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There is a well-known aphorism along the lines of “If you owe the bank $100, that's your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that's the bank's problem.” A similar dynamic applies to Taiwan in the current era of precision strike capabilities, not least on account of how the Taiwan Strait is, at its narrowest points, just 130-180 kilometers wide, and on account of how Taiwan’s western coastal plain tends to have a depth of just 25-35 kilometers. A modified aphorism for Taiwan goes as follows: “When Taiwan wants to hide a hundred missile launchers in its western coastal plain, that is China’s problem. When Taiwan wants to hide a thousand missile launchers in its western coastal plain, that is Taiwan’s problem.”
The surface area on the island of Taiwan in general and its western coastal plain in particular is fixed. As the number of systems, including but not limited to missile launchers, Taiwan deploys in its western coastal plain increases, so does the density of targets for China to detect and attack. This will, all things considered, reduce the intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) challenges that China will face in degrading This has significant implications for the survivability of Taiwanese capabilities, such as missile launchers, and the efficacy of measures to improve survivability, such as deception. By virtue of its geographic proximity to China, Taiwan is at a structural disadvantage in the current era of precision strike. The very same technological trends that are enabling Taiwan to deploy various types of strike capabilities, including maritime strike capabilities, also enable China to do much the same. Geography, after all, cuts both ways, while China remains the larger country (even if one focuses on the terrain along China’s maritime frontier) with incomparably greater resources and industrial capacity to bring to bear.