Thousands Of Ships, Millions Of Troops: China Is Assembling a Huge Fleet For War With

[Boats]

Thousands Of Ships, Millions Of Troops: China Is Assembling a Huge Fleet For War With Taiwan
By: David Axe - Forbes News - 07-27-21
Re: https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidax...h=6babe8a0751b

To have any chance of conquering Taiwan, China might need to transport as many as two million troops across the rough 100 miles of the Taiwan Strait and land them under fire at the island’s 14 potential invasion beaches or 10 major ports.

That’s a lot of people—far, far more than the People’s Liberation Army Navy can haul in its 11 new amphibious ships. To transport the bulk of the invasion force, Beijing almost certainly would take up into naval service thousands of civilian ships.

To that end, the Chinese Communist Party has created a legal and bureaucratic framework for taking over control of commercial shipping. Meanwhile, naval engineers have begun modifying key vessels to make them better assault ships.

All that is to say, the vast flotilla that would be both the vehicle for China’s assault on Taiwan—and the biggest target of Taiwanese forces and their allies—is taking shape.

“If the PLA invasion force was a million or more men, then we might expect an armada of thousands or even tens of thousands of ships to deliver them, augmented by thousands of planes and helicopters,” Ian Easton, an analyst with the Project 2049 Institute in Virginia, wrote in a recent report.

The PLAN’s eight modern Type 071 landing docks and three Type 075 big-deck assault ships together can haul around 25,000 troops. A drop in the bucket. To transport the balance of the invasion force, the Chinese navy can take up around 2,000 large commercial vessels crewed by around 650,000 mariners. (more on site)!

The legal framework is a new one. On Jan. 1, 2017, China’s National Defense Transportation Law went into effect. “Among other things, the law mandated that all of China’s basic infrastructure and related transportation platforms would henceforth be treated as military-civil fusion assets,” Easton explained.

“At the CCP’s discretion, they were now legally required to be designed, built and managed to support future military operations. In the event of conflict, they would be pressed into wartime service. Now they had to prepare accordingly in peacetime.”

According to Easton, the roughly 1,000 large vessels belonging to China COSCO Shipping Corporation could comprise the backbone of this improvised fleet.

Engineers already had begun modifying certain vessels for their wartime roles. At least one heavylift ship got a removable helicopter deck, transforming it into an ad hoc assault ship.

Perhaps the most important modification is a heavy ramp by which military vehicles speedily can drive from the hold of a ferry or roll-on/roll-off ship onto lighterage or a pier.

“The ramp is driven directly by two large hydraulic cylinders and two support arms,” Conor Kennedy explained in a briefing for The Jamestown Foundation in Washington, D.C.

When conducting launch and recovery, these are connected between the top of the hydraulic mounting assemblies on the inner ramp and the top of the freight deck threshold to provide the strength and leverage required to deploy the ramp into the water and withstand sea action.

The support arms also act as preventers at maximum extension, while the ramp is kept rigid by the hydraulic cylinders. A longer outer ramp flap has also been added, controlled by another set of hydraulic cylinders mounted on the underside or backside of the ramp.

These help to provide strength at the end of the outer ramp and may also allow for further articulation to help vehicles get on the inner ramp. Based on 2020 video footage, the ramp system appears able to launch and recover at a minimum the lightweight ZTD-05 vehicle (26 tons).

These modified civilian vessels aren’t idle. Their crews actively are training for a possible assault on Taiwan.

Thomas Shugart, a fellow with the Center for a New American Security in Washington, D.C., last week noted two large ferries sailing far from their home ports for what appeared to be a naval exercise.
“The nearest coastline appears to consist of sandy beaches, and is near the amphibious training area from the 2020 ramp tests,” Shugart tweeted.

The huge, quasi-civilian assault fleet Beijing is building would be indispensable if the CCP ever makes good on its longstanding threat to “unify” Taiwan with China. But it also represents a profound weakness.

Assaulting Taiwan under fire surely will be very, very dangerous for an armed, armored warship with a large, well-trained crew. For a thin-skinned, lightly-crewed commercial ship, it’s even more dangerous.

