China’s war games near Taiwan could be used to conceal attack, US says

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China’s military exercises around Taiwan have become so extensive that they can soon be used as a “fig leaf” to conceal an attack on the island, according to the top US military commander in the Indo-Pacific.

Speaking at the Honolulu Defense Forum, navy Admiral Samuel Paparo also warned about rising co-operation between China, Russia and North Korea, describing it as an “emerging axis of autocracy”.

“China, Russia and North Korea have formed a triangle of troublemakers,” Paparo told the event sponsored by the Pacific Forum think-tank.

The People’s Liberation Army had significantly increased activity around Taiwan in recent years, leaving it more difficult to distinguish between large-scale exercises and actual preparations for an attack, Paparo said.

“We’re very close to that [point] where on a daily basis the fig leaf of an exercise could very well hide operational warning,” he said.

“Their aggressive manoeuvres around Taiwan right now are not exercises as they call them, they are rehearsals. They are rehearsals for the forced unification of Taiwan to the mainland.”

Referring to the growing co-operation between China, Russia and North Korea, Paparo said the US had seen “co-ordination in everything from bomber patrols that penetrate American ADIZ [air defence identification zones] to shared anti-satellite capabilities and advanced submarine technologies from the seabed to the heavens”.

Highlighting an example of increased Russian activity in the Indo-Pacific, one US defence official said Russia had launched seven newly built submarines, including three nuclear-powered boats armed with nuclear weapons, into the Indo-Pacific since the start its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The others were two nuclear-powered submarines carrying guided missiles, and two attack submarines.

Paparo expressed concern about China’s rising military activity, saying that the US had to move more quickly to close critical gaps, such as increasing the amount of weapons the Pentagon had at its disposal in the Indo-Pacific. American defence officials are concerned about not having enough weapons in the case of a war over Taiwan.

“Our magazines run low. Our maintenance backlogs grow longer each month . . . we operate on increasingly thin margins for error,” Paparo said. “Our opponents see these gaps, and they are moving aggressively to exploit them.”

Paparo, who recently hosted a summit on artificial intelligence, said the US military needed to move with more urgency in acquiring and deploying different kinds of “unmanned systems”. He said AI would be a “key tool” to help the US improve early warning signs of any possible attack on Taiwan.

Paparo has called for greatly boosting the production of autonomous systems to deploy in contested areas such as the Taiwan Strait to create a “hellscape” to deter or scupper a Chinese invasion.

But Paparo also warned that the US needed to quickly reform its procurement system, which many defence experts agree needs a comprehensive overall.

“This is a hard truth, technology alone is not going to win this fight. We’ve also got to reform defence bureaucracy with unprecedented urgency,” he said. “Procurement at the speed of combat, not at the speed of committees.”