Five miles off Taiwan’s coast, ZTD-05 amphibious vehicles roll out of ships and zip over the water amid a hail of artillery fire. The Chinese soldiers inside have their orders: Seize the beach, or die trying.
Close by, China’s airborne troops are taking losses. They arrived before dawn in low-flying Y-20 aircraft to seize Taoyuan Airport. Taiwanese defenders downed several planes. The paratroopers that landed, scattered, are in a race to assault the airfield before Taiwan wrecks it.
This hypothetical battle scenario imagines a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, as militaries, policymakers and wargamers are doing. An amphibious invasion would be one of the toughest military operations to execute. And, an all-out war would be extremely bloody, devastate the global economy and change the course of the 21st century.
Whether Beijing will try to conquer the democratically governed island by force is the biggest geopolitical unknown facing the world. A close second: How the U.S., Taiwan’s main defense partner, would respond.
The flip side is that Beijing knows these problems better than most. A hot war isn’t inevitable, but Chinese leader Xi Jinping has asked his military planners to get ready, driving a rapid peacetime buildup.
Shape of the war
How would an invasion unfold? A lot would depend on what Taiwan does to fight back, whether the U.S. intervenes and how well Chinese forces work together across the skies, seas, sand and space.
Chinese doctrine and Western experts point to three broad phases. First, China would hit Taiwan with missile barrages. Second, its ships would cross the Taiwan Strait and amphibious units would attempt to land on one or more beaches. Third, Chinese forces would break out of the landing zone and launch a ground assault for Taipei.
In reality, the war would involve a dizzying array of attacks and counterattacks. China could begin by snapping up Taiwan’s small outer islands. It could enforce a blockade to squeeze Taipei into submission. It could sever undersea internet cables to plunge the island into digital darkness, or order crippling cyberattacks.
Phase 1: Firepower
China would unleash a “joint firepower strike,” pounding Taiwan with missiles. The goals: to “soften” Taiwan up by battering its defenses, make it safer for Chinese ships to cross the strait, break Taiwan’s will to fight, and dissuade a U.S. intervention with a strong show of force.
The campaign would likely involve hundreds of missiles falling on hundreds of targets, from Taiwan’s air defense systems and air force bases, to ammunition bunkers, command hubs and coastal artillery. The blitz would aim to destroy warplanes on the ground, crater runways and discombobulate the defenders.
How long the bombardment lasts—a few days or a few weeks—is a crucial decision Chinese warplanners would have to make. Stretching it out could give the U.S. time to act, but failing to eliminate key capabilities could imperil the invasion’s next steps.
China has undertaken a dramatic buildup of missiles. The Rocket Force, which was elevated to a full military branch a decade ago, has 3,500 missiles across different ranges.
Phase 2: Crossing and landing
After the blitz comes the amphibious assault. In this part of the invasion, Chinese ships would be sunk, landing forces could be blown up in the water or cut down on beaches and fighting akin to bloody World War II battles might unfold.
How would it begin? Thousands of Chinese troops and millions of tons of warfighting equipment would move to coastal staging areas in China on trucks, trains and planes—potentially tipping off its adversaries.
“If they’re going to go big—and they’re either going to go big or they’re not going to go—it’s going to take a lot of preparation,” said Dennis Blasko, a former U.S. Army attaché in Beijing and Hong Kong.
In the last two years, however, some People’s Liberation Army watchers have begun to wonder if it could use the cover of military exercises to obscure the warning signs. Since 2022, Chinese drills around Taiwan have grown far more complex and realistic. If that trend intensified year after year, China could pivot to a rapid, high-intensity attack, some experts said.
Picking the right landing spots would be tricky.
If amphibious forces headed to southern Taiwan, they might have an easier fight since Taiwan’s army is concentrated in the island’s north. But after that, they would have to wage a grinding overland campaign to Taipei, river by river, ridgeline by ridgeline, said Mark Cancian, a retired colonel in the U.S. Marine Corps who has run wargames simulating such a scenario.
Defenders could blow up bridges, collapse tunnels and bog down the enemy in cities or mountains.
Approaching Taiwan from the north would put the landing teams closer to Taipei, but they would meet stiff resistance on and beyond the beach from tanks, artillery, mines and more. Taiwan would focus its counterattacks and plant booby traps on the limited pathways out of the beaches.
Since a military restructuring in 2017, China has honed an A-team that would likely act as the spearhead. They are the army’s six amphibious combined arms brigades, totaling around 30,000 troops and more than 2,400 vehicles, Blasko’s research shows. These forces would cross the strait on ships, launch into the water in speedy armored vehicles, and “swim” to the target beach in rows.
China has also rapidly built out its marine corps, from two brigades in 2017 to 11 today, that would execute missions in tandem or separately from the army.
The most-debated question: Can Chinese forces and their weapons get across the Taiwan Strait in the numbers they need?
China’s navy has dozens of amphibious ships, but not hundreds. It hasn’t hugely ramped up production of the types of landing vessels that would best serve a Taiwan attack, though it could do so relatively easily in the future, being the world’s top shipbuilder. Instead, it has churned out ever-larger warships better suited to projecting power far from China’s shores.
These behemoths would nonetheless be pressed into service for a Taiwan fight.
To fill the gap in “sealift,” China’s military would lean on a secondary source: civilian ships. Take for instance roll-on roll-off ferries that typically carry passengers, trucks and cargo, but are now built to defense standards and train with the military.
These large ships have modified ramps that can drop down until submerged, allowing armored vehicles to roll out into the water, said Michael Dahm, a retired U.S. Navy intelligence officer and senior resident fellow at the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies. The stern ramps can withstand heavy waves and weight, he said.
The main challenge would be scaling up for a conflict in which they would need to convoy in close formation under the protection of warships sailing alongside, Dahm said.
Phase 3: Breakout and seize Taipei
A successful beach assault offers a foothold. After that, however, waves of soldiers—potentially hundreds of thousands—need to follow to break out of the beach, push deeper and take Taipei. Their equipment, such as heavy battle tanks and truckloads of bullets, fuel and medical supplies, can’t swim ashore.
The best way in is a port.
“If they take a port it’s kind of game over,” said Thomas Shugart, an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security.
That is because China could then bring in civilian ferries, deck cargo ships and other commercial vessels. These would be loaded up with warfighters and large volumes of logistics needed for a ground campaign. “The vast majority of their sealift is going to be the commercial stuff and its supply is near limitless,” said Shugart.
This is Taiwan’s nightmare. To avoid it, its forces could sabotage its ports to keep them out of Chinese hands or sink ships in the channel to block access.
This year, another capability showed up on the Chinese coast: mobile piers that can be used to unload directly onto a beach or possibly to a damaged port. The setup consists of three barges that line up one behind the other, close to the shore. Each has retractable legs that thrust down into the seabed to hold the ships in position.
Once steadied, long bridges extend out, connecting one barge to the other, and the first barge to the shore, research by Dahm and Shugart shows.
The result is a 2,700-foot causeway where ferries or civilian cargo ships could pull up. Tanks, trucks and tactical vehicles would roll out to the bridge and onto Taiwan, possibly hundreds at a time. These piers would be vulnerable to attack, though, which means they could only be used once a beach was secured.
If China got a large force ashore, it would move on Taipei, waging a 21st-century battle for a megacity.
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