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Both sides of Taiwan Strait look to Ukraine fight for guerilla warfare lessons
- Ukraine’s use of Western-supplied weapons and asymmetric warfare has obvious parallels for any possible attack from mainland China
- Military analysts say the conflict also highlights the dangers of not modernising your military and underestimating your opponent
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The fighting between Ukraine and Russia is being closely watched by both the People’s Liberation Army and Taiwanese military as Ukraine’s forces, using anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles provided by the West, inflict heavy losses on their larger Russian opponents.
Beijing has never renounced the use of force to reunite Taiwan with the mainland and if it did decide to attack, there would be a much greater disparity in the size of its forces compared with Russia and Ukraine – making the lessons the conflict provides about asymmetric warfare and guerilla tactics especially important for both sides.
“The US and Nato have not deployed troops to participate in the Russia-Ukraine war, but they have provided targeted individual combat weapons to Ukrainian forces, making them the invisible warrior behind the war,” Ni Lexiong, a professor at Shanghai University of Political Science and Law, said.
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He also said that Nato surveillance aircraft had been operating in the region and Ukraine had been given satellite reconnaissance information to monitor Russian troop movements.
The US and its allies are also reported to have supplied Ukraine with more than 17,000 Next Generation Light Anti-tank Weapon systems, hundreds of Javelin anti-tank missiles and Stinger anti-aircraft missiles.
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