Yes, $500 billion of international trade per year is mostly taxi drivers importing air fresheners for their cars. :rolleyes:
I guess the farmers are taking a lot of taxi rides from field to field?
I sadly don’t know anything about that. Would you be willing to explain a bit?
They couldn’t be more different. Iraq and Afghanistan are vast compared to Taiwan, and both still fell almost overnight to their invaders, effectively destroying the states. What followed were guerilla forces that trickled in over decades from the surrounding regions, difficult to patrol and difficult to isolate, with a culture and religion that’s notoriously intolerant of outsiders, with very little left to lose and an appetite for martyrdom.
Taiwan is tiny island easily isolated by the Chinese navy without US support. It would be even easier to decapitate than Afghanistan and Iraq, with its heavy reliance on modern command structures instead of decentralized armed warlordism. The regular people there share a cultural heritage with China and would almost certainly not engage in a total defensive war even under invasion, both because their cause would be hopeless and because a negotiated surrender from a culturally similar entity would preferable to complete destruction.
Unlike the USA in the Middle East, China doesn’t have to win over the hearts and minds of people hell-bent on fighting back. It just has to switch the leadership with something not too terrible, puppeteered by it, and spend a bit of money rebuilding the infrastructure and bribing the people with public works – which it would almost certainly do as a model colony, the same way Japan did when they decided to take over Taiwan. China doesn’t really do colonial invasions the way the West thinks about them, but they’ve gotten very good at forced assimilations over time. If anything, look maybe kind of like how they handled the Dalai Llama.
The point of that snarky remark – uncalled for, perhaps – is not to imply that Taiwan is poor, but that its economic activity is relatively centralized in a few big cities, mostly in Taipei, and thus very easily disturbed. You burn a few key neighborhoods in Taipei, some governmental buildings and bases, and you would have effectively crippled Taiwan’s international-facing economy. I would argue in fact this fragility is one of the reasons China does NOT invade; that any invasion would too easily harm the economy through collateral damage alone, leaving an empty husk for whoever the victor is that would have to be slowly rebuilt.
… in what sense?
Fine. But take out the snark and it’s a pretty empty statement. What small country isn’t like that?
China is still flying about 400-500 J-7 fighters…that’s the Mig 21 Chinese knockoff version. That’s out of around 1200 total fighters. They haven’t deployed any of their latest generation fighters you hear in the news all the time yet, and won’t until at least the early 2020’s. In a straight up fight over the straights and Taiwan itself, it’s going to be a very bloody attritional battle, not the pushover you seem to be implying. This doesn’t even get into the lack of combat experience for all branches of the Chinese military, the relatively poor training (a large percentage of Chinese military training until fairly recently…like over 30%, especially for officers…was CCP indoctrination). As for missile defense, they have a lot of ‘not-as-crappy American weapons’ like the PAC-3. What Taiwan would be vulnerable to is large numbers of Chinese surface to surface missiles hitting them in the early stages, so a real-world Chinese attack that caught Taiwan by surprise (and if we assume the US isn’t going to be helping at all) would be their best chance.
Fleet wise, China has a larger fleet, but as the attacker, they are going to be at a disadvantage in the early stages unless they get a complete strategic surprise. Taiwan has more American crap weapons for a surface to surface anti-ship weapons, as well as a handful of older US destroyers (several retired in 2015 from the USN), a bunch of home built frigates and smaller patrol ships, some minelayers built in Germany and a handful of diesel-electric boats. It would be no cakewalk for the Chinese to force a passage into that, especially since, again, their training hasn’t been all that good, and they also have a lot of older crap with only a handful of really modern units. This is changing as China is realizing that to project power abroad they need a blue water navy, and they have been focusing on this. In another, oh, say 10 years they will have a credible carrier force AND the planes and crews to man them, but not today. They are building their new generation of subs as well, but they aren’t here today. They have started building a new modern generation of destroyers but only have a handful.
On the troop’s side it’s actually worse. They are designing and testing a new generation of MBT, but the majority of what they have are older homegrown Soviet knock-offs. Their troops are poorly trained, poorly equipped, poorly lead and have limited experience. Xi is changing this, and there is a push on to fix the problems (and I actually think they are going to do this…they seem to be trying to do it now), but it’s not here today. They also have no real way to get a large body of troops across the straights for a forced entry landing. IIRC, they could, maybe, get a few divisions over with their armor…against Taiwan with their older equipment but dug in. Taiwan has over 200k troops with something like 1.6 million reserves, and they would be fighting from prepared positions and defensive fortifications on their home turf.
Could China take them anyway? Sure…if they are willing to take the losses and continue. They could force the passage (at the cost of a fairly large percentage of their 1200 fighters and the other 1000 odd attack and support aircraft, a percentage of their fleet and a hell of a lot of dead PLAN troops and equipment), and after they beat down the defenses they could logistically support it with commandeered civilian transport (which is their current plan). Once they have a viable and solid beachhead that will pretty much be it…it would just be a matter of time before Taiwan is forced to give up at that point.
Of course, all of this assumes Taiwan is fighting completely on its own and there is no additional blowback on the Chinese from countries unhappy about such an invasion, and that China is willing to basically destroy Taiwan to gain control of it, meaning they don’t really want all of the economic power Taiwan has but just want a rock in the Pacific with a few shell shocked Taiwanese at the end.
Reading the blog leaves me with the clear impression that there is a pro-israeli slant to the stories. Often there will be a discussion of Israeli weapons on the site-and the fact that these are “combat-proven” unlike their competitors is always mentioned. The repetition gets to be a little heavy-handed. Indeed, while there is a lot of discussion of US defense issues, Israel is by far the second most frequently discussed country. Many other countries get a story or two, but the US and Israel dominate the news. Whenever they bring up Iran, Hamas or the PLO, they almost always remind the reader that these organizations have sworn to destroy Israel. Agreed, it is true and occasionally even appropriate for the story. I will say though that all their pictures are of US systems. I don’t think I have ever seen a photograph of a non-US weapons system on the site. I may have missed a few, but they are at least rare.
