The Latent Military Realities of the Coming Taiwan Crisis
A blockade of Taiwan seems significantly more likely than a full-scale invasion. The US’s non-intervention in Ukraine suggests similar restraint might occur with Taiwan.
Nevertheless, Metaculus predicts a 65% chance of US military response to a Chinese invasion and separately gives 20-50% for some kind of Chinese military intervention by 2035. Let us imagine that the worst comes to pass and China and the United States are engaged in a hot war?
China’s national memory of the ‘century of humiliation’ deeply shapes its modern strategic thinking. How many Westerners could faithfully recount the events of the Opium Wars? How many have even heard of the Boxer Rebellion, the Eight-nation alliance, the Tai-Ping rebellion? Yet these events are the core curriculum in Chinese education.
Chinese revanchism toward the West enjoys broad public support. The CCP repression of Chinese public opinion likely understates how popular this view is. CCP officals actually have more dovish view than the general public according to polling.
As other pieces of evidence: historically, the Boxer rebellion was a grass-root phenomenon. Movies depicting conflict between China and America consistently draw large audiences and positive reception. China has an absolute miniscule number of foreigners per capita and this has fallen after the pandemic and never rebounded.
China is the only nuclear power that has explicitly disavowed a nuclear first strike. It currently has a remarkably small nuclear stockpile (~200 warheads). With the increased sensor capabilities in recent years China has become vulnerable to a US nuclear first-strike destroying her launchers before she can react. This is likely part of the reason for a major build-up of her nuclear stockpile in recent years.
It is plausible that there will be a hot war without the use of nuclear weapons. The closest historical case is of course the Korea War, the last indirect conflict between the US and China, ended in stalemate despite massive US economic superiority. Today, that economic gap has largely closed—China’s economy is 1.25x larger in PPP terms, while the US is only 40% bigger in nominal GDP.
How would a conventional US-China war look like? What can be learned from past conflicts?
The 1973 Falklands War between the UK and Argentina is the last air-naval war between near-peer powers. The 50-year gap since then equals the time between the US Civil War and WWI. Naval and air warfare technology advances much faster than land warfare—historically, this was tested through frequent conflicts. Today’s unprecedented peace means we’re largely guessing which naval technologies and doctrines will actually work. While land warfare in Ukraine looks like ‘WWI with drones’, naval warfare has likely seen much more dramatic changes.
Naval technology advances create bigger power gaps than land warfare. The Opium Wars showed this dramatically—British steamships simply sailed up Chinese rivers unopposed, forcing humiliating treaties on a land power.
Air warfare technology gaps may be even more extreme than naval ones. Modern F-35s achieve 20:0 kill ratios against previous-generation fighters in exercises.
The Arab-Israeli wars, and the Gulf war suggests some lessons about modern air warfare. These conflicts showed that air superiority is typically won or lost very quickly: initial strikes on airbases can be decisive, and most aircraft losses happen on the ground rather than in dogfights. This remains such a concern that it’s US Air Force doctrine to rotate aircraft between airfields. More broadly, these conflicts suggest that air warfare produces more decisive, one-sided outcomes than land battles—when one side gains air superiority, the results can be devastating.
Wild Cards
Drones and the Transparent Battlefield
Drones represent warfare’s future, yet both sides underinvest. While the US military has only 10,000 small drones and 400 large ones, Ukraine alone produces 1-4 million drones annually. China leads in mass-producing small drones but lacks integration doctrine.The Ukraine war revealed how modern sensors create a ‘transparent battlefield’ where hiding large forces is impossible. Drones might make it trivially easy to find (and even destroy) submarines and surface ships.
Submarines
Since WWI Submarines are the kings of the sea. It is plausibly the case that submarines are dominant. A single torpedo from a submarine will sink an aircraft carrier—in exercises, small diesel-electric submarines regularly ‘sink’ entire carrier groups. These submarines can hide in sonar deadzones, regions where water temperature and salinity create acoustic blind spots.
Are Aircraft Carriers obsolete?
China now sports hypersonic missiles that at least in theory could disable an aircraft carrier from 1500 miles or beyond. On the flip side, missile defense effectiveness has increased dramatically, hypersonic missile effectiveness may be overstated. As a point of evidence of the remaining importance of air craft carriers, China is building her own fleet of aircraft carriers.
Military Competence Wildcard:
Peace means we don’t know the true combat effectiveness of either military. Authoritarian militaries often suffer from corruption and incompetence—Chinese troops have been caught loading missile launchers with water instead of fuel during exercises [Comment 5: Need source]. But the US military also shows worrying signs: bureaucratic bloat, lack of recent peer conflict experience, and questions about training quality. Both militaries’ actual combat effectiveness remains a major unknown. The US Navy now has more admirals than warships.
