Is a future war over Taiwan winnable by either China or the US?
There are several thought-provoking books that imagine how a future war between the United States and China might go. Among the recent ones are The Kill Chain, a nonfiction book by Christian Brose, former staff director of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and 2034: A Novel of the Next World War, a fictional work co-authored by Elliot Ackerman and retired Adm. James Stavridis, former NATO supreme commander.
The latest contribution to the imagining-future-war-with-China oeuvre is White Sun War: The Campaign for Taiwan, the first work of fiction by the prolific military thinker Mick Ryan, a retired major general in the Australian Army.
BIDEN LOOKS TO STRENGTHEN MILITARY TIES WITH THE PHILIPPINES AS TENSION WITH CHINA INCREASES
The Washington Examiner spoke to Ryan via Zoom from his home in Brisbane. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Washington Examiner: Your previous book, War Transformed, published just last year, is nonfiction. So why fiction this time? What can you do in a novel that you can’t in fiction?
Ryan: I think as [Australian philosopher] Peter Singer describes, it’s like blending up vegetables in your kid’s milkshake. You can, in a novel, which is a more accessible form of writing than many nonfiction books, seed ideas and themes that, whilst you’re enjoying the book, you’re also learning. So for me, White Sun War was about how I apply the themes and the trends in future warfare that I discussed in detail in my previous book but do it in a way that’s more accessible and hopefully more enjoyable.
Washington Examiner: You’ve written that the structure of your book is inspired in part by the Civil War novel The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara about the 1863 Battle of Gettysburg, a book I believe is still required reading at the U.S. Army War College.
Ryan: It won the Pulitzer in 1974, a wonderful book, and I could only dream of writing as well as Michael Shaara did, but [like Killer Angels], White Sun War is designed as a future history looking back on a war and to say to people, “This shouldn’t have happened. How do we make sure it doesn’t occur in the future?” If you look at the introduction, you’ll see it’s written by future Mick Ryan in about 2038, looking back on the 10th anniversary of the war, very much as Michael Shaara did, looking back on the Battle of Gettysburg.
Washington Examiner: Hindsight is 20/20, but of course, in this case, you’re imagining the hindsight. Tell us a little bit about how the war you imagine plays out and how you use a character-driven narrative to illustrate the perils and pitfalls that war might present.
Ryan: I’ve chosen as the protagonists characters in organizations that are newer in the 21st century. So there’s a young cavalry troop leader who’s part of a human-machine team organization with lots of robotics systems. There’s a Space Force person; there’s the commander of a Marine littoral regiment. And those characters aren’t just about their own leadership demands and their own personal trials and tribulations. It’s also about exploring new kinds of ideas and organizations that are either developing, or need to be developed, by Western forces to appropriately use new technology and also counter some Chinese concepts of operations they’ve developed over the last couple of decades.
Washington Examiner: Your fictional conflict between the U.S. and China takes place in 2028, right about the time in real life Chinese President Xi Jinping has told his military to be ready to seize Taiwan by force. What advances in warfare and tactics do you envision being in place by then, just five years from now?
Ryan: I think we will see a greater penetration in military institutions of autonomous [i.e., robotic] systems. We’re really in the early days of that, with the vast majority of them in the aerial domain. I think we’re also going to see huge numbers of [robotic systems] in the ground and in the maritime domains. I think, too, that we will have a better understanding of the logistics and supply chains that influence war at the industrial scale that we’ve seen in the last year.
The book is kind of predicated on some of those advances, but also, the timing is no accident. 2028 is an election year in the United States and Taiwan. President Xi has told his military to be ready by 2027 for such a contingency. And I’ve just come back from a trip to Taiwan, and much of the discussion there is that Xi will want a fourth term. The next party Congress is in 2027, and he may well seek to do something to justify a fourth term. And something along these lines with Taiwan could be one of those things.
Washington Examiner: There’s been no shortage of war games and dire predictions about the ramifications of war with China over Taiwan. But wars usually unfold in ways that were not anticipated. I think some folks from the Bush administration would tell you in regard to the 2003 invasion of Iraq that they planned for everything — except what actually happened.
Ryan: That’s actually the story of all wars. And the greatest surprise of mine in the last year is the degree to which we’ve forgotten that. Every war takes on — I wouldn’t say a mind of its own — but the emotions of people, of soldiers, of politicians who get involved, and it escalates, it broadens in ways that we don’t anticipate. Hitler certainly didn’t anticipate the Second World War turning out like it did. The Koreans didn’t anticipate the Korean War turning out like it did when they invaded their southern neighbors in 1951.
A war in the western Pacific over Taiwan would be catastrophic. It would go longer and have far wider and deeper ramifications for the world than most people anticipate. War gaming is very useful for many things, but it has no use in predicting outcomes. Absolutely none. That is not the strength of war gaming. War gaming is about finding weaknesses in your capabilities, in your force structure, but as a predictor of outcomes, war games are entirely without value.
Washington Examiner: A theme of many books about the potential for war with China is the idea that we could “sleepwalk” into a conflict that no one really wants, or can win, by a series of missteps and miscalculations. How likely is that, do you think?
