“There’s a narrative out there that what they’re doing is indicative of a Taiwan unification dynamic or a blockade. But almost all of the evidence shared by the People’s Liberation Army during the operation lines up perfectly with what they call a deterrent activity,” said Roderick Lee, director of research at the China Aerospace Studies Institute, a US Air Force think tank. According to Beijing’s defense strategy, the PLA is ready to make some offensive moves to defend against perceived threats, but seeks to control the risk of escalation. The PLA clearly distinguishes such operations from wartime activities. Most of the PLA’s maneuvers around Taiwan in the past week are listed as options for deterrent activity in a 2020 manual from China’s National Defense University, including the display of new weapons in action and changes in force distribution, as well as limited military movements to limit the opponent. . Taiwanese defense officials and US experts say Beijing deployed a series of actions that met those criteria: seven areas were closed off for live-fire drills, blocking some of the region’s busiest flight paths and shipping lanes. the PLA transported military equipment throughout China. launched the PHL 16, a heavy artillery rocket system unveiled at a parade just five years ago. and distributed photos of China’s newest stealth fighter taking off at night. Above all, the PLA’s playbook of deterrence calls for forceful messaging to instill fear of war in their adversary, a tool used prominently during recent exercises. Several times a day, the PLA’s Eastern Theater Command released videos and images of fighters, warships and missiles and described their activity as practice for attacking Taiwan or denying US forces access to the region. The government, state media and leading commentators accompanied this effort with propaganda that justified China’s actions, demanded more and vilified Taiwan and the US. “Of course it’s useful for them to combine everything, to have pilots operating in the area associated with an attack on Taiwan, at a high operational tempo and in an environment that provides a little more stress on command and control than usual,” Lee said. . he said. “But the large-scale exercises the PLA conducts every summer do much more to prepare them for a conflict in Taiwan,” he added, pointing to regular unit-level exercises focused on amphibious landings. However, Taipei is drawing lessons from the episode. One move that caught the attention of defense officials was China’s launch of PHL 16 rockets from Pingtan Island, just off the mainland, in the narrowest part of the Taiwan Strait. “They are implying that they can hit Taiwan directly from the coast. We knew that before, but now they have taken out their weapons,” said a person advising Taiwan’s defense ministry. “This means our land defense strategy may not be sustainable. Using this [multiple launch rocket system] it would be a much cheaper and more effective way for them than missiles to hit dispersed ground forces units that we put up to defend against landing forces,” he said. Others dispute that conclusion, saying that to prove a threat from China’s newer multiple-launch missile systems, the PLA would have to fire into one of the closure zones off Taiwan’s northern coast to prove the missiles had range. over 200 km and were capable. covers most of the island. Taipei and Washington are also focused on the missile tests with which the PLA opened the exercise. Some rockets flew over Taipei and fell into the sea east of the island. “It’s a hint to the US that this is how we’re going to sink your aircraft carriers,” said Shu Hsiao-huang, a researcher at the National Defense and Security Research Institute, a think tank supported by Taiwan’s defense ministry. Su said it was notable that none of the materials released by the PLA about the drills mentioned the use of the Dongfeng 26, a medium-range missile nicknamed the “Guam express” because it is designed to hit the Pacific territory of US that hosts various forces under the Indo-Pacific Command, or the Dongfeng 17, a medium-range ballistic missile that can carry a hypersonic missile. Both are seen as necessary for the PLA to cripple the US’s ability to come to Taiwan’s aid in the event of a Chinese invasion. Compared to the 1995-96 Taiwan Strait crisis, when China retaliated against closer public engagement between top US and Taiwanese officials with missile tests, military analysts see significant progress in the PLA’s ability to accelerate a complex campaign. “In 1996, the exercise had a preparation period of more than a week, but the preparation period for this exercise has been reduced to 72 hours,” said Hsu Yen-chi, a researcher at the Council for Strategic and Wargaming Studies in Taipei. “This is the PLA’s countermeasure against the stated US goal of a one-week mission in the Taiwan Strait. A quick surprise attack is still Beijing’s ideal plan for an invasion of Taiwan.”

Officials and analysts believe Beijing began preparing months in advance because plans for Pelosi’s trip to Taiwan were first made public in April and China began threatening a military response shortly thereafter. But they argued that any plan for a PLA operation would be “bare-skinned” at that stage, and the Chinese military’s moves after Pelosi’s departure showed its greatly enhanced ability to respond quickly. Some analysts see this as a sign that the new management structure created through sweeping reforms since 2015 is working smoothly. “It is a benchmark for the state of affairs when conducting joint operations,” Li said. Video: Will China and the US go to war over Taiwan?