Taiwan is staging a war game today to see if it could withstand a Chinese assault. They have just finished another, computerized simulation. Things do not look good:
The drill came as Defense Minister Lee Jye confirmed a report that in a recent computer-simulated exercise, Taiwanese troops were wiped out 130 hours after the People's Liberation Army (PLA) started invading.China itself staged war games last month on Dongshan Island. The exercise...
The Apple Daily said the blitz was simulated as happening in 2006, the year when Taiwanese President Chen Shui-bian is scheduled to push for a new constitution, which Beijing has warned against.
After the first day of the Chinese "attacks", Taiwan's airports, bunkers, harbours and key government buildings were destroyed by extensive bombings featuring 700 ballistic missiles.
The simulated battles ended when the PLA captured the capital Taipei in the sixth day of the attacks.
which began last week, resembles what Chinese analysts say a military strike on Taiwan would look like: commando raids and elements of a so-called "decapitation strike" on Taipei, including night bombing runs - something the People's Liberation Army (PLA) has not practiced before in a coastal exercise....In case you didn't catch that, the PRC state media is directing our attention to its thermonuclear forces. The 31 in particular is a mobile ICBM carrying a MRV warhead. Each one is capable of destroying as many as three US cities, and these are estimated to be only a small part of China's nuclear capability. Under a threat of nuclear retaliation, support for Taiwan's defense would have to be highly delicate. Unfortunately, Congressional cuts to the Virginia-class submarine program have greatly weakened our ability to fight in the Taiwan strait, and doubly weakened our ability to do so in a deniable fashion.
State media are at volume levels not heard since 2000, the last time Chen, who desires a separate identity for Taiwan, was elected. Newspapers show Chinese frigates shooting rockets. They list Chinese weapons that "Americans are afraid of" - including the mobile-launched long range Dongfeng-31 and Dongfeng-4 rockets. Party newspaper People's Daily issued an angry broadside Tuesday on a July 15 resolution in Congress supporting the Taiwan Relations Act. The law allows US weapons sales to Taiwan for defensive purposes so long as the island is threatened. People's Daily argued that Congress "fabricated a Chinese military threat in order to justify arms sales to Taiwan - a blatant intervention into China's internal affairs."
There is one last point to be made about the Chinese nuclear threat. Those of you who like to hold grudges will note this paragraph from the Federation of American Scientist's report: "The DF-31 is equipped with many technologies stolen or bought from America during Clinton's term. The DF-31 success was so spectacular that the the PLA 2nd Artillery will deploy 24 missiles by the end of 2004." We've been wondering what the price of that negligence would be. Now we know the probable cost of the down payment: Taiwan, and with her the loss to China's R&D team of all the advanced US military technology we've sold Taiwan over the years.
Options for avoiding this scenario are few. We can encourage Taiwan to negotiate a peaceful return to the PRC, removing as part of the negotiations what we can of our previously-sold technologies; or we can encourage Taiwan herself to go nuclear, and arm her to the teeth. The latter position creates another nuclear power finally outside of our control, and could cause an escalation into the very war we'd like to avoid. There are no happy choices here.
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