“Adults in a Room” is a series in collaboration with The Stimson Center’s Reimagining US Grand Strategy program. The series stems from the group’s monthly networking events that call on analysts to gather virtually and hash out a salient topic. It aims to give you a peek into their Zoom room and a deep understanding of the issue at hand in less than the time it takes to sip your morning coffee without the jargon, acronyms, and stuffiness that often come with expertise.
Many in Washington view the prospect of a Chinese amphibious invasion of Taiwan as a certainty. Such speculation drives defense spending and leads the United States to allocate an excessive share of time and resources toward planning for a response to just one of a menu of options that China has available regarding Taiwan.
July’s Reimaging US Grand Strategy roundtable brought members of the foreign policy community together to examine the inherent difficulties involved in capturing Taiwan through military means. Dan Grazier, senior fellow and director of Stimson’s National Security Reform Program, and MacKenna Rawlins, a research associate with Stimson’s Defense Strategy and Planning Project, offered opening remarks based on their recent visit to Taiwan to observe how strategic, political, and economic considerations, as well as the island’s geography, would shape a potential conflict. The group discussed and debated the complex considerations that would factor into a Chinese decision to invade Taiwan — and the many challenges Beijing would face if it did.
Dan Grazier, Senior Fellow and Director, National Security Reform Program, Stimson Center
The main driver of ever-increasing defense spending since at least 2016 has been the narrative of China’s rise and the specter of war in the western Pacific, most often a US and allied defense of Taiwan against a Chinese amphibious invasion.
The China threat, Cold War 2.0 narrative has become an unchallenged mantra in hawkish national security circles. However, while China’s early 21st-century economic boom funded major military investments, Beijing has built up a largely defensive force designed primarily to keep foreign military forces away from its shores. Occasional saber-rattling aside, the Chinese have shown little propensity for military adventurism.
Yet, for Pentagon budget boosters, China remains the perfect foil. The prospect of a “near peer” fight on the other side of the globe justifies every imaginable weapons program either already in development or being dreamt up in laboratories, boardrooms, and marketing departments across the national security establishment. A hypothetical war to defend Taiwan justifies a massive navy and corresponding air forces. The supposed China menace also provides a rationale for the modernization of all three legs of the nuclear triad, which will likely cost more than $1.7 trillion in the coming decades.
The American people will almost certainly pay more than $1 trillion in 2026 on the Pentagon’s base budget, with Taiwan as a principal justification. But it’s reasonable to ask why an invasion of Taiwan hasn’t happened yet. The status quo has existed for 76 years now. What is China waiting for? It’s not like their chances of success will improve with time. As technology evolves and proliferates, the chances of success diminish almost by the day with advances in precision fires and uncrewed weapons.
There are strategic, political, and economic factors that would make any reasonable national leader reluctant to undertake such a risky military adventure. Were the Chinese to launch an invasion, they would invite a direct military response from the US. Considering the fact that China and the US both have nuclear weapons, the risk of escalation serves as a powerful deterrent. The Chinese Communist Party faces significant internal problems, including a population that is both aging and shrinking, offering a powerful disincentive to send battalions of young men to potentially die on a risky military adventure. Moreover, the waters around Taiwan include some of the world’s busiest shipping channels. A military conflict in the region would have negative economic repercussions around the globe, but the effects would be profound inside China.
Beyond these deterrents, Taiwan presents eight practical military challenges an invader would have to overcome to regain full control of the island.
First, an invader would have to transport forces across the Taiwan Strait under threat from submarines, underwater mines, long-range missiles, and uncrewed attack vessels.
Second, Taiwan’s few suitable landing beaches lead directly into dense urban development or into miles of rice paddies.
Third, if the invader captures a beachhead, they would need to bring ashore people, hardware, and supplies for the eventual breakout assault to capture the rest of the island. The invader wouldn’t be able to stage people and vehicles in rice paddies. They would fare better disembarking at developed port facilities, but they would still have to do so while fighting within the city.
Fourth, the invader would need to successfully break out from the beachhead either through extensive urban combat or by trying to fight across miles of waterlogged farmland.
