United States Institute of Peace

Even after the PLA has reached its development targets, however, an invasion of Taiwan would remain an extremely difficult undertaking with a high risk of failure. The PLA may not perform up to its own standards, or the uncertainties in such a complex operation may turn out more challenging than anticipated, or sheer bad luck and the fog of war may thwart the best of plans. A failed attempt to take Taiwan by force could have dire consequences for China’s global standing and the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP’s) hold on power.

There are many ways a Chinese invasion could go wrong, so many that it is difficult to offer more than a long list and brief description of topics that deserve much fuller treatment. What follows is far from exhaustive but it attempts to group these into coherent bins and focus on the most salient vulnerabilities in the invasion effort.

Failure to Gain Air Superiority

Before the PLA can begin moving hundreds of thousands of soldiers across the Taiwan Strait, it must protect the enormous fleet of troop carriers and support ships from enemy air attack. That in turn requires neutralizing Taiwan’s long-range air defense weapons, grounding the Taiwan air force and holding off U.S. air strike forces launched from aircraft carriers and land bases in Japan, Guam and elsewhere.

The PLA’s tools for gaining air superiority around Taiwan are PLA Rocket Force ballistic and cruise missiles; PLA Air Force bombers, fighters and drones; cyber-attacks on communications and power systems; and long-range surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) along China’s coast and aboard PLA Navy warships. This is a formidable air superiority force, both in numbers and in the quality of its weapons and platforms. If successful, it will provide significant protection to the invasion fleet and forces ashore in Taiwan. If the PLA cannot gain air superiority, however, the entire operation is vulnerable to withering U.S. air attacks. There are several major ways it could fail.

• Inability to generate enough sorties. An enduring weakness of the PLA Air Force has been its reliance on mediocre aeroengines imported from Russia and even poorer quality engines manufactured in China. There has been a risk of catastrophic failure if the engines are flown too many hours or subjected to great stress. As a result, the air force has been forced to replace engines after a few hundred hours of operation and return them for depot-level overhaul.
  
  At a peacetime operational tempo, this is a manageable burden, but in a large-scale high-intensity conflict, the PLA Air Force may not have enough spare engines to sustain high sortie rates after the first week or two. Recent reports suggest the aeroengine sector has finally overcome its long-standing challenges and is beginning to produce better engines. But this claim has been made several times in the past two decades, and even if it is finally true, it will take years to re-engine the entire fleet.
• Inability to suppress Taiwan’s air defenses. An early priority would be for the PLA Rocket Force to open the door for air operations over Taiwan by attacking air bases, radars, SAM sites, command centers and supporting communications. At some point, however, the rocket force  will expend its inventory of ballistic and cruise missiles and the PLA Air Force will be left to deal with Taiwan’s remaining air defenses. The biggest challenge will be short-range Taiwanese systems, such as Avenger and Land Sword II, which are less dependent on radars than long-range systems and therefore harder to find and kill. In the worst case (for China), the surviving Taiwanese SAMs will severely limit PLA air operations over Taiwan, impeding air landings, strikes and resupply of invading ground troops.
• U.S. suppression of PLA surface-to-air missiles. In addition to destroying Taiwanese air defenses, the PLA needs to minimize U.S. air power around Taiwan. The PLA Rocket Force and Navy can attack U.S. carriers and air bases throughout the western Pacific, but the main weapons for controlling airspace around Taiwan are the large array of long-range SAMs, radars, sensors and data integration systems along the Chinese coast. This integrated Chinese air defense system (IADS) may or may not stop U.S. stealth aircraft — although it’s unlikely — but it poses a formidable threat to fourth-generation fighters, conventional bombers, and the large force of tankers, air warning and control systems, air surveillance systems, maritime patrol aircraft and other “high-value air assets” essential to U.S. air combat operations.
  
  A key, perhaps decisive, unknown is whether U.S. forces can neutralize this enormous IADS network designed explicitly to counter U.S. air power. There is nothing in the public domain to suggest they can, but undoubtedly there are well-funded projects working hard on the problem. If U.S. forces have or can develop such a capability, the Chinese landing force and key targets inside China will be naked in the face of massive air strikes and the entire Chinese operation will probably fail.

Failure to Get Enough Forces Ashore

Foreign analysts assess that the PLA would attempt to put some 400,000 troops ashore through a very limited set of landing beaches, seized ports and air landing sites. For comparison, the Normandy invasion involved roughly 130,000 personnel ashore on D-Day and 326,000 by the end of the first week across much more hospitable beaches. There are many ways the landing could fail.

• Inability to execute large, complex operation. A “joint island landing campaign” has been the focus of many PLA training exercises, but none have involved anywhere near the number of forces, vessels, aircraft and support structures of an actual invasion, not by two orders of magnitude. Getting one brigade ashore in a choreographed three-day exercise is a step toward getting 40 brigades ashore under heavy fire, but a small step.
  
  A particularly difficult challenge will be mobilizing and coordinating thousands of civilian ships that the PLA will rely on to supplement PLA Navy vessels in a crossing operation. The largest exercises to test such a capability have involved around two dozen civilian ships, barely a hint of what a full-scale crossing would require. And movement across the strait is just one component of a huge joint PLA campaign.
  
