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In a recent memo, I explained that Taiwan faces structural disadvantages in the current era of precision strike. The very same technological trends that are enabling Taiwan to deploy various types of strike capabilities also enable China to do much the same, with Taiwanese capabilities being primarily restricted to a finite surface area along the island’s western coastal plain, which is not very large.
It has become popular to contend that mobility and deception are viable approaches through which Taiwan can readily improve the survivability of its military capabilities, such as its mobile missile launchers. Many point to the Russia-Ukraine War for evidence. Here, as elsewhere, one of the problems with extrapolating lessons from the Russia-Ukraine War is that China is not Russia, and the present-day People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is far better-equipped and positioned than the Russian military to accomplish what Russia has not vis-a-vis Ukraine. China’s intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) capabilities vis-a-vis Taiwan are much better than Russian ISR capabilities vis-a-vis Ukraine. This is, in part, reflective of geography: the Taiwan Strait is, at its narrowest points, just 130-180 kilometers wide, and Taiwan’s western coastal plain tends to have a depth of just 25-35 kilometers. It is also reflective of how the present-day PLA is better equipped to attack time-sensitive targets in “dynamic targeting,” which is something the Russian military continues to struggle with not only on account of rigid command and control, but also qualitative and quantitative limitations in Russia’s arsenal of weapons suited for use in such missions.
Current trends, technological and otherwise, suggest that the situation will only get worse for Taiwan over the coming years. The notion that Taiwanese forces will be able to “constantly” drive around the island’s western coastal plain from one hideout to another—as if Taiwan will have an unlimited supply of fuel—without being either detected or successfully targeted by the PLA in the process strains credulity, not least in the specific military-geographical context of Taiwan’s western coastal plain. Taiwan faces a reality in which there is essentially nowhere to hide in its western coastal plain other than densely-populated urban areas, there are few meaningfully hardened facilities available in Taiwan’s western coastal plain—unlike its mountainous interior and eastern coastline, and the PLA is increasingly well positioned to promptly target Taiwan forces on the move following detection on account of the geographical proximity of Taiwan’s western coastal plain to the Chinese coastline.
