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September 13 - September 26, 2025
For example, in addition to acquiring a handful of MQ-9 Reapers from the United States, Taiwan should lease additional aerial drones to achieve persistent maritime domain awareness, augmented by Taiwan’s P-3 fleet.
Taiwan should also invest in a network of long-endurance (measured in months, not hours) surface drones to provide sanitization and cueing to the airborne platforms.29
US contractor-owned-and-operated ISR platforms could operate from Taiwan, Japan, the Philippines, Guam, or some combination thereof.
In the air domain, Taipei’s daily ADIZ reports show that Taiwan can readily detect, identify, and track PLA aircraft using its ground-based systems.
blockade is the most aggressive alternative. Beijing could try to strangle Taiwan in a number of ways.
As discussed in the previous chapter, it is unlikely that Beijing would implement a blockade unless it was fully prepared to conduct an invasion.
For example, a limited quarantine would bring political and economic costs on Beijing without necessarily pressuring Taiwan into submission.
Conversely, if China launches a full air and naval blockade, it will have to contend with international political backlash as it attempts to imprison and starve 23.5 million free people.
Militarily, enforcing a blockade will tax the PLA and the China Coast Guard (CCG).
The PLA would have to commit scores of aircraft, including tankers, across long distances to maintain an airborne fighter presence around the clock—commanding tremendous resources and rapidly wearing down readiness. Without an airborne presence, allied transport aircraft could easily make the flight from Okinawa to Taipei unmolested.
Given the increasing difficulty of sustaining a blockade or quarantine politically, economically, and militarily over time, China would enact such a decree only if it were convinced of two things: that Taiwan is unlikely to challenge the blockade and that it is likely to yield in a matter of weeks, if not days. Therefore, to deter a PRC blockade, Taiwan should leave no doubt about its capabilities and intentions to resist and endure.
PRC strategists acknowledge China’s own vulnerability to blockades, known as the Malacca Dilemma.30 The credible prospect of an allied counterblockade provides an added measure of deterrence and, if implemented, could further stretch the PRC’s naval assets.
In the longer term, experts predict that first-order effects of a Taiwan blockade would reduce global production value more than two trillion US dollars per annum, threatening to plunge the world into economic depression.31
The PRC may choose not to restrict air traffic in an effort to reduce international pushback. In this scenario, foreign nationals and Taiwanese citizens would be able to leave Taiwan, potentially reducing international resistance to China’s efforts to absorb the island.
Alternatively, Beijing could declare a partial blockade by sector, whereby China would restrict only certain goods, such as the import of weapons, for example.
Under a more robust or full blockade that restricts air transport in and out of Taiwan, the government should nationalize and assume control of its commercial airline fleet.
enhance readiness and deterrence. Since the PLA likely cannot sustain a continuous combat air patrol east of Taiwan, Taipei could begin airlift operations, exchanging semiconductors for humanitarian and other supplies in places like Luzon (Philippines), the Ryukyus (Japan), or the Marianas (United States). Without fighters, the burden would fall on China to escalate by engaging unarmed civil aircraft with naval surface-to-air
air missiles.
The Taiwanese government should likewise prepare to take operational control of several large container ships and oil tankers.
Finally, Taiwan should prepare to mobilize a volunteer fishing fleet militia.
As with commercial aircraft and large merchant ships, the Taiwanese government already has the relevant authorities to mobilize fishing vessels but should rehearse them at the operational level, which would demonstrate both capability and intent and thus enhance deterrence.
The first task, then, in planning for a war is to identify the enemy’s center of gravity, and if possible trace it back to a single
point. The second task is to ensure that the forces to be used against that point are concentrated for a main offensive. —Carl von Clausewitz, Vom Kriege (On War)
From the CCP’s perspective, the short-term costs and risks of a People’s Liberation Army (PLA) lunge for Taiwan may fade to nothing compared with the achievement of the CCP’s millenarian dreams.
When the stakes are the highest and one side has convincing military options for achieving its goals, that side will have a strong incentive to escalate to decisive military options to resolve the conflict in its favor. The purpose of deterrence by denial is to convince the opponent that it does not have that option available.
The PLA now has more warships than any navy in the world, the largest array of airpower in Asia, and the greatest inventory of missile power in the Indo-Pacific region.
“Deterrence by denial” differs from “deterrence by punishment” and is the stronger and preferred form of deterrence in great power competition. Having the capability to directly defeat, or “deny,” the adversary’s military strategy and forces will leave the adversary with no further useful military options or a path to success.