Stealth bombers and JASSM-ER
We don’t know what the real dominant weapon in a real conventional 21-century naval war between peers would be, but a plausible guess for a game-changing technology are Stealth Bombers & Stealth missiles.
The obscene cost made the B2 stealth bombers even less popular than the ever-more-costly jet fighters and the project was prematurely halted at 21 platforms. Despite the obscene cost it’s plausible that the B2 and it’s younger cousin the B21 is worth all the money and then some.
Unlike fighters a stealth bombers has something ‘true stealth’. While a stealth fighter like a F35 is better thought of as a ‘low-observable’ aircraft that is difficult to target-lock by short-wave radar but easily detectable by long-wave radar, the B2 stealth bomber is opaque to long-wave radar too. Stealth bombers can also carry air-to-air missiles so may even be effective against fighters. Manoeuvrability and speed, long the defining hallmark of fighters has become less important with the advent of highly accurate homing missiles.
Lockheed Martin has developed the JASSM-ER, a stealth missile with a range up to 900 miles. A B2 bomber has a range of up to something like 4000 miles. For comparison, the range of fighters is something in the range of 400-1200 miles.
A single hit of a JASSM-ER is probably a mission kill on a naval vessel. A B2 can carry up to 16 of these missiles. This means that a single squadron of stealth bombers taking off from a base in Guam could potentially wipe out half a fleet in a single sortie.
***********
And of course last but not least, the greatest wildcard of them all:
AGI.
I will refrain from speculating on the military implications of AGI.
Clear China Disadvantages, US Advantages:
Amphibious assaults are inherently difficult A full Taiwan invasion faces massive logistical hurdles. Taiwan could perhaps muster 500,000 defenders under full mobilization, requiring 1.5 million Chinese troops for a successful assault under standard military doctrine. For perspective, D-Day—history’s largest amphibious invasion—landed only 133,000 troops.
China’s energy vulnerability is significant—China imports 70% of its oil and 25% of its gas by sea. While Russia provides 20-40% of these imports and could increase supply, the US could severely disrupt China’s energy access.
China’s regional diplomacy has backfired—Chinas has alienated virtually all its neighbours. The US has basing options in Japan, Australia, Philippines, and across Pacific islands.
US carrier advantage The US operates 11 nuclear supercarriers with extensive blue-water experience. China has two smaller carriers active, one in trials, and one nuclear carrier under construction. The big questionmark is whether carriers might be obsolete or not.
US Stealth bomber advantage: The US leads with 21 B1s and 100 new B21s ordered, while China’s H10 program still lags behind.
US submarine advantage US submarines are significantly technologically ahead. Putin selling Russian submarine technology might nullify some of that advantage, as might new cheap sea drones. Geographically, it’s hard for Chinese submarines to escape the China sea unnoticed.
Clear China Advantages, US Disadvantages:
Geography favors China Taiwan lies just 100 miles from mainland China while US forces must cross the Pacific. The massive Chinese Rocket Force can launch thousands of missiles from secure mainland positions.
Advanced missile capabilities Massive conventional rocket force plus claimed hypersonic missile capabilities [Comment : find skeptic hypersonic missile video]
China has been preparing for many years China has established numerous artificial islands with airfields throughout the region. They’ve successfully stolen F35 plans and are producing their own version at scale. The Chinese governments has built up enormous national emergency storages of essential resources in preparation for the (inevitable) conflict. Bringing Taiwan back into the fold has been a primary driver of policy for decades.
US Shipbuilding The US shipbuilding industry has collapsed to just 0.1% of global production, while China, South Korea, and Japan dominate with 35-40%, 25-30%, and 20-25% respectively.
That sounds like an exaggeration? My impression is that China has OK/good relations with countries such as Vietnam, Cambodia, Pakistan, Indonesia, North Korea, factions in Myanmar. And Russia, of course. If you’re serious about this claim, I think you should look at a map, make a list of countries which qualify as “neighbors” based purely on geographic distance, then look up relations for each one.
I note you didn’t mention the info-sec aspects of the war, I have heard China is better at this than the US, but that doesn’t mean much because you would expect to hear that if China was really terrible too.
Great write up Alex! I wonder how well the transparent battlefied translates to the naval setting. 1. Detection and communication through water is significantly harder than air, requiring shorter distances. 2. Surveilling a volume scales worse than a surface.
Am I missing something or do you think drones will just scale anyway?
both the US and China are already deploying a number of surface and underwater drones. Ukraine has had a lot of success with surface suicide drones sinking several Russian ships iirc, damaging bridges etc.
