PLA Strategy in a Taiwan Contingency

[CMP]

Let's assume you are correct and aid ships can reach Taiwan.

Let's assume that these ships are even able to unload.

OK. How do you bring the aid from the east side to the west side where 90% of the population is?

Each person drinks 2 liters of water a day. Once water treatment plants - which are big, stationary and open structures - are destroyed, that means Taiwan needs ~40 million liters of water per day. That is only to drink - no toilet, no washing, nothing but drinking.

A typical tanker truck holds 40k liters of liquid.

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You need 1000 tanker trucks going back and forth between the east and west coast every single day just to keep Taiwanese population alive with water. No food, no ammo, no medicine, just water.

Tanker trucks has fuel efficiency of 40 liters per 100 km.

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Taiwan is about 100 km across. You need 80 L of fuel every day per truck - 80k liters total - every single day - just to keep water up.

You cannot lose even a single truck or people die of thirst.

There are 3 main highways from east to west, 1 of which is a narrow mountain road. Can they even fit 1000 trucks every day going back and forth? Have you ever seen even 10 tanker trucks in a row, let alone 1000?

You also need ships bringing in ~40 million liters of water every day, because water treatment plants get bombed. 40 million liters of water is 40k tons. That's an oil tanker worth of water, every day. Lose 1 and it's over.

What's the old saying? Military amateurs talk tactics, military experts talk logistics. I love you breaking it all down here. This Lance guy is engaged in magical thinking completely disconnected from reality.

 

[GZDRefugee]

in fact they not only have to contest the air, they need air supremacy over the entire length of those highways. Even a 10 km stretch of mere air superiority is enough for air mining or FPV drones to stop tanker trucks.

They can't lose even a single tanker truck without replacement because 40k gallons is 20k people's water for the day and the average person can only survive 3-5 days without water; on average, that's 4k people reaching physiological limits.

and that is just to keep the Taiwanese population drinking water. Not eating, not fighting, just staying alive with drinking water.

To be fair, the ROC can stockpile and distribute water purification tablets instead to offload the drinking water burden a bit. It's still going to be a logistical nightmare for the government and clean drinking water will still be in short supply because the tablets only solve sterilization, not desalination (EDIT: Urban populations are also hard limited by the amount of access to water flowing through or adjacent to them). Taiwan's recent cycles of drought also make this an iffy strategy.

 

[GZDRefugee]

Too risky to blockade on east side.
The threat from US and its allies. China won't have air superiority there. J20 not able to help on the east side

After all, it's the open ocean.

You need alot of resources to blockade.
Are you going to sink every ship going to taiwan?

Able to starve the taiwan troops to death is kind of far fetched.

You do realize that cargo ships and tankers cannot unload without specialized port equipment, right? It also takes hours, potentially days, to unload large ships (stationary target). All the ships in the world don't matter if pumps and cranes (stationary/slow-moving targets) are reduced to scrap metal and harbors are choked by the carcasses of ships that attempted to unload.

The PLA has more than enough fires deployed on the mainland to guarantee that every single port on the eastern coast of Taiwan is reduced to rubble. Recent PLA drills explicitly simulated a cross-strait MLRS strike on a LNG terminal's infrastructure so we know for a fact this is the PLA order of battle.

 

[CMP]

You do realize that cargo ships and tankers cannot unload without specialized port equipment, right? It also takes hours, potentially days, to unload large ships (stationary target). All the ships in the world don't matter if pumps and cranes (stationary/slow-moving targets) are reduced to scrap metal and harbors are choked by the carcasses of ships that attempted to unload.

The PLA has more than enough fires deployed on the mainland to guarantee that every single port on the eastern coast of Taiwan is reduced to rubble. Recent PLA drills explicitly simulated a cross-strait MLRS strike on a LNG terminal's infrastructure so we know for a fact this is the PLA order of battle.

I gave up yesterday when seeing the total insufficiency of his intelligence. Straight onto the ignore list forever. It's admirable for you to put so much effort into teaching someone who is so unwilling or unable to learn anything.

 

[supersnoop]

What's the old saying? Military amateurs talk tactics, military experts talk logistics. I love you breaking it all down here. This Lance guy is engaged in magical thinking completely disconnected from reality.

Kind of a failure of elementary school problem solving?
LRASM can be launched 1000 km away, but will also take about an hour to get there (assuming 0.9 Mach "high subsonic" speed)
An hour is a long time to react, lol.

This was one of the failures of the original TASM, at max range, the target could easily have simply moved away because the missile is slow and the seeker was not advanced enough to reacquire the target, Now the TASM Block VA (2.0 reboot) has a more advanced seeker, but is still slow.

 

[GZDRefugee]

I gave up yesterday when seeing the total insufficiency of his intelligence. Straight onto the ignore list forever. It's admirable for you to put so much effort into teaching someone who is so unwilling or unable to learn anything.

I replied to the guy a grand total of twice so it really wasn't much effort on my part.

All this talk about a Taiwan contingency is moot anyways, until China starts pumping out Zubr class landing craft like how a grandma folds dumplings.

 

[Heresy]

I replied to the guy a grand total of twice so it really wasn't much effort on my part.

All this talk about a Taiwan contingency is moot anyways, until China starts pumping out Zubr class landing craft like how a grandma folds dumplings.

I gave up yesterday when seeing the total insufficiency of his intelligence. Straight onto the ignore list forever. It's admirable for you to put so much effort into teaching someone who is so unwilling or unable to learn anything.

It's difficult to argue or logically reason with something that exhibits less sentience than a potato.

 

[FairAndUnbiased]

To be fair, the ROC can stockpile and distribute water purification tablets instead to offload the drinking water burden a bit. It's still going to be a logistical nightmare for the government and clean drinking water will still be in short supply because the tablets only solve sterilization, not desalination (EDIT: Urban populations are also hard limited by the amount of access to water flowing through or adjacent to them). Taiwan's recent cycles of drought also make this an iffy strategy.

Sterilization is only 1 step. You also need mechanical filtration to remove sediment, then chemical separation to remove organic and heavy metal pollutants, then finally get to sterilization.

You can't drink untreated muddy water with industrial waste in it and expect to be OK.

 

[GZDRefugee]

Sterilization is only 1 step. You also need mechanical filtration to remove sediment, then chemical separation to remove organic and heavy metal pollutants, then finally get to sterilization.

You can't drink untreated muddy water with industrial waste in it and expect to be OK.

Somebody can make a lot of money if they create a way to combine the sterilization and chemical separation steps in an easy to use tablet format. Then you just need to filter out precipitate and voila, something that all water insecure regions of the world would pay out the ass for.

 

[FriedButter]

You do realize that cargo ships and tankers cannot unload without specialized port equipment, right? It also takes hours, potentially days, to unload large ships (stationary target). All the ships in the world don't matter if pumps and cranes (stationary/slow-moving targets) are reduced to scrap metal and harbors are choked by the carcasses of ships that attempted to unload.

The PLA has more than enough fires deployed on the mainland to guarantee that every single port on the eastern coast of Taiwan is reduced to rubble. Recent PLA drills explicitly simulated a cross-strait MLRS strike on a LNG terminal's infrastructure so we know for a fact this is the PLA order of battle.

Drones is another thing to consider. The Russians have been launching Geran drones from Kherson into Lutsk or about 750km in a straight line. So the Distance from Nanping (Further Inland) to the Upper or Lower edges of Taiwan is around 450km to 550km. With the Russians launching several hundred Gerans daily and the Ukrainians claiming their production is 500 per day. Any cargo ships will need a large escort but sending such an escort will put them in a risky scenario.