Well, I was thinking more like a few thousand special-ops guys (like Ranger battalion caliber) holed up in the hold of some freighters to capture a port or two. That might be possible, I suppose.
But actually following that up with any reasonable sort of forces? I doubt they have the naval muscle nor logistical capability to pull that off.
Yes, something akin to the commando raids of WWII might be possible, if China were willing to lose a large number of troops just to smash some things up and kill some people. While they might be able to deploy some light combat troops that way, there’s no way those troops would ever make it back to China.
In WWII, commando raids worked because we still mostly relied on people’s eyes to see the enemy. Radar was brand new, and the Germans didn’t even have it for the first few years, and we never had complete coverage of the whole of the European coast. So a ship could slip up under the cover of darkness, send in some troops to smash things up, and then recover the troops and be over the horizon to relative safety before the enemy response could be properly mobilized. None of that recovery effort would work in the modern era. We’d have eyes on them almost immediately, and keep track of them no matter where they go. They’d be captured or sunk long before making it back to a safe harbor.
It would be the naval equivalent of those Russian special forces troops who captured an airport in the early hours of the Ukraine war. They had great initial success, but lost it all when their support troops ran out of gas on the way to the airport.
A big factor is that China has been building up a big system of anti-ship missiles along its southern coast. DF-21’s have a range of about a thousand miles and YJ-12’s have a range of about two hundred and fifty miles. So they can’t be used to threaten ships out in the Pacific Ocean.
But they can attack ships around Taiwan (or in the South China Sea). And that means that the United States Navy can no longer guarantee that we can maintain naval superiority in those waters.
Sure does to the US military.
A lot of surprise attacks throughout history come down to misreading intentions, not missing forces being built up. US satellites spotted the Iraqi buildup on the border with Kuwait in 1990, but thought it was there for diplomatic pressure, not to take over the country. Israel was aware of the Egyptian and Syrian buildup on its borders in 1973 but didn’t think it presaged an invasion and order their own mobilization until hours before it came. Stalin knew there were over 3 million German soldiers on the border ready to launch the largest invasion in history in 1941, but was convinced Hitler wouldn’t invade but was only going to demand concessions.
As noted previous, the Alles had four things that the Chinese won’t have:
I think you’re overrating the ability to conduct and sustain an opposed invasion.
And as I previously noted, Germany only had one of those elements (surprise) and was able to successfully invade and occupy Norway.
That’s my point. If you convince yourself that you have control of the sea, for example, and an invasion is absolutely impossible without control of the sea then you can be caught by surprise by an invasion conducted without control of the sea.
And control of the sea is a moving target anyway. Technology changes. Control of the sea used to be about having the biggest battleships and the most battleships. So a country would count up how many battleships it had and if that total was higher than the other country’s, it was confident it had control of the sea. But then planes came along and demonstrated they could sink battleships. Suddenly the question of who had more battleships no longer mattered.
The same situation may exist today. The United States may be confident it has control of the sea because it counts how many ships America has and how many ships China has. But then in a hostile situation, China fires some missiles from its shore and shows it can sink American naval ships. So the navy withdraws its ships from the waters around Taiwan. There goes control of the sea.
There’s always a danger in thinking another country is planning on fighting a war the way you plan on fighting it.
If I may junior-mod a bit, this thread is not about conventional invasions and whether they’d work, but rather, why Russian nuclear deterrence is something US policymakers fear but apparently Chinese nuclear deterrence isn’t.
I think that this is a big part of it. You are only going to use nukes if you face an existential threat. The Chinese failing to take Taiwan involves it losing a bunch of its navy but being otherwise mostly intact, It can go home an lick its wounds knowing that any attempt to invade China proper would be suicide On the other hand Russia losing in Ukraine means its main army is defeated and a large victorious ground force is right on its border. There is no way that NATO could acheive victory without presenting of a potential existential threat to Russia.
It’s your thread, so you can point it in any direction you want.
But I’m still going to argue against the premise. I disagree with your argument that Russia’s nuclear weapons are the reason we’re not deploying troops in Ukraine. I feel the reason we’re not sending American troops is because we don’t have any treaty obligation to do so.
Do you feel that if Russia invaded Estonia, we would not send troops to fight in that country? I think we would. We would do so despite Russia having nuclear weapons because we have a treaty obligation with Estonia.
Also, China’s current leaders act in a rational way. Putin does not.
China is only irrational and fanatical about one issue: Taiwan, and they will definitely attack it as soon as they feel strong enough. But if they should lose, they will remain rational. And rational people don’t use nukes.
Putin is the opposite. If he fails in Ukraine, he will behave even more irrationally than now, If he used logic, he would know that Nato does not want to conquer Moscow the way he tried to conquer Kiev. But Putin will react irrationally, with no regard to the cost in lives, either in Russia or the rest of the world.
We also don’t have any treaty obligations to send Ukraine munitions, and yet we’re doing that. Clearly we’ve decided that it’s in the US’s best interests for Ukraine to win. And if we were just deciding on the quickest, cheapest way to ensure that Ukraine wins, we’d have gotten involved directly, because that would have been much quicker and cheaper than what we’ve got now. So clearly there’s some reason we haven’t done that. Russia’s nukes sure look like they’re that reason.
