China Invasion Of Taiwan In 2026 Will Fail, War Game Shows

A Chinese invasion of Taiwan in 2026 would result in heavy casualties among Chinese, United States, Taiwanese and Japanese forces, and it would not result in victory for Beijing, an independent Washington think tank says after conducting war game simulations of a possible conflict, Brad Lendon and Oren Liebermann reported for CNN.

Photo Insert: A war over Taiwan could leave a victorious US military in as crippled a state as the Chinese forces it defeated.

A war over Taiwan could leave a victorious US military in as crippled a state as the Chinese forces it defeated. At the end of the conflict, at least two US aircraft carriers would lie at the bottom of the Pacific and China’s modern navy, which is the largest in the world, would be in “shambles.”

Those are among the conclusions the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), made after running what it claims is one of the most extensive war-game simulations ever conducted on a possible conflict over Taiwan, the democratically ruled island of 24 million that the Chinese Communist Party claims as part of its sovereign territory despite never having controlled it.

Chinese leader Xi Jinping has refused to rule out the use of military force to bring the island under Beijing’s control.

CNN reviewed an advance copy of the report – titled “The First Battle of the Next War” – on the two dozen war scenarios run by CSIS, which said the project was necessary because previous government and private war simulations have been too narrow or too opaque to give the public and policymakers a true look at how conflict across the Taiwan Strait might play out.

“There’s no unclassified war game out there looking at the US-China conflict,” said Mark Cancian, one of the three project leaders and a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

“Of the games that are unclassified, they’re usually only done once or twice.” CSIS ran this war game 24 times to answer two fundamental questions: would the invasion succeed and at what cost? The likely answers to those two questions are no and enormous, the CSIS report said.

“The US and Japan lose dozens of ships, hundreds of aircraft, and thousands of service members. Such losses would damage the US global position for many years,” the report said. In most scenarios, the US Navy lost two aircraft carriers and 10 to 20 large surface combatants.

Approximately 3,200 US troops would be killed in three weeks of combat, nearly half of what the US lost in two decades of combat in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“China also suffers heavily. Its navy is in shambles, the core of its amphibious forces is broken, and tens of thousands of soldiers are prisoners of war,” it said. The report estimated China would suffer about 10,000 troops killed and lose 155 combat aircraft and 138 major ships.

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