China’s plan for conquering Taiwan is straightforward. Surround the island with warships, bombard it from the air then sail a huge invasion force across the Taiwan Strait and, in the first wave, land tens of thousands of troops on Taiwanese beaches and in Taiwanese ports that Chinese commandos aim to seize in the attack’s early hours.
The attack could come with little warning. Yes, China would have to mobilize hundreds of thousands of marines, soldiers, sailors and airmen. Yes, China would have to mass ships on the Chinese side of the strait.
No, surprise isn’t impossible. It’s not for no reason the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Air Force and PLA Navy routinely conduct sprawling military exercises in close proximity to Taiwan. Any one of these exercises could transform into an actual invasion with a few terse commands from Beijing.
Once the balloon goes up, so to speak, US and allied forces might have just a few hours to sink the Chinese invasion fleet before it begins landing troops. Taiwan and its allies still can win the war, even after Chinese troops hit the beaches, but such a victory would be more difficult and much more costly to the Taiwanese.
Ideally, Taiwan’s defenders would halt the assault in the strait. The problem, for US planners, is how to strike enough targets fast enough. A Chinese invasion fleet might include 50 or more navy amphibious ships as well as additional amphibious vessels from the army plus dozens of civilian ferries and countless small craft from both the military and the civilian sector.
That potential fleet gets bigger by the year, further complicating the American response.
“Here’s a metric for me: 1,000 targets for 24 hours,” said Admiral John Aquilino, head of US Indo-Pacific Command. That’s how many targets Aquilino assumes his forces would need to strike on the first day of a Chinese attack.
Striking that many targets requires a whole new approach, US officials acknowledged back in 2017. That’s when they launched the so-called “Assault Breaker II” initiative. Named for a Cold War battle-strategy that envisioned Nato smart bombs and rockets raining down on a Soviet land army, Assault Breaker II aims to develop “a capability, on short time scales compared to our adversary’s ability to succeed, to strike and render ineffective our adversary’s assets,” according to the US Defense Science Board.
The US Navy and US Air Force both have the capacity to fire thousands of missiles, quickly, but only if their ships and planes are already in position the moment the enemy attacks – and only if the initial enemy assault doesn’t overwhelm the American ships and planes.
The goal, with Assault Breaker II, is to position inexpensive drones – thousands of them – ready to defend Taiwan so that manned ships and planes don’t have to linger nearby around the clock for years and years to come.
Imagine a Chinese fleet with hundreds of vessels abruptly pivoting from some training exercise and steaming toward Taiwan under the cover of missiles, bombs and artillery. Now imagine that fleet sailing into a swarm of thousands of tiny single-use drones, each assisted by artificial intelligence and carrying a few pounds of explosives.
That’s one way US and allied forces might put the Assault Breaker II concept into practice. That was already the plan when Russia widened its war on Ukraine two years ago. Now we know for sure that a drone swarm plan could work, because the Ukrainians have executed their own version of it.
Strapping artillery shells to tens of thousands of $500 drones anyone can buy online, the Ukrainians – and the Russians to some extent – have darkened the sky over the front line with speedy exploding robots. Ukraine’s drones now rival Ukraine’s artillery as the biggest killer of Russian troops.
But here’s the twist. China produces most of the world’s small drones – including the ones Ukraine uses. Would Beijing sell its enemies the means of Beijing’s own defeat?
The Pentagon knows it has a supply-chain problem. It’s not for no reason that, this year, it launched another important program – one that could make Assault Breaker II possible. This other initiative, Replicator, aims to build an American supply chain for small drones, and start buying these drones in bulk in 2024.
Assault Breaker II is a good idea, one that could mean the difference between victory and defeat if China ever makes good on decades of threats and finally attacks Taiwan. But until US forces can source potentially tens of thousands of small drones on short notice, it will almost certainly remain just that: a good idea.
China’s amphibious assault fleet – the ships and landing craft it would deploy to land troops on Taiwanese beaches – is big and getting bigger. Xi Jinping has just said that “reunification” of Taiwan with China is inevitable, raising fears of an invasion still further. And this has put US military planners in a bind. How can US forces defeat a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, if the Chinese sail hundreds of assault ships across the 100-mile Taiwan Strait, with little or no warning?
These planners have an answer, and it boils down to one word: drones. But actually implementing a massive drone-based defense against a massive Chinese amphibious threat could prove extremely difficult.