With first strikes on U.S military bases in Japan NBC’s China invading Taiwan war game reveals a fundamental flaw which is that China knows that without a pretext for engagement, such as military strike on its territory, the U.S. has no authority to defend a province of a country from its central government and our mighty Navy’s presence is only a bluff because U.S. public opinion would not allow an engagement that starts superpowers down the path of nuclear conflagration. No, Team Red would start the invasion with a months long blockade encircling the island and keeping all material from entering or exiting by sea and air. It would spend time before the invasion with an air war that softens the target and causes the rapid expense of irreplaceable resources. How should Team Blue assert American power without crossing the nuclear threshold?
Geopolitical Analyst Peter Ziehan postulates that since the end of World War the global reach of the U.S. Navy has kept the seas secure for international trade. China in particular has been the chief beneficiary of the trade made possible by our Navy. Being a resource poor nation, a trade benefit it counts on is the steady supply of oil coming from the Middle East in supertankers crossing the Indian Ocean. What if Team Blue took a tactic from our history when an Island nation was being armed with nuclear weapons that threatened our security but had not yet made a first strike, of course it’s President John F Kennedy’s 1962 blockade around Cuba that is being referenced, and corrals those supertankers in the middle of Indian Ocean the moment that China blockades Taiwan. Naturally The Navy would provide humanitarian support to crew members as they float sequestered at idle for months. Vessels passing through wishing to offload at ports other than Chinese could do so under flight supervision, not that a lumbering tanker would not make a spectacular but distressingly easy target should it decide to make a run for it. China’s Navy on the other hand could not interfere with the corral because their vessels only have a thousand mile range leaving diplomatic outrage as their only counter. Mainland China on the other hand would run out of fuel for its economy and Navy before a well stocked Taiwan and force it to discontinue its assault.
The primary purpose of war games is to flesh out various tactics that promote a strategy toward our security. War games that have a whiff of a nuclear exchange always seem to end in conflagration so that the players should think of alternatives. Alternatives that showcase what a Navy ten times bigger than the rest of the World combined can do to assert American power in a nonthreatening way and so overwhelm any notion of defying it that it deters China from invading Taiwan in the first place.
