핵심요약

• 대만 침공 시도에 있어 세 가지 핵심 임무(상륙, 공중 강하, 공중 공격)는 현대 위협 조건에서 성공한 전례가 없다.
• 중국 인민해방군은 동일 작전에서 군사 역사를 세 번 만들어야 하는 상황에 직면할 수 있다.
• 침공의 난이도는 규모보다는 작전 전례의 부재에서 기인하며, 파괴보다는 교란을 목표로 하는 것이 더 낮은 임계치를 가진다.
• 해상 및 공중 작전의 희소성이 현대의 미사일 시대에 분석적으로 중요한 의미를 지닌다.

도입

본 기사는 대만 침공이라는 지정학적 시나리오가 단순한 군사력의 비교를 넘어, 현대전에서 요구되는 작전 전례와 운영 난이도의 관점에서 어떤 의미를 갖는지 분석합니다. 투자자 관점에서 이 분석은 잠재적인 지정학적 리스크가 실제 군사적 실행 가능성과 어떤 연관성을 가지는지 이해하는 데 중요합니다. 즉, 현 상황에서 군사적 시나리오의 '불가능성'이 어떻게 전략적 판단에 영향을 미치는지 파악해야 합니다.

본문 1: 작전 전례의 부재가 의미하는 현실적 난이도

기사의 핵심 주장은 대만 침공 시도가 규모가 아닌 작전 전례의 부재에서 오는 운영적 난이도에 의해 좌우된다는 점입니다. 1944년 노르망디 상륙작전이 역사상 가장 복잡했던 작전이었던 것처럼, 대만 침공 역시 해상 및 공중 작전에서 요구되는 특정 조건들을 충족해야 합니다. 특히, 해안 방어 시스템에 대한 대잠 미사일 위협, 현대적인 방공망을 뚫는 공중 강하, 그리고 장거리에서 대규모 공중 공격을 성공적으로 수행하는 능력은 현대전에서 매우 희소한 경험입니다. 이러한 '세 가지 불가능(Three Nevers)'은 중국 인민해방군이 동일한 작전 내에서 군사 역사를 세 번 만들어야 함을 의미하며, 이는 작전의 성공 가능성을 극도로 낮춥니다. 이는 단순히 병력의 수적 우위를 넘어, 첨단 기술과 현대적인 방어 체계에 대한 대응 능력이 결정적인 변수가 됨을 보여줍니다.

본문 2: 교란의 임계치와 전략적 목표의 변화

분석은 침공이 반드시 적을 완전히 파괴해야만 성공하는 것이 아니라는 점을 강조합니다. 작전이 시간과 제한된 물량에 기반할 경우, 목표를 완전히 파괴하는 것보다 적의 작전 순서를 교란하는 것(disruption)이 훨씬 낮은 임계치를 가집니다. 이는 공격 주체가 최소한의 생존 능력을 확보하여 작전의 흐름을 방해하는 것만으로도 전략적 목표를 달성할 수 있음을 의미합니다. 따라서 침공 시도 시 고려해야 할 전략적 목표는 '파괴'에서 '교란'으로 전환되어야 하며, 이는 군사적 자원의 효율적 사용과 리스크 관리 측면에서 새로운 접근 방식을 요구합니다. 이러한 관점은 군사적 충돌이 가져올 수 있는 장기적인 경제적, 지정학적 변동성 예측에 중요한 통찰을 제공합니다.

본문 3: 장기적 관점에서의 리스크와 전망

이러한 작전적 난이도는 단기적인 군사적 충돌의 결과뿐만 아니라 장기적인 지정학적 안정성에 영향을 미칩니다. 작전의 성공 가능성이 낮다는 분석은 중국이 대만 문제에 접근하는 방식에 있어 예측 불가능성(unpredictability)이 높다는 점을 반영합니다. 만약 침공 시도가 발생한다면, 예상되는 군사적 저항과 국제적 개입의 양상은 기존의 시나리오와 크게 달라질 수 있습니다. 따라서 투자자들은 단기적인 군사적 움직임뿐만 아니라, 이러한 작전 전례의 부재가 국제 질서와 공급망에 미치는 장기적인 변동성(volatility)을 지속적으로 모니터링해야 합니다. 이는 군사적 리스크가 금융 시장의 불확실성으로 어떻게 전이되는지를 이해하는 데 필수적입니다.

