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Starlink’s low earth orbit (LEO SATCOM) service has offered Ukraine a very significant military advantage over Russia on account of how Starlink is a low-cost and widely available low-latency and high-bandwidth non-line-of-sight radio frequency datalink with tremendous military applications, including a datalink through which strike drones and other munitions can be remotely monitored, if not remotely piloted. While Russia has been able to make limited use of Starlink to varying degrees over the course of the Russia-Ukraine War, it made an important decision to pursue an alternative approach to similar ends, namely mesh radio network modems. Mesh radio networks are no true substitute for LEO SATCOM and are, all things considered, best viewed as a complement to LEO SATCOM, but nevertheless allow Russia to remotely monitor, if not remotely pilot, its strike drones, cruise missiles, and uncrewed surface vessels (USVs) over a distance of 200-300 kilometers from the international border/frontlines (in principle, a large-enough mesh radio network can be used over greater range, albeit with more complexity).
In a recent memo, I explained that China’s development of analogues to Starlink’s massive LEO SATCOM constellation poses a major threat to Taiwan on account of how it will enable, among other things, China to do to Taiwan many of the things Ukraine does to Russia.
In another recent memo, I explained that China can, more generally, do everything Russia and Ukraine do to one another to Taiwan, and at a much larger scale. Chinese vendors supply many of the components going into the “new weapons” Russia and Ukraine are employing against one another in hitherto unimaginable numbers. For the present purposes, this notably includes mesh radio network modes that are enabling Russian Shahed-136/Geran-2 strike drones, as well as their turbojet-powered derivatives—which notably employ commercially-sourced low-cost Chinese-built turbojet engines—in the form of the Geran-3 and Geran-4, to overcome the effects of Ukrainian electronic warfare capabilities on satellite navigation systems and, no less importantly, to attack mobile targets.
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. The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) will eventually get a lot of mileage out of Chinese LEO SATCOM constellations, but it can readily employ mesh radio network modems to attack both stationary and mobile targets across Taiwan through cruise missiles, propeller-driven fixed-wing strike drones of various sizes and weight classes, multirotor drones, uncrewed surface vessels, uncrewed ground vehicles, and so forth. Chinese Mesh radio network modems are not some hypothetical and prospective component going into Chinese armaments in the manner of Chinese LEO SATCOM terminals, which are, at this time, a question of when, not if. Mesh radio network modems are being built on a very large scale by Chinese vendors at this very moment, are being used by Russia against Ukraine at this very moment, and evidently have decidedly non-zero applications and implications for Taiwan.
All of the following dynamics will be affected by the use of mesh radio network modems by the PLA:
