The Chinese People’s Liberation Army’s High-Risk Plan to Invade Taiwan.
Internal documents of the People's Liberation Army detail an operation scenario leading to the conquest of the island with heavy losses.
The People's Liberation Army in China is obsessed with a plan it trains on daily: “The Joint Island Attack Campaign,” designed to take Taiwan. This “highly centralized plan is updated regularly,” suggesting that the invasion envisioned by the Chinese Communist Party is “inevitable,” says Ian Easton.
This American expert from the Project 2049 Institute in Virginia has analyzed hundreds of internal People's Liberation Army documents and shared their contents in a book, “The Chinese Invasion Threat: Taiwan's Defense and American Strategy in Asia.”
Between 1949 and 1950, Mao Zedong instructed his generals to prepare for the worst, namely American military intervention with Taiwan. Today, Beijing expects “Taiwan's separatist enemies to put up a formidable resistance.” “People's Liberation Army officers are warned that only a massive and masterful military campaign will enable them to take Taiwan. The operation will be extremely difficult. A prolonged and bloody fight is expected,” Ian Easton emphasized.
In the Chinese Military Medicine Press, we read, “Units will be exposed to horrific scenes of carnage, deafening bombardment and fierce fighting.”
The People's Liberation Army plans to commit between 300,000 and 1 million troops to the operation.
A three-phase plan
The plan consists of three main phases lasting no more than two weeks before the capture of Taipei. Phase 1 - blockade and bombing - will be preceded by cyberattacks targeting Taiwan's Internet and government communications. Electronic warfare units, based in China, will attack U.S. satellites positioned over the Pacific. The blockade will be total: naval, air, and space. And the missiles of the Rocket Force, one of the five branches of the People's Liberation Army, will have to achieve from the outset what Moscow failed to do in Ukraine: control of the sky.
The People's Liberation Army envisions “initial strikes, followed by strikes on key points” (ministries, military headquarters, power grids, etc.), “continuous strikes throughout the country, and final strikes meant to annihilate the Taiwanese's ability to fight.” All infrastructure will have to be destroyed, even the airports, “to terrorize the island into submission.”
This first phase must be carried out very quickly so as not to give the United States and other countries time to enter the war.
Phase 2 - the landing of amphibious forces - will begin, still according to this plan, with the small islands of Kinmen and Matsu, very close to the Chinese coast, before taking the Penghu archipelago. In these Taiwanese strongholds, Beijing risks exhausting its amphibious resources, which would delay the main invasion. But not occupying them would pose a mortal threat to Chinese mainland bases, located within missile range...
The fighting, which the People's Liberation Army favored at night or in bad weather, would be ruthless. “Hunt down, kill, blow up, bury, burn and smoke them to death, clean up their nests!” professes the doctrine. The Taiwan invasion maneuver itself will mobilize four types of ships: bomb disposal, gunboats, armed civilian militia boats, and small boats to clean up the beaches. It will target areas that should take between one and four hours to capture.
The main target will be Taoyuan, the country's fourth largest city, with its international airport and oil refineries.
Phase 3 - generalization of combat on the island - calls for “ground forces to operate in dispersed groups, under the protection of air defense.” Airborne troops, dropped in battalions of five hundred men, will have to avoid operating too far from the landing beaches and the rest of the army.
The People's Liberation Army sees only two periods for such an offensive on Taiwan
Like their elders under Mao's command, the generals of the People's Liberation Army are aware of their operational weaknesses, including logistical shortcomings in transporting hundreds of thousands of men across the Strait. Moreover, it will be difficult for the Eastern Command to move into battle without Taipei being alerted.
From Beijing's perspective, “Taiwan's warning network reduces the likelihood of surprise,” writes Ian Easton. Worse, according to the researcher, “Chinese officers do not believe they have adequate intelligence on Taiwan.” The island's climate and very mountainous geography are major obstacles, with a very limited number of beaches to land on: there are reportedly fourteen.
“From the point of view of Chinese military experts, there is no good place to land with a large enough force to quickly take control of Taipei. As for the underground defense network, which is known to be very dense, it is like a fortress,” said Ian Easton. For decades, the Chinese have been modeling Taiwan's winds, waves, currents, tides, rain, and fog. There are only two realistic periods for an invasion: from late March to late April, and from late September to late October.
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