How We Would Know When China Is Preparing to Invade Taiwan | Hacker News Reader

How We Would Know When China Is Preparing to Invade Taiwan

carnegieendowment.org

29 pointsjseliger27 comments

Open articleView on HN

They same way we saw with Russia/Ukraine:

* Massing of invasion forces, equipment

* Creation of supply routes, casuality collection points, field hospitals, and SAR bases

* Straight up denial by the PLA; most importantly accusations of "ChinaPhobia"

* Restriction of speech, civil liberties (well, it's China, so...)

While China's usual tactics of small low intensity conflict work for producing islands in the South China sea, military analysts state that at minimum a 3:1 ratio to be successful.

Napoleon allegedly said: "The amateurs discuss tactics, the professionals discuss logistics."

>Straight up denial by the PLA; most importantly accusations of "ChinaPhobia"

This was far from the case with Russia and Ukraine. Russia mass at the borders and shouted for months that they would invade if their demands were not met. I would wager that most military invasions start with such Behavior opposed to denial and then a blitz.

I would instead look for escalatory rhetoric in China and Declarations of hard lines that would trigger invasion of Taiwan.

>I would instead look for escalatory rhetoric in China and Declarations of hard lines

Has anyone analyzed "China's Final Warning" in contemporary times?

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=china%27s+final+warning&t=ffab&ia=...

> Russia mass at the borders and shouted for months that they would invade if their demands were not met.

Except that’s not what happened. They spent months building up troops repeatedly claiming it was just a military training exercise, denying they were building up to invade and that they had “no plans to invade Ukraine” until “whoops we invaded haha we were lying about the drills after all”

Yes they were making noise about nato as a pretense to Putin’s imperialism, because concern of nato is a farce. But they continually denied plans to invade.

This wasn’t very long ago. It was earlier this year, why are people getting details so wrong?

>Yes they were making noise about nato as a pretense to Putin’s imperialism, because concern of nato is a farce.

Are you seriously claiming that Russia didn't care if Ukraine was in NATO?

There are so many public statements from Russia before the invasion, about their red line and demands. Like you said, this was less than a year ago.

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/43334/nato-pushes-back...

https://www.npr.org/2022/01/12/1072413634/russia-nato-ukrain...

https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-delivers-response-to-russia...

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/russia-ukraine-putin-nato...

> There are so many public statements from Russia before the invasion, about their red line and demands.

Sorry, that premise is crucially flawed. It requires believing the Russian government and taking what they say at face value. That’s frankly absurd. Don’t do it.

There is the saying “fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me.”

Russia is notorious for blatant lies and has been for decades.

Let’s review the facts just in the case of nato and Ukraine:

In January 2022 Russia’s top diplomat, Sergei lavrov, repeatedly and angrily denied Russia had plans to invaded despite massing 100k troops. A couple weeks later those same troops invaded Ukraine. That’s literally Russia’s government blatantly and obvious lying.

Next, Russia claims it was all about feeling threatened by Nato. Their solution was to do the action that was most likely to strengthen nato and has literally spurred countries like Sweden and Finland who had no previous intention of Joining nato to rush for membership. Russias noise about nato is a baseless pretense.

Did you know Russia literally imprisons people for calling their war in Ukraine a “war”? Russia doesn’t just lie, it criminalizes truth.

But sure be my guest, take Russian government statements at face value.

You are ignoring the fact that Russia has been complaining about NATO for years, and made their red line declination months and months prior to invasion.

I absolutely believe that had NATO stayed out of Ukraine, Russia would not have invaded.

I don't have to trust what Russia says, the facts speak for themselves. NATO declared Ukraine will be part of NATO and troops were building on the boarder within months. They said it was a red line, it was crossed, and they invaded!

The US has been invading Russian allies for decades and now they are setting up shop in Eastern Europe. What would you think if you were in their shoes?

> “NATO declared Ukraine will be part of NATO and troops were building on the boarder within months”

Russia Today and Sputnik are great info sources.

you’re welcome to take Russia reasoning at face value, we’ll have to agree to disagree on whether that makes sense.

