This article discusses a large report that came out of a recent war game of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan.
A U.S.-China War Over Taiwan: How Bad Could It Get?
Beware, China. And Taiwan, and Asia, and America. Just after the holidays, a team from the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) released a hefty report entitled The First Battle of the Next War: Wargaming a Chinese Invasion of Taiwan. It is jam-packed with insight. One hopes it finds avid readership among the uniformed services, their political masters, and Congress.
The report details the design and results of an unclassified wargame set in the Taiwan Strait in 2026, toward the end of the much-discussed “Davidson window,” which postulates a Chinese attack on Taiwan by 2027. The game overseers ran twenty-four iterations, changing different variables—political and strategic decisions, alliance politics, strategy and operations, weaponry and sensors available to the combatants—to identify cross-cutting themes, and to compile findings and recommendations applicable across a variety of likely circumstances.
On the whole the CSIS game struck a more upbeat note than games conducted by the armed forces themselves, which tend to prophesy bitter defeat. The First Battle of the Next War observes that China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) generally lost or fought to a stalemate under most plausible scenarios. The coauthors attribute the disparity between think-tank and Pentagon games to the fact that the CSIS hosts factored history into the game’s conduct alongside more traditional statistical methods.
Bringing in non-quantitative measures is wise. Military sage Carl von Clausewitz warns against trying to reduce a messy, complex affair like warfare to rules and formulas. Relying overwhelmingly on the probability of a kill during an exchange of fire employing certain weapons and sensors, as Pentagon games are wont to do, feels like flouting Clausewitzian counsel.
History is an antidote to fixating on numbers.
Probably the three biggest themes to emerge from the report are this: Taiwan must take ownership of its own defense rather than depend on outside intervention for survival; to succeed the U.S. armed forces must obtain permission from the Japanese government to operate from U.S. bases in Japan; and the U.S. military must bulk up its magazine of air-launched anti-ship ordnance to the maximum extent possible in order to sink a PLA Navy amphibious task force trying to cross the Taiwan Strait.
Otherwise Taiwan will fall. The island and its protectors will be unable to concentrate enough firepower at the time and place of battle to prevail.