  The PLA has a great many shortcomings, as they are painfully aware. China has not fought a large war since 1953 and has never fought a modern high-technology war. There is no way they can know in advance whether they can really execute such a large and complex operation.
• U.S. success against the invasion fleet. The most obvious point of attack for U.S. and Taiwan defenders is the enormous fleet of military and civilian vessels attempting to cross the Strait. Attacking surface ships, even from outside the Chinese air defense envelope, also plays to U.S. strengths in long-range precision strikes. It would certainly not be a cakewalk; the sheer number of targets challenges the U.S. ability to deliver munitions in quantity, and the PLA will complicate the problem as much as possible with jamming, decoys, air and missile defenses, attacks on supporting air and space assets, and attacks on carriers and air bases. Nonetheless, there is a reasonable chance that with the right weapons and operational concepts, U.S. forces could destroy enough of the invasion fleet to defeat the landing.
• Taiwan success at the beachheads. There are few places an amphibious landing force can get ashore due to mud flats, cliffs and urban buildup. The Taiwan army, for all its many shortcomings, is at least heavily focused on defending the landing beaches, and the terrain strongly favors them. Some wargames conclude that Taiwan can fend off a Chinese landing, provided that it has extensive American air and naval support; others do not.
• Climate change. If the Taiwan coastline makes a landing difficult, the Strait itself is equally inhospitable, influenced by the world’s most active Asian monsoon system, where wind and sea states are frequently unfavorable and tropical storms are common. Climate change will make these factors even less predictable. The PLA may time its crossing to reduce the seasonal risk, but there is no guarantee.

Failure after Getting Ashore

Achieving a beachhead does not secure victory for the PLA. If Taiwan defenders resist vigorously and the island’s people and leaders maintain the will to fight (granted, a significant “if”), the PLA faces a difficult task in compelling Taiwan’s surrender and gaining effective control of the island.

• Inability to sustain its forces on island. If getting hundreds of thousands of troops ashore is a daunting logistical challenge, sustaining them in protracted combat operations could be even more difficult. Moving the required volume of supplies would require defending cargo ships crossing the Strait, keeping major ports in operation, and keeping on-island transportation links intact, all soft targets for U.S. strikes and Taiwan defenders.
• Inability to compel surrender. Movement on Taiwan is difficult enough in peacetime rush hour, much less after weeks of intense conflict. PLA forces would confront densely urbanized terrain, heavily damaged infrastructure and very difficult topography. Defenders would enjoy many bottlenecks to delay or thwart the PLA advance toward Taipei. Even after a successful thrust to decapitate the political leadership or compel its surrender, the PLA could face a difficult long-term pacification campaign with no guarantee of success. Opinion varies widely on this point, in both Taiwan and the United States; some expect Taiwan to collapse at the first blow, others see Taiwan fighting on for months or years in defiance of the aggressor. The PLA seems to expect a straightforward advance on Taipei and prompt surrender, but that may prove wrong.

Other Ways to Fail

All the above could involve other contributing breakdowns. The PLA “counter-intervention campaign” against U.S. forces in the region could prove inadequate, either because U.S. forces are better able than expected to defend against missile strikes or the PLA is unable to track and target mobile forces. The PLA could suffer much higher casualties than expected, or it could fail to protect economic and political targets inside China, compelling the regime to seek a face-saving political resolution short of military victory. The anticipated effort by internal or peripheral opponents to take advantage of the conflict for their own ends could pose a greater threat than expected to regime survival, compelling Beijing to reprioritize other theaters above Taiwan. Once a war over Taiwan is underway, this would take a very grave threat indeed, but such things can happen.

Strategic Costs of Failure

Any war over Taiwan would involve enormous costs for China, regardless of the military outcome. The war itself would entail a massive economic toll from the physical destruction of Chinese forces and infrastructure, a near-total disruption of foreign trade during the conflict, and economic sanctions as severe and wide-ranging as the United States and its partners could manage. Win or lose, Beijing would face enduring hostility from Washington, Tokyo, Canberra and others, with long-lasting impact on China’s economy and international standing. Even a victorious PLA would suffer heavy losses to personnel and platforms and a near-total expenditure of munitions and materiel, requiring decades to rebuild. A sober recognition of this enormous and inevitable cost should constitute the primary deterrent to a Chinese attack on Taiwan, even more than the calculus of whether the military operation would succeed.

A military failure would be even more costly. To begin with, Taiwan would be lost to China forever; absent a total transformation of mainland China’s political system, a Taiwan that had survived the worst China could throw at it would have little incentive to consider unification in the future. The U.S. and perhaps others might grant formal recognition of Taiwan independence.

Such abject failure would pose a severe threat to the CCP’s legitimacy and hold on power. Unification is the “sacred duty of all Chinese people,” enshrined in law and declared a top-level strategic objective by every leader from Mao to Xi. In the runup to war, the political mobilization campaign would loudly proclaim that war was the only way forward, the only remaining path to unification despite the enormous cost in blood and treasure. In the wake of a failure to conquer Taiwan, CCP leaders would be scrambling to assert a formula proclaiming strategic victory despite the military outcome, in a desperate effort to save their own skins. It is not at all clear whether they could succeed.

Failure in Taiwan, and the attendant damage to China’s military and security apparatus, would also offer a golden opportunity for separatists in Tibet and Xinjiang and could give rise to other movements in Inner Mongolia, in the ethnic Korean areas of northeast China, and along the southwest frontier. External opponents such as India and Vietnam would feel emboldened to act on long-standing territorial disputes.

Finally, a failed war over Taiwan would severely damage China’s global standing. Besides being locked into long-term hostile relations with many of the world’s greatest powers, China would be much reduced economically, less able to sustain projects such as the Belt and Road Initiative, and perhaps less able to act decisively due to political contention at home. Xi’s ambitious mid-century goal of the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation” could become a sad delusion.

Lonnie Henley is a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and an independent consultant who served four decades in the United States Intelligence Community, including 17 years in senior East Asia-related posts. The views expressed are those of the author and not necessarily of any part of the United States Government.