Outside of Ukraine and Russia, maybe Israel, nobody is really on the ball when it comes to military competitiveness. To hit home this point, consider that the US military employs about 10.000 drones of all sizes while Ukraine, with an economy 1⁄5 of the Netherlands, now produces 1-4 million drones a year alone. [ofc drones vary widely in size and capability so this is ofc a little misleading]
It should be strongly suspected that when faced with a real peer opponent warring powers will quickly realize they need to massively up production of drones.
there is an interesting acoustic phenomenon where a confluence of environmental factors (like sea depth, temperature, range, etc) create ‘sonar deadzones’ where submarines are basically invisible. The exact nature of these deadzones is a closely-held state secret—as is the exact design of submarines to make them as silent as possible. As stated, my understanding is that is one of a few remaining areas where the US has a large technological advantage over her Chinese counterparts.
You can’t hit something you can’t see so this advantage is potentially very large.
As mentioned, a single torpedo hit will sink a ship; a ballistic missile hit is a mission kill; both attack submarines and ballistic missile submarines are lethal.
Although submarines can dive fairly deep, there are various constraints on how deep they typically dive. e.g. they probably want to stay in these sonar deadzones.
-> There was an incident a while back where a (russian? english? french?) submarine hit another submarine (russian? englih? french?) by accident. It underscores how silent submarines are and how there are probably preferred regions underwater where submarines are much more likely to be found.
however, sensors have improved markedly. THe current thinking is that employing a large fleet of slow-moving underwater drones equipped with very sensitive acoustive equipment it would be possible to create a ‘net’ that could effectivel track submarines. Both the US and China are working on this. I’ve seen prognoses that by 2050 the transparant battlefield will come for the underwater realm. I can’t assess this.
tidbit: I had a conversation with Jim Crutchfield about his whalelistening project. He build his own speakers and sonophones of course. He told me to get it work well required some very sophisticated mathematics. There was a well-developing literature in the ( ~)50s about this topic when it abruptly disappeared [sonomath was henceforth considered a statesecret by nat sec]
[this is a draft. I strongly welcome comments]
The Latent Military Realities of the Coming Taiwan Crisis
A blockade of Taiwan seems significantly more likely than a full-scale invasion. The US’s non-intervention in Ukraine suggests similar restraint might occur with Taiwan.
Nevertheless, Metaculus predicts a 65% chance of US military response to a Chinese invasion and separately gives 20-50% for some kind of Chinese military intervention by 2035. Let us imagine that the worst comes to pass and China and the United States are engaged in a hot war?
China’s national memory of the ‘century of humiliation’ deeply shapes its modern strategic thinking. How many Westerners could faithfully recount the events of the Opium Wars? How many have even heard of the Boxer Rebellion, the Eight-nation alliance, the Tai-Ping rebellion? Yet these events are the core curriculum in Chinese education.
Chinese revanchism toward the West enjoys broad public support. The CCP repression of Chinese public opinion likely understates how popular this view is. CCP officals actually have more dovish view than the general public according to polling.
As other pieces of evidence: historically, the Boxer rebellion was a grass-root phenomenon. Movies depicting conflict between China and America consistently draw large audiences and positive reception. China has an absolute miniscule number of foreigners per capita and this has fallen after the pandemic and never rebounded.
China is the only nuclear power that has explicitly disavowed a nuclear first strike. It currently has a remarkably small nuclear stockpile (~200 warheads). With the increased sensor capabilities in recent years China has become vulnerable to a US nuclear first-strike destroying her launchers before she can react. This is likely part of the reason for a major build-up of her nuclear stockpile in recent years.
It is plausible that there will be a hot war without the use of nuclear weapons. The closest historical case is of course the Korea War, the last indirect conflict between the US and China, ended in stalemate despite massive US economic superiority. Today, that economic gap has largely closed—China’s economy is 1.25x larger in PPP terms, while the US is only 40% bigger in nominal GDP.
How would a conventional US-China war look like? What can be learned from past conflicts?
The 1973 Falklands War between the UK and Argentina is the last air-naval war between near-peer powers. The 50-year gap since then equals the time between the US Civil War and WWI. Naval and air warfare technology advances much faster than land warfare—historically, this was tested through frequent conflicts. Today’s unprecedented peace means we’re largely guessing which naval technologies and doctrines will actually work. While land warfare in Ukraine looks like ‘WWI with drones’, naval warfare has likely seen much more dramatic changes.
Naval technology advances create bigger power gaps than land warfare. The Opium Wars showed this dramatically—British steamships simply sailed up Chinese rivers unopposed, forcing humiliating treaties on a land power.
