Now, China being a communist country (with a strong capitalistic bent) does have the ability to call upon all civilian and commercial assets for use by the state. As such, some people postulate that many of their larger fishing vessels can be used as amphibious assets.
Now, as an amusing exercise one of our associates asked artificial intelligence (Chat GPT) what would be the Chinese lift capacity. They came back with:
Now, we don’t buy into their count from military ships (the first wave capability is probable half of what they list), we don’t buy into their use of merchant ships, and we can honestly say we are not sold on the idea of conducting an opposed amphibious operation using fishing vessels.
Basically, what they are talking about is some form of a reserve Dunkirk. Now the problem with a reverse Dunkirk is that you need to get the troops into four feet or less of water. That is a problem with V-hull large commercial fishing vessels. Furthermore, these are men with combat loads and in need to support equipment. Whole lot easier to evacuate desperate men with fishing vessels than it is to invade with them carrying full combat loads. The vast majority of people at Dunkirk were not evacuated by fishing vessels.
Needless to say, if gathering dozens of RoRo commercial ships would alert Taiwan, gathering hundreds of fishing vessels and moving them to south China, would give Taiwan considerable alert time. We don’t think this is a serious discussion, although some people in the west have seriously discussed it (artificial intelligence did not pull this idea out of thin air).
Anyhow, as we stated in our original post on this subject, “China has the ability to land over 20,000 soldiers on Tawain on the first wave.” They can supplement that capability by 1) Seizing a working port, 2) running a hundred old landing craft across 100 miles of sea, 3) enlisting China’s commercial fleet of RoRo ships, 4) enlisting their fishing fleet. We have addressed each of these issues in our posts and will probably continue to discuss some of these in the following weeks. Our original post concluded with the statement “It is clear, based upon their military capabilities, they currently have no real plans to invade Taiwan.”
I am sure some of you will disagree.
A very interesting series of articles, thank you. It seems that the PRC cannot win unless they can somehow preempt/disrupt mobilization. They must be planning to do just that, somehow. Is Taiwan’s reserve force as capable as the Israeli reserves, or are they more like the US National Guard, which would probably require significant training before being committed to battle.
Thanks Gary. There is more to come.