The critical blind spot in Taiwan’s defence

It’s the million-dollar question in Taipei: if China attacked Taiwan, would the US intervene?

Most analysts agree that Washington would. The US supplies the island with virtually all of the weapons and support that would be crucial to its survival in the event of an invasion.

But there is a crucial blind spot in Taiwan’s defence.

The US and Taiwan’s militaries have not trained together for decades and have no combined command structure, making it a formidable task to fend off one of the largest and most powerful militaries in the world.

Mark Montgomery, the former commander of the US’s sole continuously deployed carrier strike group in Japan, said: “It’s clinically insane to me that the country which we are most likely to fight with against our highest-level adversary, China, we intentionally are deconflicted.”

All joint training between the US and Taiwan, which involved tens of thousands of American troops training on Taiwanese soil, stopped in 1979 when Washington established diplomatic relations with China.

Since then, no American generals or admirals are permitted to travel to Taiwan, meaning they are planning for a conflict in a theatre they have never witnessed.

Roy Kamphausen, the former China strategist for the US joint chiefs of staff and a fellow at the National Bureau of Asian Research, said: “In the American military way of thinking, leaders’ reconnaissance of the battle space is an essential element for effective planning and command and control.”

Beyond the top brass, there is no joint training, no code-sharing and a language barrier that would make the two militaries struggle to establish basic communication.

There is also a human component that the US and Taiwan lack: building up a rapport, familiarity and, most importantly, trust with one another.

Grant Newsham, a retired US marine officer with decades of experience in the Indo-Pacific, said: “There’s a psychological part of this as well, the confusion that arises when you’re having to fight alongside somebody that you don’t know, where you’re strangers. 

“You can’t just show up five minutes before the war starts or even after and say, ‘Let’s figure it out.’”

Experts say this lack of preparedness leaves Taiwan and the US exposed and puts the lives of tens of thousands of Americans and Taiwanese at risk.

The reason is clear: China, which sees Taiwan as part of its sovereign territory, would view joint military exercises or retaliation between US and Taiwanese forces as a threat.

This means Taiwan and the US face a critical dilemma: expand interoperability and face China’s wrath, or hold off and risk losing a war to Beijing.

Analysts told The Telegraph that the chance of a friendly fire scenario – in which American or Taiwanese forces accidentally shoot at each other – would be high if they did not work closely together.

“Let’s say you have an aircraft coming at you and you’re not linked in with [Identification Friend or Foe], the electronic signal which tells you whose aircraft it is. If you’re interoperable you will know, otherwise you might shoot it down because you don’t know,” said Mr Newsham.

He also pointed to procedural interoperability, which encompasses how a military operates, its doctrine, who gives the orders and how they are relayed down the chain of command.

“For example, when you call for fire support, [the US] has a set format for doing that. Do the Taiwanese have the same?” asked Mr Newsham.

“If the Taiwanese do it a certain way and we do it a different way, it’s hard for each to ask the other for help.”

Any joint training between the US and Taiwan is usually small-scale and largely kept under wraps to avoid incurring China’s wrath.

Approximately 500 Taiwanese troops train in the US at the Camp Grayling Training Center in Michigan, where they use the Great Lakes to simulate the Indo-Pacific waters, and Taiwanese F-16 pilots have also trained at the Luke Air Force Base in Arizona.

American soldiers have been sent to Taiwan secretly to train forces to use new US weapon systems, but all of these interactions are limited in scope and restricted to soldiers of certain ranks.

Life and death

Even if the US and Taiwan were to begin training together tomorrow – which experts say is extremely unlikely – they are still a long way from reaching an effective level of interoperability, according to Alexander Huang, one of Taiwan’s leading wargame experts and a former consultant at Taiwan’s de facto embassy in the US.

“Even with full sincerity and determination, it would take more than 10 years to make it sincerity,” he said, adding that such an unlikely prospect was not even worth wargaming.

But Taiwan might not have 10 years. While experts do not think an attack is imminent, Xi Jinping has said he wants his military ready to take control of Taiwan by next year.

This week, a Telegraph investigation revealed how advanced the Chinese military is, with satellite images showing China building exact replicas of US warships and fighter jets in the middle of the desert.

It is the clearest sign yet that Mr Xi is preparing for war with Taiwan. If that happened, without any established interoperability between the US and Taiwan, a lot would be at risk.

Mr Montgomery estimates that the number of casualties from a war with China could vary from 7,000 to 30,000, depending on the US’s integration with Taiwan, as well as its other allies in the Indo-Pacific region, such as Japan and South Korea.

Without interoperability, most experts agree that Taiwan and the US would split the battlefield into sections and each military would be tasked with defending their portion.

Chieh Chung, a leading Taiwan defence researcher and a fellow at the Institute for National Defense and Security Research, said that there were rough plans in place to delineate which force would be tasked with which area.

He said: “Taiwan’s forces are solely responsible for the Taiwan Strait, as well as specific air and maritime zones around the island. Outside of this area, assuming US intervention, the US military would take responsibility for any major Chinese naval or air targets.”

He added that US assistance would only “be effective” if Taiwan were able to “hold its designated defence areas”, which is why Washington had been pushing Taipei to develop its own domestic defence capabilities.

This split approach would not only reduce the efficacy of the defence forces, it would also allow China to focus on targeting Taiwan as the weaker partner.

Mr Newsham said: “If you’re fighting an enemy with two militaries and one of them wasn’t really all that good, you could concentrate on them.”

“You go after the weaknesses and the better military isn’t able to assist as effectively as they otherwise could because they don’t know how to work together,” he added.

No solution in sight

Experts have tried to come up with creative ways to increase the capacity for joint training without upsetting China, but there is no clear solution.

In 2023, the US passed the Taiwan Enhanced Resilience Act, which directed the Pentagon to “address specific interoperability shortfalls”.

However, Mr Montgomery said that because of “political sensitivity”, the law was not being implemented with the “speed and agility that the act demands”.

Another option could be using joint humanitarian missions around Guam or islands in the Pacific that recognise Taiwan to gain some operational experience, suggested Mr Newsham.

However, this approach would only scratch the surface.

Mr Kamphausen said that a humanitarian mission probably would not help with integrated command and control and risked serving as a political irritant.

China has proven to respond with force when there is any kind of high-level engagement between the US and Taiwan.

When Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the US House of Representatives at the time, visited Taiwan in 2022, China responded by launching 11 ballistic missiles into the waters around Taiwan’s north-eastern and south-western coasts.

Experts are worried that the US and Taiwan would trigger an even greater response with any kind of joint military activity – or worse. So, for now, the status quo reigns.

“The US and Taiwan do not have an integrated command and control facing a large military challenge precisely because to do so would precipitate the crisis that they’re both trying to avoid,” said Mr Kamphausen.

“It would be a fast track to an accelerated crisis.”

[Source: Daily Telegraph]