PrairiePundit

 Headline USA: Hegseth Says US Ready to ‘Fight and Win’ a War With China Over Taiwan China slammed Hegseth for having a 'Cold War mentality' and 'playing with fire' on the Taiwan issue... A majority of the Chinese nationals who are in Taiwan are there becasue they did not want to be ruled by the communists who now control the mainland.   The Chinese who are in Taiwan are supporters of the US.  I suspect that what has held back the Chicoms is their lack of experience with the kind of amphibious operation it would take for them to conquer Taiwan. That task would be even greater if the US helped to defend Taiwan.

 The Federalist Wire: ... America’s resolve to protect freedom and stability in the Indo-Pacific is being tested as China escalates its military maneuvers around Taiwan. On Thursday, Adm. Samuel Paparo, commander of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, delivered a sobering warning to the Senate Armed Services Committee, describing Beijing’s actions as more than mere drills—they’re “rehearsals” for potential conflict. His words underscore the United States’ unwavering commitment to countering threats that could destabilize a region vital to global prosperity. “China’s unprecedented aggression and military modernization poses a serious threat to the homeland, our allies and our partners,” Paparo declared, pointing to a 300% surge in China’s military pressure on Taiwan. For America, this isn’t just about geopolitics—it’s about defending the principles of sovereignty and self-determination that Taiwan embodies against Beijing’s push for forced “reunification,” a move the U.S. and its allies ...

 The Federalist Wire: ... America’s resolve to protect freedom and stability in the Indo-Pacific is being tested as China escalates its military maneuvers around Taiwan. On Thursday, Adm. Samuel Paparo, commander of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, delivered a sobering warning to the Senate Armed Services Committee, describing Beijing’s actions as more than mere drills—they’re “rehearsals” for potential conflict. His words underscore the United States’ unwavering commitment to countering threats that could destabilize a region vital to global prosperity. “China’s unprecedented aggression and military modernization poses a serious threat to the homeland, our allies and our partners,” Paparo declared, pointing to a 300% surge in China’s military pressure on Taiwan. For America, this isn’t just about geopolitics—it’s about defending the principles of sovereignty and self-determination that Taiwan embodies against Beijing’s push for forced “reunification,” a move the U.S. and its allies ...

  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 . ...  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 Chi...

 Wall Street Journal: Taiwan Detains Ship and Chinese Crew After Undersea Cable Severed Coast guard declares incident national-security matter and possible case of Chinese sabotage Taiwan detained a cargo ship and its eight Chinese crew members after an undersea fiber-optic cable was severed, in a stepped-up effort to police such incidents, which are often seen as part of China’s pressure campaign targeting the self-ruled island. ... Taiwan should be able to interrogate the crew.  Cutting an undersea cable does look like a deliberate act of sabotage. 

... China has voiced strong opposition to the Trump administration after the US State Department removed a key line from its website stating that US policy does “not support Taiwan independence.” Beijing, which considers Taiwan a part of its territory despite the island’s self-governing status, reacted with sharp criticism, accusing Washington of a “serious regression” and demanding an immediate reversal. “This move severely violates the one-China principle and three China-US joint communiqués, goes against international law and basic norms of international relations, and sends a seriously wrong signal to the separatist forces,” Chinese Foreign Ministry representative Guo Jiakun stated to reporters. “This is another example of the US clinging to its wrong policy of ‘using Taiwan to contain China.’” The divide between China and Taiwan dates back to 1949, when the Chinese Civil War ended with nationalist forces retreating to the island while the communists assumed control of the mainlan...

 CNN: China has launched its first next-generation amphibious assault ship, adding a powerful cutting-edge warship to the country’s fast-expanding navy as it races to rival the military power of the United States. The Type 076 amphibious assault ship entered the water on Friday at a launch ceremony at a shipyard in Shanghai, the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) said in a statement. Named Sichuan after a southwestern Chinese province, the independently developed ship is hailed as a “key asset” for advancing the Navy’s transformation and enhancing its long-range operational capabilities, according to the statement. China, which already boasts the largest naval force in the world, is building carriers and large warships at a staggering pace as it seeks to project power far beyond its shores and catch up to the military supremacy of the US. With a full-load displacement of over 40,000 tons, the Type 076 ranks among the world’s largest amphibious assault ships, featuring a twin-isla...

 Futurism: A 730-ton steel ball suspended inside Taiwan's iconic Taipei 101 skyscraper protected the structure during the region's 7.4-magnitude earthquake this week. The ball is visible to the public on the skyscraper's 89th-floor observatory and has become a popular tourist attraction. While it's also a beautiful object in and of itself, it serves an important role as a "tuned mass damper," which is a pendulum that reduces " violent swinging " and "vigorous shaking" of the building in strong winds — and during earthquakes. And as CCTV footage of the city's skyline shows, the system works astonishingly well, stopping the 101-floor tower from significantly swaying — a magnificent feat of engineering that relies only on simple physics. Seismic Safety The earthquake, the strongest in 25 years , struck Taiwan early Wednesday morning, killing at least nine people. Many structures fared far worse than the skyscraper, with videos showing se...

