Taiwan Runs ‘Enemy Annihilation’ Drill as China Steps Up Intimidating Military Activity

Taiwan carried out a major live-fire military drill on Thursday to simulate repelling a Chinese amphibious invasion, pointedly demonstrating a strategy the Defense Ministry described as “enemy annihilation on the shore.”

The drill was a special exercise held several weeks ahead of Taiwan’s major annual Han Kuang military exercise, currently scheduled for July 16 after a coronavirus delay.

The anti-landing drill was held at Taichung City, a coastal region along the Taiwan Strait, and involved an impressive array of land-based rocket artillery, ships, helicopters and warplanes, most of them sold to Taiwan by the United States. Aircraft involved in the exercise included Taiwan’s most advanced jet fighter, the F-16V, and Apache attack helicopters.

The five-day Han Kuang exercise will be held in the same location two weeks from now. Defense Ministry sources said the main exercise will give Taiwan’s allies and adversaries their first look at its restructured combined-arms battalions, which mix several branches of the military together into highly flexible joint-operations units that should be able to respond more quickly to changing battlefield conditions.

Presumably, the debut of these units will also dash the hopes of Chinese strategists that they could neutralize the Taiwanese military by hitting a few key command locations in the early hours of an invasion. 

Taiwan held a similar drill in March after a string of incursions into its airspace by Chinese warplanes. More Chinese incursions were reported in June and now the Taiwanese military is once again demonstrating its ability to “annihilate” enemy landing forces – a necessary shift in deterrence strategy as the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) has grown in size and sophistication, making it harder for Taiwan’s defenders to credibly threaten they could completely wipe out an invasion force in the Taiwan Strait.

Which is not to say the Taiwanese could not make passage across the Strait difficult for the PLAN; on Wednesday the Taiwanese air force conducted a simulated bombing of enemy ships with powerful American-made MK-84 bombs and torpedoes. Rumor from the Defense Ministry has it that the Han Kuang exercise will include live-fire submarine torpedo drills, the first practiced by Taiwan’s navy since 2007. 

Military analysts describe Taiwan’s current approach as a “porcupine strategy,” acknowledging that it may no longer be possible to halt a Chinese invasion outright, but the Taiwanese military can make the invasion so painful that Beijing decides against risking casualties so severe they could topple the Communist regime.

Key elements of the porcupine strategy include demonstrating that Taiwan’s defense can inflict enormous casualties on an invading force and cannot be easily neutralized with preemptive strikes. It is also considered important for Taiwan to demonstrate more indigenously-produced military hardware so its defenses cannot be weakened by blockading supplies from America and other allies, and the current round of Taiwanese military exercises do include some locally-produced equipment.

Defensive strength is a more urgent priority for Taiwan than ever, a fact President Tsai Ing-wen has recognized with record increases in the island’s military budget. The current tyrant in Beijing, Xi Jinping, has essentially committed himself to Taiwanese reunification before he leaves office; he made himself president-for-life, but he is 67 years old.

Peaceful reunification once seemed plausible following a massive Chinese campaign of propaganda, political isolation, and economic pressure launched after Tsai’s election, but events in Hong Kong over the past year appear to have eliminated any real appetite on the part of the Taiwanese for accepting Beijing’s rule.

One of the few strategic ambiguities protecting Taiwan is the question of whether the United States would intervene against a Chinese invasion, and the coronavirus combined with the 2020 presidential election may have created a situation where Xi calculates that Washington is less willing to go to war to defend Taipei. A successful demonstration of the porcupine strategy might help convince China it could only capture Taiwan with the kind of prolonged, bloody war that would be likely to prompt international intervention.