The Chicom threat against Taiwan

 Ward Clark:

The defense issues website 1945.com, on Friday, presented some troublesome predictions about China, namely that China is preparing to invade Taiwan and will do so in the next few months. That's a debatable premise, but indications over the last few months are, admittedly, making it look more likely.

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 Chuck DeVore, a retired US Army LTC, presented three likely scenarios for how this could be done. Let's take a quick look at each.

As DeVore projects, the first option would be a full-on blockade of the ROC. China’s navy (PLAN) would ring the island “like a steel noose, turning the Taiwan Strait into a kill zone. Of course, 90 percent of Taiwan’s food and all its natural gas come by ship. Snip that lifeline and the island will starve for months. No invasion, no blood-soaked beaches, just a slow strangulation.”

This seems the most likely option, on the surface. It would achieve the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) goals with the least risk to China itself. But it's probably not the best option for China, as it also is the option that would necessarily drag on for months, giving Taiwan's allies the chance to gear up and figure out how to break the CCP's blockade. Blockades are notoriously hard things to maintain, and Taiwan is important enough to the West that there would be enormous military and economic pressure put on China from the moment the blockade went up.

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Taiwan is a rather large island, making it difficult for a navy to completely blockade it.  It is also well defended, and China's navy would be hard pressed to pull off an amphibious operation against it.  Only the US has demonstrated that capability in the last hundred years.