 DC Daily Journal: Both parties in Congress are fed up with Biden. He’s being taken to task. Because the U.S. Senate has made an announcement to hold Joe Biden’s feet to the fire. Democrats and Republicans in Congress don’t often agree on much these days. It’s no secret that partisanship in Washington, D.C. is more potent than it’s ever been in modern American history. When they do come together on a bipartisan move, it can be interesting to see what’s bringing the two major parties together. Recently, U.S. Senators from the Democrat and Republican party came together to finally set the record straight on an issue that Joe Biden refuses to address at all. The issue? China potentially invading Taiwan and what the United States would do if that were to materialize. Over the past year, the Biden administration has been giving mixed signals about what they would do if China grew emboldened enough to actually invade Taiwan and try to lay claim to the region. Now a group of U.S. Senators...

 Ward Clark: If China Invades Taiwan, Could They Even Take It, Much Less Hold it? ... There's another way to read that: "If China can't take Taiwan in 90 days, they're in trouble." But can China cross that strait with enough troops to take Taiwan in the first place? And more to the point, can they keep those troops supplied with beans, bullets, and fuel? In military matters, amateurs study tactics, while professionals study logistics; wars are always won or lost because of logistics. And China might not be able to pull that off. ... The Americans were successful in amphibious operations in World War II and in Korea.  China does not have any history of pulling that off although it could probably produce the landing craft over time.  

 CNN: The Chinese hackers behind a campaign to infiltrate transportation hubs and other critical American infrastructure have had access to some of their targets’ computer networks for “at least five years,” according to a new report by US and allied security agencies obtained by CNN. The campaign is part of a long-running effort by the hackers to position themselves for potentially crippling cyberattacks that could disrupt water and electricity, according to US officials. US intelligence chiefs sounded the alarm about the threat to Congress last week, saying Beijing could use the hackers to disrupt a US response if China invades Taiwan. FBI Director Christopher Wray told lawmakers last week that the hackers could “wreak havoc and cause real-world harm” to the US. The nearly 50-page report comes as US-China tensions over Taiwan and other key issues remain high and shows how central cyber operations could be to Chinese efforts to hobble US infrastructure in the event of a conflict...

The Telegraph:   China must master a difficult form of warfare before it can take on the US Navy Submarines could decide Taiwan’s fate. If recent war games are at all accurate, the US Navy’s fleet of 54 stealthy, heavily-armed nuclear-powered attack submarines could sink scores of troop transports and blunt any Chinese invasion across the 100-mile-wide Taiwan Strait. And working in conjunction with US Air Force bombers firing long-range cruise missiles, the subs could even end the invasion – and decisively resolve three-quarters of a century of escalating tension between Taiwan and China. The prospect of an undersea defeat of Beijing’s central strategic aim – the destruction of Taiwanese democracy – should only grow more likely in coming years as Taiwan adds its own new submarines, eight diesel-electric models, to the defensive fleet. The open question is whether the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Navy can develop weapons and tactics for hunting down the subs before the subs hun...

 Fox News: China is continuously massing forces at its coastal military bases facing Taiwan, the self-governing island warned Tuesday. Taiwan said it is bolstering its own defenses in response. The island's Defense Ministry issued a report on the expansion of Chinese airfields and military activity on Taiwan's doorstep, saying China has begun probing Taiwan's territory on a near-daily basis. "This year, the Chinese Communist Party has aggressively expanded its armaments and continued to build various types of fighter jets and drones," Maj. Gen. Huang Wen-Chi said of the report. "The information we have received is that all important military bases along the coast … are being continuously updated." The Chinese military also sent nearly two dozen warplanes on a sortie near Taiwan's territory Tuesday morning. The Defense Ministry reported that 22 Chinese warplanes and 20 warships entered the Taiwan Strait and that 13 of the aircraft crossed the median...

 War Zone: A newspaper in Taiwan has published pictures and video clips that it says offer the first-ever look at the Hsiung Feng IIE land-attack cruise missile. This missile has reportedly been in Taiwanese military service for more than a decade, but has never been seen publicly in that time. It is one of a number of secretive counter-strike capabilities Taiwan's armed forces are understood to possess to try to help deter or respond to a Chinese military intervention by holding targets on the mainland at risk. The report from Taiwan's United Daily News (UDN) says the imagery was captured during a recent nighttime launch from the Jiupeng military base in Pingtung County at the southern end of the island. The Hsiung Feng IIE (HF-2E) missile was "understood" to have subsequently flown for "many hours," according to UDN's report. https://twitter.com/stoa1984/status/1691713617824018477?s=20 A separate report today from Taiwan's semi-official Centr...