결론

결론적으로, 대만 침공 시도는 규모의 문제가 아닌 현대 작전 환경에서의 운영적 전례의 부재라는 근본적인 난관에 직면해 있습니다. 이는 군사적 실행의 어려움을 강조하며, 실제 충돌 시나리오를 예측하는 데 있어 작전의 '교란' 목표와 같은 새로운 전략적 목표를 고려해야 함을 시사합니다. 향후에는 이러한 군사적 불확실성이 국제 관계와 글로벌 공급망에 미치는 영향을 면밀히 관찰하는 것이 중요합니다. 우리는 이러한 지정학적 리스크가 금융 시장의 변동성으로 어떻게 반영될지 지속적으로 주시할 필요가 있습니다.

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원문 링크: https://news.google.com/rss/articles/CBMirgFBVV95cUxOSGtraEdWMTZNSHNKVUpvc0NndFI5S3ZVVEJieFV0ZHhJY1MzTTV0bWVrZmVscnRUUkdRUmlieU1zU0d2WkRybEVMTzYydjA4U05fSTBiR0VCekxKVGF2bTZYNXlDWE5iUUFMSUpMUzN0UjNvTlpwRFRQSDZiOVRRS2lULW55N2V0U0prZ2NITUZEMXZGcEpIMS16akozdU5yZGdjam9rWmVvWHZUVUE?oc=5

The Three Nevers: To Invade Taiwan, China Would Have to Make Military History Thrice - War on the Rocks

