Communist China always telegraphs its punches—even if you don’t quite know when they’re coming.
The People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) Joint Sword-2024A exercises in May were intended to “punish” Taiwan for the voters’ temerity in choosing their own destiny—and more are reportedly coming.
China’s defense minister was uncompromising at the recent Shangri-La Dialogue regarding Taiwan (and everything else). He wasn’t winging it.
Commentators offer a range of scenarios for what the punches might look like, including the Chinese regime blockading Taiwan, blustering, squeezing, and isolating until Taiwan folds, seizing Taiwan’s off-shore islands, or an all-out kinetic assault to take all of Taiwan.
There are arguments for all of these.
The Chinese military is honing skills for joint/combined operations and practicing specific capabilities: rockets, naval, air, ground, logistics, cyber, electronic, intelligence collections, targeting, and so forth. The PLA is tightening operational (and psychological) pressure on Taiwan and gauging Taipei’s and, most importantly, Washington’s reactions.
The PLA is at a point in which it can move from exercise to “the real thing” in relatively short order—if the political decision is made to do so.
These latest exercises seem to have come out of the blue, some have said with only 45 minutes’ notice.
Some imagine that we would probably get more than that for the real thing, but not necessarily months of advance notice.
Of course, it’s hard to fully ascertain PLA capabilities since the Chinese only report the positive aspects, there’s no foreign or free press coverage, and no friendly foreign military attaches are observing the exercises.
But the biggest weakness is that the PLA has never done joint, combined operations for real in modern times, nor fought an actual war. War is always harder than a military drill since people are shooting back and almost nothing is predictable.
So it’s a roll of the dice for the Chinese regime if it decides to start a war over Taiwan.
But that’s the case with most wars.
Plenty of experts—even some respected ones—said in 2022 that Russian President Vladimir Putin wouldn’t dare invade Ukraine, and they had the “facts” to back it up.
The military exercises get the attention, but Beijing compliments its efforts with subversion and fifth-column activity directed against Taiwan.
Read the rest at Epoch Times.
Grant Newsham is a Senior Fellow at Yorktown Institute.
