China to strike US bases in Indo-Pacific, aircraft carriers in war over Taiwan
China will learn from Russia’s miscalculation in the urban warfare in Ukraine before launching a ground attack considering that Taiwan’s 24 million population is concentrated in dense urban areas like the capital Taipei. Besides, the vast difference between the size of Taiwan (36,197 sq km) and Ukraine (603,548 sq km) will be another factor in China’s favour with its forces not facing the same difficulties in controlling areas as faced by Russia.
“I’m sure the PLA is learning from what they’re seeing [in Ukraine],” Thomas Shugart, a former US Navy submarine captain and now an analyst at the Centre for a New American Security, told CNN. “You can read open-source translations of their strategic documents. They learned very carefully from what we did in Desert Storm and Kosovo.”
One of the earliest war games planned by American nonprofit global policy think tank RAND Corporation in the early 2000s to find out the winner in a US-China confrontation over Taiwan 10 years later revealed that Beijing would use what the Pentagon refers to as A2/AD (anti-access, area denial) to prevent an Iraq-like American military build-up.
RAND came to this conclusion after studying classified US intelligence on Beijing’s military plans and weapons programmes that also showed how Beijing had minutely studied the two Iraq wars and transformed the PLA.
Before Operation Desert Storm, the PLA’s military strategy mainly focussed on countering the enemy with its massive ground forces. The US coordination between its army, air force and navy and allies, the ‘shock and awe’ techniques that pulverised the Iraqi military, the precision bombing, the electronic warfare, and a modern command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (C4ISR) system jolted China.
In 1993, then-president Jiang Zemin coined the phrase “local wars under modern conditions” — a development of Deng Xiaoping’s term ‘local war’ — and directed the PLA to rehaul itself on the lines of the US techniques used in the Gulf War. His successor Hu Jintao went further and asked the Red Army to “win local wars under informationised conditions”.
In the next two decades, “informationised warfare” became the guiding force of the PLA’s metamorphosis into a modern, tech-savvy military with an extensive focus on cyber, space and electromagnetic warfare — especially under Xi. In 2015, Xi announced the reduction of the 2.3 million-strong PLA by 300,000 troops to establish the PLA Strategic Support Force, the cyber, space and electronic warfare service branch.
David Ochmanek, a senior RAND analyst and former deputy assistant secretary of defence for force development, remarked that the US was defeated by China in every Taiwan war game because “in that scenario, time is a precious commodity and it plays to China’s strength in terms of proximity and capabilities”.
In case of any conflict with the US, the PLA will rely on its space and airborne surveillance and reconnaissance, gigantic arsenal of precision-guided longest-range missiles, submarines, militarised man-made islands in the South China Sea (SCS), PLA Air Force (PLAAF) and PLA Navy — which is the largest in the world with 360 combat ships as against 300 of the US — to attack the American bases in Western Pacific (Guam) and the Indian Ocean (Diego Garcia), ports and aircraft carriers in the region.