Basically, you are saying that on technology alone, the PLA can piggyback the Taiwan invasion on Desert Storm. Keep that institutional memory in mind.
The fact that you pretty much asserted that the PLA will piggyback the Taiwan invasion on Desert Storm tells the world, not just me and the forum, that you never heard of the 'adaptation gap'.
We predict, project, and finally act. But the real world %99.999 of the time do not conform to what we predicted, projected, and acted upon. The difference that we found is called the 'adaptation gap'.
The great boxer Mike Tyson said: Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.
Before Tyson, the German field marshal Helmuth von Moltke said: No plan of operations extends with certainty beyond the first encounter with the enemy's main strength. Or to reformat: No plan survives contact with the enemy.
Just in case you think I made up this 'adaptation gap'...
Adapting to change is the competitive advantage of today.
www.forbes.com
Companies don’t fail because of changes in the environment, they fail because their leaders are either unwilling or incapable of dealing with said change. In fact, companies don’t change. People do. Which means that to stay competitive in today’s environment warrants not only the skill and will to adapt to change but also the foresight to anticipate it.
But there is a critical difference between business in the civilian world versus business in the military world: Death.
In the civilian world, you can quickly adapt by mergers, acquisitions, or joint ventures with who was/were once your competitor(s). But in the military world, failure to adapt or inadequate speed of adaptation equals to death.
How critical is compensation for that gap?
Professor Amy Zegart, national security specialist at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University, said:
...magnitude of change. It is one thing to say that an organization changes, quite another to say that it adapts. More specifically, adaptation involves large changes, or the accumulation of many smaller ones that lead to a transformation in what an organization does or how it does it.
Williamson Murray, military historian and author, said:
Consequently, one of the foremost attributes of military effectiveness must lie in the ability of armies, navies, or air forces to recognize and adapt to the actual conditions of combat, as well as to the new tactical, operational, and strategic, not to mention political, challenges that war inevitably throws up.
That ability to make the necessary change is understandably called 'adaptability'. It is up to the person or the institution to change the current course of heading to conform to the real world. And no military is better than the US military -- as an institution -- to rapidly close that gap. But how is the US military got so good at it?
If it is not possible to have zero difference between the predicted and the real world, the ideal situation then is to have as small as possible that gap, which then begs the question on how to have as small a gap as possible for the next war? For this, we go back to WW II where we learned from the Wehrmacht.
Auftragstaktik
apps.dtic.mil
Gen. Helmuth von Moltke, the Chief of the Prussian General Staff during the Franco-Prussian War, defined Auftragstaktik as the actions a subordinate took in the absence of orders that supported the senior commanders intent. The use of mission tactics allowed subordinate commanders like Crown Prince Frederick Karl, Gen. Konstantin von Alvensleben, and Gen. Karl von Steinmetz to interpret how best to achieve the commanders intent based upon their understanding of the tactical situation.
Many 20th century theorists who advocated central planning and control (from Gaetano Mosca to Carl Landauer, and hearkening back to Plato’s Republic) drew a direct analogy between economic contr
www.realcleardefense.com
The Americans, when they saw that most bold tactical maneuvers happened without or even against orders, and that the commanders other than Patton generally met with slow progress, adopted the Auftragstaktik model. These methods may not even seem foreign to modern soldiers or veterans, as it is still actively promoted by the US Marine Corps.
Basically, what
Auftragstaktik does, as a military cultural mindset, is to replace the rigid instructions/orders based mode of battle to that of
INTENTION based, meaning junior officers and NCOs are allowed tactical flexibility to discard previous orders if in the heat of combat they found a more effective tactic to achieve the original goal. The result was the
blitzkrieg.
While adaptation is important, it is important to recognize two critical types. Tactical adaptation is bottoms up and usually
DURING combat. Strategic adaptation is top down and always before the war. The 1973 Yom Kippur War between Israel and Egypt had both. The Egyptian Army had strategic adaptation. The IDF had tactical adaptation. Look up who won.
Go back to what Zegat said:
adaptation involves large changes, or the accumulation of many smaller ones. Institutions, specifically people and bureaucracies, changes better when the changes are small ones. Tactical adaptations are better and easier to transmit and recorded, which also make it easier to correlate among the many units to discriminate out commonalities, which then leads to better institutional adaptations.
Here is the escalation path:
Tactical adaptations comes from battlefield leaders from colonels down to NCOs, even junior NCOs. Theater level adaptations are developed by junior generals and admirals from what was given to them by the battlefield commanders. Strategic level adaptations are made by senior generals and admirals back at the capitals.
All these lead up to this point: That the more experienced a military, the smaller the adaptation gap on the next war, and the quicker the adaptability when encountering tactics and even weapons not seen before.
The PLA last combat experience was in 1979. Since then, much have changed in terms of technology, politics, environments, and even people. Mao gave the PLA "The People's War", a defeatist military philosophy that essentially require the armed forces to be passive and to allow an enemy ingress into the country before doing anything. And for decades, the PLA organized itself around that philosophy and exported that philosophy, but never actually fought with it. Now, you are saying that the PLA can invade Taiwan on an environment -- the sea -- that it has no experience in, using a tool -- an amphibious fleet -- that it never used before, and on a scale that not even D-Day can match. And that the PLA will use Desert Storm, a land warfare event, as template just because the PLA have more ballistic missiles than Taiwan.
Critical to introspection is the willingness to be self critical.
www.benning.army.mil
Adaptation is the act of adjusting one's actions, assumptions, or predictions about the operational environment in a way that alters interaction with that environment either in the immediate timeframe or in preparation for future interaction (assumedly to better achieve one's goals). Individuals and units constantly adapt, as a result of field problems as well as operational deployments. Innovation, on the other hand, occurs during periods of peace and is characterized by having "time available to think through problems."
Look at the highlighted above. Adaptations occurs in war. Innovations occurs in peace.
What have the PLA innovated, not for itself but for the arts and science of warfare, during China's decades of peace since 1979? Nothing.
THAT is the best evidence of the lack of self criticism. Adapatation is like an emergency, ie war, and necessary. But analyzing past wars and trying to anticipate future ones is optional and even though one maybe wrong, at least there is an attempt, and the PLA also failed miserably on that.
One of the more insightful analysts of warfare is Sir Michael Howard:
December 2019 HandgrenadeSir Michael Howard and the Moral Imperatives of WarJohn T. KuehnIf you live in this world,You’re feelin’ the change of the GuardDonald Fagen and Walter Becker, 1971 (probably earlier)
networks.h-net.org
I am tempted indeed to declare dogmatically that whatever doctrine the Armed Forces are working on now, they have got it wrong. I am also tempted to declare that it does not matter that they have got it wrong. What does matter is their capacity to get it right quickly when the moment arrives.
Taiwanese defense is just as inexperienced as the PLA. But make no mistake that with US technical assistance, they
WILL give the PLA that moment of change and we will see how quickly can the PLA adapt. All Taiwanese defense have to do is exact 1 out of 4 PLA attackers to cancel the invasion.