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The amphibious invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944, remains the largest and most complex amphibious operation in history. On the first day alone, Allied forces landed eight divisions, including five amphibious assault and three airborne, totaling roughly 160,000 personnel . That force more than doubled within days. Normandy was unprecedented in scale but not in kind. A Taiwan invasion would present the reverse problem: Taiwan’s size is not the unprecedented part — the operational challenges are. Analysis of a potential Chinese invasion of Taiwan typically emphasizes the People’s Liberation Army’s rapid modernization and the possibility of strategic surprise . Far less attention is paid to operational precedent. Three key missions at the heart of any cross-strait campaign have never been successfully executed under modern threat conditions: an amphibious landing against a credible coastal anti-ship missile threat, a large-scale airborne drop against modern air defenses, and a large, opposed air assault at extended range. In other words, the People’s Liberation Army would have to make history three times in the same campaign. I refer to these as the “Three Nevers,” a deliberately tongue-in-cheek nod to Chinese Communist Party doctrinal formulations, or tifa . The absence of precedent does not prove impossibility. Major amphibious and airborne operations have been rare since World War II, especially in the missile age. Yet that rarity is analytically important. The familiar point is that invasion would be difficult. The sharper point is that Taiwan would not need to defeat the invasion force outright. It would only need enough surviving capability to disrupt the sequence. In a campaign built around tight timing and limited lift, the threshold for disruption is far lower than the threshold for destruction. China would have to move, land, reinforce, and sustain exposed forces under fire. Taiwan would only have to break that sequence. Lift makes the problem more concrete: China would need to deploy sufficient combat power ashore in the opening hours to prevent the beachhead’s isolation before follow-on forces arrive. That makes amphibious lift central to the campaign. If China cannot meet that threshold in the opening waves, it must either accept a dangerously thin landing force or compensate with airborne and air assault operations. Those workarounds create the second and third Nevers. None of this means an invasion is impossible. Political leaders may accept significant operational risk, and the People’s Liberation Army, as a party army , will carry out the orders it receives. But the lack of relevant combat experience , from the lowest-ranking conscript to the (remaining) senior military leadership of the Central Military Commission, makes these assumptions especially consequential. BECOME A MEMBER Why Lift Drives the Three Nevers In “Mind the Gap,” Thomas Shugart estimates that the People’s Liberation Army Navy can transport roughly 21,000 troops and the equipment of one heavy amphibious brigade per wave. Modified civilian roll-on/roll-off vessels could increase that to about three brigades. The number could rise further with access to ports and temporary causeways, but those would not be available to the first wave. An initial Chinese landing force of three brigades would be dangerously understrength against Taiwan’s ground forces. Taiwan’s army fields seven combined-arms brigades and maintains 20 reserve infantry brigades to reinforce its active-duty units. Not all would be available at the landing site but given the limited number of viable landing beaches , defenders would not need to be everywhere at once. Three brigades would remain well below the three-to-one ratio often associated with offensive operations. Because amphibious lift constrains tempo and mass, the People’s Liberation Army would rely on three-dimensional operations to compensate. The challenge is that airborne forces face modern air defenses while air assault forces must also operate at extreme range. Lift does not just drive the first Never. It creates the conditions for the second and third. Landing Under Fire There has never been an amphibious landing in the face of a coastal defense cruise missile threat. When the Allies came ashore at Normandy, the longest-range shore-based threats they faced were coastal artillery with ranges of up to roughly 15 miles. Taiwan’s coastal defense missiles can range from 75 to 93 miles, with extended-range variants reportedly reaching up to 250 miles . This means Chinese landing forces would be within range for most, if not all, of their transit across the strait. The approach to the beach becomes part of the fight. A Chinese campaign would almost certainly attempt to degrade these systems before the invasion. But suppression is not elimination. Much of Taiwan’s coastal defense cruise missile force is mobile , allowing it to exploit the island’s urban environment and mountainous terrain to avoid detection and engage Chinese forces with little warning. In a campaign this tightly sequenced, even a single surviving coastal missile battery could generate enough firepower to break a wave. The 2006 Lebanon War offers a sobering illustration. Hizballah launched an anti-ship missile near Beirut, striking the Israeli Navy corvette INS Hanit . More recently, American forces have struggled to fully neutralize Houthi anti-ship missile capabilities in Yemen, despite sustained strikes and persistent overhead surveillance. Taiwan’s coastal defenses are more capable, more mobile, and embedded in far more complex terrain, making them difficult to locate and engage. The Falklands Conflict offers another example. Argentina began the conflict with only five air-launched Exocet missiles. One struck HMS Sheffield , a modern air-defense destroyer, which later sank. Two more targeted the aircraft carrier HMS Hermes, but instead hit the SS Atlantic Conveyor , a civilian merchant vessel. The ship sank three days later, taking several helicopters with it and significantly degrading subsequent land operations. The parallel to a Chinese invasion fleet is direct. Chinese landing forces would rely heavily on civilian roll-on/roll-off vessels to transport combat power across the strait. As Mike Pietrucha argues, civilian vessels pressed into military service are poorly suited for amphibious assault. Their design makes the problem difficult to engineer away: Large, open vehicle bays with few firebreaks become extraordinarily dangerous when loaded with fuel and ammunition. In April 2021, a fire aboard the modern Chinese roll-on/roll-off vessel Zhong Hua Fu Qiang caused significant damage in peacetime, without enemy action. A missile strike on a combat-loaded vessel would be catastrophic by comparison. Unlike the SS Atlantic Conveyor, losing a roll-on/roll-off vessel does not merely complicate the operation — it undermines an entire wave. A single vessel carries the personnel and equipment of nearly two battalions, and each hull lost is one fewer available to lift forces in subsequent waves. In a constrained lift environment, attrition is not linear, but compounding. Coastal defense cruise missiles are only one component of Taiwan’s defensive system. They are complemented by mines , naval- and air-launched anti-ship missiles, and a growing inventory of unmanned air, surface, and subsurface vehicles, all of which are cheaper and easier to produce than the vessels they would target. Taken together, these capabilities create a layered threat environment that further complicates any attempt to move, land, and sustain forces across the strait. Dropping Into Modern Air Defenses There has never been a large-scale airborne drop against modern air defenses. On D-Day, Allied paratroopers faced anti-aircraft artillery and machine guns, not radar-guided missiles or modern shoulder-fired air defenses. Even so, they suffered significant losses , and many drops were scattered. Reflecting on the losses suffered by Allied paratroopers during operations Overlord, Market Garden , and Varsity , military historian John Keegan writes in Six Armies in Normandy : Within a few years, when ground- and air-launched missiles would have been added to the troop-carrying aircraft’s enemies, no general anywhere would consider sending formations en masse against prepared positions, and the role of the parachutist would dwindle to that of the clandestine interloper. The problem Keegan identified has only grown more dire, yet People’s Liberation Army doctrine still relies on airborne assault in the opening phase of a Taiwan campaign. Its writings describe the integration of amphibious, airborne, and air assault forces as a “ three-dimensional landing ” operation intended to strike before the defender can mount an effective response. As outlined in the Science of Campaigns, airborne forces intend to seize key terrain, exploit confusion, and accelerate the tempo of the assault. Limited amphibious lift makes airborne forces not just a tactical enabler but a necessary means of adding combat power to the initial assault. The large transport aircraft that deliver paratroopers have limited defensive capabilities and maneuverability . These aircraft must fly low and slow along similar routes as they approach the drop zone . Suitable drop zones are scarce in Taiwan’s complex terrain. Taiwan fields a modern integrated air defense system that includes early-warning radars, fighters, and surface-to-air missiles. Chinese strikes would aim to suppress these defenses before an airborne assault, but such efforts would not address the threat from mobile, man-portable systems. Taiwan operates U.S. -supplied Stinger man-portable air defense missiles — infrared-guided systems that are extremely difficult to detect or suppress and are ideally suited to engage low, slow aircraft. Even a few dozen could inflict severe losses around Taiwan’s limited number of viable drop zones. The Tyranny of Distance The third Never is less a categorical first than an unprecedented combination of distance, exposure, opposition, and physics. The People’s Liberation Army would employ helicopter-borne air assault forces for the same reason it would employ paratroopers: Limited amphibious lift leaves gaps in combat power that only vertical insertion can fill quickly enough to matter. Like airborne forces, air assault forces depend on multiple low, slow aircraft and a finite number of suitable landing zones. They face another challenge: range. Air assault forces launching from China would need to fly at least 100 miles to reach their landing zones. Although within the ferry range of several Chinese helicopters , a realistic combat scenario — with loaded aircraft, low-altitude ingress to avoid air defenses, and time spent loading and unloading — would make the mission far more demanding. This is the third Never: a large, opposed air assault at extended range. The issue is not whether helicopters can fly that far. It is whether combat-loaded helicopters can do so at scale, at low altitude, against a prepared defender, and still deliver enough force to matter. The closest historical comparison is the 2001 Marine air assault into Forward Operating Base Rhino in Afghanistan, but Navy special operations forces were already on the ground , making it effectively unopposed. Those helicopters also relied on in-flight refueling, a capability China lacks for rotary-wing aircraft. China could mitigate the range problem by launching air assault forces from its Yushen-class (Type 075) amphibious assault ships. Recent analysis from the Jamestown Foundation suggests that China intends to employ its amphibious assault ships in a counter-intervention role rather than in direct support of landing operations. If so, the force most capable of addressing that problem would be held back from the operation where it would matter most. Conclusion A Chinese invasion of Taiwan would not hinge on a single capability. It would require the People’s Liberation Army to execute several complex operations simultaneously, none of which has a historical precedent. Analysts often examine these three challenges in isolation, but they are interconnected. The same lift constraints that limit amphibious capacity also drive reliance on airborne and air assault forces, which are vulnerable in contested airspace and at extreme range. These are not independent challenges. They stem from the same underlying problem: the need to generate sufficient combat power ashore before Taiwan can isolate and defeat the landing force. A single surviving Taiwanese battery — four mobile launchers, four missiles each — could fire a volley of 16 Hsiung Feng III missiles, a small fraction of Taiwan’s anti-ship missile inventory . An amphibious transport within 24 miles of the beach would have less than a minute between launch and impact. The disruption threshold is far lower than the destruction threshold: that battery need not sink the invasion fleet, only enough critical lift to break the wave. Losing a single roll-on/roll-off vessel removes the equipment of nearly two battalions from a force already thin against Taiwan’s ground forces. That loss increases pressure on airborne and air assault forces to compensate, even as those forces face their own threats from surface-to-air missiles, including man-portable Stingers. Failure in one part of the sequence worsens the others. The window for success is narrow, and each of the Three Nevers narrows it further. None of this makes an invasion impossible. Political leaders may accept significant operational risk to pursue strategic objectives, and the People’s Liberation Army is ultimately a party army that will carry out the orders it receives. Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, launched despite a military that was unprepared by almost every measure, is a recent reminder. While the People’s Liberation Army faces many challenges outlined above, so do Taiwan’s forces. They share a lack of recent combat experience. Under sustained attack, their forces would face problems with survivability, command, targeting, logistics, and morale. But the argument does not require Taiwan’s defenses to work perfectly. It requires only that enough survive to disrupt China’s landing operations. Taiwan and its partners should invest in exactly the capabilities that make each of the Three Nevers more costly: more coastal defense missiles and better low-altitude air defenses. These are the direct answer to the operational problem the Three Nevers describe. The best deterrent is not confidence that China will never try. It is Beijing’s doubt that any attempt would succeed. BECOME A MEMBER Jay “McFly” McVann is a U.S. Navy officer serving as the Navy Senior Service Advisor and China Program Director at the National Intelligence University. He has more than two decades of experience in naval intelligence and is a former TOPGUN instructor. The opinions and views expressed here are those of the author alone and do not necessarily represent those of the National Intelligence University, the U.S. Navy, the Department of Defense, or any part of the U.S. government. Image: China News Service via Wikimedia Commons

Normandy was unprecedented in scale but not in kind. A Taiwan invasion would present the reverse problem: Taiwan’s size is not the unprecedented part — the operational challenges are. Analysis of a potential Chinese invasion of Taiwan typically emphasizes the People’s Liberation Army’s rapid modernization and the possibility of strategic surprise . Far less attention is paid to operational precedent. Three key missions at the heart of any cross-strait campaign have never been successfully executed under modern threat conditions: an amphibious landing against a credible coastal anti-ship missile threat, a large-scale airborne drop against modern air defenses, and a large, opposed air assault at extended range. In other words, the People’s Liberation Army would have to make history three times in the same campaign. I refer to these as the “Three Nevers,” a deliberately tongue-in-cheek nod to Chinese Communist Party doctrinal formulations, or tifa .

The absence of precedent does not prove impossibility. Major amphibious and airborne operations have been rare since World War II, especially in the missile age. Yet that rarity is analytically important. The familiar point is that invasion would be difficult. The sharper point is that Taiwan would not need to defeat the invasion force outright. It would only need enough surviving capability to disrupt the sequence. In a campaign built around tight timing and limited lift, the threshold for disruption is far lower than the threshold for destruction. China would have to move, land, reinforce, and sustain exposed forces under fire. Taiwan would only have to break that sequence.

Lift makes the problem more concrete: China would need to deploy sufficient combat power ashore in the opening hours to prevent the beachhead’s isolation before follow-on forces arrive. That makes amphibious lift central to the campaign. If China cannot meet that threshold in the opening waves, it must either accept a dangerously thin landing force or compensate with airborne and air assault operations. Those workarounds create the second and third Nevers.

None of this means an invasion is impossible. Political leaders may accept significant operational risk, and the People’s Liberation Army, as a party army , will carry out the orders it receives. But the lack of relevant combat experience , from the lowest-ranking conscript to the (remaining) senior military leadership of the Central Military Commission, makes these assumptions especially consequential.