Fifth, the invader would have to figure out how to fight across Taiwan’s landscape. The invasion force would need tanks and armored personnel carriers to protect soldiers in the open terrain and cities. These vehicles would need to stick to the island’s road network because armored vehicles will sink in rice paddies. Surface roads through the farmland provide a single lane in each direction at best. An advancing armored force that gets stopped when the lead vehicle is destroyed by the defenders would not be able to drive around the new obstacle because the tanks would get stuck in water-logged fields. Using Taiwan’s highway network would be faster, but these roads are often elevated which means the defender needs only to drop sections of the road to completely disrupt forward movement.
Sixth, along the western plain of the island, the mountains reach all the way to the sea in several places, creating narrow passes through which an invader would have to fight. The Yilan plain on the island’s east coast offers long stretches of usable beaches, but an invader would have to fight directly through the mountains to reach Taipei along a highway that includes numerous bridges and long tunnels.
Seventh, Greater Taipei, the ultimate objective for an invader, occupies a massive ancient lakebed in the northern part of the island, which is surrounded by mountains on all sides. The city is only accessible on the ground through narrow passes, which are easily defendable.
And finally, if an invader overcomes all of Taiwan’s other challenges, the force will still have to contend with Taipei proper, a vast, dense metropolis of over seven million, dwarfing Stalingrad in both scale and population. Urban combat there would be catastrophic.
When considered all together, the risks associated with an invasion of Taiwan are daunting. Chinese leaders are unlikely to order such a drastic step so long as the status quo is maintained and options other than war remain to achieve their goal of unifying with Taiwan.
Despite all of these obvious challenges, Washington continues to center defense planning around this scenario and use it to justify greater defense spending. Hyping up the purported threat to Taiwan to justify greater defense spending in the US is dangerous beyond the mere wasted resources, which is why it is important for people to understand the realities of the situation.
A major reason why such careless rhetoric should be avoided is the inherent danger of an arms race. The US is currently undertaking both a conventional and nuclear arms modernization effort. China is likewise building up its own forces. As both sides treat each other with suspicion, the risk of miscalculation remains high. Many will remember the Hainan Island Incident in April 2001 when a Navy P-3 reconnaissance aircraft collided with a Chinese J-8 fighter over the South China Sea. The collision forced the American pilots to land at a Chinese airbase. That incident was resolved after 10 days when the US issued a statement of regret for the death of the Chinese pilot and for entering China’s airspace. The entire episode was a tense moment that could have easily escalated had leaders on either side handled matters differently. If American and Chinese leaders keep ramping up tensions, a similar episode could spark a conflict.
While a direct conflict with China is unlikely as long as both sides exercise restraint, the US will eventually fight another war somewhere else. When that inevitably happens, we will hear the ghost of Donald Rumsfeld reminding us that, “You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time.”
The US will spend $1 trillion a year buying F-47s and Ford-class aircraft carriers. The Marine Corps has already reshaped itself specifically to fight this one, very specific scenario. When the US inevitably goes and fights somewhere else against a far less sophisticated adversary, all the services will have little choice but to employ weapons designed to fight a very different kind of war. Just as happened in Iraq and Afghanistan, the US will lose in the moral dimension of war from the very beginning. Sending aircraft costing more than $100 million to drop GPS-guided bombs against tribal fighters isn’t just overkill, it creates the ultimate Goliath versus David situation with the US cast as the Philistine giant. In the thousands of years people have told that story, few have ever cast Goliath in a positive light.
The US needs a responsible defense policy based on a realistic strategic assessment rather than an over-hyped threat. As long as the cross-strait status quo remains, there is little risk of a military conflict over Taiwan. Still, plenty of people in Washington believe that by preparing for the worst-case scenario, the military will be ready to handle any situation. That is not the case. We will end up bankrupting ourselves by building a military force that has prepared for the wrong war and is too sophisticated to effectively fight the wars that actually happen.
John Culver, Non-Resident Senior Fellow, John L. Thornton China Center, Brookings Institution
Over the past decade, much of the US public commentary on the Chinese military and prospects for conflict has shifted from the expert community to pundits, popularizing some tropes that are almost certainly false and propagating a deeply flawed narrative. The most widespread is that China’s leader Xi Jinping some years ago decided the PLA would have to invade Taiwan sometime in 2027. Although this view is rejected by much of the expert community and the top US intelligence leadership, it persists and serves to justify increased US defense spending and claims that the US and allies must deter a war that China is bent on conducting.
