Thursday, January 6, 2022

U.S. Army War College: How Taiwan can stop a Chinese Invasion

All they have to do is threaten to dynamite their computer chip plants, and the Chinese will simply not invade.  Simple.

"Simple", of course, applies to the authors of the paper.  All you have to do it listen to all the hysterical talk about what happened a year ago in Washington, and look at what the current Administration is doing to the economy to get a sense of what governments will do to consolidate power - even at the expense of economic damage.

Oh, and it seems that this article is the one that was downloaded most often from the War College web site in 2021.  Oooooh kaaaay.

9 comments:

Aesop said...

Pishtosh.

If China invades Taiwan, they won't give a wet fart about the destruction of the chip plants, and they'll be feeding the Taiwanese inhabitants into wood chippers at capacity after they've consolidated their gains.

The way Taiwan stops a Chinese invasion is to demonstrate a nuclear weapon detonation somewhere in the straits as a warning, with the advice that Shanghai, Tianjin, Guangzhou-Dongguan-Shenzhen, Hainan, Hong Kong, Macao, and Beijing will be the first of any twenty targets of a wartime launch of same, which would halve the population of China in about twenty minutes, and put most of the most populated coastal part of the country back to 1946 (or 1906) conditions all over again. Odds are it wouldn't leave much of that new Chinese PLANavy any the better for wear either.

Faced with certain annihilation anyway if conquered, Taiwan would have zero incentive to not carry that threat out if threatened or actually under invasion.

At that point, China has to decide if the lemon is worth the squeeze, and odds are, they answer it's not that important.

Taiwan has the tech now to assemble any two dozen nukes in about an hour's time, a feat the US accomplished when most of the country here still used an outhouse.

Old NFO said...

Never advertise actions... just do them.

Beans said...

Be a shame if there were smart-mines lining the Chi-Com harbors and alnng probable invasion routes.

And these days? What's the range of a GPS coordinated torpedo? Shame if that dam got hit by several...

Jonathan H said...

One of Dale Brown's books showed how easily smart weapons can decimate units gathered for invasion prep.

Richard said...

After 9-11, I had a neighbor who as a civil engineer was part of a team tasked to evaluate various potential terrorist targets. Her assignment was Hoover Dam. Conclusion is that it could be done with a nuke. AQ didn't have any but Taiwan could or perhaps already does have them. Busting Three Gorges would do a number on China. It has been estimated that it would take out 15% of worldwide production and obviously much more of China's. Not to mention the half billion people living down river. Even for hard core irrendists, that is a steep price.

Lawrence Person said...

You wouldn't even need to blow up the fab to make it useless. Simply remove key part from various machines (like the optical elements from an ASML EUV stepper) and then wipe the controller memory and shut everything down.

There are parts and recipes so far beyond China's semiconductor industry capacity that they'd never be able to restore a downed TSMC fab to a running, cutting edge facility.

More on problems with China's own semiconductor industry here.

More on the difficulty China faces in invading Taiwan here.

Chuck Pergiel said...

I suspect all Red China's belligerent talk is just to distract their people from the economic disasters and energy shortages. Well, that's what I hope anyway.

Comrade Misfit said...

If the Republic of Taiwan hadn't planned something like this many years ago, then we've all underestimated them.

Will said...

Investigations of the construction of the 3 Gorges Dam indicate that it was rife with poor quality materials and workmanship. The Chinese just couldn't resist the call to work some fraud into their own bit of the construction. I got the impression that it wouldn't take much stress to bring it down. Most of the engineers seemed a mite nervous after looking at it. Time will tell...