Battle for Taiwan risks turning into a blood bath
American casualties would dwarf the post-9/11 wars, but Chinese armed forces would suffer even more
American forces risk suffering tens of thousands of casualties in a battle to stop China from invading Taiwan. It would dwarf the number of fallen during the post-9/11 wars, the deputy commander of the United States Army in the Pacific warned.
Lieutenant General Joel Vowell spelled out the grim reality of an explosive conflict around the island democracy, which straddles the East and South China Seas. Casualties would be “much higher” than those sustained during the Global War on Terror.
“We have to calculate [a] mass casualty event,” he said at a briefing to a Defense Writers Group at George Washington University last week, painting a nightmare scenario of carnage if hostilities broke out.
“Our assumptions for planning are that casualty estimates will be much higher than you might have seen [in] Iraq, Afghanistan, and other places where there were very small numbers,” Vowell added, as reported by military news site Task & Purpose.
To put that into context, the outcome of war games conducted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies estimated that between 9,500 and 21,000 American troops could be killed or wounded.
“More than a century after President Theodore Roosevelt made the US the maritime power in the Pacific, that position is under threat. China is seeking to displace it,” Krista Wiegand, at the University of Tennessee, wrote for The Conversation.
An invasion would be more complicated than the Normandy landings.
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Sea of blood:
- China would suffer even greater casualties and leave the powerful People’s Liberation Army Navy broken and beaten.
- Economically, it would be a disaster even if President Xi Jinping’s regime launched a blockade around Taiwan instead of a full-blown invasion.
Delve deeper: China’s GDP would suffer a 9% hit as the economy went into meltdown. “It would be astronomical,” Paul Triolo, of the Albright Stonebridge Group, told the United States Institute of Peace.
Between the lines: Commercial goods worth an estimated US$5 trillion transit the South China Sea annually. Any disruption would be a catalyst for instability.
Big picture: “[Yet,] an all-out invasion of Taiwan would be an operation larger and more complicated than the World War II Normandy landings,” a report released last year by the American Enterprise Institute and the Institute for the Study of War stated.
Bottom line: “But unlike the Allied forces, the [Chinese] military has never done such a thing,” the white paper pointed out.
China Factor comment: To soften the island up, Xi is pursuing a “coercion campaign.” His ruling Communist Party considers Taiwan a “rogue province.” Yet it has never ruled the island, making “reunification” a myth.