PLA able to cut Taiwan’s sea and air supply lines, island’s military reports

Beijing has developed six types of operational capabilities against Taiwan, including blockades, island’s defence ministry says in biennial report
Details of US military cooperation revealed for the first time amid rising tensions across the Taiwan Strait

Taiwan

Lawrence Chungin Taipei

Published: 6:43pm, 9 Nov 2021

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Beijing’s armed forces already have the power to blockade Taiwan’s key harbours, airports and outbound flight routes, the island’s defence ministry said in a report released on Tuesday.

The biennial report, which comes amid rising cross-strait tensions, also disclosed that active military exchanges between Taiwan and the US in the last two years involved more than 380 programmes and 2,700 military personnel, the first time details on their defence cooperation have been revealed at length.

Tensions between Taiwan and mainland China have flared in recent months, with the People’s Liberation Army sending warplanes to harass the island on an almost daily basis and US experts warning of a potential conflict across the Taiwan Strait.

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“[The PLA] is using force-on-force confrontational drills, joint landing exercises, hacker attacks in cyberspace and long-distance training to prepare itself for potential operations against or to simply threaten Taiwan,” according to the island’s “National Defence Report 2021”.

In line with its forces’ growing modernisation, Beijing’s military threats against Taiwan are becoming more intense, the report says, adding that mainland forces have developed six types of operational capabilities against the island, including blockades.

“At present, the PLA is capable of performing local joint blockades against our critical harbours, airports, and outbound flight routes, to cut off our air and sea lines of communication and impact the flow of our military supplies and logistic resources, as well as our sustainability for operations,” the report said.

This was mainly due to the growing strength of the PLA Navy and Air Force’s counter-air, sea-control, and land-strike capabilities, and rapid deployment of new missiles for the PLA Rocket Force to improve its precision strike and strategic suppression capabilities, it said.

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The report also underlined the PLA’s deployment of cutting-edge satellites, spy boats and drones to improve intelligence-gathering on Taiwan, including on its military activities and battlefield preparation.

All of the PLA’s ballistic, cruise, air-launched and land-attack missiles are capable of striking political, economic and military targets in Taiwan proper. Moreover, mainland forces had the ability to carry out joint landing operations against Taiwan with amphibious vessels flanked by commandeered commercial container ships, the report noted.

Further, with the aid of mainland China’s indigenous BeiDou satellite navigation and command and control (C2) datalink systems, the PLA is strengthening its ability to acquire battlefield intelligence about Taiwan and other countries, including the US in support of the island, the report says.

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Teng Keh-syong, director of defence policy at the Taiwanese ministry’s strategic planning department, said challenges posed by the PLA’s growing operational capabilities had prompted the island to boost its asymmetric warfare strength in the past two years.

“In addition to strengthening our asymmetric warfare operations, the military has also stepped up training combat forces and consolidated development of our indigenous defence manufacturing capability, as well as reforms of our reservist system,” he said in Taipei on Tuesday.

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Faced with the mighty PLA’s intensifying threats, the island’s military needed to employ “innovative and asymmetric thinking” to engage in an arms race with the mainland, the report said.

It also needed to use natural barriers in the Taiwan Strait to aid forces in striking the mainland’s “critical nodes of operations so as to thwart its war plans, disrupt its operational tempo and paralyse its combat power”.

As part of fortifying its defence capabilities, Taipei has closely cooperated on active military exchanges with the US, in line with Washington’s 1979 Taiwan Relations Act, which commits the US to help defend the island.

In all, there were 384 exchange programmes involving 2,799 personnel between September 2019 and August this year, the report revealed.

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During this period, 542 Taiwanese military personnel in 175 programmes visited the US, while 618 US troops in 107 programmes went to the island. Some 1,639 personnel from the two sides were involved in 102 other programmes.

This is the first time that exchanges with the US have been reported at length by the ministry.

Earlier reports about US military presence in Taiwan have greatly infuriated Beijing, which consistently warns Washington against any official or military contact with the island, seeing it as a breakaway province to be eventually reunited with the mainland.

The US switched diplomatic recognition to Beijing from Taipei in 1979.

This article appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition as: PLA able to blockade ports and flight routes, report says