Ryan: I think that’s very likely. Miscalculation on either side is a significant risk. It’s not just in the West where we are capable of making strategic errors and bad political decisions. We’ve seen that from the Chinese for a long time. I mean, everything from the one-child policy forward, they’ve made some terrible strategic mistakes, up to and including some of their coercive behavior with their neighbors recently, which has turned the whole neighborhood against them and their “wolf warrior” diplomacy more broadly, including in Europe where it just hasn’t gone well for them.
So the Chinese are capable of terrible miscalculation just as we are in the West, and that’s why these current initiatives from the United States to set up clearer lines of communication between senior U.S. and Chinese military and political leaders in the event of crises are really important. The Chinese don’t appear to want to do that at the moment, but I think we’re going to have to keep working to ensure that they do that.
Washington Examiner: U.S. commanders keep saying that while war with China is neither imminent nor inevitable, we are in a period of increased risk and that preventing war will require a much stronger U.S. and allied military presence in the Pacific to convince Xi Jinping, in their words, “today is not the day.”
Ryan: Absolutely. I fully agree with the U.S. commanders who talk just like that. It’s not inevitable. Nothing in the future is inevitable, and it’s in our power to do things that deter the Chinese Communist Party and the [People’s Liberation Army] for doing something that will be catastrophic, not just in the region but globally. The Chinese have engaged in the greatest peacetime military buildup ever seen. I mean, there’s just no precedent for what they’ve done, and that’s not cheap. So they’ve done it for a reason, whether it’s to cower Taiwan into an accommodation or to actually use it. And the only way to deter the Chinese from doing it is to have those military, diplomatic, and economic measures in place that will convince them that, in fact, “today is not that day.”
Washington Examiner: You write on your Substack blog, “Both Ukraine and Taiwan are young democracies being preyed upon by large, technologically sophisticated authoritarian regimes who care little for human rights and freedoms.” What lessons from Ukraine apply to Taiwan, and which ones don’t?
Ryan: One of the really important ones is that allies help those who help themselves first. This is a really important lesson from Ukraine. The Ukrainians, not just their military but their people, stood up. They didn’t just ask to; they went out and helped the military. I think the Taiwanese have looked at that and gone, “Well, that’s one of the reasons why a lot of people were inspired to help Ukraine.”
The Taiwanese have looked at that, but then again, so have the Chinese, and the Chinese will want to ensure that an equivalent of President Volodymyr Zelensky does not stand up in Taiwan. So I think they’ll be doubling down to ensure that there’s some form of decapitation of Taiwanese leadership in the early hours of any scenario.
Washington Examiner: Another major difference, I would think, is that Taiwan is an island, while Ukraine is surrounded by friendly allies?
Ryan: It’s a pretty significant difference. Geography really matters, even in the 21st century. Its importance might have declined or changed, but it still matters. Now the Chinese have to cross [91 to 118 miles] of ocean, which sometimes is really, really rough. This is a very, very large-scale operation that would require thousands of ships, thousands of aircraft, and hundreds of thousands of troops. The Russians can just step across the border. So that’s a big difference.
But whilst Ukraine’s enemy is very close, so are its supporters. Poland is right there. Taiwan doesn’t have that. Its closest ally or partner is Japan, and its next one is the United States. It’s a long way away, and assistance will take a very long time to kick in.
But I think one of the most consequential differences is that, unlike Ukraine, Taiwan is denied access to many of the multilateral and global institutions to put its case forward about protecting its sovereignty and gaining support. Ukraine can speak at any of these forums. Taiwan doesn’t have that kind of diplomatic access.
Washington Examiner: What are the stakes of any future war for both the U.S. and China? Is such a war even winnable in the way we usually define victory?
Ryan: It is all in how you define victory. Every war is winnable except for maybe a nuclear one, which I think is not. The stakes are humanitarian first, and most importantly, probably hundreds of thousands of people would die in such a war — Chinese, Taiwanese, Americans, Japanese, and others. The stakes are also economic. Taiwan is a very sophisticated high-tech manufacturer, particularly of computer chips. No one in the world can produce the sophisticated microchips they do.
Finally, you’ve got the risk of escalation. You don’t know where these things might lead. We don’t know how disciplined the Chinese leadership is in the use of things like electromagnetic pulse weapons or tactical nuclear weapons if things don’t go well for them. So there’s a lot of risk. There’s a lot of downside risk in this kind of war and not a lot of upside.
Washington Examiner: How optimistic are you that war over Taiwan can be averted, considering China has made so-called reunification with the mainland, by force if necessary, one of its top priorities?
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Ryan: I’m kind of on the fence. The Taiwanese are very keen on maintaining the status quo. They’re walking a careful line, and we should support them in walking that careful line. They are not keen to go out and make some kind of arbitrary declaration about independence. I mean, in many respects, they don’t need to because they’re created a sovereign polity over the last few decades that is the envy of many in the western Pacific.
How optimistic am I about the chances of Taiwan and its allies beating off a Chinese assault? I’m pretty optimistic, but it really depends on what the Chinese do in the opening hours of a war. Depends on how vicious and brutal they are in attacking U.S., Japanese, and Australian bases throughout the region to slow down a response but also the degree to which the Taiwanese are able to stand up and help themselves while they’re waiting for others to come to their assistance.
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