Stupid Questions

a special edition of the Scuttlebutt.

Photo courtesy of the Daily Mail UK.
I get a constant stream of Stupid Questions from the agitprop folks and Intel officers that make up the majority of folks on Quora. Most of them I just delete but occasionally, one comes by that causes me to light the twit up.

This is one such.

Taiwan's drills this year have included a lot of urban warfare content. What is the purpose of this?

Alright, well, this is obviously a Troll question, probably by a PRC MSS operative, but I’m bored, so sure, I’ll play.
The nation of Free China (Taiwan) is staring down the barrel of an invasion by the PRC on any given day. While the PRC has a lot of people, they are not exactly inventive. Most of their tech, and most of their military ideas come from the has-beens of the former Soviet Union. IE Russia.

Looking at how Russia tried to take down Ukraine, through a lightning Decapitation strike, it’s reasonable to assume that the thugs in Beijing will try the same thing. The PRC needs to take Free China mostly intact for several reasons, not the least of which is that the value of the nation is made up primarily of two things, 1)Their industry and infrastructure, and 2) Their people. A long war, which in this case means anything more than a week or two, means the nice computer chip factories are destroyed, and the people that know how to run them are dead.

Oh the PRC will do it even if they can’t take the factories, because they’re wound around the axel on the “Face” of having something that, even though it never belonged to them, they’ve been claiming was theirs ever since that fat, infantile little pedophile Mao started the country in 1949. But if they can’t take the factories, it will be ash in their mouths.

Further, they need to take it fast to keep the rest of the world from getting involved. The US, Australia, and Japan would take a couple days to react with more than a token force. If by the time the US can muster up enough force to do more than cause the dragon to stub it’s toe, the task is done, the PRC is counting on “Hey, it’s a fait accompli, what you going to do?” Now I am not sure that that will work, but it’s at least a reasonable gamble.

Frankly I suspect that any attempt to take Free China will kick off World War Four (three was the cold war.) There are a bunch of neighbors of the PRC that would really like to watch a lot of the People’s Revolutionary Army become fertilizer. Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, India, the Philippines, Singapore, and of course Tibet and Japan, would all like to place the People’s Revolution in the same dust bin of history as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Meanwhile, the only real friends the PRC has, is North Korea, Russia, and arguably Pakistan, although I wouldn’t count on the Paki’s to back the PRC’s play when push comes to shove… Think Italy during two world wars, but with a South East Asian accent.

All of this comes down to “Take it fast, or wind up with your wedding tackle stuck in a sausage grinder, and no way to reach the off switch.” Free China knows this, they’re not as stupid as the questioner seems to be. They have to play for time. They have to make the warmongers in Beijing understand that “there’s no way to take us quickly, and you know what will happen if the war goes on too long.”

So, they’re practicing becoming a hard target, and are demonstrating that they are indeed a hard target, on the “You thought Russia was having problems with Ukraine? You ain’t seen nothing yet, sucker” model.

That answer your question?

Yours in service

William Lehman