It’s not for no reason Taiwan and its allies are stocking up on long-range anti-ship missiles. The plan, if that giant Chinese fleet ever sails toward Taiwan with a couple million troops aboard, is to sink as many of them as possible in the day or two it would take for Beijing to assemble the fleet and send it across the Taiwan Strait.

In assigning its commercial ships a military role, China risks not just a fleet, but a big chunk of its economy, as well.
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**Another link to review**: ‘The Ultra Mega’: Taiwan Invasion Could Defy Comprehension
Re: https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidax...h=4c9ef9563452

To have any chance of conquering Taiwan, China might have to mobilize as many as 2 million troops and take up into naval service thousands of ships crewed by hundreds of thousands of mariners.

The invasion force could face an entrenched force of half a million Taiwanese soldiers and marines in well-prepared positions. And that’s after it runs a gauntlet of potentially hundreds of anti-ship missiles while crossing the Taiwan Strait.

The likely scale and violence of a Chinese assault on Taiwan “defies human comprehension,” analyst Ian Easton wrote in a new study for the Virginia-based Project 2049 Institute.

The cross-strait conflict would be “the ultra mega,” to borrow Easton’s phraseology.

Easton’s study focuses on the likelihood that, in order to surge heavy forces into Taiwan in sufficient numbers and with sufficient speed to defeat Taiwan’s own armored formations, the Chinese People’s Liberation Army might need to seize intact one or more Taiwanese ports.

Taiwan after all has only 14 small beaches that are suitable for an amphibious landing. The Taiwanese military could turn each of these beaches into a brutal kill-zone.

Taiwan is a hard target. But the Chinese Communist Party seems determined—somehow, eventually—to “unify” the island democracy with the mainland, despite the risk. Where Taiwan’s rugged terrain and stiff defenses collide with the CCP’s iron will, a meat-grinder could result.

“We cannot clearly see it in our minds because nothing like it has ever happened before; no point of comparison or juxtaposition exists,” Easton wrote. “Our natural impulse when thinking about a future amphibious operation is to look to the past, but no event has occurred in history that is similar.”

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The closest comparisons—the Allied invasion of Nazi-occupied France in 1944 and the American attack on Japanese-held Okinawa in 1945—were tiny in comparison to the likeliest Taiwan invasion scenarios.

“In wartime, Taiwan could mobilize a counter-invasion force of at least 450,000 troops, and probably far more,” Easton explained. “While Taiwan’s standing military is only around 190,000 strong, it has a large reserve force composed primarily of recent conscripts with basic training. In 2020, Taiwan’s then defense minister estimated that 260,000 reservists could be mobilized in a worst-case scenario to augment active-duty personnel. This appears to be a conservative estimate.”

“In theory, the PLA might land as few as 300,000 to 400,000 soldiers, for example, if the Taiwanese president was killed or captured prior to Z-Day and armed resistance crumbled,” Easton added. “On the other hand, if Taiwanese government leaders survived and mobilized everything under their power in a timely fashion, the PLA might have to send over two million troops to Taiwan, including paramilitaries such as the People’s Armed Police and the Militia of China.”

A one-on-one fight pitting 2 million PLA invaders against half a million Taiwanese defenders would be apocalyptic. If the United States and other allies—Australia and Japan, for example—intervened, the violence could escalate.

Especially considering that the PLA and the Taiwanese and allied militaries all are heavily-armed with long-range, precision-guided missiles “capable of cracking open ships and devastating land targets with precision from hundreds of miles away,” according to Easton. “No one actually knows what such a fight looks like because it has never happened before.”

But for all the uncertainty, some things are reasonably predictable. “The imagination-crushing dimensions of a PLA amphibious operation against Taiwan—the millions of moving humans and machines—all rely on robust logistic lines, without which everything else quickly crumbles and falls apart,” Easton explained.

And to avoid squandering countless lives and its one chance at capturing Taiwan, the Chinese Communist Party probably will avoid a simple frontal assault on narrow, heavily defended beaches.

Taken together, those two truisms could mean a Chinese invasion strategy whose first and central goal is to capture Taiwanese ports without heavily damaging them. “All of this and more should help inform future efforts to make Taiwan’s ports better defended and more secure,” Easton wrote.

