Possible PRC Military Actions against Taiwan

According to Taiwan and U. S. Government documents, the possible PRC military actions against Taiwan can be categorized into five phases: mili­tary intimidation, blockade, surgical strikes, asymmetric warfare, and amphib­ious invasion.25 Air operations clearly figure prominently in all of these, con­sistent with Deng Xiaoping’s pronouncement that “No matter what, the Air Force is most important in all operations: Army, Navy and Air Force, the first is a strong Air Force.”26 A 2008 White Paper on national defense issued by the PRC stated that:27

The Air Force is a strategic service of the PLA, and the main force for car­rying out air operations. It is responsible for such tasks as safeguarding the country’s territorial air space and territorial sovereignty, and maintaining a stable air defense posture nationwide. It is mainly composed of aviation, ground air defense, airborne, signal, radar, ECM [electronic countermea­sures], technical reconnaissance and chemical defense sections.

Certainly, the PLAAF can be expected to join all the possible military actions against Taiwan. In this regard, the following discussion examines pos­sible PRC military actions against Taiwan, focusing on the role that airpower forces and air warfare would play in them.

Military Intimidation

In its 2009 Quadrennial Defense Review, the Taiwan government noted

that:28

The PLA may wage psychological warfare against Taiwan by means of escalation [of] the intensity of its military activities, adjusting force deploy­ments, including forward deployments, field training exercises, firepower demonstration, and use or combine media influences to exaggerate the seriousness of military situation over the Taiwan Strait, so as to stoke internal panic in Taiwan and undermine their will and morale.

From the PLAs perspective, air intimidation offers the prospect of flex­ible, wide-ranging action having strong political and military effect yet with low political and military risk.29 Airpower has the inherent ability to project power at high speed and over long distance without being hindered by the obstacles and difficulties afflicting surface power projection. The combination of airplane and missile make air intimidation a very real prospect. With regard to Taiwan, the PLAs joint-service missiles and aircraft, with their newer fight­ers like the Su-27, J—11, and Su-30, can project power across the entire Taiwan area. Indeed, already, Taiwan is “under” a missile-threat envelope of consid­erable depth and density. The coupling of this with precision navigation and sensing systems—like the various space-based navigation and cuing systems now on line (such as GPS and GLONASS)—make air intimidation more effec­tive and more likely by largely removing the threat of counterproductive col­lateral damage.

Missile intimidation is a core Second Artillery mission, and works to restrain the enemy’s strategic attempts or important risky military actions. The SRBMs of the Second Artillery offer long range, high accuracy, hypersonic speed, high-explosive effects, deep target penetration, and low risk of both interception and collateral damage, thus constituting a very important means of military intimidation. Air intimidation can be performed by means of air – power exercises, which not only demonstrate the threat and potentiality of air- power, but the national determination of the PRC as well. Further, routine air demonstration and intimidation can swiftly and readily transform into higher intensity military action against Taiwan, and, if done gradually and carefully, without necessarily alerting Taiwan’s air defenders.