By Andrew Thornebrooke
May 10, 2022 Updated: May 11, 2022
The
Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is
rapidly developing the military capabilities required to launch an invasion
of Taiwan, which
doesn’t yet have sufficient training and forces to repel such an attack, the
Senate Armed Services Committee was told during a May 10 hearing on worldwide
threats.
“China has
focused on studying the United States’ way of war and on offsetting our
advantages,” committee Chair Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.) said. “Beijing has
made concerning progress in this regard and holds its own expansive
geostrategic ambitions.”
Reed
said the CCP is actively weighing its options for invading Taiwan and closely
scrutinizing the Russian invasion of Ukraine to inform its own strategy.
While
the CCP claims Taiwan is a breakaway province, Taiwan has been self-governed
since 1949 and has never been controlled by the CCP. Nevertheless, CCP leader
Xi Jinping has vowed to unite Taiwan with the mainland, and has refused to rule
out the use of force in achieving that.
The war
that would erupt in the event of such a conflict could draw the United States
in, as the nation depends on Taiwan for innumerable products and services,
including semiconductors, which are vital to technologies ranging from
commercial vehicles to missiles.
The
United States officially maintains a stance of so-called strategic ambiguity,
in which it neither confirms nor denies whether it would militarily defend
Taiwan from invasion. Since the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979, however, the
United States has maintained an obligation to ensure that Taiwan has the
military capabilities necessary to defend itself from aggression.
Director
of National Intelligence Avril Haines testified that China was engaged in
a “coordinated whole-of-government approach” to coerce other powers in the
region to accept its claims to Taiwan, and was paving the way for its coerced
unification with the mainland in this decade. To that end, she said, China’s
communist regime was the United States’ “unparalleled priority.”
Sen.
Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) asked Haines whether the threat of a Chinese invasion of
Taiwan was “acute between now and 2030.”
The
director responded: “It’s fair to say that it is critical, or acute, between
now and 2030. I think that that’s absolutely fair.”
Haines
added that the lessons learned from Ukraine by both China and Taiwan could
affect that timeline for better or worse. As such, the United States would need
to work closely with allies and partners throughout the Indo-Pacific to
deter an invasion.
Additionally,
Haines said the CCP is expanding its power across military, diplomatic, and
economic spheres, and is now actively challenging U.S. dominance in most arenas
throughout the world.
“[China]
is coming ever closer to being a peer competitor in areas of relevance to
national security, is pushing to revise global norms and institutions to its
advantage, and is challenging the United States in multiple arenas
economically, militarily, and technologically,” she said.
Regardless
of its global ambitions, the CCP would prefer not to risk a war that could
result in the decimation of its own forces through a protracted fight, said Lt.
Gen. Scott Berrier, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Instead, the
regime would likely continue its attempts to isolate Taiwan in order to coerce
it into unification through fear and intimidation.
As
such, Berrier said that Taiwan’s military is learning from the Ukrainians’
fight against its Russian invaders, and the successes it has been able to build
with a relatively modest, but supremely spirited, fighting force.
“There
are some things that we can do with Taiwan,” Berrier said. “I think they’re
learning some very interesting things from the Ukrainian conflict like how
important leadership is, how important small unit tactics are, how important an
NCO [non-commissioned officers] corps is.”
Still,
he cautioned that Taiwan isn’t yet capable of repelling or deterring a CCP
invasion, and questioned whether its forces would match the will for battle
that the Ukrainians have thus far displayed.
“They
have a largely conscript force,” Berrier said of the Taiwanese military. “I
don’t believe it is where it should be.
“I
think Taiwan could do more.”
But,
with the right weapon systems and better training, Berrier said, Taiwan could
have a fighting chance.
To that
end, he said, the United States could help Taiwan to better understand where
its defense dollars could be best spent to ensure its continued de facto
independence and democratic way of life. To achieve that, it’s necessary to
understand precisely how broad-ranging the CCP’s potential strategies are for
seizing Taiwan.
“China
has a range of military options to coerce Taiwan, including increasing military
presence operations, an air and maritime blockade, seizure of Taiwan’s smaller
outlying islands, and a full-scale amphibious invasion of Taiwan itself,”
Berrier said in a prepared statement.
“Beijing
appears willing to defer the use of military force as long as it considers that
unification with Taiwan can be negotiated and that the costs of conflict
outweigh the benefit.”
Perhaps
most importantly, he said, China and Russia would continue to grow their
militaries and develop new capabilities with the goal of displacing the United
States for so long as they perceived the nation to be a declining power.
“Both
China and Russia perceive that the United States is a nation in decline and use
that view as a pretext for advancing their authoritarian models and executing
their global ambitions,” Berrier said.
The
United States will need to work tirelessly to curb the growth of those global
ambitions and to ensure the continued self-determination of Taiwan, according
to the committee’s ranking Republican member, Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.)
“The
Chinese threat is beyond anything we’ve ever dealt with before,” Inhofe said.
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