We looked at the risks and benefits of various courses of action. Sending arms to Ukraine is less of a risk than sending troops to Ukraine. And on the opposite end, sending arms to Ukraine provides greater benefits than doing nothing to help Ukraine. So that’s where we decided that we would get the most benefit for the least risk.
But that’s not really the topic here. The question is why are we willing to send American troops to defend Taiwan against China, a nuclear power, when we are not willing to send American troops to defend Ukraine against Russia, a nuclear power. And I’ve been trying to answer that question. And that answer is that whether or not the other country has nuclear weapons is not the deciding factor.
It’s really a question that answers itself. If the United States had a blanket policy on how to confront countries with nuclear weapons, then we would see the same policy applied to China and Russia. We don’t apply the same policy to China and Russia so we can therefore see we don’t have a blanket policy on how to confront countries with nuclear weapons.
Not really. The US is avoiding putting troops on the ground because that is one of the more last ditch things you do. They see how Ukraine is fighting, and think they can do it on their own, as long as they supply the weapons. Why would the US send in troops if they don’t have to?
@Velocity: the difference is that Ukraine is a hot war, and China/Taiwan is not. The US stance on Ukraine is a current reality. The US stance on Taiwan is a deterrent. It’s telling China “don’t do this, or you’ll pay a dear price.”
The whole reason that Biden feels comfortable saying that he would be willing to defend Taiwan from a military is that he does not anticipate having to do so any time soon. The point is to remind Xi of why he shouldn’t think he can take Taiwan.
Statement about what you will do and what you currently decide to do are not the same.
The problem with that is the things a country says have to be credible in order to work.
Biden has clearly stated that he would send American troops to Taiwan to defend it if China invaded. The obvious intent was to convince China the cost of invasion would be too high and to prevent such an invasion.
But suppose China decides that the cost was worth it and invades Taiwan. And then America decides that while we were willing to say we would send troops, we’re not willing to actually send those troops. China’s invasion would be successful and at a much lower cost than it had anticipated.
America would have avoided the cost, both in casualties and money, of a war. But this would be only a short term advantage. There are other situations where America has promised military support to prevent invasions. And those promises would now look much weaker. Russia would be asking itself if America was really willing to defend the Baltic countries, North Korea would be asking if America would defend South Korea, Iraq would be asking if America would defend Saudi Arabia, etc. These questions might lead to invasions.
And even if they didn’t lead to invasions, the same questions would also be asked in the Baltic countries and South Korea and Saudi Arabia. Those countries would be wondering if America would honor its promises to defend them. And they might decide that if they can’t rely on American promises, they might be better off seeking an accommodation with the country that’s threatening them. We would find ourselves becoming weaker as countries pivoted away from the United States and towards our enemies.
To summarize, Putin is batshit crazy, Xi is not.
That’s not a fact, but seems to have been U.S. administration opinion. Battlefield reality is leading to a policy change:
Ukraine uses long-range missiles secretly provided by U.S.
The British are saying it a bit more clearly:
UK gives Ukraine green light to use British weapons inside Russia
I’d have to disagree with this assessment as well. What exactly has Putin done that qualifies as batshit crazy? Not morally reprehensible or with the power of hindsight foolhardy, but batshit crazy. And before you say, “invaded Ukraine,” the echo chamber that was feeding him bad information about both Russian and Ukrainian capabilities was telling him Russia would be in Kiev and the Ukrainian government would fall in 72 hours. Considering how quickly and easily he occupied Crimea in 2014, it wasn’t even an entirely crazy assessment. Even a more prolonged war wasn’t necessarily a batshit insane thing to worry about either, his wars in Georgia and Chechnya gained him territory.
Even with the war in Ukraine lasting far more than 72 hours and revealing massive problems and incompetence in the Russian military, without the massive amount of Western aid flowing into the country Ukraine would have fallen to Russia long ago. And even with that massive aid, the displays of incompetence and the embarrassing reverses Russia suffered at Kiev, Kharkov and Kherson, Russia still physically occupies 20% of Ukraine. By that metric they are winning the war, and from where things stand now, it is looking more and more like Ukraine is not going to be able to take that territory back, and the war is going to stay in an attritional slogging match for a long time, with the caveat of course that nothing is ever certain in war and things could drastically swing in either direction.
Whenever the Soviet-Finnish Winter War comes up, I often have to remind people that Finland lost that war. That the Soviet military displayed extreme incompetence, suffered highly disproportionate losses and plucky little Finland was able to stand against the might of the Soviet Union for three and a half months doesn’t change the fact that they lost, the Soviet Union won, Finland had to cede 9% of its most developed territory, and nearly half a million Finns had to flee their homes as they were no longer located in Finland but in the USSR.
Putin has threatened use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine. Xi wants a no-first-use policy. Easy to tell which one is nuts.
Last year China introduced some ambiguity there: