Don’t Expect A Lot Of Aerial Dogfights If And When China Attacks Taiwan

A Chinese invasion of Taiwan would be the “ultra-mega” war, to borrow a phrase from Ian Easton, an analyst with the Virginia-based Project 2049 Institute.

It would begin and probably end at sea, first with a massive Chinese invasion fleet and later with a possible U.S.-Japanese naval counterattack aimed at severing the supply lines of the Chinese troops on Taiwan.

In between, there could be deadly Chinese missile barrages, brutal close fighting on Taiwan’s beachheads and unfathomably destructive counter-shipping campaigns by American submarines and bombers.

But if a series of war games organized by the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C., is any indication, there won’t be much aerial dogfighting. While many hundreds of fighter jets would participate in the war, very few of them would shoot at each other. Or even get off the ground, for that matter.

Chinese missile barrages in the first hours of the war would “cripple” Taiwan’s air force—destroying runways and hangars and burying the entrances to the tunnels where the Taiwanese hide many of their best jets. The same missiles were the reason “90% of U.S. and Japanese aircraft losses occurred on the ground” in CSIS’s war games, according to CSIS analysts Mark Cancian, Matthew Cancian and Eric Heginbotham.

Some observers have argued that American warplane designs—the Lockheed Martin F-22, Lockheed Martin F-35 and the secretive “sixth-generation” Next-Generation Air-Dominance fighter—are superior to Chinese designs such as the Chengdu J-20.

But “the relative strength of U.S. and Chinese air-to-air capability was unimportant,” the Cancians and Heginbotham explained in their summary of the war games. An F-35’s sophistication is irrelevant when it’s a flaming pile of wreckage on the tarmac at Kadena Air Force Base in Okinawa.

Geography explains the extreme vulnerability of Taiwanese, U.S. and Japanese fighters in a war with China. Taiwan lies just 100 miles from mainland China across the narrow Taiwan Strait. Every Taiwanese air base is within easy reach of the People’s Liberation Army Rocket Force’s thousands of ballistic missiles. Some bases even are vulnerable to PLA rocket-artillery.

Every simulation CSIS ran, even the ones that ended with a Taiwanese victory, began with powerful rocket attacks on Taiwan’s air bases. In even the most optimistic scenario for Taipei, “Taiwan’s air losses included roughly half of its operational air force, the majority lost on the ground to missile strikes,” the Cancians and Heginbotham wrote.

Simultaneous strikes on Kadena and other airfields in Japan—the only bases that are close enough to project USAF fighters into an aerial battle over Taiwan—likewise resulted in heavy losses for American and Japanese squadrons. “In all base-scenario iterations, the [U.S.] Air Force suffered losses between 70 and 274 aircraft, mostly on the ground,” the analysts explained. “Japanese air losses were also high in two out of three iterations, averaging 122 aircraft, and were also largely incurred on the ground.”

The U.S. Navy was unable to take up the air-power slack resulting from the suppression of USAF squadrons in the CSIS simulations. Chinese missiles sank between two and four USN aircraft carriers in each of the think-tank’s 24 simulations.

After a few days of relentless bombardment in the war games, the PLARF began to run out of missiles. By then, the PLA Air Force and PLA Navy “enjoyed substantial air-superiority over Taiwan and were able to employ ground-attack aircraft and bombers to obstruct the movement of Taiwanese reinforcements to the battle area.”

The U.S. Air Force at the same time was enjoying its own form of air superiority, but not directly over Taiwan. Rather, the USAF’s heavy bombers, flying from American bases well beyond the range of Chinese forces, were beginning “conveyor-style” raids, one bomber squadron launching 200 stealthy cruise missiles at Chinese ships and air bases from 700 miles away while another squadron was en route to add its own missiles to the ceaseless barrage.

So on and so forth until U.S. forces had expended all of the roughly 4,000 cruise missiles in their inventory. The bomber campaign, working in concert with equally relentless attacks by USN submarines, ultimately turned the tide of the war in most of CSIS’s simulations.

American missile strikes by then had done to Chinese fighter squadrons what Chinese missile strikes had done to Taiwanese, American and Japanese fighter squadrons. And the PLAN’s transport fleet was scattered along the bottom of the Taiwan Strait, depriving Chinese troops on Taiwan of reliable resupply.

Starving and running out of ammunition after two or three weeks, the Chinese invasion force increasingly was defenseless against Taiwanese army counterattacks.

Taiwan and its allies can win a war with China, if CSIS’s simulations are predictive at all. But all those thousands of high-tech fighter jets that Taipei, Washington, Tokyo and Beijing have acquired over the decades, at a cost of many hundreds of billions of dollars, might have very little to do with the war’s outcome.

Aerial dogfights might have even less to do with it. Jets can’t shoot at each other if they can’t take off.