China Will be Ready for Potential Taiwan Invasion by 2027, US Admiral Warns

Brad Dress wrote . . . . . . . . .

U.S. Adm. John Aquilino, head of Indo-Pacific Command, said “all indications” point to the Chinese military being ready for a potential invasion of Taiwan by 2027, the date China’s leader Xi Jinping has set for a possible military operation.

Aquilino testified in front of the Senate Armed Services Committee on Thursday that China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) continues an “aggressive military buildup” and modernization effort.

“All indications point to the PLA meeting President Xi Jinping’s directive to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027,” the admiral said in a statement released ahead of his testimony. “Furthermore, the PLA’s actions indicate their ability to meet Xi’s preferred timeline to unify Taiwan with mainland China by force if directed.”

China increased its defense budget by 7.2 percent this year, the third year in a row that Beijing has boosted the budget, Aquilino told lawmakers during the Senate hearing.

“My assessment is they are actually spending more on defense than they articulate,” he said, adding later that “we haven’t faced a threat like this since World War II.”

Aquilino said at the hearing that the “trend is going in the wrong direction” for the U.S. and pushed for more resources to counter the Chinese buildup.

While China is pursuing the 2027 objective to prepare for an invasion, a military invasion of the island is not assured.

Aquilino said China will seek to unify with Taiwan through other means by force, but he stressed Beijing has not ruled out military force if those efforts fail.

“Although the PRC claims it prefers to achieve unification through peaceful means, Xi will not renounce the use of force,” he said in the statement.

Still, China has grown increasingly aggressive against Taiwan in recent years, conducting frequent military drills and airspace violations around the island nation, which has self-ruled since 1949 after breaking off from communist rule on the mainland. China has also floated spy balloons around the island.

The democratic island nation has moved further from China and closer to the U.S., with January elections empowering another pro-Washington administration.

The U.S. has informal relations with Taiwan but commits to arming and supporting the country. American troops in the Indo-Pacific are also bolstering alliances with countries like the Philippines and Australia as the potential for a Chinese military invasion of Taiwan looms.

Aquilino said in the statement that the PLA is pursuing an “integrated, joint, high-tech, network-centric military force.”

“Modernization has remained aggressive,” he said, “and China remains committed to delivering the capabilities needed to achieve its objective by 2027.”

Source : Yahoo!

How the US Is Preparing for a Chinese Invasion of Taiwan

Phil Stewart and Idrees Ali wrote . . . . . . . . .

When U.S. and Australian troops practiced amphibious landings, ground combat and air operations last summer, they drew headlines about the allies deepening defense cooperation to counter China’s growing military ambitions.

But for U.S. war planners preparing for a potential conflict over Taiwan, the high-profile Talisman Sabre exercises had a far more discreet value: They helped create new stockpiles of military equipment that were left behind in Australia after the drills ended in August, U.S. officials told Reuters.

The United States and its allies are increasingly worried that in the coming years Chinese President Xi Jinping could order his military to seize Taiwan, the democratically governed island China considers its own territory. So, the U.S. military is taking a hard look at its own military readiness and trying to play catch-up in a critical area: its logistics network.

The equipment from Talisman Sabre included roughly 330 vehicles and trailers and 130 containers in warehouses in Bandiana, in southeastern Australia, the Army says.

The amount of equipment, which the United States military has not previously acknowledged, is enough to supply about three logistics companies, with as many as 500 or more soldiers, focused on ensuring supplies reach warfighters.
It’s the kind of materiel that’s needed for a future drill, a natural disaster, or in a war.

“We’re looking to do this more and more,” Army General Charles Flynn, the top Army commander in the Pacific, told Reuters in an interview.

“There’s a number of other countries in the region where we already have agreements to do that,” he added, without naming specific countries.

Reuters interviews with more than two dozen current and former U.S. officials found that American military logistics in the Pacific is one of the greatest U.S. vulnerabilities in any potential conflict over Taiwan.

U.S. war games have concluded that China would likely try to bomb jet fuel supplies or refueling ships, crippling U.S. air and sea power without having to battle heavily armed fighter jets or sink America’s fleet of surface warships, according to current and former officials and experts.

In response, the United States is trying to spread its military logistics hubs across the region – including warehouses in Australia, officials told Reuters.

Asked about Reuters’ conclusions, the Pentagon said that the Department of Defense is working with allies to make U.S. forces more mobile and distributed.

The Chinese embassy in Washington did not directly address the Reuters report, but a spokesperson said the United States should “stop enhancing military contact with the Taiwan region” and ”stop creating factors that could heighten tensions in the Taiwan Strait.”

The Australian embassy in Washington referred questions to the Ministry of Defense, which did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Critics say Washington’s network is still too concentrated and that the government hasn’t put enough money or urgency toward the effort.

“When you really dig down a couple of layers, the intel community is blinking red as far as for the next five years. And yet some of these timelines (to address the risks) are 10, 15, 20 years long,” said Congressman Mike Waltz, a Republican who leads the House subcommittee overseeing military logistics and readiness.

“There’s a mismatch there.”

RISKS FOR THE U.S.

The U.S. military’s logistics arm, U.S. Transportation Command (TransCom), has had a major success: funneling more than 660 million pounds of equipment and over 2 million rounds of artillery to the Ukrainian military in its war with Russia.

Supporting Taiwan, roughly 100 miles from the coast of China, would be orders of magnitude harder, U.S. officials and experts acknowledge.

The U.S. has not formally said it would intervene if China were to attack Taiwan but President Joe Biden has repeatedly suggested he would deploy U.S. troops to defend the island.

Xi has ordered his military to be ready to take Taiwan by 2027, U.S. officials say. But many analysts see that as an attempt to galvanize his military rather than a timeline for invasion.

A senior U.S. military official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said supplies of ammunition are at the top of the list of priorities in the Indo-Pacific, followed by fuel, food and spare parts for equipment. “If we run out of the things to shoot … that’s going to be an immediate problem,” the official said, adding planning for a Taiwan contingency was already well underway.

U.S. officials warn that in a major conflict Navy ships could quickly run out of missile defenses.

In a war game run for Congress in April, China prepared for an amphibious assault on Taiwan with massive air and missile strikes against U.S. bases in the region. That included the U.S. naval base on the Japanese island of Okinawa and the Yokota Air Base in western Tokyo.

The potential impact of attacks on U.S. logistics hubs, refueling ships and aerial refueling tankers, was a “wake up call” for many lawmakers, said Becca Wasser at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) think tank, which ran the war game.

“China is going to purposely go after some of the logistics nodes to make it difficult for the United States to sustain operations in the Indo-Pacific,” Wasser said.

To address such vulnerabilities, the U.S. military is looking to places like Australia as more secure locations to stockpile equipment, even as it expands cooperation with the Philippines, Japan and other partners in the Pacific.

The Biden administration announced in July the United States would also create an interim logistics center in Bandiana, Australia, with the aim of eventually creating an “enduring logistics support area” in Queensland.

According to an internal U.S. military document seen by Reuters, the facilities in Bandiana could hold more than 300 vehicles and had 800 pallet positions.

In July, the U.S. Air Force carried out Mobility Guardian 23, an exercise in the Indo-Pacific with Australia, Canada, France, Japan, New Zealand and the United Kingdom that included practicing air refueling and medical evacuations.

The military used the opportunity to leave behind equipment, including in Guam. That gear helped forces there deal with fallout from the recent Typhoon Mawar but would also be useful in any future conflict, said Air Force Major General Darren Cole, the director of operations at Air Mobility Command.

Cole noted his command was responsible not just for disaster relief but contingencies “all the way up to full combat operations, full scale major war.”

FROM ‘JUST IN TIME’ TO ‘JUST IN CASE’

There has been a shift in the United States military’s thinking. For decades, the United States has not had to worry about a foreign power targeting its logistics bases. That allowed planners to focus on efficiency, adopting the “just-in-time” logistics model common among private-sector manufacturers.

That approach led to the cost-saving decision to create mega-bases, like Ramstein Air Base in Germany. Ramstein was safe from Taliban and Islamic State attacks.

But a conflict with China could make mega bases, which include Camp Humphreys near Seoul, prime targets. This risk is prompting the switch to a more costly approach to logistics that includes dispersing U.S. stockpiles and pre-positioning supplies around the region.

“Instead of planning for efficiency, you probably (need) to plan for effectiveness, and move from ‘Just in time’ to ‘Just in case,'” said Rear Admiral Dion English, one of the Pentagon’s top logistics officers.

The U.S. did this in Europe after Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, pre-positioning stocks and investing in bases and airfields that deploying U.S. troops could use if needed. In the five years leading up to Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the Pentagon requested $11.65 billion in funding from Congress to preposition equipment in Europe.

By contrast, a Reuters analysis of the Pentagon’s budget request found that the military currently plans to only ask for $2.5 billion from fiscal year 2023 to 2027 to preposition equipment and fuel and improve logistics in Asia. The Pentagon has an annual budget of about $842 billion currently.

Another costly problem is the aging fleet of U.S. transport ships. The average age of the ships designed to carry heavy cargo, like tanks, into a conflict zone is 44 years with some older than 50 years.

One blistering analysis by CNAS concluded: “The Department of Defense has systematically underinvested in logistics in terms of money, mental energy, physical assets, and personnel.”

Senator Roger Wicker, the top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said the Pentagon and Congress needed far more focus on Pacific bases and logistics.

“Our ability to deter conflict in the Western Pacific over the next five years is not close to where it needs to be,” he told Reuters.

Source : Reuters

Taiwan’s Doubts About America Are Growing. That Could Be Dangerous.

Damien Cave and Amy Chang Chien wrote . . . . . . . . .

The collection of American memorabilia, vast and well-lit in a busy area of City Hall in the southern Taiwanese city of Tainan, reflected decades of eager courtship. Maps highlighted sister cities in Ohio and Arizona.

There was a celebration of baseball, an American flag laid out on a table. And in the middle of it all, a card sent to the United States that seemed to reveal the thinking of Tainan, a metropolis of 1.8 million, and nearly all of Taiwan.

“Together, stronger,” it said. “Solidarity conquers all.”

The message was aspirational — a graphic illustration of profound insecurity. Taiwan is a democratic not-quite nation of 23 million, threatened by a covetous China, with a future dependent on how the United States responds to the ultimate request: to fight the world’s other superpower if it attacks and endangers the island’s self-rule.

Now more than ever, the fraught psychology of that predicament is showing signs of wear. With China asserting its claim to the island with greater force, and the United States increasingly divided over how active it should be in global affairs, Taiwan is a bundle of contradictions and doubts, less about its own government’s plans or even Beijing’s than the intentions of Washington.

Vice President Lai Ching-te of the Democratic Progressive Party won Taiwan’s presidential election this month in part because he looked like the candidate most likely to keep America close.

Pre-election polling showed that most people in Taiwan want stronger relations despite the risk of provoking China. They support the recent rise in weapons sales from the United States. They believe President Biden is committed to defending the island — but they worry it is not enough.

As they watch Washington deadlock on military aid for Ukraine and Israel, and try to imagine what the United States would actually do for Taiwan in a crisis, faith in America is plummeting. The same Taiwanese poll showing support for the U.S. approach found that only 34 percent of respondents saw the United States as a trustworthy country, down from 45 percent in 2021.

Recent studies of online discussion show a similar trend: deepening concerns that the world’s oldest democracy will lack the strength or interest to really help. In interviews, voters described feeling like passengers. Many see the United States as an unpredictable driver that could get them to safety but could just as well abandon the wheel.

And on a small island about 100 miles from China that has a defense budget only a fraction of Beijing’s, those doubts about America can have their own dangerous impact.

Taiwanese and American analysts are unsure what a widespread lack of faith in the United States could inspire — for some, perhaps a commitment to do more with self-defense. But for others, it contributes to a lack of urgency. If survival depends on the Americans, and who knows if they will ever come, the argument goes, what is the point?

The risk for Taiwan — and those who see it as a first line of defense that, if lost to Beijing, would give China greater power to dominate Asia — is that distrust toward the United States could make it easier for the island to be swallowed up.

“It’s really important that they believe the United States is coming to intervene on their behalf because there are a lot of studies showing that can influence how well they hold out,” said Oriana Skylar Mastro, a fellow in international studies at Stanford University and the American Enterprise Institute. “And we’d need them to hold on long enough for us to get there.”

An Abandonment Complex

The origins of Taiwan’s distrust can be glimpsed in a row of mildewing houses in the mountains above the skyscrapers of Taipei, the island’s vibrant capital. Starting around 1950, American soldiers occupied these bungalows, with their speckled floors and large yards.

The troops’ presence seemed permanent. There were about 9,000 American soldiers in Taiwan in 1971 when a treaty ensured that the United States would defend Taiwan against any attacker. Then, rapidly, they were gone.

When the United States established diplomatic ties with the People’s Republic of China in 1979, after President Richard M. Nixon’s visit to Beijing in 1972, it sped the departure of American personnel. Neighbors recalled friends disappearing with toys, and kitchen utensils left behind to rust.

Eva Wang worked as a legal adviser for the American military in the 1960s. She said she cried the day in 1979 when U.S. officials lowered the American flag for the last time, learning a powerful lesson: “Our destiny was out of our control.”

Her husband, Wayne Chen, a retired prosecutor, concluded — as did many others — that the Americans could not be trusted.

“If a war really breaks out and the C.C.P. comes over,” he said, referring to the Chinese Communist Party, “then of course the U.S. military will not defend us.”

Researchers in Taiwan have found that 1979 continues to shape Taiwanese views. Even for those not alive at the time, the American reversal stings, like a parent’s adulterous affair, endlessly discussed.

“If you look at the skepticism generated from within Taiwan today, it’s mainly about the U.S. abandoning Taiwan,” said Jasmine Lee, the editor of US-Taiwan Watch, a think tank that recently contributed to a report on doubts about the United States. “It’s reasonable because we’ve been abandoned before.”

Nixonian history is still baked into relations. After 1979, the United States developed a policy of “strategic ambiguity,” declining to commit outright to defending Taiwan, which China sees as lost territory. That means everything the United States does is closely watched through a lens of past and potential betrayal.

The disastrous American withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021; Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Washington’s decision not to send troops; the 2022 visit to Taiwan by Nancy Pelosi, which led to a strong Chinese military response — news events have had a sharp effect on Taiwanese public opinion about the United States, according to polls and discussion in Chinese-language media outlets and online platforms.

Dr. Mastro, of Stanford, said that in some cases, “Taiwan’s views of trustworthiness make no sense.” While polls in Taiwan showed doubts rising because America did not do more to help Ukraine, she said, the reality was that the United States held back in part “so we could be prepared to defend Taiwan.”

But abandonment has not been the only worry. Data scientists with a Taiwanese think tank identified 84 separate narratives of skepticism toward the United States in online discourse from 2021 to 2023. Some people argued that the United States was too weak to defend distant Taiwan, or that it was a destructive force, a creator of chaos. Others declared America to be anti-democratic and a “fake friend.”

Chinese commenters often tried to amplify the criticisms, and the “fake friend” line came from the mainland, researchers said, but nearly everything else grew out of Taiwanese anxiety.

Hsin-Hsin Pan, an associate sociology professor at Soochow University in Taipei who studies Taiwanese public opinion, said insecurity and frustration with a lack of influence over its own fate had become an even bigger part of Taiwan’s identity.

Taiwan is at a lopsided crossroad of U.S.-China relations. It sits in the shadow of an increasingly authoritarian giant that sees Taiwan as a haughty, breakaway appendage that must be returned, by force if necessary. And it is thousands of miles from the United States, where polls since 2021 have shown that a plurality of Americans oppose committing troops to Taiwan’s defense. In one recent poll, 53 percent of Republicans said the United States should stay out of global affairs.

“There is no anti-Americanism here,” Dr. Pan said. “But there is substantial skepticism.”

Seeking Steadiness

Some of Taiwan’s most vocal U.S. skeptics have learned from not just history, but also personal experience. They were graduate students in New York during the Covid-19 pandemic, disillusioned by the chaotic response and anti-Asian prejudice. Others are engineers with Silicon Valley connections who worry that Taiwan’s microchip industry, which makes 90 percent of the world’s most advanced semiconductors, will be weakened by pressure to manufacture in the United States — stealing the jewel that makes the world want to keep the island out of Chinese hands.

They are also immigrants like Amy Chou, 67, a no-nonsense restaurant owner in San Francisco who returned to Taiwan this month to vote. Like many others, she said she thought the United States would help Taiwan in a war, but she was not sure and did not trust America to think about anything but its own economic interests.

“Americans just want us to buy more weapons,” she said at a political rally in Tainan. “They want our money, and want our chips.”

“If Trump wins,” she added, fearing the effect of another four years with an “America First” foreign policy, “it’ll be worse.”

Taiwanese politicians are hesitant to discuss such concerns — including Mr. Lai, a former mayor of Tainan, the city with the pro-America shrine. But in a sign of his priorities, he addressed the international media before thanking supporters after securing victory last Saturday night. For a leader reviled by Beijing for having once called himself a “pragmatic worker for Taiwanese independence,” that seemed to suggest he believed nothing mattered more for Taiwan than outside support.

Not that he or other officials are solely lobbying for help. Taiwan’s 2024 budget included a jump in military spending to 2.5 percent of gross domestic product, or $19 billion. But its leaders have been slow to shift toward the drones, missiles and other asymmetrical weapons that, according to analysts, would be needed to hold off a Chinese amphibious invasion.

There is even less urgency in Taiwanese society. Volunteer enlistments in the Taiwanese military have been declining since 2021. Deferments from compulsory service are common, and civil defense training at the community level, while improving, remains infrequent.

American officials and analysts often lament the inaction. They have shown less interest in doubts about the United States. Laura Rosenberger, chairwoman of the American Institute in Taiwan, the U.S. embassy in all but name, simply praised Taiwan’s “robust democracy” when asked at a news conference about the rising skepticism.

But instead of flattery, many on the island long for a candid reckoning about the past, America’s struggles in the present, and a shift from strategic ambiguity to strategic clarity. Put U.S. troops or equipment in Taiwan, some argue; swap intelligence, make and publicize shared plans — commit long-term to protect an island that may be both a pawn and where the U.S.-led global order wins or loses.

“There needs to be a commitment to elaborate on why Taiwan matters to America’s national interests,” Dr. Pan said.

She added, “We need to know there’s a steadiness to power.”

Source : The New York Times

Chart: Taiwan Investment in China Plummets As It Soars in Other Countries

Source : Bloomberg

Huawei Teardown Shows 5nm Laptop Chip Made in Taiwan, Not China

Vlad Savov and Debby Wu wrote . . . . . . . . .

Huawei Technologies Co.’s newest laptop runs on a chip made by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., a teardown of the device showed, quashing talk of another Chinese technological breakthrough.

The Qingyun L540 notebook contains a 5-nanometer chip made by the Taiwanese company in 2020, around the time US sanctions cut off Huawei’s access to the chipmaker, research firm TechInsights found after dismantling the device for Bloomberg News. That counters speculation that Huawei’s domestic chipmaking partner, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp., may have achieved a major leap in fabrication technique.

Huawei caused a stir in the US and China last August when it released a smartphone with a 7nm processor made by Shanghai-based SMIC. A teardown by the Canada-based research outfit for Bloomberg News showed the Mate 60 Pro’s chip was only a few years behind the cutting edge, a feat that US trade curbs were meant to prevent. That revelation spurred celebration across the Chinese tech scene, and a debate in the US about the effectiveness of sanctions.

In the latest teardown, TechInsights discovered a Kirin 9006C processor fabricated via TSMC’s 5nm method, which was assembled and packaged around the third quarter of 2020. Industry experts had previously speculated that SMIC achieved that milestone by developing workarounds to US sanctions, which would have marked a second technological triumph for the Chinese national champion in the span of months.

SMIC’s shares slid 2% in Hong Kong. Representatives for Huawei and TSMC did not provide comment when reached by Bloomberg News.

The advances encapsulated in the Mate 60 smartphone in 2023 cemented Huawei’s role as the standard-bearer for Chinese efforts to wean itself off Western technologies and create domestic alternatives. Chinese consumers snapped up the smartphone in the final quarter, helping the company regain the symbolically important $100 billion revenue threshold — eroding Apple Inc.’s iPhone dominance along the way.

A foray into 5nm territory would have represented a big leap for the Shenzhen conglomerate, bringing it closer to the most-advanced processes currently in use, mostly centered around 3nm nodes. Before TSMC cut off ties with Huawei, it was supplying chips as advanced as 5nm to the Chinese firm.

It’s unclear how Huawei managed to procure a three-year-old processor, though the Chinese company has been stockpiling vital semiconductors since the US began cutting off its access to components and gear globally. While Huawei has been on Washington’s Entity List since 2019, it was only in 2020 that TSMC stopped taking orders from Huawei in order to comply with elevated US trade restrictions.

Huawei has since sunk billions into chip research and stockpiling in past years, while also building a domestic network of suppliers and manufacturing partners, in some cases with government backing.

The L540 is the latest in a line of laptops that Huawei began selling around 2016, when the then-networking leader developed ambitions to get into mobile and computing devices and round out its offerings.

Its emergence coincides with a growing call from Beijing to replace foreign technology in sensitive environments, from mandates to stop using iPhones in the workplace to replacing Dell and HP computers.

Some online retailers touted that the new laptop was designed specifically to comply with recent, stringent requirements in China on data security across sensitive government organs. Huawei’s official site highlights the device’s security features, but didn’t go into that detail.

Source : BNN Blomberg

China’s Spies Offered $15 Million for Taiwan Army’s US Chinook Helicopter

Aadil Brar wrote . . . . . . . . .

Counterintelligence agents in Taiwan thwarted a high-profile defection from the island’s armed forces after Chinese spies enticed a Taiwanese army pilot to hand over a U.S.-made CH-47 Chinook helicopter in exchange for $15 million, a local magazine reported on Monday.

The lieutenant colonel surnamed Hsieh was offered money, and safe passage for him and his family in the event of a conflict with China, if he could land the helicopter on the deck of a Chinese navy aircraft carrier, which would be passing the island’s coastline, according to Chinese-language outlet CTWant.

Taiwan’s Defense Ministry declined to comment on the report’s details but in a statement later on Monday, said an investigation, following an “internal tip-off,” led to the officer’s arrest and prosecution in Kaohsiung, a southern port city, at an undisclosed date this year.

“Measures have been taken to minimize damage from the case,” the ministry said. “The Chinese Communist Party’s espionage is increasingly urgent and the means and methods of its infiltration more diverse.”

Hsieh was flown to Bangkok in June by an intermediary — a retired Taiwanese military officer — and met self-identified Chinese operatives working for the People’s Liberation Army, CTWang said.

The Taiwanese pilot was first offered a modest cash incentive and promised Thai visas for his entire family so they could avoid any future fighting across the Taiwan Strait. The conditions for Hsieh’s defection, the report said, would have required him to fly the army’s Chinook into the strait, near the center line, and land it on the PLA Navy carrier in international waters.

He initially declined but later changed his mind after the alleged Chinese spies offered to pay him half the cost of the helicopter — $15 million — and agreed to sail the warship closer to Taiwan’s coastline, within 24 nautical miles.

The U.S. Navy has landed a Chinook on an aircraft carrier in the past, but the same has not been recorded for the Chinese Navy using a similarly sized airframe. Defense analysts in Taipei this week challenged some of the report’s details, including the low probability that a Chinese carrier could sail so close to the island without interdiction.

“I feel pained, too, to have discovered a case like this, and those allegedly involved should be dealt with according to the law,” Chiu Kuo-cheng, Taiwan’s defense chief, told lawmakers in Taipei’s parliament on Monday.

Discussing a separate espionage case—also involving Beijing’s intelligence efforts targeting Taiwan — Chiu said those found guilty of treason “should be shot,” remarks that he later said reflected his serious view of the matter.

Taiwan’s legislators have called for the strongest possible punishment for Hsieh and others who helped broker the deal. In other espionage cases, prosecutors seeking harsher sentences for suspects have argued that only heavy penalties will deter future similar incidents.

A Taiwanese court in August said it was investigating a lieutenant colonel surnamed Hsieh, a member of a special army aviation unit, as well as a businessman, for allegedly leaking defense secrets to Chinese spies. It was unclear whether the two cases were linked.

Source : Newsweek

Chinese Blockade of Taiwan Would Likely Fail, Pentagon Official Says

A Chinese blockade of Taiwan would likely fail and a direct military invasion of the self-ruled island would be extremely difficult for Beijing to carry out successfully, senior Pentagon officials told Congress on Tuesday.

China’s military in recent years has stepped up activity around Taiwan, which Beijing claims as its territory. U.S. CIA Director William Burns has said Chinese President Xi Jinping has instructed his country’s armed forces to be ready to invade by 2027.

However, whether Xi would order taking Taiwan by force, either through military options like a blockade or an invasion is unclear.

Ely Ratner, U.S. assistant secretary of defense for Indo-Pacific security Affairs, said a blockade would give Taiwan’s allies time to mobilize resources for Taiwan. A blockade’s economic impact would be so devastating that it would harden international resolve against Beijing, he said.

“It would likely not succeed, and it would be a huge risk of escalation for the PRC, where it would likely have to consider whether or not it was willing to ultimately start attacking commercial maritime vessels,” Ratner told the House Armed Services Committee, using an acronym for the People’s Republic of China.

Army Major General Joseph McGee, vice director for strategy, plans and policy of the Pentagon’s Joint Staff, said a blockade was also not very likely given the challenges involved.

“I think it is an option but probably not a highly likely option, when you start looking at the military options – much easier to talk about a blockade than actually do a blockade,” McGee told lawmakers.

China staged war games around Taiwan in August of last year and again in April, and its forces operate around the island almost daily.

Taiwan’s defense ministry said last week in its biennial report that China was bolstering its air power along the coast facing Taiwan with a permanent deployment of new fighters and drones at expanded air bases.

Still, McGee also said China’s military, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), would be hard pressed to carry out frontal, amphibious invasion of the island. That is not something it could do in a surprise attack either, he said.

“They would have to mass tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of troops on the eastern coast and that would be a clear signal,” McGee said.

He added flatly: “There is absolutely nothing easy about a PLA invasion of Taiwan.”

“They would also encounter an island that has very few beaches, where you could land craft on mountainous terrain, and a population that we believe that would be willing to fight so there is absolutely nothing easy about a PLA invasion of Taiwan,” he said.

Source : Reuters

Haikun: Taiwan Unveils New Submarine to Fend Off China

Tessa Wong wrote . . . . . . . . .

Taiwan has unveiled its first domestically-made submarine as it bolsters its defences against a possible Chinese attack.

President Tsai Ing-wen presided over the launch ceremony in the port city of Kaohsiung on Thursday.

US officials have warned that China could be militarily capable of mounting an invasion within the next few years.

Taiwan is a self-governing island which China regards as a renegade province and has vowed to reclaim one day.

Most observers believe China will not attack the island imminently, and Beijing has said it seeks peaceful “reunification” with Taiwan.

But at the same time it has warned against Taiwan formally declaring independence and any foreign support. It has increasingly sought to put pressure on the island with its military drills in the Taiwan Strait, including several conducted this month.

“History will forever remember this day,” said Ms Tsai as she stood in front of the towering submarine draped in the emblem of Taiwan’s flag.

She added that the idea of a domestically-made submarine had previously been considered “an impossible task… but we did it”.

Building their own submarines has long been a key priority for Taiwan’s leaders, but the programme accelerated under Ms Tsai who has revved up military spending to nearly double its budget during her tenure.

The $1.54bn (£1.27bn) diesel-electric powered submarine will undergo several tests and will be delivered to the navy by the end of 2024, according to military officials.

It has been named the Haikun after a mythical massive fish that can also fly, which appears in classic Chinese literature.

Another one is currently in production. Taiwan aims to eventually operate a fleet of 10 submarines – including two older Dutch-made boats – and equip them with missiles.

The head of the domestic submarine programme Admiral Huang Shu-kuang told reporters last week that the goal was to fend off any attempt from China to encircle Taiwan for an invasion or impose a naval blockade.

It would also buy time until US and Japan forces arrive to aid Taiwan’s defence, he added.

When asked by reporters about the submarine on Thursday, a Chinese defence ministry spokesperson said it was “idiotic nonsense” to try to stop their military’s actions in the Pacific.

“No amount of weapons [Taiwan’s ruling] Democratic Progressive Party buys or makes can stop reunification with the motherland,” he added.

In a piece published earlier this week, state media outlet Global Times said Taiwan was “daydreaming” and the plan was “just an illusion”.

It also claimed China’s military “has already constructed a multidimensional anti-submarine network all around the island”.

Observers agree that the new submarines could help boost Taiwan’s defence.

Taiwan’s 10-submarine fleet would pale in comparison to China’s, said to currently comprise more than 60 boats including nuclear-powered attack submarines, with more on the way.

But the island has long pursued an asymmetric warfare strategy where it aims to build a more agile defence force to face down a larger and well-resourced enemy.

The submarines could “aid Taiwan’s relatively small navy in taking initiative against China’s mighty navy” by conducting “guerrilla style warfare with their stealth, lethality and surprise capabilities”, noted William Chung, a military researcher with the Institute for National Defense and Security Research in Taiwan.

In particular, he said, they could help guard the various straits and channels that link the so-called “first island chain”, a network of islands including Taiwan, Philippines and Japan seen as a possible battlefront for any conflict with China.

Anti-submarine warfare remains the Chinese navy’s “weakest part, and this is the chance for Taiwan to exploit it”, he added.

But the “centre of gravity” for any China-Taiwan naval conflict would not likely be in the deep waters off the island’s east coast, where submarines would be most effective in, pointed out Drew Thompson, a visiting senior research fellow at the National University of Singapore and former US Department of Defense official.

Instead, the main theatre of war would be in the shallower waters of the west coast facing mainland China.

“The submarine is not optimised for a counter invasion role… having this increased capability to complicate China’s military operations would have an effect, but it’s not a decisive one,” he said.

Their effectiveness would largely depend on how Taiwan chooses to deploy them.

Beyond playing a deterrent role they could also be used to ambush Chinese ships; carry out mine-laying operations in Chinese ports; disrupt maritime oil supplies; and destroy key facilities on the Chinese coastline, according to Chieh Chung, a defence researcher with Taiwanese think tank National Policy Foundation.

What is more significant, however, is that Taiwan managed to design and build its own submarine in the first place.

The Haikun uses a combat system by US defence company Lockheed Martin and will carry US-made torpedoes. While this may be no surprise given that the US is Taiwan’s chief ally, at least six other countries including the UK came to Taiwan’s aid in supplying components, technology and talent, according to a Reuters report.

Adm Huang told Nikkei Asia he had personally approached military contacts in the US, Japan, South Korea and India for help but did not specify which country eventually agreed.

The fact that several countries and companies were “not afraid to supply parts to a marquee defence programme in Taiwan… indicates a significant geopolitical shift”, noted Mr Thompson.

It is an indicator of the “doubt and dissatisfaction” with Beijing felt by some members of the international community, and “should cause China to feel disquiet”, added Mr Chieh.

The launch comes a day after Beijing confirmed it had been conducting military drills this month to “resolutely combat the arrogance of Taiwan independence separatist forces”.

In recent weeks it had once again ramped up its warship presence in the Taiwan Strait and military jet incursions into airspace around the island.

US military and intelligence officials have given varying timelines for a possible Chinese invasion.

One date put forth recently is 2027 – Chinese President Xi Jinping is believed to have told his military to be operationally capable of mounting an invasion by that year.

But CIA director William Burns also said it did not necessarily mean Mr Xi would decide to invade then as he is thought to have doubts over whether China would succeed.

Source : BBC

Smaller, Faster, Stronger 1 nm Chips by TSMC

Mitchell Lim wrote . . . . . . . . .

Microchip researchers have once again pushed the limits of Moore’s Law: an observation made by inventor Gordon Moore, that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit (IC) doubles about every two years.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), the world’s largest chip foundry, and its research partners from the National University of Taiwan (NTU) and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) jointly made a technological breakthrough in the development of 1-nanometer (nm) chips.

Innovating semiconductor materials

The core of this innovation revolves around using the semi-metal bismuth (Bi), in place of silicon, as the basis for new transistors to resolve one of the biggest problems in miniaturising semiconductor devices.

According to their research published in the journal, Nature, the discovery was first made by the MIT team, with TSMC optimising the deposition process and improved by NTU’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Optometrics.

With bismuth as the transistor’s contact electrode, the contact resistance between the metal electrode and the monolayer semiconductor material can be reduced substantially. An ‘easy deposition process’ was achieved using a helium ion beam (HIB) lithography system.

The flow of electrical current is also increased, allowing the technology to achieve energy efficiency close to the existing physical limits of semiconductor chips.

Pushing the boundaries in semiconductor technology

Just a few weeks ago, IBM announced the first 2-nm chip that boasts a 45% increase in performance or a 75% slash in power consumption, though commercial production will likely be 2-3 years away.

Present-day technology already has the capability to produce chips down to the 3-nm scale, with production by TSMC slated to start in the second half of 2022.

This 1-nm node breakthrough could potentially break the limits of Moore’s Law. This engineering “rule of thumb” predicts the number of transistors that can be packed onto a microchip will double every couple of years – which roughly equates to a doubling of compute capacity.

When 1-nm nodes become a reality, perhaps it’s time to express photolithographic chips in angstroms (Å), and retire the current unit of length, nanometers (1 Å = 0.1 nm) – though that will only be sufficient for a decade at the current pace of advancement.

Still in its technological infancy

While this is absolutely great news, TSMC has also clarified that their newly developed process may not be used in high volume manufacturing in the foreseeable future.

Their 1-nm node is currently in its path-finding and exploratory R&D stage, and they are experimenting with various other options. Even the usage of their new material bismuth is not guaranteed.

But above all, one thing is for sure – this is a stellar demonstration of human innovation and bodes well for the computing industry’s desire for more compute with less energy consumption.

As evidenced by TSMC’s progress, microchip scientists are already breaking new grounds in developing nodes close to the physical limits.

Expect your electronic devices to be packed with chips beyond the 1-nm node in the not-too-distant future.

Source : DUG

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Read also at EDN

TSMC approaching 1 nm with 2D materials breakthrough . . . . .

Inspired by Ukraine War, Taiwan Launches Drone Blitz to Counter China

Yimou Lee, James Pomfret and David Lague wrote . . . . . . . . .

In the summer of 2022, just months after Russia invaded Ukraine, Taiwan’s president gathered senior officials from her ruling party in downtown Taipei. On the agenda: How was Ukraine, in its war with Russia, successfully offsetting the advantages of a much more powerful foe?

President Tsai Ing-wen was given an internal 77-page briefing report via PowerPoint. It had a clear answer: drones.

“Since the war began, Ukraine, which was previously considered as lacking air supremacy, cleverly used drones to create its own partial air supremacy,” the presentation stated.

For Taiwan, though, the report painted a darker picture: The island lagged dangerously behind its far more powerful rival, China, in arming itself with aerial drones – and needed a crash program to close the gap.

“We are far outnumbered,” said the report, a copy of which was reviewed by Reuters.

The drone gap is stark. Taiwan currently has four drone types at its disposal and a fleet size of just “hundreds,” according to two people with direct knowledge of the matter and a separate internal security report.

Across the narrow Taiwan Strait, China’s military, the People’s Liberation Army, has an arsenal of more than 50 different drone types that is estimated to run into the tens of thousands, according to defense analysts and a Reuters examination of Chinese military manufacturers and reports in Chinese state media. These drones range from jet-powered, long range surveillance aircraft to small quadcopters deployed by ground troops.

Clearly outmatched, Tsai “pressed the button” on the creation of a strategic plan to close the gap, said a person who attended a series of meetings in which the drone strategy was forged. Under the “Drone National Team” program, Taiwan is recruiting the island’s commercial drone makers and aviation and aerospace firms in a joint effort with the military to fast-track the building of a self-sufficient drone supply chain.

“We need to quickly catch up, with thousands of drones,” aerospace entrepreneur Max Lo, the coordinator of the drone effort, told Reuters in an interview. “We are trying our best to develop drones with commercial specifications for military use. We hope to quickly build up our capacity based on our existing technology so that we can be like Ukraine.”

The aim, according to a government planning document reviewed by Reuters, is to build more than 3,200 military drones by mid-2024. These will include mini-drones that weigh less than two kilograms as well as larger surveillance craft with a range of 150 kilometers.

To accelerate production, the government is for the first time enlisting private companies in the research and development phase of a weapons program. At least nine private firms have joined the effort.

Thunder Tiger Group, best known for making radio-controlled model aircraft for leisure and commercial use, is typical of the type of companies recruited by the government. Participants have expertise ranging from aviation to telecommunications to the production of electronic components for applications like GPS positioning. Hawk Yang, the head of Thunder Tiger’s R&D department, told Reuters his firm is now developing drones for Taiwan’s military, including pilotless ship- or land-based surveillance helicopters with four-meter-long rotors that have a range of 400 kilometers and can stay airborne for up to six hours.

His company, Yang said, was recruited by defense ministry officials last year to turn commercial drones into craft that also have a military use.

“One small drone could blow up a tank that is worth tens of millions,” he said, underscoring how rapidly modern warfare is changing with the rise of asymmetrical weapons – cheap, small arms that can offset big, expensive systems.

The Russia-Ukraine war has given Taiwan “great inspiration,” Tsai’s office said in response to questions from Reuters. “In Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the entire world saw the importance of drones.”

“For future generations, drones will play a very important role in both civilian and military applications,” the president’s office said. “For a country with advanced industries, Taiwan cannot be absent.”

Taiwan’s bid to mass produce drones is part of an intensifying military rivalry that is dividing Asia, setting off a sprint to harness emerging technologies with the potential to deliver a decisive boost in firepower. On one side are the United States and its allies, including Taiwan, Australia, Japan and South Korea, who want to preserve American dominance in the region. On the other is an increasingly assertive China, determined to gain control over the democratically governed island and displace America as the leading regional power.

In this high-tech arms race, military and civilian researchers from both sides are scrambling to seize the lead across a swathe of fields, including artificial intelligence, autonomous weapons, advanced semiconductors, hypersonic flight, quantum computing and cyber warfare.

China’s ruling Communist Party says Taiwan is an inalienable part of China and refuses to rule out force to bring the island under its control. Tsai says Taiwan is already an independent country, formally called the Republic of China, and has vowed to defend its freedom and democracy. The United States, bound by U.S. law to provide Taiwan with the means to defend itself, has long followed a policy of “strategic ambiguity” on whether it would intervene militarily in the event of a Chinese attack. U.S. President Joe Biden, however, has said that U.S. forces would defend Taiwan in the event of an invasion.

In response to questions for this report, China’s foreign ministry said the “Taiwan authorities’ attempts to ‘reject reunification with force’ and ‘seek independence with foreigners’ is certain to fail.” China’s defense ministry and Taiwan Affairs Office did not respond to questions.

The U.S. Department of Defense and White House did not respond to questions for this report.

As China presses its claim to Taiwan, it has increasingly deployed drones as part of a campaign of gray-zone warfare – an almost daily series of intimidating air and surface operations that it has been waging around the island in an effort to test and wear down Taiwan’s defenses. In late April, the defense ministry in Taipei tracked a Chinese combat drone, the TB-001 Twin-Tailed Scorpion, as the craft completed the first known “encirclement” by a drone of Taiwan.

“China is intimidating Taiwan verbally and militarily,” Tsai’s office said in its statement. “‘The more provocative the enemy, the more calm we need to be.’ We won’t give the other side any inappropriate excuse to trigger a conflict.” Taiwan, it added, would “take necessary and forceful action” to defend its airspace.

Taiwan’s inability to counter China’s drone arsenal was on dramatic display in August last year, when the outlying island of Kinmen, controlled by Taiwan and located less than two kilometers from the Chinese coastline at its closest point, was buzzed by Chinese civilian drones. A video clip first circulated on Chinese social media and later picked up by Taiwanese media showed two soldiers throwing stones at a drone that flew near their guard post.

Social media posts in Taiwan calling the incident a “national humiliation” got wide pickup in local press reports. Taiwan’s defense ministry said in response to Reuters’ questions that anti-drone jamming technology had since been deployed on its offshore islands.

‘Porcupine’ strategy

As part of the plan to close the drone gap, Tsai last year ordered an assessment of Taiwan’s drone industry, according to the two people with direct knowledge of the matter. The study included the sourcing of industrial materials and identifying the types of drones that would suit Taiwan’s geography and military objectives. Tsai wanted to know what Taiwan needed to do to develop what military planners call a “kill chain” for drones, in which targets are identified, tracked and then destroyed, said one of the people, a senior official familiar with Taiwan’s security planning.

Lo, the coordinator of the drone project, said he delivered the PowerPoint presentation to Tsai in June last year.

The presentation noted Ukraine had used drones to conduct “asymmetrical warfare” and surprise attacks. It advised that Taiwan aim to become a major exporter of drone components and an R&D center for this technology in Asia, with the government coordinating efforts. Taiwan should accelerate mass production of a range of military drones to boost self-reliance in the struggle with Beijing, it concluded.

Lo told Reuters the island must build up a production line so it won’t have to “cry piteously for help from others” if it comes under attack. And it must avoid relying on the so-called “red supply chain” – components sourced from China.

Tsai has thrown her weight behind a drone plan that appears to conform with advice from Washington and senior Taiwanese military thinkers who propose an asymmetrical strategy. According to this thinking, Taiwan should bristle with big numbers of smaller but mobile and lethal weapons systems to deter China rather than acquire a small number of big-ticket weapons that would be vulnerable to attack, turning the island into what strategists call a “porcupine.”

The United States, Taiwan’s main ally, has the world’s most advanced military drones, say defense analysts. This includes an arsenal of more than 11,000 of these aircraft in service with the army, air force, navy and marines, according to the Pentagon. U.S. drones range in size from two-kilogram, hand-launched drones to 14,500-kilogram long range surveillance drones. U.S. allies Japan, Australia and South Korea also field aerial drones in their forces.

“The U.S. military currently has the world’s largest and most sophisticated drone fleet, with the rest of the world only beginning to catch up,” the Teal Group, a defense and aerospace research firm, wrote in a 2022/23 report.

In the event of a war over Taiwan, however, U.S. drones would need to be dispatched from outside the conflict zone were the Americans to step in. There are no U.S. or allied combat forces stationed on the island, so Taiwan would have to rely on its domestic fleet, at least in the early stages of an attack or invasion, according to military analysts interviewed by Reuters. Longer-range U.S. and allied strike and surveillance drones could be deployed from bases in Japan and the Pacific if Washington and its allies decided to intervene in a conflict, they said.

And China is catching up.

Tai Ming Cheung, an expert on the Chinese military at the University of California San Diego, said that while the U.S. maintains an advantage in drone capability, China has become more competitive because of the country’s high degree of commercial-military fusion.

“The drone ecosystem in China involves a lot of companies in that space,” Cheung said. “So it’s competitive, and drones are one of the areas where they’ve been very strong in exports.”

A milestone moment came last August, with tensions running high as PLA warships and aircraft threatened the island just after a visit to Taiwan by former U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi. That month, the Taiwanese leader opened a new drone R&D center in the southern city of Chiayi. “Facing the ever-changing geopolitical scene, Taiwan is also working hard to boost defense self-sufficiency,” Tsai said at the opening ceremony. “Under the goal of building our own military planes and submarines, the drone industry will be our focus.”

In Ukraine, both sides have relied heavily on a broad range of drones for reconnaissance, surveillance and striking targets. Even rudimentary adaptations allowing mass-market consumer drones to drop grenades and mortar rounds have become deadly threats to tanks, artillery, troops and supply dumps, according to military experts and footage of these strikes widely circulated on social media.

Airborne munitions have prowled deep into both sides’ rear areas, searching for targets as they loiter before launching deadly attacks. The frontlines have become “saturated” with drones, which have been used to improve battlefield awareness without risking loss of life for the operators, according to a November report from the Washington-based Center for Strategic & International Studies. Ukraine and Russia have also deployed counter-drone technology, primarily electronic jamming and radar-controlled anti-drone guns and missiles, according to the report.

Source : Reuters