Analysts say China is moving faster and faster in preparing its military to invade Taiwan. Meanwhile, the U.S. is struggling to deliver crucial deterrence weapons to Taiwan, causing officials to negotiate a desperate plan.
Things are heating up across the Taiwan Strait. Last month, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken spoke at the Hoover Institution with former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, saying that China has changed its approach toward Taiwan in recent years. “A fundamental decision [has been made by China] that the status quo was no longer acceptable, and that Beijing was determined to pursue reunification [with Taiwan] on a much faster timeline.”
A few days later, Chinese leader Xi Jinping received a historic third term as general secretary at the Communist Party’s 20th National Congress, making him the most powerful Chinese leader since Mao Zedong finally gave up power by dying in 1976. This gives Xi more power to push through his own priorities, and he has been vocal about the need for Taiwan to be “reunified” with China, by force if needed.
U.S. Navy officials say that 2027 is the year when China wants to have the capability to take over Taiwan. U.S. Representative Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.) sits on the House Armed Services Committee, and he believes the U.S. needs to prepare to be ready to react to a Chinese invasion of Taiwan by 2027. “China’s just throwing so much money into military modernization and has already sped up its timeline to 2027 for when it wants the PLA to have the capability to seize Taiwan, that we need to act with a sense of urgency to tackle that threat because that is something unlike anything we’ve seen in modern history, at least,” Gallagher is quoted as saying by the U.S. Naval Institute.
One of the most obvious ways to deter and repel such an invasion, would be to arm Taiwan with the types of weapons that can survive a massive bombardment by China’s huge arsenal of ballistic and cruise missiles. These “high survivability” weapons would have to be small, easy to hide and highly mobile while also having the ability to destroy much larger weapon systems like warships, tanks, bombers, helicopters and attack jets.
In other words, Taiwan needs a large number of anti-ship missiles to take out a large number of warships and ships carrying invasion forces. These missiles could be fired from trucks hidden on Taiwanese soil, and from a large number of missile boats that should be as small as possible to avoid detection. Larger Taiwanese warships like frigates would be easy to find and target with guided missiles, while a scattering of many small missile boats would make target acquisition and target prioritization much harder.
Taiwan also needs hundreds of MANPADS launchers. These “MAN-Portable Air Defense Systems” are lightweight missile launchers like the Stinger that can be used by small teams to shoot down expensive jets that would be attacking Taiwanese ground targets after an initial missile barrage had taken out radar stations, warships, airstrips and fighter jets. These teams can easily disperse to general locations around Taiwan’s countryside, where they can then choose their own hiding positions and firing positions, making it hard for the enemy to know where they are, even if enemy spies managed to steal a list of all the general locations.
Such MANPADS teams would also be able to severely damage an airborne troop assault, as they would be able to shoot down large numbers of troop-carrying helicopters and airplanes. All in all, it’s hard to think of a more effective weapon than the Stinger when it comes to deterring a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. It would make a lot of sense for Taiwan to equip, train and field as many such MANPADS teams as possible. Such teams would also be able to transform into regular or guerilla units once their missiles run out or the conflict evolves into a ground war.
Another “asymmetric weapon” that can destroy weapons much more expensive than itself is the modern lightweight anti-tank missile launcher — like the U.S. Javelin and British NLAW systems. These types of tank-killer missiles have been used with great success by Ukrainian forces in the current conflict in Ukraine. Ukraine has also proven how devastating roving MANPADS teams can be against helicopters and airplanes, making it almost impossible for the Russian Air Force to achieve air superiority over the battlefields of Ukraine. And once you lose air superiority, you lose a huge part of your ability to keep the enemy’s heads down, allowing the enemy to inflict massive losses on your troops and transport vehicles — as Russia is currently experiencing in Ukraine.
The problem right now is that Taiwan is completely dependent on the U.S. to manufacture and deliver these highly effective weapons to its armed forces. Taiwan has already bought hundreds of Harpoon anti-ship missiles and Stinger anti-aircraft MANPADS from the U.S., but it is still waiting for most of these weapons and others that it ordered as long ago as 2017.
As we explained a few weeks ago, the U.S. is experiencing an arms-delivery crisis at a time when Taiwan can least afford it. Taiwan needs to urgently take delivery of its already ordered weapons — and probably needs to order many more asymmetric-warfare weapons — but the U.S. is struggling to produce these weapons after rerouting large numbers of asymmetric-warfare weapons like Stingers, Javelins and HIMARS guided-missile trucks to Ukraine.
Another reason for the backlog is the lengthy Foreign Military Sales process that each foreign application to buy a U.S. weapon system has to go through. This process requires multiple government departments to hold a series of reviews to see if the deal passes a range of political and tech-security requirements. Once these are done, the application goes to a 30-day Congressional review, after which it can take years to sign a final contract.
After that, the arms producer can start the lengthy process of actually building the weapon systems. And for some of these weapons, Taiwan has to wait for the previous clients’ products to be finished first. For instance, Taiwan is currently on the waiting list behind multiple Middle Eastern and Eastern European countries for 66 F-16 fighter jets that the U.S. approved in 2019.
This backlog is made worse by the global supply chain crisis. U.S. producers sometimes have to temporarily stop production because they can’t find crucial components of their high-tech systems.
That’s why the U.S. is now in talks with Taiwanese officials to see if there’s a way in which the two countries can co-produce the weapons that Taiwan needs most urgently. The Nikkei Asia Review reports that unnamed sources have confirmed that the Biden administration is looking at ways to either provide Taiwan with the technology to build similar weapons in Taiwan, or to build components of such weapons in Taiwan and then ship them to the U.S. for final assembly.
Nikkei quotes a representative of the U.S.-Taiwan Business Council — a group that includes major U.S. defense contractors — as saying that two Taiwanese missiles that had been developed by Taiwan’s government are being produced with some U.S. technology, but Taiwan has never before “co-produced U.S. weapons whether munitions or platforms.”
If feasible, such a project would help to increase the production capacity for these U.S. weapons and speed up their transfer to Taiwan’s forces.
This would go a long way to beat the clock by greatly strengthening Taiwan’s defenses before China reaches its peak readiness to invade. It would also make it easier for Taiwan’s military to ask for more weapons-acquisition funding from its politicians, as the Taiwanese population would be much more accepting of spending all those billions if they know that some of it will be spent inside Taiwan.
But the clock is ticking, and apart from the time it would take to set up production facilities, any negotiations would also take a long time to conclude. As one source told Nikkei Asia: “This is going to take some time to really shake out,” adding that the negotiation process is likely to continue throughout 2023.
Image: U.S. Navy
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