The Taiwanese military has expressed some reservations about the plan, apparently because of the need to relocate air bases close to a couple of the proposed airports.
I’d like to ask SDMB military/ex-military members, though, is that the extent of it–just reconaissance issues? Or are there other, more strategic risks involved in opening up a relatively small island country’s airways to a massive neighbor 131 km away?
I dunno… I suppose the risk would be China using commercial airliners to drop large numbers of troops very quickly onto Taiwan if an invasion, but to be honest commercial airliners aren’t very good for a contested landing as they take too long to unload (why military transports have ramps usually - you can get all the troops or kit off quickly) so I wouldn’t think it could be used for a airborne invasion… You wouldn’t keep the surprise for long and the planes would be sitting ducks whilst unloading.
I don’t think it’s a huge risk, and I think the scouting aspect (either spies or electronic snooping) is already happening anyways and would be riskier if coming direct from China. I’m sure the direct flights will be checked closely by the Taiwanese for that sort of thing.
We used commercial airliners in 1991 to ferry troops to Saudi, but that was uncontested landing on a airfield in a friendly country. I would not wanna be the guys trying to do that if people were actively shooting at me.
It would be easy to substitute a bomber for a scheduled commercial flight and attack the bases with insufficient warning for the Taiwanese to get airborne.
This was a Strategic Air Command; put luminescent pads on the outside of a B-52 so air defense fighters rising to intercept, at night, would think it was an airliner, then fly into Russia following civilian air traffic routes.
Never said it was viable, just that it was explored. I’m sure KAL 007 made them think again before using it - crews and BUFFs are expensive, missiles are comparatively cheap.
china could nuke taiwan right now. worrying about a commercial trojan hourse flight is delusion. direct flights just make the practically inevitable economic integration faster.
plus it considerably reduces the door to door travel time of my business trips from shanghai to taipei…and that of the 500,000 taiwamese that live in the broader shanghai area.
I suspect China would think nuking it would be counterproductive. If I were in charge of the Taiwanese air base, I’d be worried more about a conventional attack.
I’d be less worried about a conventional invasion than missile or other ‘strategic’-type attacks for a simple reason - geographic isolation and a defender with vastly superior weapons technology and full US Navy support. Sailing across the Taiwan straights in a troop ship or flying across with transports the Chinese ‘invaders’ would be sitting ducks. A couple of Seawolf-class attack subs on the bottom and a couple of AWACS plus fighter support from a carrier group on the other side of the island and it’d be open season on the transports and lots and lots of Chinese troops would die accomplishing little or nothing. Taiwan is simply too well defended for that type of attack to succeed. Intel would know about the Chinese intentions way before they could gather the required transports, and could move additional carrier groups and subs from PacFleet into the area as well. It would be a shooting gallery, and I seriously doubt the Chinese would be able to come out on top.
However, if China started lobbing missiles, either conventional or nuclear, Taiwan or even the US Navy would run out of countermeasures before China would run out of missiles and eventually China would start nailing their targets. Ticonderoga-class cruisers carry 88 SM-2 missiles each in their Aegis missile defense systems; each carrier battle carrier group usually has 2 Ticos with them, so that’s 166 SM-2 anti-missile missiles; call it an even 180 with other missile systems in the carrier group, and say there are 2 available carrier groups in PacFleet. Also let’s say there are 10 Patriot batteries on Taiwan as well, which have say 8 SM-2 missiles each. That’s another 80 SM-2s. That means the Taiwanese defenses can shoot down the first 440 missiles fired at them. All China needs to do is fire more than 440 missiles at Taiwan and there won’t be any countermeasures left; I think China just might have more than 440 short- and medium-range missiles in their inventory.
Still, I wonder what that would accomplish? Terrorizing the population, I suppose, though I think the Chinese leadership has learned enough about the cantankerous Taiwanese electorate that they would probably anticipate an immediate declaration of independence with massive popular support–and international recognition from sympathetic foreign goverments. In the worst case, Taiwan would go running straight into the arms of Japan, which in any event would be starting its own massive re-armament program with its own nukes, to counter the clear and present danger that China has just demonstrated it is.
Meanwhile, China wrecks its international reputation and probably wrecks a fair bit of its own economy. For what?
All I was proposing was a more likely threat than false 747s full of PLA troops landing in Taiwan or a seaborne invasion; the politics behind it I agree with you - China isn’t that stupid and would very unlikely win in the longer term and China is nothing if it isn’t forward-thinking
Why not slip a fighter/bomber close behind an actual commercial flight (or two or three) and use it as cover to slip across the straits undetected and lob cruise missiles at, say, Patriot BMD installations? They fire their cruise missiles, do a tight U-turn and haul ass back to the mainland, and about the same time, China’s short-range conventional ballistic missile force lets loose with a few hundred DF-11 or DF-15 missiles.
Would the Chinese allow North Korean flights to Taiwan? Would Taiwan have to allow North Korean flights to land if they came via China? Frankly, North Korea scares me more than China.
It probably won’t work with an “erstwhile enemy”, but the Red Army’s 1979 take over of Afghanistan, while it was nominally a “friendly” power, involved the use of a coup d’main and the infiltration of spetznaz troops into Kabul via Bagram airport on civilian flights, to seize the city in conjunction with a land invasion.
Well, might work for civilian radar, but military radar is powerful and sensitive enough to probably tell the difference between one plane and two flying very close together.
And besides, the range is nothing. You could probably fire those cruise missiles from within Chinese airspace and still have plenty of room to hit Taiwan.
Very different circumstances. I’d think the Chinese flights will be much more tightly scrutinized than the Soviet ones were, being as how they would be landing in nominally ‘enemy’ territory.
