Chinese attack on Taiwan ‘unwise’

The Pentagon’s top general has warned that any move on Taiwan would be a strategic mistake as bad as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

General Mark Milley says physically capturing the mountainous, heavily populated island would be a ‘very difficult military task’. Picture: Getty Images/AFP

The Pentagon’s top general has warned that any Chinese attack on Taiwan would be a strategic mistake as bad as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

“I think it would be unwise, it would be a political mistake, a geopolitical mistake, a strategic mistake, similar to what the strategic mistake is that (Russian President Vladimir) Putin has made in Ukraine,” US Joint Chiefs chairman General Mark Milley said.

General Milley did not say any attack on the self-governed, democratic island was imminent. But he said he believed that Chinese President Xi Jinping, who just won a historic third term as the country’s paramount leader and has declared uniting Taiwan with China a high priority, is a “rational actor”.

“I think he evaluates things on cost, benefit and risk and I think that he would conclude that an attack on Taiwan in the near future would be an excessive amount of risk, and would end in a strategic debacle for the Chinese military,” General Milley said.

That would stall China’s push toward becoming the world’s top economic and military power, he said.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine offered vivid lessons.

“One of the things people are learning is that war on paper is a whole lot different than real war,” General Milley said. “When blood is spilled, and people die, and real tanks are being blown up, things are a little bit different. There’s a lot of friction and fog and death in combat.”

He noted that the Chinese military had not been involved in combat since fighting the Vietnamese in 1979.

And he said that while China’s People’s Liberation Army could easily open an ­assault on Taiwan with bombs and missiles, physically capturing the mountainous, heavily populated island would be a “very difficult military task”.

“They would be playing a very, very dangerous game to cross the straits and invade the island of Taiwan. They don’t have the experience, the background to do it. They haven’t trained to do it yet,” he said.

On the invasion of Ukraine, General Milley said Russia had resorted to a “campaign of terror” targeting Ukraine’s civilian population after failing to achieve the strategic, operational and tactical objectives of its invasion.

It was, however, unlikely that Ukraine could militarily force Russia out of all of the territory it occupied, but a winter slowdown in fighting could create an opening for a political solution.

Russia was “imposing a campaign of terror, a campaign of maximum suffering on the Ukrainian civilian population in order to defeat Ukrainian morale”.

Many of the recent Russian strikes – including a barrage of dozens of missiles across Ukraine on Tuesday that General Milley said may have been the heaviest of the war – have targeted the country’s energy ­infrastructure.

“The deliberate targeting of the civilian power grid, causing excessive collateral damage and unnecessary suffering on the civilian population, is a war crime,” he said.

Moscow’s attacks on infrastructure, which General Milley said were likely to make for a tougher winter in Ukraine, came after a string of Russian failures to achieve its military objectives.

“The Ukrainians have achieved success after success after success,” he said.

“And the Russians have failed every single time.

“They’ve lost strategically, they’ve lost operationally, and I repeat, they lost tactically.”

Russia failed in its objective to overthrow President Volodymyr Zelensky and his government, as well as more limited goals such as seizing the Donbass region.

“The strategic reframing of their objectives, of the illegal ­invasion, have all failed – every single one of them,” he said.

AFP