In “Mind the Gap,” Thomas Shugart estimates that the People’s Liberation Army Navy can transport roughly 21,000 troops and the equipment of one heavy amphibious brigade per wave. Modified civilian roll-on/roll-off vessels could increase that to about three brigades. The number could rise further with access to ports and temporary causeways, but those would not be available to the first wave.

An initial Chinese landing force of three brigades would be dangerously understrength against Taiwan’s ground forces. Taiwan’s army fields seven combined-arms brigades and maintains 20 reserve infantry brigades to reinforce its active-duty units. Not all would be available at the landing site but given the limited number of viable landing beaches , defenders would not need to be everywhere at once. Three brigades would remain well below the three-to-one ratio often associated with offensive operations.

Because amphibious lift constrains tempo and mass, the People’s Liberation Army would rely on three-dimensional operations to compensate. The challenge is that airborne forces face modern air defenses while air assault forces must also operate at extreme range. Lift does not just drive the first Never. It creates the conditions for the second and third.

There has never been an amphibious landing in the face of a coastal defense cruise missile threat. When the Allies came ashore at Normandy, the longest-range shore-based threats they faced were coastal artillery with ranges of up to roughly 15 miles. Taiwan’s coastal defense missiles can range from 75 to 93 miles, with extended-range variants reportedly reaching up to 250 miles . This means Chinese landing forces would be within range for most, if not all, of their transit across the strait. The approach to the beach becomes part of the fight.

A Chinese campaign would almost certainly attempt to degrade these systems before the invasion. But suppression is not elimination. Much of Taiwan’s coastal defense cruise missile force is mobile , allowing it to exploit the island’s urban environment and mountainous terrain to avoid detection and engage Chinese forces with little warning. In a campaign this tightly sequenced, even a single surviving coastal missile battery could generate enough firepower to break a wave.

The 2006 Lebanon War offers a sobering illustration. Hizballah launched an anti-ship missile near Beirut, striking the Israeli Navy corvette INS Hanit . More recently, American forces have struggled to fully neutralize Houthi anti-ship missile capabilities in Yemen, despite sustained strikes and persistent overhead surveillance. Taiwan’s coastal defenses are more capable, more mobile, and embedded in far more complex terrain, making them difficult to locate and engage.

The Falklands Conflict offers another example. Argentina began the conflict with only five air-launched Exocet missiles. One struck HMS Sheffield , a modern air-defense destroyer, which later sank. Two more targeted the aircraft carrier HMS Hermes, but instead hit the SS Atlantic Conveyor , a civilian merchant vessel. The ship sank three days later, taking several helicopters with it and significantly degrading subsequent land operations.

The parallel to a Chinese invasion fleet is direct. Chinese landing forces would rely heavily on civilian roll-on/roll-off vessels to transport combat power across the strait. As Mike Pietrucha argues, civilian vessels pressed into military service are poorly suited for amphibious assault. Their design makes the problem difficult to engineer away: Large, open vehicle bays with few firebreaks become extraordinarily dangerous when loaded with fuel and ammunition. In April 2021, a fire aboard the modern Chinese roll-on/roll-off vessel Zhong Hua Fu Qiang caused significant damage in peacetime, without enemy action. A missile strike on a combat-loaded vessel would be catastrophic by comparison.

Unlike the SS Atlantic Conveyor, losing a roll-on/roll-off vessel does not merely complicate the operation — it undermines an entire wave. A single vessel carries the personnel and equipment of nearly two battalions, and each hull lost is one fewer available to lift forces in subsequent waves. In a constrained lift environment, attrition is not linear, but compounding.

Coastal defense cruise missiles are only one component of Taiwan’s defensive system. They are complemented by mines , naval- and air-launched anti-ship missiles, and a growing inventory of unmanned air, surface, and subsurface vehicles, all of which are cheaper and easier to produce than the vessels they would target. Taken together, these capabilities create a layered threat environment that further complicates any attempt to move, land, and sustain forces across the strait.