Air warfare technology gaps may be even more extreme than naval ones. Modern F-35s achieve 20:0 kill ratios against previous-generation fighters in exercises.
The Arab-Israeli wars, and the Gulf war suggests some lessons about modern air warfare. These conflicts showed that air superiority is typically won or lost very quickly: initial strikes on airbases can be decisive, and most aircraft losses happen on the ground rather than in dogfights. This remains such a concern that it’s US Air Force doctrine to rotate aircraft between airfields. More broadly, these conflicts suggest that air warfare produces more decisive, one-sided outcomes than land battles—when one side gains air superiority, the results can be devastating.
Wild Cards
Drones and the Transparent Battlefield
Drones represent warfare’s future, yet both sides underinvest. While the US military has only 10,000 small drones and 400 large ones, Ukraine alone produces 1-4 million drones annually. China leads in mass-producing small drones but lacks integration doctrine.The Ukraine war revealed how modern sensors create a ‘transparent battlefield’ where hiding large forces is impossible. Drones might make it trivially easy to find (and even destroy) submarines and surface ships.
Submarines
Since WWI Submarines are the kings of the sea. It is plausibly the case that submarines are dominant. A single torpedo from a submarine will sink an aircraft carrier—in exercises, small diesel-electric submarines regularly ‘sink’ entire carrier groups. These submarines can hide in sonar deadzones, regions where water temperature and salinity create acoustic blind spots.
Are Aircraft Carriers obsolete?
China now sports hypersonic missiles that at least in theory could disable an aircraft carrier from 1500 miles or beyond. On the flip side, missile defense effectiveness has increased dramatically, hypersonic missile effectiveness may be overstated. As a point of evidence of the remaining importance of air craft carriers, China is building her own fleet of aircraft carriers.
Military Competence Wildcard:
Peace means we don’t know the true combat effectiveness of either military. Authoritarian militaries often suffer from corruption and incompetence—Chinese troops have been caught loading missile launchers with water instead of fuel during exercises [Comment 5: Need source]. But the US military also shows worrying signs: bureaucratic bloat, lack of recent peer conflict experience, and questions about training quality. Both militaries’ actual combat effectiveness remains a major unknown. The US Navy now has more admirals than warships.
Stealth bombers and JASSM-ER
We don’t know what the real dominant weapon in a real conventional 21-century naval war between peers would be, but a plausible guess for a game-changing technology are Stealth Bombers & Stealth missiles.
The obscene cost made the B2 stealth bombers even less popular than the ever-more-costly jet fighters and the project was prematurely halted at 21 platforms. Despite the obscene cost it’s plausible that the B2 and it’s younger cousin the B21 is worth all the money and then some.
Unlike fighters a stealth bombers has something ‘true stealth’. While a stealth fighter like a F35 is better thought of as a ‘low-observable’ aircraft that is difficult to target-lock by short-wave radar but easily detectable by long-wave radar, the B2 stealth bomber is opaque to long-wave radar too. Stealth bombers can also carry air-to-air missiles so may even be effective against fighters. Manoeuvrability and speed, long the defining hallmark of fighters has become less important with the advent of highly accurate homing missiles.
Lockheed Martin has developed the JASSM-ER, a stealth missile with a range up to 900 miles. A B2 bomber has a range of up to something like 4000 miles. For comparison, the range of fighters is something in the range of 400-1200 miles.
A single hit of a JASSM-ER is probably a mission kill on a naval vessel. A B2 can carry up to 16 of these missiles. This means that a single squadron of stealth bombers taking off from a base in Guam could potentially wipe out half a fleet in a single sortie.
***********
And of course last but not least, the greatest wildcard of them all:
AGI.
I will refrain from speculating on the military implications of AGI.
Clear China Disadvantages, US Advantages:
Amphibious assaults are inherently difficult A full Taiwan invasion faces massive logistical hurdles. Taiwan could perhaps muster 500,000 defenders under full mobilization, requiring 1.5 million Chinese troops for a successful assault under standard military doctrine. For perspective, D-Day—history’s largest amphibious invasion—landed only 133,000 troops.
China’s energy vulnerability is significant—China imports 70% of its oil and 25% of its gas by sea. While Russia provides 20-40% of these imports and could increase supply, the US could severely disrupt China’s energy access.
China’s regional diplomacy has backfired—Chinas has alienated virtually all its neighbours. The US has basing options in Japan, Australia, Philippines, and across Pacific islands.
