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China launched its most extensive war games around Taiwan on Monday to showcase Beijing’s ability to cut off the island from outside support in a conflict, testing Taipei’s resolve to defend itself and its arsenal of U.S.-made weapons.
The Eastern Theatre Command said it had deployed troops, warships, fighter jets and artillery for its “Justice Mission 2025” exercises to encircle the democratically governed island, conduct live fire and simulated strikes on land and sea targets, and drills to blockade Taiwan’s main ports.
The live-firing exercises will continue on Tuesday across a record seven zones designated by China’s Maritime Safety Administration, making the drills the largest to date by total coverage and in areas closer to Taiwan than previous exercises. The military had initially said artillery firing would be confined to five zones.
Taiwan’s military is surprisingly ramshackle, unless you mean the US? I’m not sure they can reliably be considered an adversary of China anymore. Xi could buy a few million of Trump’s crypto and all would be forgiven.
Ah yes, the infamous ramshackle F35
10 cent army out in force
10 cent army? I want to see Taiwan armed to the teeth. They can’t solo the CCP in their current state.
No one is soloing anyone, including China and Russia
That’s really the crux of the issue. If China finally move against Taiwan, who will help? Japan seems the most reliable ally at the moment, and perhaps Australia. The US are untrustworthy.
Doesn’t Taiwan have well over a thousand modern ASMs in inventory, and manufacturing hundreds more annually? How would mainland China enforce an encirclement by sea for any length of time with that sort of threat?
I hope they don’t engage in a war. China can bomb all Taiwan and destroy everything and lose on the process a lot of people and resources. If China is not a fool, and I don’t think it is, the best path is to wait (and maybe push) for a second civil war in the US to have the upper hand in a possible reunification talk. And this drills would be just showing muscle before sitting to talk with Taiwan.
AFAIK they don’t have that many of the newer ASMs, and anyway a thousand isn’t really that many, especially given that Taiwan’s missiles are on the smaller end of the spectrum - we’re not talking KH-22 sizes here.
It doesn’t take too many ASMs to sink some really important assets. Size isn’t really important, if one of the mainland’s carriers is within a couple hundred KMS of Taiwan, then it’s in the kill zone. Supersonic maneuvering missiles that work in gps-denied environments and can be sea, air and land launched are just the sort of weapon that works great in an asymmetric conflict and to break naval blockades. The blocader has to defend against every single inbound, the adversary only needs to get one missile through the defenses
While this is all true, the aggressor being the largest green-water navy in the world skews the equation, plus the naval angle is of course only one of multiple avenues of attack. We can’t be complacent about Taiwan’s ability to defend itself, no more than we could say for example that Finland could hold off Russia alone.
Taiwan doesn’t need to sink every PLAN ship, they just need to make the political cost of enforcing a blockade higher than the CPC can afford.
Ukraine has area-denied Russia’s most important warm water port and most of the black sea from use by the Russian surface fleet with a small handful of homebrew ASMs and some jetskis painted black with a barrel of RDX strapped to them. And Finland did hold off the red army alone once already.
Ukraine is still being actively devastated after three years by a country far inferior to China - I’m sure the Taiwanese would prefer to avoid that fate. Finland’s “victory” came at the cost of collaoration with the Nazis, which maybe was the right choice at the time, but not great in hindsight to say the least. It’s also hard to quantify the political cost when discussing a one-party state - it’s not like the CCP will lose the next election. I’m not saying you’re wrong, I’m saying I’d prefer to support Taiwan to such a great extent that we don’t have to cross our fingers.