Ukraine’s massive drone strike against Russian air bases on 1 June should reverberate across all theaters of conflict. But there is one Western Pacific scenario where it could be very relevant indeed: a Chinese invasion of Taiwan.
There was a micro-panic among invasion watchers in March when a brief video appeared, and then vanished, showing an impressively large and unique Chinese device, a series of barges with telescoping vertical pylons in their hulls and built-in bridges at each end. Towed into place in line astern, the barges would extend their pylons to the sea bottom and lift themselves out of the water, connect themselves with bridges and extend a long cable-stayed ramp to the shore.
The system is designed to bypass Taiwan’s ports and allow commercial ro-ro ships to directly and rapidly discharge vehicles ashore. That’s important because an invasion of Taiwan would be so massive—300,000 troops is the baseline estimate in a comprehensive recent study by the US Naval War College—that for a navy to provide enough sealift is almost inconceivable.
But the mobile pier, ingenious as it is, acknowledges a basic fact: there is no alternative in Taiwan to an amphibious assault through the surf line, with the goal of then seizing nearby port or using the beach as a landing point for the pier. Attractive alternatives such as directly seizing a major port or using airborne force to grab centers of gravity (Hostomel was another Ukraine lesson) don’t exist.
Completed in October 2022, the War College study is the product of a conference held in 2021, before Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The study doesn’t mention the kind of drones used in Ukraine—but they could make an enormous difference.
China’s amphibious forces, a joint army-navy responsibility, are built on a blend of the assets and technologies used by the US Marine Corps and others, technologies based on experience in World War II and Korea, where the last major amphibious landing took place.
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