To the contrary, for Xi Jinping, Taiwan is a crisis he seeks to avoid, not an opportunity he hopes to seize. His firings of more than twenty top general officers in the past 18 months underscore that he does not trust the PLA enough to bet the Communist Party’s hold on power on the military’s competence.
However, if conditions required military force from his perspective, China probably would go to war. But it might not be the war that some in Washington seem to expect. Beijing has a long-term political strategy to achieve “unification,” which has a military component. Too many in the US focus entirely on the military dimension.
Below are some aspects of a prospective US-China war over Taiwan that should get more attention:
- China’s primary goal in military operations since the 1950s is to punish, not conquer. Its short wars with India (1962), Vietnam (1979), and in the 1990s Taiwan crises were driven by actions of its adversaries and Beijing’s goal was to “teach a lesson,” not seize and hold territory. The Party’s goal — beyond punishment — is to compel an adversary to return to the status quo, or create a new status quo more advantageous to Beijing.
- If events, such as a Taiwan assertion of permanent separation or US direct military commitment to defend the island, drive conflict over Taiwan, the most likely PLA course of action would be escalation from the military pressure campaign it’s been conducting since 2019. This is not without precedent — in early 2008, Beijing postured the PLA to be prepared to strike key military targets, conduct a limited blockade, and seize all the islands off the coast of Fujian Province held by Taiwan since 1949. Beijing’s goal was then, and likely would again be, to inflict severe hardship on Taiwan and limit effective US intervention, not to invade the main island.
- Unlike previous conflicts in the past century involving US forces, a war with China would not just be fought “over there.” China is building formidable regional and intercontinental strike weapons, both conventional and nuclear, and by 2035 will have a conventional firepower advantage in addition to destructive cyber and space capabilities. Especially if China’s overwhelming conventional strike forces compromise US operating areas within the second island chain, we should expect strikes on Guam, Hawaii, the west coast of CONUS, and well beyond. These kinetic strikes would be in addition to major cyber and counterspace campaigns to disrupt US military operations and impose costs on ordinary Americans.
- China likely enjoys a significant and growing intelligence advantage over Taiwan, as a recent Politico article documents. Senior Taiwan intelligence officials have estimated that China has “5,000 spies” on the island, integrated into all key government and military institutions, and recent cases include penetration of President Lai’s personal security detail. In 2021, the leading candidate to be named Taiwan’s Chief of General Staff was quietly reassigned after the government learned he was a Chinese spy — arrest and prosecution were judged to be too embarrassing to the government. China’s cyber penetrations probably are equally important and could provide decisive.
Gil Barndollar, Senior Research Fellow, Center for The Study of Statesmanship, The Catholic University of America; Non-Resident Fellow, Defense Priorities
In an address at National Taiwan University on Aug. 4, virtual reality inventor cum military hardware hawker Palmer Luckey painted a stirring picture of superweapons, drone submarines, and autonomous missiles, with which Taiwan could “fashion itself into a veritable floating fortress” and forestall invasion and annexation by the People’s Republic of China, just 80 watery miles away. But a fixation on weapons and tech misses the most vital ingredient in maintaining Taiwan’s independence: will.
A full-fledged Chinese invasion of Taiwan is what the US military calls the “EMDCOA,” or the “Enemy’s Most Dangerous Course of Action.” Far more probable, under the sibling heading of “EMLCOA” (“Enemy’s Most Likely Course of Action”), is a continuum of subversion and pressure tactics, designed to convince the Taiwanese and their leaders that submission to China is the only viable path forward.
A campaign of military annihilation, at sea and ashore, is still a daunting proposition. Geography has made Taiwan a tough nut to crack. Treacherous tides and limited viable beaches constrain the timing and targets of an invading force. Once ashore, Chinese troops will confront dense cities, open agricultural land, and the highest mountains in East Asia. To ensure success, a Chinese invasion would have to be the largest amphibious operation in history. In lieu of initiating landings that could become a prolonged and bloody campaign, China could attempt a coup de main, but the outcome of Russia’s effort at one in Ukraine argues against such a gambit.
