Wargaming the Taiwan Fight

A Report Worth Reading

To my new readers, my profession is that of a Defense Consultant, so I spend a good bit of time thinking about conflict, especially naval conflict. I occasionally use this space to talk about things from that part of my life.

Photo: Sam Yeh/AFP via Getty Images and CSIS

My friend the great Tom Shugart brought a recent Center for Strategic and International Studies product to my attention, one of which I should have been more aware. I just finished reading "The First Battle of the Next War: Wargaming a Chinese Invasion of Taiwan" this morning, and it is a report of extensive wargaming conducted by the DC-based think-tank. Study co-lead Mark Cancian invited me to be part of this project, and I really wish I had been able to clear the time for it. Not because I think I would have added much, but because I would have been proud to be associated with work of as high quality as this. Anyone with an interest in the growing dynamic between China and the U.S. ought to have a look at this work. The bottom line I took away from this analysis is that given a reasonable amount of warning and a reasonable sense of commitment, a Chinese invasion of Taiwan in the next few years is unlikely to succeed. This tracks with my own sense of the thing.

Chief among the virtues of this report are two. First, there is the making of a solid case against those who have built China into a ten-foot giant, which it is not. Second, the report makes very clear statements about U.S. combat losses in such an undertaking, which are considerable. Very few Americans alive will have had any experience with warfare as consuming as this clash would be, and no one in uniform will have ever faced this intensity. All of this said, I have some quibbles worth sharing which come from my biases as a navalist and former destroyer CO.

1) the report makes clear (several times!) that surface ships are extremely vulnerable, and that the "...United States typically loses two carriers and 10 to 20 large surface combatants in game iterations". I do not quibble with these numbers, but they must be placed in context, to wit, across numerous scenarios (both optimistic and pessimistic), a similar number of US ships are lost and China is denied its objectives AT THE COST OF ITS NAVY. Think about that the next time you blithely predict China's aggression. We lose 15-20 percent of our Navy--they lose much of their Navy. This is one of the factors that goes into the effectiveness of U.S. conventional deterrence. Yes—the loss of all those ships and lives would be horrific. But the losses to China in pursuit of an unlikely outcome would be catastrophic.

2) I will stipulate the losses of ships cited by the CSIS team. What I have trouble with is the degree to which their analysis nulls the offensive weapons carried on those ships. In fact, the first mention of Tomahawk (outside of footnotes) comes on page 137 (of 165), and it comes in the context of a land-based employment. The first mention of sea-launched Maritime Strike Tomahawk is two pages later and is worth repeating in its entirety. "Although the range of the Maritime Strike Tomahawk (MST) allowed U.S. surface ships to attack Chinese ships from a distance, every MST in a ship’s inventory meant one fewer interceptor or anti-submarine missile that the ship had for defense. A ship with enough MSTs to destroy multiple Chinese warships was a glass cannon, very vulnerable in turn to Chinese attack." It is unclear how this philosophy played out in the game(s). Were the missile loads played in the game exclusively defensive, in which case these ships largely were taken out without taking out any of the enemy? Or were they a representative mix of what would be found in forward deployed warships, in which case hundreds of long range ship-killing cruise missiles would/could be employed ? The report cites the China team as having positioned destroyers and frigates east of Taiwan as a means of keeping US forces at bay. Were none of these forces targetable by US Surface Forces?

This is a really interesting report and worth the time to work your way through. Particularly helpful for readers without a background in wargaming, the CSIS team spares no effort in explaining how they conceived of, designed, conducted, and analyzed their game.

This analysis is focused SOLELY on a Chinese invasion of Taiwan and what it would take to stop it. No matter how hard I try to confine myself to this one question, I inevitably return to the conclusion that an attempted Chinese invasion of Taiwan cannot be confined to this limited geography, and that such a move on China’s part will likely bring on a much wider conflict. This conclusion leads me to another, and that is that we and our friends/allies must put a team on the field 365 days a year that leaves China without any viable option for victory in this scenario, and therefore little incentive to precipitate it. I see little evidence of this dedication in the nation’s defense planning and budgeting. Winter is coming.