-in zones of sea denial and generate salvos of rocket fire to close shores and critical ports. Or it could develop air- and missile-defense bubbles within which larger forces could muster safely for a large-scale amphibious assault on Taiwan itself. Alternatively, EABs might act as forward arming and refueling points (FARPS) for swarms of cheap littoral craft to enforce a close blockade. EABs could contribute to these blockades both by kinetic means and by conducting electronic warfare.
Moreover, suppressing a force now on widely dispersed atolls and islets would force the defending Taiwanese to expend large quantities of munitions with uncertainty complicating targeting. The volume of fire required to overwhelm company-sized units on EABs or a littoral ship taking shelter among these islets vastly exceeds the cost and value of the units being targeted. As such, Taiwan—attempting its own A2AD strategy—could well end up exhausting its magazines before an invasion of the Taiwanese mainland even begins. How likely is it, then, that the PLA and PLAN might seize some or all of the 90 features that comprise the Pescadores as part of an “expeditionary advanced base operation with Chinese characteristics?” And, if this is in fact a realistic possibility, how might Taiwan’s security posture be adjusted to account for this?
The EABO concept in the Taiwan Strait
Taiwan’s overall defense concept largely assumes that the PLA’s ultimate goal is Taiwan itself and that offshore islands such as the Pescadores are of secondary importance. The objective of the Taiwanese national defense concept is to make a mainland Chinese force crossing the straits pay a heavy price. It is thus assumed the crossing cannot begin before the PLA has seized control of the air and seas; to do otherwise would be to risk the few amphibious landing craft that the PLAN possesses.
This may be the case, but it is worth considering what might happen if instead of attempting the crossing in a single go, the PLAN utilized its growing fleet of catamarans—such as the Type 022—tiltrotor aircraft, hovercraft and small-deck amphibious craft, as well as its improving airlift capabilities, to achieve a snap partial crossing of the straits to take part or all of the Pescadores. Given that the Type-022s have deck space to carry small numbers of personnel in addition to their crews, they could be used to bring crews ashore. Moving platforms such as the HQ-9 surface-to-air missile or the PHL 03 rocket launcher likely would require either hovercraft, planes, or small-deck amphibious vessels, although China may well emulate U.S efforts to create a system like the Marines’ High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HiMARS) but small enough to be carried by tiltrotor or a glider.4 As the surprise that followed China’s rapid placement of the HQ-9 on islands in the South China Sea shows, these assets are mobile enough to be moved without the need to use large, conspicuous ships. Indeed, the force needed to set up EABs should be a force light enough not to need the long mobilization times a full-scale invasion force would. Moreover, even if Taiwan did spot the initial mobilization, it seems likely it would anticipate an invasion of Taiwan proper rather than the Pescadores. This sort of surprise would hardly be unprecedented; consider the surprise of Israeli planners at Egyptian leader Anwar Sadat’s limited land grab across the Suez, a surprise engendered by Israeli expectations that any Arab attack would be an all-or-nothing attempt to extinguish Israel as a state. Israeli planners correctly assumed that Egypt could not accomplish this goal, but incorrectly concluded, therefore, an Arab attack could not be imminent.
To achieve a Pescadores-only crossing, the PLA would not need absolute command of the air or sea. Temporary suppression of Taiwan’s A2AD system for long enough to get a relatively small, light, dispersed force to the Pescadores would be sufficient. The task of suppression is one that the PLA’s substantial battery of SRBMs and cruise missiles arrayed across the Taiwan straits would likely be capable of. Moreover, this missile bombardment could be initiated at relatively short notice. Taiwan’s excellent repair teams would get runways and ports working in fairly short order but the window of time bought could be long enough to attempt the comparatively short crossing. From the Pescadores, long-range rocket systems such as the PHL 03, mobile EW platforms, and air defenses such as the HQ-9 could stifle defenses on Taiwan’s west coast. Unlike the 1996 Taiwan Strait crisis, in which the primary threat came from shore-based ballistic missiles, a close blockade by Type 022 missile boats operating from EABs would be less escalatory, because ships could be warned and turned around rather than summarily sunk by missiles or submarines. It would also be more effective, given that light vessels could operate closer to Taiwan’s ports. Expeditionary mobile EW platforms could assist in turning ships away by shutting down the navigation systems of any vessel attempting to break the blockade. Finally, long-range rockets from the Pescadores could blanket much of Taiwan’s west coast.