 Time: ... Physically, Taiwan sits astride some of the world’s busiest shipping lanes and prevents China from projecting power far beyond its shores. If China were to annex Taiwan and station its military on the island, it would be able to limit U.S. military operations in the region and hamper our ability to defend our allies. Geopolitically, should we fail to counter Chinese aggression against Taiwan, our allies would have doubts about whether they could rely on us. China’s military, if occupying Taiwan, would be only seventy miles from Japanese territory and 120 miles from the Philippines. Our allies, questioning whether we would or even could come to their defense, would be faced with a difficult choice: drawing closer to China or taking their security into their own hands, potentially to include developing nuclear weapons. Either outcome would result in diminished U.S. influence and increased regional and global instability. Economically, given Taiwan’s dominance of semiconduc...

 The Hill: China is taking aggressive new actions in the Taiwan Strait, escalating Beijing’s routine harassment in the international waterway at a low point in diplomatic relations between Beijing and Washington. U.S. officials and experts say confrontations between Chinese and American military planes and ships in the region are unavoidable, but the instance of a Chinese warship overtaking a U.S. destroyer earlier this week in the Strait is almost unprecedented. “​​In the Taiwan Strait, it certainly is new,” said Bonnie Glaser, managing director of the German Marshall Fund’s Indo-Pacific program. “Maybe this has been happening in the South China Sea, but in the Taiwan Strait, the Chinese generally shadow U.S. ships, they get on the comms and tell them to leave — but I know of no prior case of that kind of dangerous maneuver.” In a video of the incident , the Chinese naval ship overtakes the U.S. destroyer and crosses the bow with 150 yards between the ships, according to U.S. Indo...

 ISW: ... The Chinese People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) Shandong aircraft carrier strike group conducted exercises in the Philippine Sea from April 13 to April 24, likely to maintain operational readiness and demonstrate the ability to isolate the Philippines during Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang’s visit. The exercises were a continuation of the carrier strike group’s activity in early April closer to Taiwan in the response to Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen meeting with Speaker of the United States House of Representatives Kevin McCarthy. The carrier strike group was comprised of the Shandong, a Renhai-class destroyer, two Luyang III-class destroyers, two Jiangkai II-class frigate, and a Fuyu-class support ship. [9] This is the first time the Shandong conducted exercises in the Philippine Sea since commissioning in December 2019. [10] The ROC Ministry of National Defense (MND) subsequently detected the group on its return voyage 120 nautical miles southeast of Taiwan. [11...

 Wall Street Journal: On Basco Island South of Taiwan, U.S. Military Prepares for Conflict With China Part of largest-ever annual drills with the Philippines focuses on defending strategic Bashi Channel On a rocky, windswept island just over 100 miles south of Taiwan, U.S. troops from the Marines and Army ran out of MV-22 Osprey aircraft with weapons, including Javelin and Stinger missile launchers, before setting up camp next to a field of watermelons. On the opposite side of the island, a Himars rocket launcher was brought ashore on Monday from an amphibious landing craft, a system that could give U.S. forces the ability to target ships up to a few hundred miles away. ... The ISW has much more on the threat to Taiwan.  ... The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Joint Sword exercise around Taiwan from April 8 to 10 likely provides a rough sketch for future isolation campaigns around Taiwan that the CCP may use to try and create a sense of inevitability regarding “unificati...

 Telegraph: On a cloudy April morning, with the world’s media distracted by an explosive leak of highly sensitive documents from the Pentagon, more than 100 Chinese warplanes and ships circled Taiwan. The three-day onslaught earlier this month was not the beginning of war, but rather the latest in a series of increasingly aggressive military drills dubbed “United Sharp Sword” in which Beijing rehearsed a full-blown invasion of its tiny democratic neighbour. China’s military, it confidently declared, was now “ready to fight”. Xi Jinping’s latest war games, which came as the Pentagon leaks revealed a warning that Taiwan was unprepared to fend off an attack by China, were a timely reminder of the threat of a conflict that would further destabilise an increasingly fragile geopolitical situation. But worsening relations with Beijing aside, there are growing fears that a war in the region would upend global supply chains and leave the West scrambling to get hold of crucial technology....

 Fox News: China says it 'hopes and believes' Germany will support its 'peaceful reunification' with Taiwan The German foreign minister said that a military escalation from China to take control of Taiwan would be a 'horror scenario for the entire world' Taiwan should have a say on whether it wants to be a part of Communist China.  It has a lot of Chinese that fled mainland China to avoid the communist government.