There has never been a large-scale airborne drop against modern air defenses. On D-Day, Allied paratroopers faced anti-aircraft artillery and machine guns, not radar-guided missiles or modern shoulder-fired air defenses. Even so, they suffered significant losses , and many drops were scattered.

Reflecting on the losses suffered by Allied paratroopers during operations Overlord, Market Garden , and Varsity , military historian John Keegan writes in Six Armies in Normandy :

Within a few years, when ground- and air-launched missiles would have been added to the troop-carrying aircraft’s enemies, no general anywhere would consider sending formations en masse against prepared positions, and the role of the parachutist would dwindle to that of the clandestine interloper.

The problem Keegan identified has only grown more dire, yet People’s Liberation Army doctrine still relies on airborne assault in the opening phase of a Taiwan campaign. Its writings describe the integration of amphibious, airborne, and air assault forces as a “ three-dimensional landing ” operation intended to strike before the defender can mount an effective response. As outlined in the Science of Campaigns, airborne forces intend to seize key terrain, exploit confusion, and accelerate the tempo of the assault. Limited amphibious lift makes airborne forces not just a tactical enabler but a necessary means of adding combat power to the initial assault.

The large transport aircraft that deliver paratroopers have limited defensive capabilities and maneuverability . These aircraft must fly low and slow along similar routes as they approach the drop zone . Suitable drop zones are scarce in Taiwan’s complex terrain.

Taiwan fields a modern integrated air defense system that includes early-warning radars, fighters, and surface-to-air missiles. Chinese strikes would aim to suppress these defenses before an airborne assault, but such efforts would not address the threat from mobile, man-portable systems. Taiwan operates U.S. -supplied Stinger man-portable air defense missiles — infrared-guided systems that are extremely difficult to detect or suppress and are ideally suited to engage low, slow aircraft. Even a few dozen could inflict severe losses around Taiwan’s limited number of viable drop zones.

The third Never is less a categorical first than an unprecedented combination of distance, exposure, opposition, and physics. The People’s Liberation Army would employ helicopter-borne air assault forces for the same reason it would employ paratroopers: Limited amphibious lift leaves gaps in combat power that only vertical insertion can fill quickly enough to matter. Like airborne forces, air assault forces depend on multiple low, slow aircraft and a finite number of suitable landing zones.

They face another challenge: range. Air assault forces launching from China would need to fly at least 100 miles to reach their landing zones. Although within the ferry range of several Chinese helicopters , a realistic combat scenario — with loaded aircraft, low-altitude ingress to avoid air defenses, and time spent loading and unloading — would make the mission far more demanding. This is the third Never: a large, opposed air assault at extended range. The issue is not whether helicopters can fly that far. It is whether combat-loaded helicopters can do so at scale, at low altitude, against a prepared defender, and still deliver enough force to matter. The closest historical comparison is the 2001 Marine air assault into Forward Operating Base Rhino in Afghanistan, but Navy special operations forces were already on the ground , making it effectively unopposed. Those helicopters also relied on in-flight refueling, a capability China lacks for rotary-wing aircraft.

China could mitigate the range problem by launching air assault forces from its Yushen-class (Type 075) amphibious assault ships. Recent analysis from the Jamestown Foundation suggests that China intends to employ its amphibious assault ships in a counter-intervention role rather than in direct support of landing operations. If so, the force most capable of addressing that problem would be held back from the operation where it would matter most.

Source: https://news.google.com/rss/articles/CBMirgFBVV95cUxOSGtraEdWMTZNSHNKVUpvc0NndFI5S3ZVVEJieFV0ZHhJY1MzTTV0bWVrZmVscnRUUkdRUmlieU1zU0d2WkRybEVMTzYydjA4U05fSTBiR0VCekxKVGF2bTZYNXlDWE5iUUFMSUpMUzN0UjNvTlpwRFRQSDZiOVRRS2lULW55N2V0U0prZ2NITUZEMXZGcEpIMS16akozdU5yZGdjam9rWmVvWHZUVUE?oc=5