Against this network of advanced bases, Taiwan would not be without options. It could attempt to sink the vessels carrying Chinese troops to their EABs with cruise missiles. Alternatively, Taiwan could attack newly established EABs from the air and with land-attack cruise missiles or retake them by amphibious assault.
But the craft used to seize the Pescadores probably would not be the same high-value amphibious assault ships used in an invasion of the main island. And air bombardment or cruise missile attacks would involve expending expensive precision munitions on a range of low-value island targets, many of which may well be empty or occupied with decoys for passive defense. In both cases, Taiwan would be forced to expend expensive, scarce munitions on comparably cheap targets, wearing down Taiwan’s defensive stockpile and making a later assault with big-deck assault ships easier. In addition, active air and missile defenses from EABs would likely take their toll on the air force.
As recent studies by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Analyses have pointed out, the cost in scarce precision munitions of overwhelming the defenses of even a company-sized landing team equipped with point defenses and high-precision radio-frequency weapons on an island or atoll is exorbitant, requiring around 120 weapons to achieve a kill with certainty.5 Such an exchange ratio would rapidly exhaust Taiwan’s arsenal.
As for an amphibious assault to retake the islands, Taiwan lacks the amphibious landing craft and operating plans to retake the Pescadores, even ignoring the costs that running the gauntlet of antiaccess fires from the islands would incur. Taiwan views these islands as a peripheral theater to a campaign that will be won or lost on Taiwan proper.
What Now?
The scenario above operates under two assumptions: first, that the United States will be deterred from intervening on Taiwan’s behalf, and second, that the PLA will employ EABO-type concepts. The first assumption is realistic in the medium-to-long term. The risk to U.S. bases and ships posed by China’s A2AD capabilities and the political risks of escalation mean that, even if the Taiwan Relations Act does not technically oblige the United States to respond to aggression against Taiwan and the Pescadores, PRC seizure of the latter would leave a President choosing between the risk of massive escalation over a territory that the U.S. public probably would view as valueless or too sparsely populated to fight over and abandoning a friend. This is not a certainty, but it is a distinct possibility as the conventional power of the PLA grows. The second assumption is far more speculative but not unreasonable. The PLA may not emulate the EABO concept, but it is a potentiality worth considering, given the risks it would pose.
The good news is that Taiwan can adjust to the risk of a PLA EABO against the Pescadores without fundamentally altering the basic contours of its defensive strategy. To make seizing EABs prohibitively costly, Taiwan needs to do two things. First, existing garrisons on the Pescadores need to grow in size. Of course, not every island in the archipelago can be militarized, but population centers such as Magong should be well defended. Second, in addition to the expensive tools with which Taiwan intends to target high-value PRC platforms at long range, Taiwan needs lower-cost munitions to suppress the individually low-value PRC targets on which the EABO strategy is contingent. Taiwan’s 3-km-range Kung-Feng rocket system would not be useful; it was built to defend beachheads at short range. Something capable of saturating targets with relatively cheap munitions at long range like the HIMARS is needed; in fact, the Marine Corps’ HiMARS, with its 300-km range, might be the best platform. As T. X. Hammes has convincingly argued, developments in nano explosives, automation, and additive manufacturing have coincided to make it possible for states to cheaply manufacture and deploy massive swarms of highly potent unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)—similar to Israel’s Harpy, a loitering, unmanned antiradar munition system—to generate massed fires at extended ranges.6 In effect, Taiwan needs its long-range defenses—cruise missiles—and its short-range ones—mines, coastal warfare craft—with an intermediate layer of rocket and UAV fires to suppress EABs before they can become firmly established in the Pescadores.
1. Michael Beckley, “The Emerging Military Balance in East Asia How China’s Neighbours Can Check Chinese Naval Expansion,” International Security 42(2):78–119.
2. Drew Thompson, “Hope on the Horizon: Taiwan’s Radical New Defence Concept,” War on the Rocks, 2 October 2018.
3. Beckley, 95.
4. Shawn Snow, “The Corps’ HiMARS Are Going Airborne as Marines Bring Them to Targets via KC-130s,” Marine Times, 28 December 2018.
5. Bryan Clark and Jesse Sloman, Advancing Beyond the Beach: Amphibious Operations in an Era of Precision Weapons, CSBA.
6. T. X. Hammes, Technological Change and the Fourth Industrial Revolution. In George P. Schulz, Jim Hoagland, and James Timbie (eds.), Beyond Disruption: Technology's Challenge to Governance (Stanford, CA: Hoover Press, 2018).