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Good points, and I'll raise another aspect for audience consideration.
The ground aspect of a Taiwan invasion is definitely a massive challenge. The other side of the issue is if it will be necessary if Taiwan can be blockaded and starved into submission. China could absolutely bungle an invasion, a D-Day failed, and still end up with the win if it just successfully blocks ships from coming in and landing to unload long enough. Taiwan has something like a third of food self-sufficiency in peace time.
This is where the question of the naval war, and war length, comes. While it's typically framed in terms of whether China can keep the US Navy out, and that does matter for letting China try that very difficult landing scenario, the actual needs in the war regarding Taiwan ports change depending on if the war is a short conflict or a long conflict.
In a 'short' war, China just needs to keep the US out long enough to make the naval invasion, which- even if it can't sweep the island- might have the political shock effect of a political capitulation by the Taiwanese. I generally take a dim view of 'and then the enemy loses the will to fight' scenarios, but they aren't impossible. From the Taiwan coalition situation, the key interest is maintaining enough naval / air power in the area to deter / undercut / critically weakening the landing threat so that it trips and drowns, until the PRC accepts a status quo ante end to hostilities. However, the shortness of this war makes Taiwanese ports relatively unimportant beyond a defense objective. They don't have to work, just not be captured to facilitate PRC logistics.
In a 'long' war, China and the US are now involved in a global-scale power struggle with global economy cracking implications even as dynamics prevent a status quo ante resolution. One of the reasons this might endure is because the PRC get enough of a bridge head that they have a toe hold on the island that can neither advance nor be driven into the sea, but it's not the only one. In this format, the Taiwan ports- especially those on east of the northeast of the island become a critical facilitator for supplies, both military and, well, food. Except ports can be shut down via missiles or cyberattacks or other things. So now it's the Taiwanese coalition that has to overcome the 'how do I get men and material onto the island,' where instead of hostile terrain and a defender they are facing hostile terrain and a major regional airbase trying to enforce a naval blockade.
Yeah it's definitely worth breaking up the scenarios into e.g. most likely, most feasible, most acceptable, most dangerous, etc. An amphibious invasion is the most dangerous (most dangerous that is acceptable to the CCP at least) scenario, but far from the most likely.
I think a war on a 1-3 year time horizon favours the US. I think a war on a 5+ year time frame favours China. I don't think a toehold on Taiwan shifts things too much, I'm very much of the opinion that an occupation of Taipei is the only physical occupation that achieves a defacto peace with Taiwan. But a blockade is much more complex and it's much much harder to determine what would happen there.
Mild tangent...
I'm pretty confident Chinese naval skill and technology remains super overmatched by US and Western navies. Putting hulls in the water is really cool but it means that you're naturally promoting officers who face less of a bottleneck than those before them. We don't know, but the PLAN could be scrounging officers into command positions that would, if the navy wasn't expanding so rapidly, be middle of the ladder candidates.
The PLAN carrier fleet is a good example. A US admiral generally needs to start his career flying planes off the deck of a carrier. From there he commands a squadron, becomes an EX of a carrier, then a CO of a ship, and a carrier after that. He'll be promoted into a flag position, maybe as a director or deputy for a shore based position where he rounds off his military understanding. He gets a couple more commands, of a carrier strike group or something, then gets the US 7th Fleet.
This guy knows what it is to take off from the carrier, has trained a squadron himself, commanded ships, departments and has competed every step of the way to take command of the fleet. A Chinese admiral today has never flown a plane off a deck of a carrier, will be asking his guys to do things he couldn't do himself, doesn't understand the impact of the conditions, etc etc. Their carriers are only just coming into service, which means there has been no incremental improvements of technology with lessons learned from previous deployments or mid-life upgrades. We know the Chinese aviation arm isn't as good as the US Navy's, because their sortie rate is not that good. It is getting better with practice, but it'll take a full generation to peak.
The Chinese have a lot of advantages re: manufacturing but a lot of limitations re: institutional military knowledge. The Chinese have at least air parity with the Taiwanese coalition across the SCS, maybe air superiority if their fighters perform as promised (definitely not a given). But I'm pretty sure they hemorrhage materiel rapidly when they start coming up against Western/coalition soldiers, sailors and airmen.
My totally unjustified, out of pocket assessment, is that I think counting VLS cells or ship hulls is something that's going to be looked back on like we look back on all of Sadam's tanks. Yes, it's not a fair comparison as Chinese ships are actually modern. But I think commentators greatly underappreciate the likelihood that the Chinese military isn't actually the professionalised force it claims to be. I think it could rapidly devolve into a Russian-style calamity, where US ships are picking off Chinese ships at will, and this terrifying armada is actually constricted to a coast guard type role after they lose 50 frigates in a week.
I’m not a military expert, and I don’t know whether your assessment of either the US or Chinese military is accurate, so I won’t comment on the military side. But aren’t the perennial questions 1) whether the Taiwanese are willing to fight a prolonged war, given that they’re an advanced economy unlike the Ukrainians who arguably had little left to lose, and 2) the US’s (and to a lesser extent Japan’s) willingness to engage in an unlimited shooting war with China?
I’m not pretending to know everything about the Taiwanese military, but the infighting between the DPP and KMT, and how closely tied the KMT is to the Taiwanese military sounds pretty dire to me. The state of their military reserves also seems less than ideal. It would be ridiculous to expect them to fold as soon as shots are fired, but there doesn’t seem to be much confidence at least based on the narrow and admittedly biased sample of Taiwanese people I’ve met with.
Yes. But I don't think Taiwan is low hanging fruit by itself anyway.
Yeah they're terrible. But it's easier to get conscripts to destroy bridges and sit in trenches than it is to conduct amphib ops, or manoeuvre their tanks through complex terrain. Like I said, PLAAF jets and bombers would be a major problem for Taiwanese ground forces, but PLA brigades still need to capture ground. And I'm just not sure they're up to it.
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