Originally Posted by
Big Pistons Forever
The recent exercises had very little to do with messaging Taiwan, they had everything to do with messaging the Chinese population. After allowing and even encouraging popular outrage over the Pelosi visit Xi backed himself into a corner and had to be seen to be doing something. Therefore a hastily arranged set of Kabuki theatre exercises was carefully designed to look impressive to the locals but had no practical effect on Taiwan. No ports were blocked and shipping was only briefly affected. Trade continued unaffected except for a few meaningless product bans.
Intent and capability are the only metrics that matters and I would suggest neither have manifestly changed on the part of the PLA with respect to a Military invasion of Taiwan.
Personally I do not think that the PLA will ever have the capability to invade Taiwan. Dictators focus military force inward to control the population and disperse power among multiple overlapping security agencies so that no one will become powerful enough to overthrow the leader. Senior leaders will be chosen for political loyalty over military competence and independent thoughts will be discouraged.
All of the above are the exact opposite of the qualities a modern military capable of effective joint and combined expeditionary operations, needs.
Ultimately it doesn’t matter how many ships and airplanes the PLA has if they don’t have the Command and Control and logistics to effectively use them.
Finally Xi can’t afford to lose, it would be the end of him so I would suggest that the lessons of the Ukraine war have not been lost on him and therefore the chance of a Military invasion of Taiwan had actually gone down.
Agree with the above.
Xi is not stupid and has serious problems at home, including an imploding real estate sector (30% of GNP), unprecedented unemployment among the youngest, best educated recent graduates and a failed Covid policy, whose costs mount daily.. Getting his third term confirmed with these headwinds is hard enough, but confirmation while engaged in a war that causes China's customers to gag is a non starter, at least imho.