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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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