WAR WITH CHINA OVER TAIWAN: WHAT WAR GAMES TELL US ABOUT THE RISK OF MASSIVE CASUALTIES

Commentary by Michael Klare, August 16, 2022 

During the first half of 2022, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a Washington-based think-tank, conducted a series of war games using retired U.S. military and intelligence officials to assess what might happen if the U.S. and China go to war over Taiwan. The U.S. usually prevailed in these simulated engagements, but not without sustaining a huge loss of life and equipment. “The outcome varies from game to game,” said Bradley Martin, a senior policy researcher at the RAND Corp and a participant in the games, in remarks to reporters from Breaking Defense. “But what almost never changes is [that] it’s a bloody mess, and both sides take some terrible losses,” he noted. 

According to Breaking Defense, CSIS had not finished calculating the number of assets lost across all its games by early August, but, in general, project staff reported that the U.S. usually loses around 500 aircraft, 20 surface ships, and two aircraft carriers per game – a staggering loss for the U.S. unseen since World War II. The loss of the carriers alone – each carrying a crew of some 5,000 – would prove a powerful psychological loss and significantly diminish the U.S.’s capacity to project power abroad. (Not reported by CSIS are the likely losses to China and Taiwan, each of which would no doubt suffer enormously.) 

All of the exercises assume that China initiates the action by commencing an invasion of Taiwan, prompting U.S. intervention and eventual Chinese defeat after the loss of many of its ships and planes. “It is a very tough sell for China such that if Taiwan resisted and the U.S. came to Taiwan’s aid, there’s an extremely low possibility that China would be successful,” said Matthew Cancian, who served as one of the game’s chief architects. “But, the U.S. takes a lot of losses…. In a lot of games, the U.S. will lose almost its entire global fleet of tactical aviation.” 

In order to ensure consistency across the games and allow for a clear outcome, CSIS ruled out the use of nuclear weapons in its exercises. Hence, China suffers a defeat at the conventional level without escalating to the use of such weapons – an inherently questionable limitation. However, another Washington-based think-tank, the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), conducted a similar war game in June, in which the players were not barred from using nuclear munitions and, in fact, the “red team” (playing China) did so, altering the outcome of the game.

The red team’s first move “took a page from Putin’s playbook in Ukraine,” with China threatening to use nuclear weapons should the West decide to interfere in an “internal affair” concerning Taiwan. While the “blue team” (playing the U.S. and its allies) believed the size of the U.S. nuclear arsenal would deter China from using its own nuclear weapons, it “was also careful to avoid attacking targets that might threaten the Chinese regime.” However, the blue team was proven wrong in the last move of the game, when the red team conducted a nuclear demonstration near Hawaii – far enough away to not result in loss of life, but close enough to signal the credibility of its threats, CNAS stated in its report on the game. (Since this occurred during the last move of the wargame, the CNAS reported, we do not know how the Blue team would have responded, but this likely would have been viewed as a major escalation.)

Aside from the difference concerning the allowable use of nuclear weapons, the CSIS and CNAS war games largely agreed in the eventual outcome, Breaking Defense reported: “a situation in which China is unlikely to successfully take over the whole of Taiwan, but where the U.S. and China would be locked into a protracted war with massive losses of equipment and personnel by both the Chinese and U.S. sides in the initial weeks of the campaign – a devastating scenario unlike any conflict since World War II.” 

“Fighting a peer military is incredibly different than trying to bomb ISIS into submission in Iraq and Syria,” noted Becca Wasser, a participant in CSIS’s wargame and director of the Gaming Lab at CNAS. “There is going to be massive loss of life, there are going to be ships sunk at the bottom of the ocean, and we haven’t had to deal with that. That’s going to be a massive change in the American psyche, for the average American citizen watching this unfold, but also for our military.”