As Ukrainians valiantly resist Vladimir Putin’s brutal attempt to destroy their democracy, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is watching closely for strategic and tactical wisdom to destroy the democracy on Taiwan.
One key lesson for Taipei and Washington should be an increased focus on preventing American and European companies from making such an attack easier for the People’s Liberation Army (PLA).
A gathering Taiwan-US-China consensus points to a possible PLA invasion attempt by the mid-2020s.
On October 6, 2021, Minister of National Defense Chiu Kuo-cheng (邱國正) told reporters that China currently had the capability to invade Taiwan, but that it would be able “to lower the cost” of doing so by 2025.
In March 2021 former United States Indo-Pacific Command Commander Admiral Phil Davidson told a US Senate panel that an invasion could occur by 2026, saying, “I think the threat is manifest during this decade, in fact, in the next six years.”
Then Professor Jin Canrong (金燦榮) of China’s Renmin University, one of a gang of CCP-maintained academic and journalist threat-mongers, on January 31, 2022 told Japan’s Nikkei:
“Once the National Congress of the Communist Party of China is over in the fall of 2022, the scenario of armed unification will move toward becoming a reality. It is very likely that the leadership will move toward armed unification by 2027, the 100th anniversary of the PLA’s founding.”
A PLA invasion of Taiwan will be led by infiltrated Special Forces, working with a larger number of “sleeper cells” long resident in Taiwan, but the bulk of the PLA’s invasion forces will have to come by air and sea.
It is in these two mediums that Western companies make the greatest contributions to the PLA invasion potential.
The PLA is likely following closely Russia’s use of mechanized Airborne forces to try to capture major airfields to assist their conquest of Ukraine’s capital of Kiev.
For air assault operations, the PLA Ground Forces can today mobilize over 1,000 transport and attack helicopters increasingly organized into Air Assault Brigades. In addition, the PLA is now expanding its Airborne Corps brigades and is equipping them with mechanized armor and artillery systems.
For these Brigades, top priority targets will be to capture civilian and military airfields.
However, once those airfields are captured, the PLA Air Force (PLAAF) only has about 50 heavy air transports, to include about 30 Xian Aircraft Corporation Y-20s, and about 20 Russian Ilyushin Il-76MDs, which can each transport about 50 tons.
But the PLAAF has long organized its civilian airliners into its Reserve forces and is not shy about publishing images, mainly of US Boeing Corporation cargo transport aircraft participating in mobility exercises, sometimes even transporting 8-ton ZBD-04 airborne armored infantry fighting vehicles.
Today this PLAAF civilian reserve can potentially call up 175 Boeing cargoliners and three Airbus cargo aircraft, or about three times the number of large formal PLAAF transports.
Chinese cargo airlines have about 10 B-747F cargoliners that can carry 128 tons, 33 B-777Fs that carry 102 tons, 54 B-757s that can carry 34 t,ons and 65 B-737Fs that can carry 23 tons of military cargo.
In all, Planespotters.net assesses that 93 Chinese airlines have 4,141 airliners. The vast majority have been purchased from Boeing and Europe’s Airbus, almost split evenly in number.
According to Taiwanese statistics, before the China Virus pandemic Taiwan’s six largest commercial airports were able to process about 175,000 passengers a day, including the delay of customs procedures.
Should it successfully capture these airports, the PLA potentially could fly over 5 million troops and occupation officials to Taiwan in one month, though this number likely would be much higher.
Western companies are also helping to greatly increase the PLA sea-borne invasion potential.
For a mid-2020s invasion attempt, the PLA will be relying on thousands of mobilized “civilian” roll-on-roll-off barges and scores of much larger passenger and car carrying ferries which are required by CCP “civil-military fusion” to be designed to carry heavy armor.
However, Western companies are now helping to build China’s new luxury passenger cruise liner industry, which by the late 2020s could include up to eight huge Italian Fincantieri 123,000 ton Vista class cruise liners.
Up to six of these 3,936 passenger cruise liners could be built in China, emerging from a 2015 60-40 joint venture between the China State Shipbuilding Corporation and the US and British owned Carnival Cruise Lines. The first was launched in December 2021.
Two more have been built in Italy to be operated for the Chinese market by Italy’s Costa Cruise Corporation, but low demand forced one to be withdrawn to the Mediterranean market in late 2021.
Due to the CCP’s well developed civil-military fusion policies, six or possibly eight mega cruise liners could be mobilized by the reserve forces of the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN).
During the 1982 Falklands War, it took Britain ten days to convert the 1,892 passenger carrying Queen Elizabeth 2 cruise ship into a 3,000 troop-carrying military transport.
It is possible that for short three-day missions the PLAN’s reserve mobilized Vista class mega liners could carry 10,000 troops. Should the PLA control eight ships, this capacity rises to 80,000 troops or about 16 PLA Ground Force brigades.
Assuming the PLA can capture enough ports or build enough temporary docks, and assuming two round trips a week, in one month these eight cruise liners could transport up to 640,000 troops to Taiwan.
Or they could be used to move 640,000 Taiwanese political prisoners a month to a horrific fate in China.
Consequently, the United States and its North Atlantic Treaty Alliance (NATO) should be considering how prevent the CCP/PLA from using thousands of US and European made airliners and future Chinese and Italian built mega cruise liners to enable its conquest of Taiwan.
Perhaps it is necessary to consider how best to “decertify” all of China’s Boeing and Airbus airliners pending their inspection outside of China, when it would be possible to install numerous “kill switch” devices to ground them in the event the PLA prepares for an attack.
With sufficient political pressure, it may only be possible to prevent the Italian-owned Vista class liners from being “drafted” into PLA invasion plans, but there should be wider sanctions on China’s cruise liner industry so that democratic countries do not subsidize the maintenance of a major PLAN reserve invasion capability.
Should it successfully invade Taiwan, the PLA will have mobilized the world’s largest reserve air and seaborne military transport system, that it can use to invade other democracies or defend client dictatorships, all to advance CCP ambitions for global hegemony.
For the democracies, denying such a weapon to the CCP-PLA is an act of collective self-defense.
Richard D. Fisher, Jr. is a senior fellow with the International Assessment and Strategy Center.
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