What US war with China about Taiwan would look like

Tensions between the United States and China have been ramping up for years, as Beijing continues to build military bases on islands and fortified reefs in the South China Sea, and the U.S. and its allies have been flooding the international waters around Taiwan with warships conducting “FONOPS,” Pentagonese for Freedom of Navigation operations.

Both the U.S. and China are playing a high-stakes game of chicken, each hoping to intimidate the other side to back off.

But for Chinese President Xi Jinping to decide to launch an amphibious and airborne assault aimed at achieving his longtime goal of unifying democratic Taiwan with the communist mainland, the leader-for-life would have to roll the dice for two unknowable eventualities.

One, after building up his military for two decades, it was finally capable of successfully invading, subduing, and occupying an island the size of the Netherlands that has the terrain of Norway and a population of 25 million people, not to mention a modern, U.S.-armed military.

And two, he’d have to hope that a war-weary American public and divided U.S. Congress would be reluctant to enter a war in which casualties would be high and the outcome uncertain and that carries the risk of an exchange of nuclear weapons.

Both assumptions are risky gambles, but the longer Xi waits, the longer the odds, said Lonnie Henley, a Pentagon intelligence officer and adjunct professor at George Washington University.

“The very strong preference among all Chinese leaders is not to have to use force to achieve their objectives in Taiwan,” Henley testified before the congressionally chartered U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission last month. “What would make them decide they must use force is a conclusion that the nonmilitary approach cannot succeed, that time is not on their side, that if they don’t use force, they will lose Taiwan forever.”

No one knows how a war over Taiwan would end, but experts have a good guess about how the conflict would likely unfold in the early stages.

The Chinese People’s Liberation Army, or PLA, would set conditions for a seaborne invasion with an “intense fire-strike campaign against targets in Taiwan,” said Henley, an opening salvo aimed at degrading Taiwan’s air defenses and knocking out many of its shore-based anti-ship missiles.

China has been working for the past 15 years to overcome its most glaring shortcoming: the lack of adequate sealift to ferry a sufficient invasion force across the 110-mile-wide Taiwan Strait.

“The PLA concept of operation for how to get that many troops across the Taiwan Strait includes massive use of civilian shipping, both cargo ships or roll-on/roll-off ferries and any other assets, including a lot of small vessels and large vessels that will need to be going to a port,” Henley said. “If the political leadership turned to the PLA and said, ‘Can you invade right now?’ It’s my assessment that the answer would be a firm yes.”

China would likely employ special operations commandos delivered by air and sea to begin to secure the ports on Taiwan’s west coast in advance of the main invasion force.

Taiwan’s counterinvasion strategy is to use U.S.-provided anti-ship weapons to sink as much of the Chinese armada as possible.

“Sea denial weapons, things like missile boats, coastal defense missiles, can allow Taiwan to send more PLA ships to the bottom of the ocean that Beijing is hopefully willing to lose,” said Michael Hunzeker, an assistant professor at George Mason University. “And should deterrence fail, they can buy time for Taiwan and the United States, if it decides to intervene.”

The problem Hunzeker told the commission is that “sea denial” is not just Taiwan’s first line of defense. It’s its only line of defense.

“Taiwan’s Army does not seem to have a contingency plan for what it will do if the PLA finds a way to fight its way off the beaches or, worse yet, finds a way to skip the beaches entirely,” he said.

It is why U.S. support to the Taiwanese military would be crucial in the early hours, days, and weeks of any conflict.

Under the Pacific Deterrence Initiative, the U.S. has plans to expand both its air defenses and land-based missiles in the Pacific.

China might be tempted to hit U.S. positions, including its air bases in Guam and Japan, preemptively with a missile barrage. Still, a first strike that produced U.S. casualties would likely result in a “Pearl Harbor scenario,” in which U.S. public opinion would galvanize in support of U.S. entry into the war.

In the early stages, the U.S. could use missiles, standoff weapons, and sleuth platforms such as the F-35 fighter to hit Chinese targets while avoiding China’s air defense umbrella of advanced air defense systems.

As the war progressed, under a new doctrine championed by the Marine Corps Commandant Gen. David Berger, the Marines would conduct guerrilla warfare from the waters of the South China Sea, well inside the island chains that China relies on for defense.

“Once inside, they will use armed drones, offensive cyber capabilities, Marine Raiders, highly capable special forces, anti-air missiles, and even ship-killer strike weapons to attack Chinese maritime forces and perhaps even their land bases of operations,” said retired Adm. James Stavridis, NATO’s former supreme commander in Europe and author of a just-published novel, 2034: A Novel of the Next World War, which imagines a future war with China.

“The Chinese militarized artificial islands in the South China Sea would be juicy targets, for example,” he said.

Beijing’s biggest problem is that once it’s in a war that it has sold to its citizens as vital to its national interest, China is on what is called “death ground,” and politically, it can’t afford to accept defeat.

“They must continue to fight,” argued Henley, who said Beijing, lacking a clear victory, would resort to an economic and military blockade of Taiwan that, because of the island’s proximity to China and its thickly forested mountains on its eastern coast, China could maintain indefinitely.

“Even if U.S. forces have sunk the entire Chinese Navy, shut down the entire Chinese Air Force, and the Chinese have expended all of their long-range missiles in the invasion phase of this conflict, the PLA nonetheless can continue to seal those west coast ports with shore-based short-range assets, including the short-range cruise missiles and anti-ship cruise missiles that were not of much use in the earlier conflict.”

It’s a prescription for a long and costly stalemate.

In his fictionalized account of a future war, Stavridis constructs a scenario in which one side weighs employing a tactical nuclear weapon to turn the tide of battle.

That’s something China has vaguely hinted at by unveiling a new “Guam killer” nuclear missile and recently producing a propaganda video depicting Chinese H-6 bombers attacking Andersen Air Force Base on Guam.

How likely is it that the nightmare of war with China will one day come to pass?

“If we’re going to have a global conflict, it would appear to me most likely [to] be between the United States and China,” Stavridis said. “If you asked me, ‘What are the odds of that occurring?’ I’d say, ‘Too soon to tell.’ We’ll know a lot more, I think, over the next five years.”

“Xi sees the United States and China as being on a collision course. While Xi, a pragmatist, would prefer to secure China’s ascendancy without open conflict with the United States, Xi, the realist, likely sees one form of conflict or another as unavoidable,” according to a new strategy document issued by the Atlantic Council. “For a leader like Xi, the fundamental strategic question is one of when and under what circumstances.”

Jamie McIntyre is the Washington Examiner’s senior writer on defense and national security. His morning newsletter, “Jamie McIntyre’s Daily on Defense,” is free and available by email subscription at dailyondefense.com.