If a defender cannot defeat or “deny” the aggressor’s military strategy, the defender will instead have to resort to inflicting pain to dissuade the aggressor. The aggressor gets to decide how much pain it is willing to suffer, which, as numerous combatants throughout history have displayed, can be very high indeed.
US and allied military planners should thus fashion an operational concept and acquire the supporting military forces designed to directly defeat the strategy and military forces the PLA will require for a military invasion of Taiwan.
For example, under conservative assumptions the PLA’s airpower can launch more than 1,400 precision-guided antiship and land-attack cruise missiles per day, day after day, at allied bases and warships out to the Second Island Chain, three thousand kilometers from China’s coast.
In addition, in October 2023 the US Department of Defense identified 2,800 PLA land-based surface-to-surface ballistic and cruise missiles (a 70 percent increase according to the Pentagon’s 2022 report), some capable of precision attacks out to Guam and against surface warships underway.6
The PLA Navy’s surface ships and submarines are armed with an equally large number of long-range land-attack and antiship cruise missiles.
The US Defense Department’s Joint Publication 5-0, Joint Planning is the Pentagon’s official doctrine for planning military operations.
Loss of a center-of-gravity asset can mean defeat when the center of gravity is an essential military capability a combatant requires for its campaign.
The PLA specifically designed its “counter-intervention” force structure, its long-range battle network, to find, attack, and destroy US air and naval bases and carrier strike groups in the Western Pacific that would be used to intervene and counter a PLA assault on Taiwan.
The PLA Navy Is the Center of Gravity
and allied planners need only to find and destroy the PLA invasion force’s center of gravity, the essential capability the PLA requires for a successful assault of Taiwan. The PLA Navy is that essential center-of-gravity target.9
The good news from the perspective of Taiwan, the United States, and its allies is that the US-led coalition almost always defeated the PLA assault attempt, by annihilating the PLA Navy. The bad news is that US losses of warships, fighter aircraft, bases, and personnel in the Western Pacific were severe.
Losses typically included two complete US aircraft carrier strike groups attempting to sail to Taiwan’s aid; destruction of amphibious groups attempting to bring US troops to Taiwan; many hundreds of US Air Force and Marine Corps fighter aircraft destroyed on the ground at their Western Pacific bases; and more than ten thousand US personnel killed in action after three weeks of missile combat.11 This could be the butcher’s bill for saving Taiwan.
The US Space Force, along with other government and private-sector space-based intelligence-gathering resources, will make the first contribution to thwarting a PLA attack on Taiwan.
Such indications would include a surge in the production of the missiles and munitions the PLA would need for its assault on Taiwan; the construction of new bases, warehouses, and infrastructure needed for transporting and positioning military equipment, supplies, and personnel; changes in the pattern of training and maintenance cycles for military personnel and equipment; repositioning military forces at coastal bases and embarkation areas; repositioning command posts to wartime sites; the diversion of normally civilian ferries, cargo ships, trucks, rail equipment, and aircraft for military
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Should Chinese leaders proceed with their assault on Taiwan, the US Navy’s attack submarine force would likely be the first to engage in the kinetic phase of the war. The US Navy has assigned twenty-four of its forty-nine attack submarines to the Pacific Ocean, each of which carries more than twenty Mk-48 heavy torpedoes.13
The US Air Force’s bomber force—141 aircraft capable of large payloads and global range with aerial refueling—is also an excellent matchup against the PLA Navy.15
With each aircraft able to carry and launch sixteen to twenty-four long-range precision-guided land-attack and antiship missiles, the US bomber force, flying about one-third of the force’s aircraft each day, could launch about eight hundred of these missiles against the PLA assault forces per day.16
US Navy’s P-8 Poseidon maritime patrol aircraft.
PLA commanders and planners will also have to account for the US Navy’s guided missile destroyers, dozens of which are based in the Pacific.
The US Army is acquiring the Precision Strike Missile, future versions of which will be capable of attacking surface ships underway.18 The US Marine Corps is reorganizing itself for missile combat against the PLA from outposts along the First Island Chain. The service is acquiring the Naval Strike Missile for its shore-based antiship forces.19
Even so, the massive volume and range of potential PLA missile firepower, the large number of targets the United States and its coalition partners will have to attack, the vast distances in the Western Pacific, and the relatively tiny amount of island terrain available for basing US military forces combine to limit the effectiveness of much of what the US military services are attempting to build.
As mentioned, the August 2022 CSIS Taiwan war-game series described the devastation that PLA missiles would inflict on US and allied forces attempting to operate from the Second Island Chain westward.
First, as mentioned, PLA airpower can launch over 1,400 antiship and land-attack cruise missiles per day, with the PLA’s 2,800 land-based missiles and numerous ship-based missiles adding to this total.
