Would the President Be in Charge During a War in Taiwan?

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With 5 months remaining until the November elections, candidates Joe Biden and Donald Trump have, over the last few months, staked out positions on key issues on the geopolitical stage. One of the more noteworthy examples was Trump’s acquiescent opinion given to reporters about how Congressional Republicans could get behind the controversial military aid package passed in May.

Another flashpoint was Joe Biden’s recent comments on whether the United States would militarily intervene if China launched an attack against Taiwan.

In an interview with TIME, Biden gave his best shot at “clarifying” his position on the use of American bodies, ships, and planes to defend Taiwan

“It would depend on the circumstances. You know, by the way, I’ve made clear to Xi Jinping that we agree with—we signed on to previous presidents going way back—to the policy of, that, it is we are not seeking independence for Taiwan nor will we, in fact, not defend Taiwan if they if, if China unilaterally tries to change the status. And so we’re continuing to supply capacity. And, and we’ve been in consultation with our allies in the region,” said the President.

When asked to re-clarify if he is not ruling out US troops being deployed, he responded that he was “not ruling out using US military force,” adding that there “is a distinction between deploying on the ground, air power and naval power, etc.”

It’s no secret that Biden has difficulty communicating as exhibited by the constant mistakes and loss of thought train in the TIME interview, but this section underlines the consequences of that as regards a conflict that would take place over 8,000 miles away and 12 hours from Washington.

It’s a conflict where Washington’s opponent sits one-eightieth of that distance away from their target, and where POTUS has moments to decide how to respond to a conflict that’s predicted to be decided itself in just moments.

In a series of war games run 24 times at the Center for International and Strategic Studies in January 2023, the authors of the simulations determined that the most significant decisions needed to be made immediately—that US forces must directly engage as fast as possible, as well as those of the Japanese, who haven’t committed to defending Taiwan’s independence.

“The invasion always starts the same way,” the authors write, “an opening bombardment destroys most of Taiwan’s navy and air force in the first hours of hostilities. Augmented by a powerful rocket force, the Chinese navy encircles Taiwan and interdicts any attempts to get ships and aircraft to the besieged island”.

“In the first hours” is a key detail, during which the authors conclude that the only way for Taiwan to remain independent and for the United States to be able to declare anything other than a “pyrrhic victory” is for the Commander-in-Chief to order US forces to “quickly engage in direct combat”.

If the worst predictions about an attack on Taiwan come true, then it would either be Trump or Biden who would have to, as the authors write, “recognize the need to continue operations in the face of heavy casualties,” predicting that in three weeks, “the United States will suffer about half as many casualties as it did in 20 years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan,” which could be over 5,000.

A second opinion

In the book The Doomsday Machine, the famous RAND Corporation whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg revealed that President Eisenhower had disseminated command and control of America’s Asia-Pacific nuclear weapons to a certain Harry D. Felt, admiral of CINCPAC, or Pacific Fleet Command—the latter directly telling Ellsberg that he had received such orders from Eisenhower via a letter and that he could not say for certain that no other letters of similar nature were distributed to any other senior theater commanders.

In a loosely similar parallel, Biden’s attempt at clarification on his Taiwan policy, the consequences of which (decided in mere hours) mean engaging directly in wartime conflict with a near-peer nuclear power, come just three weeks before Admiral Samuel Paparo, the head of US Indo-Pacific Command, told Washington Post reporters with perfect clarity his intention to turn the Taiwan Strait into an “unmanned hellscape using a number of classified capabilities so that I can make [the Chinese] lives utterly miserable for a month, which buys me the time for the rest of everything”.

Paparo’s plan is a serious one, as the war games conducted by CISS rule out the possibility of a “Ukraine solution” whereby weapon systems and ammunition are funneled into the country after the conflict begins. The Red Sea shipping attacks by the Houthis and the Ukrainian war have both demonstrated how important unmanned systems will be to the future of warfare because of their much lower cost compared to sophisticated anti-projectile missiles and piloted machines.

The People’s Liberation Army won’t want to send tens of thousands of its soldiers across the 60 miles of water when each ship could be sent to the bottom by a disposable robot that has a cost of five figures.

However effective Paparo’s strategy might be, it calls into question exactly who would be making the decisions in the critical hours following an attack by Beijing. Will military commanders like Paparo be able to weigh all the appropriate risks? In Ellsberg’s book, several commanders he interviewed during the 1950s, which included an Air Force major in addition to Admiral Felt and others, believed that the nature and ethics of commanding men in wartime gave them a sort of moral obligation to launch a nuclear attack in order to give their men the best chance of surviving a battle.

With Vladimir Putin’s Russia now conducting joint-military drills with China in the seas off Taiwan, and with diplomatic relations between the two countries at a historic height, there are even more consequences for choosing to “quickly engage in direct combat”. What if Russia begins to assist the invasion and, with any flexible decision-making limited by Biden’s clearly impeded cognitive abilities, Paparo conducts operations just as Admiral Felt believed he should and the US is suddenly engaged on the other side of the world with the largest and third largest nuclear powers?

In the CISS war games, America loses two aircraft carriers and 10 to 20 smaller surface ships. What decisions are made, either by authorities with unknown powers of action delegated to them, or by Biden in Washington, if the US sustains these losses? While the outcomes typically end in a hollow US/Japanese victory, the Japanese always allow the US to use bases on Okinawa to strike at China, and the war games were run under the conditions that PLA fifth-generation fighter aircraft (J-20) were produced in limited numbers.

Some statements from Indo-Pacific Command suggest otherwise, with Pacific Air Forces commander Gen. Kenneth Wilsbach commenting in 2022 that “they seem to be a building a lot,” of the J-20s. In addition, Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall said that the PLA has enjoyed an “iterative” approach to innovation in their fighter aircraft, allowing them to make smaller advances more frequently than the US, which Kendall said made larger advances less frequently. Additionally, reporting at The Diplomat suggests that China is advancing towards their sixth-generation fighter, which would seem to indicate that a fifth-generation one is largely a complete piece of technology. The author estimates that 300 J-20s may already be ready for action.

Imagining a situation in which slightly more planes and ships are destroyed attempting to stop the amphibious invasion of Taiwan and Japan pulls out at the first sign of trouble—both perfectly reasonable scenarios given the advances in Chinese aircraft—are these situations where an American could reasonably expect Trump or Biden to be capable of making key decisions in limited time with potential nuclear costs? WaL