About this writer: David Axe is a journalist out of Columbia, S.C.

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U.S. Defense Secretary in first South-East Asia trip as China tensions grow
By: dpa International News 07-27-21
Re: https://www.dpa-international.com/to...0727-99-561262

Bangkok (dpa) - The US does not expect South-East Asia "to choose" between it and chief rival China, Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin said in Singapore on Tuesday at the start of his first official trip to the region.

However Austin is expected to push back against Beijing's growing influence during a visit meant "to deepen America's bonds" with the "Indo-Pacific."

Austin will later this week visit the Philippines, a US ally, and Vietnam, a former foe, both of which have been at loggerheads with China for at least a decade over the disputed South China Sea.

Beijing's claim to most of the sea "has no basis in international law" Austin said, speaking at an event hosted by the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS).

The Global Times, a Chinese state mouthpiece, claimed on Sunday that Austin's trip was about hyping "the China threat," scoffing that the US "has a relative shortage of capabilities and tools to influence South-East Asia."

Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, who has raised concerns about South-East Asia potentially having to choose between the US and China, said he had "a good discussion" with Austin "on regional and international developments, as well as defense cooperation."

Austin's trip is the first by a Biden Cabinet minister to South-East Asia but his second to the wider region, after he visited Japan, South Korea and India in March.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken is in India ahead of a meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Wednesday.

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more:

U.S. Defense Secretary says committed to stable, constructive relationship with China
By: Idrees Ali - of Yahoo News 07-27-21
Re: https://www.yahoo.com/news/u-defense...090940094.html

SINGAPORE (Reuters) -U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said on Tuesday he was committed to having a constructive relationship with China and working on common challenges as he laid out his vision for ties with Beijing, which have sunk to their lowest point in decades.

While Austin's speech in Singapore touched on the usual list of behavior Washington describes as destabilizing, from Taiwan to the South China Sea, his comments about seeking a stable relationship could provide an opening for the two countries to start to reduce tension.

"We will not flinch when our interests are threatened. Yet we do not seek confrontation," Austin said in Singapore.

"I am committed to pursuing a constructive, stable relationship with China, including stronger crisis communications with the People's Liberation Army."

Austin has been unable to speak with any senior Chinese official despite repeated attempts since starting as defense secretary in January.

Even with the tension and heated rhetoric, U.S. military officials have long sought to keep open lines of communication with their Chinese counterparts, to be able to mitigate potential flare-ups or tackle any accidents.

A top Chinese diplomat, in rare high-level talks with the United States, on Monday accused Washington of creating an "imaginary enemy" to divert attention from domestic problems and suppress China.

Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman, the second-ranked U.S. diplomat, had arrived on Sunday for the face-to-face meetings in China's northern city of Tianjin.

"Big powers need to model transparency and communication," Austin said.

NOT A BINARY CHOICE

The speech by Austin, who is set to visit Vietnam and the Philippines later this week to emphasize the importance of alliances, is being closely watched by states in the region worried about Beijing's increasingly assertive behavior but heavily reliant on access to China's large markets.

"We are not asking countries in the region to choose between the United States and China. In fact, many of our partnerships in the region are older than the People’s Republic of China itself," Austin said.

Biden has ramped up sanctions on China over alleged human rights abuses in Xinjiang and Hong Kong and targeted more Chinese official last week.

In a shift from Trump, Biden has broadly sought to rally allies and partners to help counter what the White House says is China's increasingly coercive economic and foreign policies.

(Reporting by Idrees Ali; Editing by Clarence Fernandez and Jon Boyle)

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Personal note: Suddenly things are stirring - and China isn't going to wait.
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China wants Taiwan and P.I. - At this time trying to parley an agreement may be too late. China has made it perfectly clear what their game plan is and that's it. Russia & North Korea may join in - if they can negotiate some terms on their behalf as well. But it seems to me the games afoot - and no matter what we try to do - they will do what they intended to do regardless.
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The War is right around the corner and when it goes - all hell will break loose - and from there on - who knows what will transpire?
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Boats

The United States has put countering China at the heart of its national security policy for years and President Joe Biden's administration has called rivalry with Beijing "the biggest geopolitical test" of this century.