Instead of overwhelming physical destruction, more measured methods would target the will to resist of Taiwan’s servicemen and citizens. Spread out over time, incremental Chinese pressure could embrace a strategy of exhaustion, seeking Taiwanese capitulation without conquest. This could culminate in a blockade of Taiwan by the People’s Liberation Army Navy, backed by Chinese airpower and China’s enormous missile arsenal. A blockade is an act of war, legally, but it can put the onus on its target to actually initiate hostilities. A “quarantine” by China’s coast guard would strangle Taiwan more gradually than a full blockade, with less risk of war.
Evaluating morale and will to fight is notoriously difficult. The US proved this twice in 24 months, failing to anticipate the collapse of its Afghan client state in 2021, then misapprehending Ukraine’s resistance and resilience a year later. A thick stew of culture, leadership, and circumstance, all of it refracted through the rational calculations and irrational attachments of millions of citizens, determines a country’s collective decision to fight or fold.
The US may have one saving grace in attempting to accurately assess Taiwan’s will to fight: limited US engagement with the island’s military has resulted in a negligible pool of US officers and analysts who are personally or professionally invested in the performance of the Taiwanese armed forces. Careerism and emotional investment in what was once dubbed “the Long War” clouded the judgment of US servicemembers and civil servants working on Afghanistan, yielding an overly optimistic view of the endurance of Afghan soldiers and the stability of their state.
Wargames are of dubious value as predictive tools, but both games and open-source analysis suggest tremendous Chinese and American losses in any full-blown war over Taiwan. Attempts to stack the deck before the cards are dealt, through measures like sending a US Marine Littoral Regiment to Taiwan, could well trigger the war that all parties appear to dread. Dozens of Chinese battalions are likely to make it ashore even in optimistic scenarios. They will have to be checked and defeated by Taiwanese soldiers.
Weapons and will are not wholly independent elements. Attempts to better the odds for Taiwan through technology, like the Defense Department’s Replicator Initiative, are to the good. Better gear and more munitions should hearten Taiwanese soldiers and make them more confident in their ability to resist and win. But the best robot submarines and autonomous missiles will still answer to men and women, in uniform and out.
Luckey closed his address by conjuring a future vision of a 2029 Xi Jinping so intimidated by Taiwanese arms that he forsakes his dreams of conquering the island. But in the long history of organized violence, this kind of bean counter military assessment has been wrong more often than right. Xi would be wise to center the question of Taiwanese will to fight in his decision-making. The US should do the same.
Ransom Miller, Research Associate, Institute for Global Affairs, Eurasia Group
When China launched aggressive military drills during then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s controversial visit to Taiwan in August 2022, I was surprised that my Taiwanese friends responded with relative calm. I was visiting the island as part of a language program, and my American peers were panic-stricken. But as Chinese missiles rocketed above Taipei and Taiwanese fighter jets sortied from the base near us in Tainan, there seemed to be a collective shrug. Roughly four generations of Taiwanese people have come of age under the existential threat of a Chinese invasion.
It’s received wisdom that it will never really happen. That has made Taiwan uniquely unprepared for war.
Relations with China are the central political fault line in Taiwan. The current ruling party advocates for Taiwan’s independence from China, while the main opposition party wants to eventually reunify with the mainland.
But most people don’t want independence or reunification. More than 60% of Taiwanese people would prefer the status quo to continue, according to polling by National Chengchi University. Less than 7% support reunification, while slightly more than 25% support independence either now or in the future.
One reason for that: Taiwan has benefited greatly from its relationship to China. When China’s market reforms began, Taiwanese investors with connections to the mainland stood to gain. Taiwanese billionaire Terry Gou, for instance, founded Foxconn, the electronics manufacturer that makes most iPhones in China.
Close relations with and economic benefit from China haven’t made service in the Taiwanese military very popular. Among the left, the military is still associated with Taiwan’s brutal 20th-century dictatorship; among the right, it’s considered an impediment to negotiations with China. Today, Taiwan’s active-duty force has dwindled to 150,000 troops from a high of 500,000 in the 1980s. That’s as compared to two million active-duty Chinese troops.
Taiwanese service members in uniform are not adequately prepared for a war with China. Basic training is minimal, with draftees firing less than 100 rounds, as compared to 600 fired in the US Army’s basic combat training. A friend of mine said compulsory military service in Taiwan was like summer camp. In wartime, many conscripts say they’ll be “cannon fodder.”
