Pat Dollard

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Wired:

In 2000, the influential think thank RAND Corporation crunched some numbers regarding a possible Chinese invasion of Taiwan, and concluded that “any near-term Chinese attempt to invade Taiwan would likely be a very bloody affair with a significant probability of failure” — especially if the U.S. raced to the island nation’s defense. But nine years later, a new, much-updated edition of the RAND study found that China’s improved air and missile forces “represent clear and impending dangers to the defense of Taiwan,” whether or not the U.S. is involved.

“A credible case can be made that the air war for Taiwan could essentially be over before much of the Blue [American and allied] air force has even fired a shot,” the monograph notes.

It’s a potentially controversial assertion — and one that might have fueled the (now-resolved) debate over whether the U.S. Air Force should buy more F-22s. RAND found that F-22s flying from the relative safety of Guam could be surprisingly effective in blunting a Chinese air assault.

Still, with or without F-22s, the Chinese air and missile force “dramatically outnumbers [U.S. and Taiwanese] forces and wins the war of attrition,” according to Steve Trimble’s summary of the RAND study. The Chinese lose 241 jets on the first day of fighting, while the U.S. and Taiwan together lose 147, but this lopsided kill ratio doesn’t matter, when China has hundreds more planes to put into the air. Moreover, most of the U.S. and Taiwanese planes lost, are destroyed on the ground by barrages of Chinese ballistic missiles. (It’s not for no reason that the U.S. Air Force is working hard to win new friends, each with juicy new bases, all over the Pacific.)

Before you panic, though, consider the many caveats RAND sneaks into the study — especially in the footnotes.

In light of how close the Chinese and Taiwanese economies have grown in the last decade, a Chinese invasion would amount to Beijing “shooting itself in the foot.” “China’s IT sector, in particular, could be devastated.” Never mind that the U.S. and Chinese economies are also irrevocably interdependent.

What’s more, despite focusing on the air battle for most of the report’s 185 pages, RAND admits that dogfighting can’t conquer an island. “Ultimately, there is only one military course of action that guarantees China control of Taiwan: a successful invasion and occupation.” An amphibious assault across the 200-mile-wide Taiwan Strait would represent “by far the most challenging military operation ever undertaken” by the Chinese. The entire Chinese navy could only carry 31,000 troops in the first wave — a number RAND admits would “almost certainly not” suffice, “assuming that Taiwan’s government, military, and populace chose to put up a fight.” It would take just one successful attack by Taiwan’s missile boats, or one day’s sorties by the island’s attack choppers, to incapacitate the whole Chinese assault fleet.

For that matter, RAND admits that successful attacks by just four U.S. B-1B bombers could also disable the invasion fleet. But let’s assume China does sweep the sky of U.S. and Taiwanese planes, bombers included — and even manages to take out Taiwan’s missile boats and choppers. The RAND study glosses over, in a single footnote, the force that would really play the biggest role in halting a Chinese invasion: the U.S. Navy’s huge, lethal fleet of nuclear submarines.