Taiwan's Expanding Opportunity To Employ Low-Cost, Short-Range Strike Munitions Against China

🇨🇳 🇹🇼 Extensions

This extensions-themed post is an extension of material that has appeared in another newsletter/section and other parts of my website more generally. While my newsletters/sections are primarily categorized by region but only appear in one newsletter/section given how the Substack platform is configured—and may be highly relevant to readers who are primarily interested in other parts of the world.

In several recent posts, I have discussed how China can use a wide range of generally low-cost short-range strike munitions to attack targets on the island of Taiwan and Taiwan’s outlying western islands more generally. The corollary is that Taiwan is also increasingly well-positioned to pursue much the same capability set to attack targets along the Chinese coastline. While the effects of technological change on military capabilities tend to cut both ways unless there are major asymmetries in geography, it bears emphasis that Taiwan is unlikely to have the luxury of time to undertake what is likely to amount to a rather slow-burning strike campaign through such generally low-cost short-range strike munitions against Taiwan. Taiwan also faces an additional challenge in that China’s surveilling and targeting of the island country’s western coastline is likely to greatly impede the operations of uncrewed surface vehicles in particular. More generally, Taiwan will likely struggle to replenish critical assets in wartime, including long-range air and ballistic missile defences. Without a credible air defence capability in place, Taiwan, which is located just some 130-180 kilometers from the Chinese mainland, is far too proximate and, therefore, far too exposed to all manner of Chinese strike capabilities to have much scope for a rather slow-burning strike campaign against China even if China either forgoes a large-scale amphibous landing attempt for whatever reason or if a Chinese amphibious landing attempt(s) fails. In any event, the following recent posts published in my China newsletter/section are relevant to readers interested in Taiwan’s military capabilities in terms of both the potential approaches that China may pursue against Taiwan and the potential approaches that Taiwan may itself pursue against China.