Their red lines were just as much unserious jokes/farces similar to Sergei lavrov declaring to the world they had no intention of invading literally right before the start of invasion. Take them at face value, everyone has the right to make their own assessment.

But Putin knew invading would strengthen nato. He didn’t care. It was never about nato.

What do you think it was about instead?

Simple bloodlust, conquest, and imperialism?

Do you see how one line of reasoning is consistent with rational actors and the other relies pathological boogeymen?

> imperialism and restoring the lost empire

That’s part of it.

And yes Russia use twisted pretenses about nato and nazis as boogeyman quite a lot and it works wonders judging by the way this thread is going.

Besides the canary-in-a-coal-mine signs of a PLA buildup and other mobilization steps, another issue brought up in the essay was the prospect of a U.S. port blockade. The author did not explain how this would work. Would ships be required, or could it be done with aircraft, land-based missiles, and warnings to potential trade partners and shipping firms?

Don't forget sea mines. We have the ability to deliver them covertly by submarine (some can swim to find their assigned resting place), or overtly by aircraft, a whole bunch at once. Some are able to be selectively armed or disarmed.

Offensive mining will, in my estimation, play a major role in any South China Sea conflict to come.

Article talks about PRC quarantining/blockade TW, or US blockading PRC (likely at Malacca chokepoint). The former is just PRC spamming her coast guard assets to setup a maritime cordon supported by navy. The latter involves retasking a lot of navy and coast ships but studies I've come across suggest the amount of traffic to/from PRC makes this unsustainable.

To some extent the actual weapons system used would be irrelevant. If the US declared a blockade, all commercial shipping insurers would immediately withdraw coverage in that zone. Conflict zones are (mostly) uninsurable, and large merchant ships don't sail without insurance. And the US would immediately back that up with wide-ranging economic sanctions prohibiting any entities involved in trade with China from being able to use any part of the US financial system. Thus almost no neutral flagged ships would be able to call on Chinese ports.

The US Air Force has put a renewed emphasis on air-delivered naval mines. During WW2 those weapons played a major role in starving Japan and they're just as effective today.

Respect Culver, one of the sounder PRC analyst out there.

But article talks about moves PLA modernization is trending towards. Exercises are going to get larger with increasingly huge mobilization for training purposes, munition factories are going to start stockpiling after improved jointness narrows procurement, state censorship apparatus can turn on dime.

All of which ignores PRC actual invasion will be preempted by long range / standoff attacks from land, air and sea. Even an autist like Ian Easton acknowledges PLA rocketry gives TW leadership ~8minutes of warning max before decapitation strike.

The more PLA modernizes, the larger the scale of joint training/exercises, the less warning there will be.

Taiwan? Looking at the board, seeing what's happening in the west, I would keep an eye on the level of loss the Russians are willing to endure before probable tactical nuke usage. Just before that point, I would look to China's northern border to see if they are about to roll north to undo the unequal Treaty of Aigun.

From Russia's perspective, tactical nukes aren't some kind of magic solution to reverse their battlefield losses. In land warfare, such weapons are most useful to knock out military bases and troop concentrations. But at this point the Ukrainian military is well dispersed and much of it is currently engaged in close combat with Russian forces. So a small nuke wouldn't kill many Ukrainian soldiers and there would be a high risk of fratricide. Most of those Russian military units are probably also not properly trained or equipped to fight on a nuclear battlefield; I suspect much of their CBRN gear has been stuck in storage since 1991.

Russia could force Ukraine to surrender by nuking population centers and civilian infrastructure. But that would come with such a high political and economic cost that I hope Putin will be rational enough not to go so far.

I meant that China would take back those parts of Manchuria and nearby lands it lost to Russia in 1860 the second Russia commits to total war on its western front. Taiwan is too difficult: crossing the ocean, powerful allies, entrenched defences. But Vladivostok and the Amur river region is defended by an overhyped, depleted, substandard, number-2-only-inside-Ukraine, army. It's just as good an offering to the people as Taiwan would be and a good legacy for Xi.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com