"Second, China has ~2000 SSMs in various regts. At best, the PLAAF has managed a 40 plane sortie duirng their exercises. That's a Tuesday for the US. The US flew 2000 sorties per day for 30 days during the Kuwait War. That's 60,000 air strike missions. And first day of the Iraq War, Baghdad got hit with 700+ cruise missiles, that's ~half the current Chinese SSM inventory and we're talking a Taiwan with a target desnity 120 times that of Iraq."No, China has ~2,000 BALLISTIC missiles. Nobody knows how many cruise missiles (ASCMs + LACMs) are in China's inventories; I would assume a far larger number than that given ballistic missiles are much larger and more expensive than standard ASCMs. And we're not even talking dumb bombs, LGBs, JDAMs, helo-fired ATGMs, suicide drones, and ARMs yet. Oh and let's not forget about the massive waves of rocket artillery that easily have the range to reach Taiwan's west coast and even some interior cities. What the US unleashed on Iraq in 1990 isn't even vaguely similar to the varied types of destruction the PLA could and would unleash on the shores, cities, C&C, communications, transportation arteries, and infrastructure of Taiwan in the event of an all-in invastion.
"Even with the tonnage the US dropped on Kuwait and Iraq, the US still had to fight Medina and 73 Eastings and that's with numeric parity on the ground. And we're not even started talking ground combat in Taiwan with at best a corps size invasion force (30K men max travelling in 3 waves). Taiwan can mass 120K REGFORCE and another 180K RES."
The Chinese military has use of the country's entire commercial shipping fleet in the event of war, and has been training on commercial ships for many years at this point. Just a single commercial ro-ro could haul hundreds of vehicles to Taiwan.
In addition, while Taiwan has a few hundred thousand men in total, they are and have to remain somewhat dispersed along the coastline of Taiwan given China has never announced which beaches and cities it plans to attack. Which means those thousands of ballistic and cruise missiles will come in handedly when both the north-south and east-west highways in Taiwan get severed in multiple places to make sure Taiwan takes a LONG time to mass anywhere along the coast if it even can to begin with. And China having air and drone superiority over the island and the strait will mean it will be able to interdict reinforcements at will before they arrive at any beach landing sites. With the space over Taiwan filled with recon sats of every type and the skies over Taiwan swarming with recon UAVs, UCAVs, suicide drones, attack helos, fighters, and bombers, there is little chance any Taiwanese force will be able to gather en masse before being detected and attacked. It won't be a cakewalk for China, but without US support, Taiwan is gone. I would further venture that 5-10 years from now, even with US support, Taiwan as a de facto independent country will become an artifact of Chinese history.