None of that is intended to disparage the site or imply that it isn’t a good source of news. I read the blog almost every day. But it is like CNN or FOX or Al Jazeera-a good source of news but with a strong point of view that one should be aware of.
Maybe you’re supposed to read it right to left.
My guess would be that the strategic goal of Taiwanese defense forces is not to repel an invasion but rather to hold out long enough for a diplomatic solution to emerge among the larger powers of the world.
My guess is that they rely on US support, but if they don’t have that they want to make it painful enough to the mainland that it wouldn’t be worth the trouble. They know that without the US that the mainland could take them if they are willing to pay the price to do so, so they want to ensure that price is high enough to give the CCP pause.
Right now they are in the process of updating a lot of their equipment. They plan to buy Abrams MBT from the US as well as more 3rd and 4th gen fighters, more advanced surface to surface anti-ship missiles as well as further expand their surface to air defense systems. IIRC, a lot of this will be in by the early 2020’s and will make the cost even higher. Of course, the Chinese mainland is pouring money into it’s military and, unfortunately, seems to have recognized a lot of their systemic weaknesses with training and equipment, and seem to actually be working on rectifying those weaknesses. In theory by the mid-2020’s they should have a credible carrier force with their new carrier-based fighters in full production, have a new MBT in full production, expanded missile technology (which is already pretty good), and a much larger and more capable fleet, plus their (supposed) 5th gen fighter in production. Assuming they continue as they have been the gap between Taiwan and China wrt military capability will continue to grow.
If I may present a tangent:
What has prevented Taiwan from getting nuclear weapons? Was there ever a time in the past when the U.S. would’ve been willing to hand nukes over to Taiwan fairly freely? Or was that never geopolitically feasible?
Taiwan did have a nuclear-weapons program in the 1970s-1980s but abandoned it after US pressure, especially after a mole defected to the US in 1987 with vital documents.
Doubtful the US would ever have handed over nukes to Taiwan. At no point in Chiang Kai-Shek’s reign was he ever considered that trustworthy, or the KMT. IIRC there were actually nukes stationed in Taiwan at one point, but those were under US control.
This is probably the most balanced analysis in this thread 
Well, thank you. Remember though that this is a zombie thread, so what was true in 2013 has changed, especially wrt Chinese capabilities. They have poured hundreds of billions of dollars into their military since then, and some of those in power definitely see the issues with the military and have taken at least the initial steps to rectify those issues. Of course, another aspect of this is that the CCP isn’t some monolithic group, all on the same page and moving forward or in the same direction in lockstep. It’s more like a bunch of mob families all in the same syndicate, with each family out for themselves and their close allies and only vaguely moving to the direction of the syndicate head…and the syndicate head is just another family head who had his own agenda. Xi wants the consolidate his power (which he’s pretty much done in the 19th congress) and part of that is too consolidate the power of the military AND bring that faction under his own personal wing. So, as well as his famous ‘anti-corruption’ campaign he’s been doing a lot to stroke the military, get them additional funding and also begin to address some of the systemic issues that have plagued it.
But if you are going to take a realistic look at how powerful and advanced the Chinese military you HAVE to look at this deeper level, and to date, China really has been a paper tiger. They have no joint chiefs or even joint operations coordination…so, if they did try and invade Taiwan, say, there would be a lot of operational issues just from that alone. Coordinating the PLAN, PLA and PLAAF alone would be a stone-cold bitch. Then you have the fact that none of these bodies have really trained well for the task, even though the Chinese actually have whole training bases built just like parts of Taiwan to enable such practice.
Anyway, today, in 2017, things are a lot different for the mainland Chinese military (all branches) than it was in 2013…and, frankly, within 5-10 years they will be so far beyond what Taiwan could credibly defend against that it won’t really be a question anymore, just how long it would take and what the butchers bill would be (it kind of is there now, I just think the bill is more than the mainland Chinese and CCP would be willing to accept for the benefits of having the ‘break away province’ back in the fold).
now that you mention it, the index of stories is on the right-so usually I do read it right to left!
That includes 25,000 paratroopers.
Of course, in addition to the massive scale of the invasion, the Allies enjoyed total naval and air supremacy. German responses were under perpetual threat of bombardment; Allied troops en route to the battlefront were not under any significant threat of aerial of naval attack. China would have no such advantage in trying to take Taiwan.
Was watching this YouTube video on comparisons between the US and Chinese navies so figured I’d post it if anyone is interested.
Bumped.
The Pentagon is now concerned that China has a missile force which would endanger US aircraft carriers if push came to shove: New missile gap leaves U.S. scrambling to counter China
It honestly seems like the same old same old. The Chinese have been making this claim for years now, and touting their carrier killer missiles that can push the US ‘out of their territorial waters’ (translation: Out of the waters claimed by other countries that China is claiming are theirs since ancient times). The US recently did another freedom of navigation exercise in the, and we have the whole trade war thingy still looming over everything, so the Chinese are reminding us that they aren’t to be taken lightly. The article you posted seems more along those lines than any real change in the relative power, even though the article is full scary sounding stuff about a missile gap and the US falling behind and all. YMMV, but I’d take all that with a grain of salt.
It’s not that a CVN is actually “unkillable”. There are probably a number of countries around the globe, some of them hostile to US, that could manage to sink a carrier, given a bit of good luck. It’s what happens after, say Iran or North Korea or China, have sunk a carrier that’s an issue for those countries. The USA isn’t likely to just tuck its tail between it’s legs and go home at that point.