Secretary of State Antony Blinken, while traveling in Cambodia Friday, said “there is no justification for this extreme, disproportionate, and escalatory military response,” adding the Chinese moves “are a significant escalation” in the region. White House National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby has said repeatedly this week that the U.S. Those peeks “would present a better picture of how the PLA may in future prosecute an invasion of Taiwan, or more generally how it would conduct a major military campaign,” than any long-planned exercise on the Chinese mainland ever could, Koh added.ĭefense officials said the military is watching the exercises closely, but generally, they have remained quiet about the Chinese actions. It will likely be a “bonanza of intelligence,” that could yield insights into “the strengths and weaknesses of PLA mobilization,” said Collin Koh, a research fellow at the Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies in Singapore. More significant will be the glimpses into how China deploys and uses its forces. The amphibious ship USS Tripoli is near Okinawa and the amphibious USS America is in the East China Sea.

To this point, the United States has publicly held back, saying very little about the exercises while keeping its Japan-based USS Ronald Reagan carrier strike group in the region, but not close to Taiwan. “The coordinated bracketing of the island is the kind of exercise that will be more applicable to an actual strike.” Previous Chinese drills have been “like driving a new car around a lot, as opposed to taking it out on the highway,” said Randy Schriver, who served as the Pentagon’s top Asia policy official in the Trump administration. The dozens of warplanes flying daily over the median line in the Taiwan Strait and warships prowling the waters off the coast represent a significant and ominous change to the status quo, and one that could have enormous consequences for the defense of Taiwan in the future, experts and officials said. Its ability to sustain those operations over time, if that’s what Beijing decides, will be a critical test for the military, and closely watched. China has brought dozens of aircraft, 13 ships, missile batteries and their crews to bear in the last days, signaling an ability to deploy quickly, even if it's close to home.

That makes these quickly assembled exercises around Taiwan a critical test for Beijing. But China is also learning plenty of lessons that could eventually prove more important in how it plans for any future strike against the island of 23 million people.įor all of China’s military might, the People’s Liberation Army has limited real-world experience outside of highly-choreographed domestic military exercises and hasn’t fired a shot in anger since border scraps with Vietnam that ended in the 1980s. a never-before-seen glimpse of how Beijing might launch a military campaign against the island. China’s massing of ships, aircraft and missiles near Taiwan is giving the U.S.

Modern warships and modern warplanes