China’s efforts to capture Taiwan are “consistently thwarted” in war games run by the U.S. Department of Defense, according to a former U.S. intelligence official.
Dennis Blair, former Director of National Intelligence under the Obama administration, argues in an essay published in Foreign Affairs on Tuesday that when highly classified systems from both China and the United States are incorporated into Taiwan invasion simulations, China is unable to conquer the island.
Over the past few years, several American think tanks have conducted table-top war simulations to help policymakers and the public better understand the dynamics of a potential military contingency in the Taiwan Strait. In most cases, a coalition of Taiwan, the United States and Japan is able to repel a Chinese amphibious assault. But in some, China wins.
“A few well-publicized war games conducted by American civilian think tanks using unclassified data resulted in Chinese victories,” Blair writes. “These results occur when the United States is slow to respond to an attack and when the game models give too much weight to China’s superior numbers of long-range missiles and do not account for various countermeasures that can render these Chinese systems ineffective.”
“In more sophisticated simulations of a Taiwan invasion that the Department of Defense held in the past decade, played with all the highly classified systems from both sides, China was consistently thwarted in achieving its objective of conquering the island,” he adds.
Blair spent 34 years serving in the U.S. Navy, rising to become commander in chief of the U.S. Pacific Command, with most of the American forces in the Asia-Pacific under its purview. He became President Barack Obama’s Director of National Intelligence in 2009, but resigned the next year after a series of bureaucratic controversies.
Blair has argued in recent years that Taiwan’s will to fight China makes U.S. assistance more likely in the case of conflict, a view he reiterated in this week’s essay. But his main point is broader: China currently lacks the capacity to seize Taiwan in an amphibious assault, and analysis to the contrary is counterproductive for maintaining deterrence and ensuring peace.
Blair’s essay strikes an optimistic tone on several topics that have darkened other experts’ perspectives on Taiwan’s security. Efforts by Taiwan’s opposition party to delay and limit funding for the country’s domestic drone industry will not ultimately paralyze its development, he argues. And he says that if China were to escalate militarily, it would reveal a level of patriotism and defiance in Taiwan’s populace which has lain dormant during peacetime.
But Blair concludes that this favorable state of affairs will not endure without continued investment and integration between Taiwan and its partners. “Taiwan, the United States, Japan, and the Philippines must continue to commit resources, engage in effective military planning and exercises, and respond to China’s aggressive actions,” he writes.
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