US carrier advantage The US operates 11 nuclear supercarriers with extensive blue-water experience. China has two smaller carriers active, one in trials, and one nuclear carrier under construction. The big questionmark is whether carriers might be obsolete or not.
US Stealth bomber advantage: The US leads with 21 B1s and 100 new B21s ordered, while China’s H10 program still lags behind.
US submarine advantage US submarines are significantly technologically ahead. Putin selling Russian submarine technology might nullify some of that advantage, as might new cheap sea drones. Geographically, it’s hard for Chinese submarines to escape the China sea unnoticed.
Clear China Advantages, US Disadvantages:
Geography favors China Taiwan lies just 100 miles from mainland China while US forces must cross the Pacific. The massive Chinese Rocket Force can launch thousands of missiles from secure mainland positions.
Advanced missile capabilities Massive conventional rocket force plus claimed hypersonic missile capabilities [Comment : find skeptic hypersonic missile video]
China has been preparing for many years China has established numerous artificial islands with airfields throughout the region. They’ve successfully stolen F35 plans and are producing their own version at scale. The Chinese governments has built up enormous national emergency storages of essential resources in preparation for the (inevitable) conflict. Bringing Taiwan back into the fold has been a primary driver of policy for decades.
US Shipbuilding The US shipbuilding industry has collapsed to just 0.1% of global production, while China, South Korea, and Japan dominate with 35-40%, 25-30%, and 20-25% respectively.
That sounds like an exaggeration? My impression is that China has OK/good relations with countries such as Vietnam, Cambodia, Pakistan, Indonesia, North Korea, factions in Myanmar. And Russia, of course. If you’re serious about this claim, I think you should look at a map, make a list of countries which qualify as “neighbors” based purely on geographic distance, then look up relations for each one.
I note you didn’t mention the info-sec aspects of the war, I have heard China is better at this than the US, but that doesn’t mean much because you would expect to hear that if China was really terrible too.
Great write up Alex!
I wonder how well the transparent battlefied translates to the naval setting.
1. Detection and communication through water is significantly harder than air, requiring shorter distances.
2. Surveilling a volume scales worse than a surface.
Am I missing something or do you think drones will just scale anyway?
Great to hear this post had \geq 1 readers hah.
both the US and China are already deploying a number of surface and underwater drones. Ukraine has had a lot of success with surface suicide drones sinking several Russian ships iirc, damaging bridges etc. Outside of Ukraine and Russia, maybe Israel, nobody is really on the ball when it comes to military competitiveness. To hit home this point, consider that the US military employs about 10.000 drones of all sizes while Ukraine, with an economy 1⁄5 of the Netherlands, now produces 1-4 million drones a year alone. [ofc drones vary widely in size and capability so this is ofc a little misleading] It should be strongly suspected that when faced with a real peer opponent warring powers will quickly realize they need to massively up production of drones.
there is an interesting acoustic phenomenon where a confluence of environmental factors (like sea depth, temperature, range, etc) create ‘sonar deadzones’ where submarines are basically invisible. The exact nature of these deadzones is a closely-held state secret—as is the exact design of submarines to make them as silent as possible. As stated, my understanding is that is one of a few remaining areas where the US has a large technological advantage over her Chinese counterparts. You can’t hit something you can’t see so this advantage is potentially very large. As mentioned, a single torpedo hit will sink a ship; a ballistic missile hit is a mission kill; both attack submarines and ballistic missile submarines are lethal.
Although submarines can dive fairly deep, there are various constraints on how deep they typically dive. e.g. they probably want to stay in these sonar deadzones.
-> There was an incident a while back where a (russian? english? french?) submarine hit another submarine (russian? englih? french?) by accident. It underscores how silent submarines are and how there are probably preferred regions underwater where submarines are much more likely to be found.
however, sensors have improved markedly. THe current thinking is that employing a large fleet of slow-moving underwater drones equipped with very sensitive acoustive equipment it would be possible to create a ‘net’ that could effectivel track submarines. Both the US and China are working on this. I’ve seen prognoses that by 2050 the transparant battlefield will come for the underwater realm. I can’t assess this.
tidbit: I had a conversation with Jim Crutchfield about his whalelistening project. He build his own speakers and sonophones of course. He told me to get it work well required some very sophisticated mathematics. There was a well-developing literature in the ( ~)50s about this topic when it abruptly disappeared [sonomath was henceforth considered a statesecret by nat sec]
Damn! Dark forest vibes, very cool stuff!
Reference for the sub collision: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Vanguard_and_Le_Triomphant_submarine_collision
And here’s another one!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine_incident_off_Kildin_Island
Might as well start equipping them with fenders at this point.
And 2050 basically means post-AGI at this point. ;)