“Taiwanese service members in uniform are not adequately prepared for a war with China.”
That’s not to say Taiwan’s military is hopeless. In 2022, the government announced an extension of the draft to a full year. New recruits now often train with domestically-produced anti-armor rockets. Taiwan has an impressive, growing defense industry.
Amid increased aggression from China and grim predictions from many US experts, Taiwan’s political class is feeling a sense of urgency. President Lai Ching-te has said he intends to raise military spending to over 3% of GDP from its current rate of 2.45%. But the opposition has repeatedly blocked the budget initiative.
Even if Taiwan succeeds in raising military spending, its vulnerabilities run deeper than that. Taiwan imports its food and energy. Without access to international shipping lanes, Taiwan would run out of most food in six months. It would run out of fuel in five months if the country halts all manufacturing.
Taiwan continues to rely on US support. Fifty-three percent of Taiwanese think the US would send troops to defend Taiwan in the event of a Chinese invasion, but only 36% of Americans agree. As President Trump pressures Taiwan on defense spending and trade, Taiwanese leaders need to deal with what they can realistically do to prepare for war with China.
Hunter Slingbaum, Research Assistant, Reimagining US Grand Strategy Program, Stimson Center
Taiwan has been blessed with a conveniently defendable natural fortress — its mountains, rivers, rice paddies, and narrow roads make a full-scale Chinese invasion of the main island exceedingly challenging. But with enough weak points, even an unpalatable option becomes viable, and Taiwan’s ability to leverage its natural defenses and effectively balance against the growing threat from the People’s Republic of China remains limited. Much of the blame lies with its fractured domestic politics.
Critical weaknesses persist in Taiwan’s defensive preparations, particularly in reserve readiness and military exercises, both of which require urgent reforms. Reserve forces — a critical factor in Ukraine’s successful defense of Kyiv in 2022 — require more frequent and comprehensive training to ensure readiness. Equally important, military exercises need to expand to include a broader range of scenarios, including urban warfare. Historically, urban combat has challenged both attackers and defenders, and with limited training in such environments, the Taiwanese military risks failing to capitalize on its homecourt advantage.
Both reforms are understandably unpopular. Besides the disruptions they would cause to daily life, they confront an absence of trust in the military. Extensive vestigial distrust persists from the White Terror era of martial law, and nearly a third of Taiwanese express “no confidence” in their military.
Given the growing threat Taiwan faces from China, however, realism might suggest that the island’s political leaders would press ahead with necessary reforms. Why, then, are they reluctant to undertake these critical measures? The answer lies in deeply entrenched political divisions and the high political costs associated with pushing unpopular reforms in a polarized society.
Taiwan has long been subject to a widening partisan divide. Its two dominant political parties — the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and Kuomintang (KPT) — have reflected this growing polarization since at least the 1990s. But tensions have escalated since the 2024 election, which split government control, and recent attempts to recall large numbers of KMT legislators. This has produced broad legislative gridlock and undermined political willingness to pursue likely necessary but nonetheless unpopular reforms. Thus, the significant domestic political costs associated with effectively balancing against China have Taiwan caught in an underbalancing trap.
Taiwanese citizens are not blind to the threat, but many adopt the widespread undervaluation of its urgency, fueling the unpopularity of more significant reforms. Though a slim majority support higher defense spending in the abstract, a recent survey found that 65% of Taiwanese adults view a PLA attack on Taiwan as unlikely in the next five years. On a recent trip to Taipei, several experts I spoke to concurred that party leaders were too afraid to make any moves that could worry the public about security, so new defense reforms are bound to be incremental rather than transformational.
This is fundamentally a domestic problem for Taiwan — one that US foreign policy has limited capacity to influence. To the extent Washington can play a constructive role, it might consider making portions of its extensive military support contingent on meaningful internal reforms and targeted investments. By leveraging its existing political clout, Washington could potentially reduce the domestic political costs for Taiwanese leaders. US requests should be targeted and specific, since blanket demands for increased defense spending do not guarantee that such investments will be efficient or effective.
Ultimately, however, it is not the responsibility of the US to convince Taiwanese citizens of the exigency of their security challenges. While an invasion is neither “imminent” nor inevitable, the US must still ask why it is prepared to risk military conflict over Taiwan when its own public does not share the same sense of urgency in defending the island.
