Ukraine’s drone triumph gives hope to Taiwan

Ukraine’s massive drone strike against Russian air bases on 1 June should reverberate across all theaters of conflict. But there is one Western Pacific scenario where it could be very relevant indeed: a Chinese invasion of Taiwan.

There was a micro-panic among invasion watchers in March when a brief video appeared, and then vanished, showing an impressively large and unique Chinese device, a series of barges with telescoping  vertical pylons in their hulls and built-in bridges at each end. Towed into place in line astern, the barges would extend their pylons to the sea bottom and lift themselves out of the water, connect themselves with bridges and extend a long cable-stayed ramp to the shore.

The system is designed to bypass Taiwan’s ports and allow commercial ro-ro ships to directly and rapidly discharge vehicles ashore. That’s important because an invasion of Taiwan would be so massive—300,000 troops is the baseline estimate in a comprehensive recent study by the US Naval War College—that for a navy to provide enough sealift is almost inconceivable.

But the mobile pier, ingenious as it is, acknowledges a basic fact: there is no alternative in Taiwan to an amphibious assault through the surf line, with the goal of then seizing nearby port or using the beach as a landing point for the pier. Attractive alternatives such as directly seizing a major port or using airborne force to grab centers of gravity (Hostomel was another Ukraine lesson) don’t exist.

Completed in October 2022, the War College study is the product of a  conference held in 2021, before Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The study doesn’t mention the kind of drones used in Ukraine—but they could make an enormous difference.

China’s amphibious forces, a joint army-navy responsibility, are built on a blend of the assets and technologies used by the US Marine Corps and others, technologies based on experience in World War II and Korea, where the last major amphibious landing took place.

The technology hasn’t changed much: a combination of seagoing ships designed to approach the beach, and larger ships that carry and launch landing craft to deliver troops and vehicles to the beach, along with amphibious combat vehicles (ACVs) that can swim to the beach and fight beyond it. Helicopters and hovercraft have been added to the mix since Korea, but can only handle part of the load. And some of the landing craft are now hovercraft, which are faster and may be able to move a little inland.

Like the Marines, China’s amphibious doctrine calls for a focused landing on a front of 2 to 4 km, with boats, hovercraft and ACVs approaching the beach in columns from the motherships close to the horizon. Except for a few hovercraft, they’d be generally moving at less than 15 knots.

Such a force is a fat target. The landing craft and ACVs are neither fast, nor hard, nor can they carry effective defenses. Surprise is next to impossible, particularly in Taiwan, with a rugged coast where most beaches are backed by steep cliffs or equally impassable rice fields.

China’s plan, tested in its own exercises and countless Western wargames, is based on massive use of force to prevent attacks on the landing force, through control of the three domains—land, water, and air.

But small drones do not live in any of those domains.

Sure, they fly, and travel faster than anything on the surface, but their small size and proximity to the surface protect them from air threats and most surface-to-air weapons. Sometimes called the ‘air littoral’, it’s a different domain.

The Ukrainian strike on 1 June highlighted other aspects of drones. Slower than conventional aeroplanes and missiles, surviving with swarm tactics and small size, they can be very precise, picking the exact point where to land or deliver a weapon. ‘Zero miss distance’ means that a small warhead can be destructive, using the target’s fuel or weapons—or its very marginal buoyancy—to destroy it. A laden landing craft or an ACV will sink rapidly if holed.

Small drones don’t have long range, but if the target is headed your way from 20 km out, that’s not necessary.

Being sure that an object is the enemy, not a friend, is not hard in an amphibious invasion. If it has a wake and it’s heading for the beach, it’s Red—the other side.

But let’s throw in a self-forming 5G network of autonomous drones, all with cameras. The Ukraine attack was against non-moving targets, so the invasion force might be harder to hit. But as the drone swarm overflies the incoming force, the video from each camera is continuously stitched into a high-resolution target map, updated as targets are hit.

Drones that still have energy but are out of munitions continue to build the target map, diving on a target as their batteries drain. Drones joining the fight do not have to search for targets; they are directed to them, so the attack becomes more efficient. None of this takes sophisticated hardware or artificial intelligence—just simple rules that ensure drones with unused munitions don’t run out of energy and fall uselessly into the sea.

If resources permit, the drones can engage larger combatants and ro-ros. Heavier drones with more powerful munitions can hide in a swarm of smaller vehicles and are hard to distinguish from them.

Red does not have many good counter-moves. Defensive directed-energy weapons or guns on large ships are far from where the drones are hitting the landing force. Jamming a communications network that has dozens or hundreds of nodes within a few kilometers of one another is next to impossible. ACVs or other craft assigned to carry counter-drone weapons risk being identified as such and swarmed.

And can this drone force be hit on the ground before launch, even with total air supremacy? Not much. As the Ukraine attack showed, drone arsenals are mobile and easily camouflaged: the drones that hit airbases were driven thousands of kilometres into Russian territory without being detected.

At the defender’s discretion, the operation can be livestreamed on social media, stressing the most disciplined nation’s will to fight.

Can we doubt that China is rewriting its wargames this week?

This article was published by The Strategist.