In his classic study of guerrilla warfare War of the Flea, Robert Taber compares the small, disadvantaged opponent in an armed conflict to a flea, whose small, intractable nature can be turned into an advantage against its enemy.
As the military divide between China and Taiwan widens in China's favor -- thanks, in part, to the Chinese Nationalist Party's (KMT) efforts to block weapons development and acquisition -- Taiwanese who are committed to defending the nation have had little choice but to begin considering asymmetrical or nonconventional options. That is, they have been forced to look at a potential war with China from the flea's perspective.
While much has been said in recent weeks about Taiwan's development of the Hsiung Feng II-E cruise missile and -- for a brief, hallucinatory moment -- nuclear weapons, ultimately these remain part of an arsenal that, should war break out, stands little chance of overwhelming Beijing's massive and widely distributed forces. Even if, for a while, Taiwan could inflict punitive damage against an invading People's Liberation Army (PLA), past experience shows that massive casualties within PLA ranks does not deter Beijing. During the Korean War, Chinese "volunteers" suffered 148,000 deaths, while an estimated 20,000 lost their lives in the debacle following China's invasion of Vietnam in 1979.
History also teaches us that successive regimes in Beijing have no compunctions about noncombatant casualties -- as the Cultural Revolution and the Tiananmen Square Massacre so starkly remind us. More recently, former PLA chief of the general staff Xiong Guangkai's (
Two traditional pillars of deterrence -- massive military losses or threats against civilian populations (a reprehensible option) -- are denied Taiwan. It must therefore find China's Achilles' heel elsewhere.
And that's its economy.
Enter the graphite, or "blackout" bomb, a non-lethal weapon that can knock out an enemy's power grid by short-circuiting it. Taiwan has announced it could begin development of that weapon, which can be dropped by aircraft or mounted onto cruise missiles such as the Hsiung Feng. Whether that device will suffer the same fate as the Hsiung Feng at the hands of the KMT remains to be seen, but its introduction shows that a paradigm shift has occurred within the nation's defense apparatus, which, by sheer virtue of its size and the prevailing international context that favors China, is awakening to the realization that it cannot hope to compete with China in conventional military terms.
Beyond the graphite bomb, Taiwan must explore other venues where its technological advantage could be put to good use and continue to identify other weaknesses in China's defenses, such as maritime ports, industrial centers and command-and-control nodes.
Beijing has made no secret of the fact that, aside from the very survival of the Chinese Communist Party, the economy is paramount. Many of its policies are formulated to ensure that economic growth continues unhampered, even at a debilitating social or environmental cost. It is therefore not difficult to imagine how Beijing could be made to pause should a credible threat to its economy come from Taipei.
Taiwan has all it needs to mount a countervailing strategy based on innovative technologies and an asymmetrical mindset to make Beijing think twice before it attempts to take on the flea.
The beauty of it is that Taiwan might not even have to kill people to achieve its objectives.
Despite the complicated legacy of colonialism, relations between Taipei and Tokyo continue to blossom in these troubled times. As East Asia continues to battle the COVID-19 pandemic and struggles to contain an increasingly aggressive China, our democratic archipelago benefits from a new high in its security relations with Japan. Remarkably, with its generous vaccine diplomacy and the unprecedented explicit mention of the situation surrounding Taiwan in Japan’s annual defense white paper, Tokyo began to embrace a novel, two-track, comprehensive approach for engaging Taiwan. The first track deals with non-traditional security such as public health and vaccine donations. Japan has generously supported
As the incursions by China into Taiwan’s air defense identification zone intensify, the international community’s anxiety has risen over the question of whether the US military would become directly involved in the case of an attack on Taiwan. Washington’s long-held policy of “strategic ambiguity” does little to ease the trepidation. The rationale universally espoused on “strategic ambiguity” is that an announced commitment from Washington to directly defend Taiwan would encourage Taiwanese independence and consequently bring forth a Chinese military attack and a possible nuclear confrontation between two superpowers. However, this line of argument could soon lose steam if the subject is viewed from
Having deceived the world about its nuclear capabilities while preparing for an arms race, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is now using its increasing nuclear forces for virtual nuclear coercion. This new threat will continue until the United States, Japan, and Taiwan can restore the CCP’s sense of fear. This dynamic is a familiar one for Taiwan. As the CCP’s People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) capabilities have grown, its inhibitions about conducting larger and more frequent coercive military demonstrations have shrunk. The PLA now more openly practices for the destruction of Taiwan’s democracy and the murder of its citizens. In the nuclear realm,
In an unprecedented move, a group of democratic nations led by the US, UK and EU in a joint statement on Tuesday accused the Chinese Ministry of State Security of having carried out a major cyberattack earlier this year and stealing data from at least 30,000 organizations worldwide, including governments, universities and firms in key industries. Western officials were reportedly perplexed by the attack’s brazen execution and unparalleled scale. In an article on the attack, BBC security correspondent Gordon Corera wrote: “Western spies are still struggling to understand why Chinese behavior has changed.” The attack raises the fear “that they [China]
RSS