interesting item -china and taiwan

JUNE 7, 2004
China-Taiwan war unlikely before 2010, says US report
Pentagon assessment of cross-strait scenarios questions China's military capacity and coordination - for now

By Ching Cheong

HONG KONG - If the Pentagon's latest report on China's military strength is accurate, then it implies that Beijing's unification war with Taiwan will not take place before 2010.

The US assessment comes at a sensitive time - just after Taiwan's pro-independence President Chen Shui-bian has won a second term in office and just when China has reiterated its resolve to use force to prevent the island from breaking away.

According to the American report, it will take 10 to 15 years for Beijing to become a world-class military power.

However, in terms of the quality of its weaponry, it would need only five to 10 years to develop.

The tone of the report remains sanguine about weapons that employ cutting-edge technology, saying the United States would still enjoy a comfortable lead of at least 20 years.

Washington's perennial concern is whether China has the means to inflict damage on the American homeland should it intervene militarily in a Taiwan Strait crisis.

The report estimates that China's stock of intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of reaching the US homeland would grow from the present 20 to about 30 by 2005 and to about 60 by 2010.

In other words, China should be in a position to inflict considerable damage on US targets by the end of this decade.

The report also expressed concern as to whether China could block US aircraft carrier battle groups from entering the Taiwan Strait area when and if hostilities were to break out.

It points out that Chinese leaders, realising that engaging the US in a direct confrontation any time soon is not possible, have instead put emphasis on how to effectively prevent intervention by superior US forces.

To achieve that, the Chinese might already have been developing a weapon that they cryptically call an 'assassin's mace'.

This, they say, could be used asymmetrically to offset American technological superiority in the opening stage of a war.

Taken together, if these assessments are accurate, then the judgment is that China could not expect to win a unification war before 2010.

The US report also points out several areas in which China's People's Liberation Army (PLA) is still grossly inadequate for the task of winning a war now.

Foremost is its shortage of boats and other amphibious craft to ferry its forces far from the Chinese coast.

China only began its massive development of landing craft in the mid-1990s and the report estimates that its troop-lift capability is still 'insufficient to support a sizeable amphibious operation in the next five years'.

Then there is the inadequacy of air cover for its landing craft - which is critical because Taiwan is expected to dominate the air space over the Strait before the end of the decade.

According to the report, Taiwan has three times as many fourth-generation fighters as China, while the latter's best pilots are as yet no match for their Taiwanese counterparts.

The report also estimates that the PLA airforce could only attain matching capabilities in 2010 in this aspect.

Although the report notes that China could cripple the Taiwanese airfields with short-range ballistic missiles and cruise missiles, this capability would take 'the next several years' to develop.

But the most crucial weakness of all, according to the report, is the PLA's lack of experience in joint-service operations, which is a must in a war against Taiwan.

The report notes that the PLA has not demonstrated a capability to conduct Western-style joint operations due to a lack of experience in inter-service cooperation, although it had conducted some multi-service activity requiring cross-arms synergy.

This lack of experience would greatly hamper 'the inter-operability of the PLA forces and the ability of the logistic system to support the necessarily high tempo of operations'.

The report therefore concludes that 'the PLA most likely would encounter great difficulty conducting such a sophisticated campaign throughout the remainder of the decade'.

Despite China's pre-2010 handicaps, the Pentagon report concedes that barring a third-party intervention, a campaign to capture Taiwan before 2010 could succeed 'if Beijing were willing to accept the political, economic, diplomatic and military costs that an invasion would produce'.

This conclusion differed significantly from an influential report by the Rand Corporation, a US military think-tank, which was published in 2000.

It forecast that China could never win a war against Taiwan even without US intervention.

The difference in assessments perhaps indicates the rate of progress the Chinese military has made in the past four years.

When asked by The Straits Times to comment on the latest report, a Chinese military expert who declined to be identified said that weapons and military assets were but one factor in a Taiwan campaign.

Without elaborating, he emphasised instead that the US would do well to observe the famous adage of China's late leader Deng Xiaoping - tao guang yang hui - which means hiding one's capabilities while biding one's time.