• a Quora - Could Taiwan successfully counter a Chinese invasion?

    From a425couple@21:1/5 to All on Sat Jul 19 09:34:21 2025
    XPost: sci.military.naval, soc.history.war.misc, alt.war.world-war-three
    XPost: seattle.politics, alt.economics

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    Tomaž Vargazon
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    Practicing atheistJul 13
    Could Taiwan successfully counter a Chinese invasion?
    By now? Yes, quite easily.

    (Well, I don't know, but interesting.)

    A naval drone

    I assure you Taiwan is looking at how Ukraine handled the Russian Black
    sea fleet most keenly. The approach is as brilliant as it is simple,
    take high-performance jet ski and modify it into a remote controlled
    torpedo. No navy is equipped to handle something like this and they come
    on top of conventional measures, already rather difficult to handle.

    Drones are the most effective counter-weapon in a while. They can’t
    really perform occupation duties or take land, but they can interfere
    with operations and especially naval landings. Taiwan already has all
    the ground-launched anti-ship missiles, planes and submarines it can
    usefully have in a war, but a segment of naval drones designed to take
    out incoming landing craft from across the strait would complicate
    matters for China most severely. It’s easier to add more drones into the attack than it is to counter them too.

    As a result any Chinese invasion of Taiwan would have to rely on
    airborne drops, drop special forces to take an airport then fly more
    troops in. In the era of MANPADs and SAMs that’s even more suicidal than
    it was back in the day. Russians tried that near Kyiv and lost several
    hundred VDV in a couple of hours to a few dozen hastily mobilized local militiamen.

    China may be able to forcibly subdue Taiwan through other means, but not
    with a military invasion. Taiwan is too wealthy, too full of technically skilled people and has been getting ready for something like this for
    too long for an invasion to possibly work any time soon. Maybe if they
    glassed the island first, then move in to take the wasteland.

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