Old-Fashioned Weapons Are a Key to Taiwan’s Defense

Since the Vietnam War, munitions have become increasingly precise, allowing an attacker to destroy specific targets with fewer weapons. Yet modern militaries still suffer from a reconnaissance problem. As Russia’s air force learned in 2022, if you don’t know where the enemy is, precise weapons aren’t that useful.

Yet both forces have also relied on so-called legacy systems. Drones and antitank weapons haven’t rendered tanks obsolete, and neither have antiship missiles done so for warships. Any weapon is useful in the right context. The Ukraine war has shown the interplay between the deep fight—using missile strikes to starve the enemy’s front line of supplies and stall reserve movement—and the close fight—the traditional combat phase between tanks and infantry.

A war over Taiwan would have the same dynamic. The PLA has little incentive to conduct a lengthy blockade, given the naval power of the U.S. and other allied combatants. More likely are early strikes on fixed targets, such as American and allied bases throughout the First Island Chain, Guam and the U.S. West Coast. The more the PLA can disrupt America’s logistics and decimate its forces as the conflict opens, the longer it could isolate Taiwan.

To do that, PLA ground forces would have to create a beachhead on the island, capture a major port, land forces on that beachhead, and then break into the country’s interior. But amphibious operations are logistically intense. Transporting men and materiel over water is hard, even across a relatively small body of water like the Taiwan Strait. The PLA has only a limited number of amphibious ships for an assault—six combined arms brigades theoretically capable of amphibious operations, but with limited experience. China’s likely plan, then, is to use civilian ferries to make up the difference. Yet these ships are exceptionally vulnerable, and so with enough missiles, Taiwan and its allies could likely disrupt an invasion.