As China waged extensive military exercises off Taiwan, a group of US defense experts in Washington was focused on their own simulation of an eventual — but for now entirely hypothetical — US-China war over the nation.
The unofficial what-if game is being conducted on the fifth floor of an office building not far from the White House, and it posits a US military response to a Chinese invasion in 2026. Even though the participants bring a US perspective, they are finding that a US-Taiwan victory, if there is one, could come at a huge cost.
“The results are showing that under most — though not all — scenarios, Taiwan can repel an invasion,” said Mark Cancian, a senior adviser at the US Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), where the war games are being held. “However, the cost will be very high to the Taiwanese infrastructure and economy and to US forces in the Pacific.”
Photo: Screengrab from CSIS Twitter
In sessions that are to run through next month, retired US generals and navy officers and former Pentagon officials hunch like chess players over tabletops along with analysts from the CSIS think tank. They move forces depicted as blue and red boxes and small wooden squares over maps of the western Pacific and Taiwan. The results are to be released to the public in December.
The not-necessarily-so assumption used in most of the scenarios: China invades Taiwan to force unification, and the US decides to intervene heavily with its military. Also assumed but far from certain: Japan grants expanded rights to use US bases on its territory, while stopping short of intervening directly unless Japanese land is attacked.
Nuclear weapons are not used in the scenarios, and the weapons available are based on capabilities the nations have demonstrated or have concrete plans to deploy by 2026.
In 18 of the 22 rounds of the game played to this point, Chinese missiles sink a large part of the US and Japanese surface fleet and destroy “hundreds of aircraft on the ground,” said Cancian, a former White House defense budget analyst and retired US Marine. “However, allied air and naval counterattacks hammer the exposed Chinese amphibious and surface fleet, eventually sinking about 150 ships.”
“The reason for the high US losses is that the United States cannot conduct a systematic campaign to take down Chinese defenses before moving in close,” he said.
“The United States must send forces to attack the Chinese fleet, especially the amphibious ships, before establishing air or maritime superiority,” he said.
“To get a sense of the scale of the losses, in our last game iteration, the United States lost over 900 fighter/attack aircraft in a four-week conflict. That’s about half the [US] Navy and Air Force inventory,” he said.
Taiwan’s defense capabilities are an especially important part of the calculations, because its forces would be responsible for blunting and containing Chinese landings from the south — a scenario played out in the simulation.
“The success or failure of the ground war depends entirely on the Taiwanese forces,” Cancian said. “In all game iterations so far, the Chinese could establish a beachhead, but in most circumstances cannot expand it. The attrition of their amphibious fleet limits the forces they can deploy and sustain. In a few instances, the Chinese were able to hold part of the island, but not conquer the entire island.”
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