PLA Strategy in a Taiwan Contingency

In 2024 ROC army is said to have 94,000 active duty servicemen and 1.5 million reserve. The army is made up of small number of professional soldiers and the rest are consript who theoritically have to serve for a 1 year period. There is a huge quality gap between the professionals and the consripts.

And the 1.5 million reserve is basically conscripts who had done their 1 year service.

ROC navy and airforce made up about 60,000, they are mostly equiped with less advance weapons than PLAAF and PLAN, and also have geographical disadvantage to maneuver. So they would be less of an obstacle to PLA than the ROC ground forces.

Subtracting the number of poorly trained conscripts in the army, the professional soldiers are probably less than 20-50% of the total in the army, (note that is an assumption since I have no accurate number), or around 20,000 to 50,000 men.

How anyone have the idea that ROC armed forces can stand more than a month against PLA have to look deeper on the reality.

The biggest advantage of PLA is not in their numbers but in their ability to locate, identified and pre-planned their opening assault on the key strong points and depots in the island. There is no way ROC can hide most of their long range weapons like Himar from the survaillance from satellites and ground listening stations across the straits and local spies and sympathisers inside the islands.

latenlazy said:

The central problem with all these potential countermeasures for ROCA to operate their rocket artillery is that they all significantly degrade attack cadence and without sufficient attack cadence you’re not really inflicting the kind of damage you’d need to to make amphibious landing for the PLA thorny. The win for the PLA here doesn’t rest on whether they can destroy all the launchers but whether they can suppress them to the point where they’re not a meaningful resistance factor.

Click to expand...

These weapons are not meant to be tactical weapons to fight the landings, but strategic terror weapons to strike at Chinese soft civilian targets.

The original game plan for the US was to use AR as the pretext to bomb China’s economic heartland to rubble and thus secure American global preeminence for the next half century or more while China rebuilds.

However, Chinese long range strike capabilities have essentially taken that move off the board for the Americans, as all their strike assets within range of the Chinese mainland are liable to be obliterated in the opening hours of actual combat such that they are unlikely to cause any meaningful damage.

So now the plan is the outsource the attacking of Chinese civilian and industrial targets to the willing idiots on Taiwan. I would not be surprised if they are demented enough to go after Chinese civilian nuclear power plants to try to cause maximum damage. The ultimate poison pill move.

The PLA has plenty of capacity to defend military targets in range against HIMARs, but throw in all the civilian targets and things get more tricky. The PLA will either need to front deploy its missile defences close to the coast to be able to engage the missiles at source; but doing that will put those SAM batteries within range of more strike options from Taiwan; or they will need to deploy many more batteries to cover all key civilian targets; or both most likely. And if the PLA is forced to focus most of its air and missile defence forces around Taiwan, that leaves other theatres potentially more open, such as the NE around Korea and Japan for example, or SW towards India, for the US and vassals to open up a second or even third front.

Well, that’s the wet dream of course. The reality is that PLA strike capabilities will massively blunt the effectiveness of any such attacks against Chinese civilian targets. The most likely consequence of the sale is the PLA just place more orders for MALE drones, hypersonic missiles and SAMs to cover those additional launchers and missiles many times over. So it’s just going to make things even worse for America in the long run.

The article on Military Watch Magazine:

PLAN vs US Navy

In July 2024 the U.S. Navy and the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Navy were reported by multiple Philippine and U.S. sources to have

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

in intensive electronic warfare battles in the South China Sea, with electronic warfare engagements reportedly having last a full twelve hours in the northern Philippines. American warships “faced an unprecedented crisis—screens full of static and a total loss of GPS signals,” with the fleet withdrawing due to the serious disruption of communication and navigation capabilities.

Click to expand...

"Houston, we have a problem!"

vincent said:

I bet ROCA will use them as terror weapons against civilians.

Click to expand...

I have my doubts that DPP has enough loyal cadres in the regular ROCA to be able to execute a sustained terror mission unless PLA launches attack without provocation. There is a reason why they are trying to develop a paramilitary group like Kuma that is loyal only to DPP rather than the idea of China like ROCA.

vincent said:

I bet ROCA will use them as terror weapons against civilians.

Click to expand...

Doesn’t really make sense to. If they justify civilian vs civilian retaliation they will end up losing much quicker because it green lights indiscriminate attack on urban centers.

latenlazy said:

Doesn’t really make sense to. If they justify civilian vs civilian retaliation they will end up losing much quicker because it green lights indiscriminate attack on urban centers.

Click to expand...

I don’t think PLA will ever strike actual soft civilian targets.

But I think a reasonable response from them would be targetting critical infrastructure. Basically accelerating the war and the escalation ladder.

lcloo said:

In 2024 ROC army is said to have 94,000 active duty servicemen and 1.5 million reserve. The army is made up of small number of professional soldiers and the rest are consript who theoritically have to serve for a 1 year period. There is a huge quality gap between the professionals and the consripts.

And the 1.5 million reserve is basically conscripts who had done their 1 year service.

ROC navy and airforce made up about 60,000, they are mostly equiped with less advance weapons than PLAAF and PLAN, and also have geographical disadvantage to maneuver. So they would be less of an obstacle to PLA than the ROC ground forces.

Subtracting the number of poorly trained conscripts in the army, the professional soldiers are probably less than 20-50% of the total in the army, (note that is an assumption since I have no accurate number), or around 20,000 to 50,000 men.

How anyone have the idea that ROC armed forces can stand more than a month against PLA have to look deeper on the reality.

The biggest advantage of PLA is not in their numbers but in their ability to locate, identified and pre-planned their opening assault on the key strong points and depots in the island. There is no way ROC can hide most of their long range weapons like Himar from the survaillance from satellites and ground listening stations across the straits and local spies and sympathisers inside the islands.

Click to expand...

The ROC is primarily a volunteer army with 10% of so conscripts, but only 80% or less depending on some of the units are combat ready. So it should be around 66,000 or so combat ready active duty servicemen. Though Taiwan can definitely last more than a month I think, if their fighting like Ukraine and Russia are then a few months 3-5 months I would say they can last, if they switch to guerrila warfare I think they can last a lot longer but it depends.
but I mostly agree with you here.

Zhejiang said:

The ROC is primarily a volunteer army with 10% of so conscripts, but only 80% or less depending on some of the units are combat ready. So it should be around 66,000 or so combat ready active duty servicemen. Though Taiwan can definitely last more than a month I think, if their fighting like Ukraine and Russia are then a few months 3-5 months I would say they can last, if they switch to guerrila warfare I think they can last a lot longer but it depends.
but I mostly agree with you here.

Click to expand...

How can they last more than a month when all the power stations, transformer stations fuel depots are destroyed? The people on the island can’t even cook instant noodles.