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