 All right. Good morning everyone and welcome to the United States Institute of Peace. We are delighted that you could join us today for our discussion about China's military modernization and Beijing's intentions vis-à-vis Taiwan. My name is Jennifer Statz and I'm the Director for East Asia and Pacific Programs here at the US Institute of Peace and it's my honor to be moderating today's session. For those of you who don't know us, the US Institute of Peace was founded by the US Congress in 1984 as a national nonpartisan public institution focused on preventing, mitigating, and resolving violent conflict around the world. Not surprisingly, much of our work today focuses on how we can avert crisis and promote peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait. That's largely because as you know in today's world of increasing strategic competition between the United States and China, Taiwan stands out as the issue with the greatest potential to trigger a violent conflict in the Indo-Pacific. The stakes are high, not only for the United States and China, but most importantly for the 23 million people who call Taiwan home. If you've been following the news lately, you may have come to the conclusion that prospects for peace in the Taiwan Strait appear bleak. PRC provocations around Taiwan have increased considerably in recent months. The most notable example being large-scale military exercises undertaken by the PLA in response to then- Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi's visit to Taiwan in August of last year. Meanwhile, as China continues to advance its decades-long military modernization process, many are becoming increasingly concerned that the PLA will use its new capabilities to compel Taiwan to accept unification. In light of all of these developments, the National Defense University's new edited volume titled Crossing the Strait, China's Military Prepares for War with Taiwan explores the political and military context of cross-strait relations today. Its authors focus on understanding the Chinese decision calculus related to the use of military force, the capabilities that China's military would potentially bring to the fight, and what Taiwan can do to defend itself. It is a timely addition to the conversation around one of today's most pressing peace and security issues. Today, we are privileged to have four of the volume's authors with us to explore their findings. Andrew Scobell, Phil Saunders, Joel Withnow, and Alexander Huang. We're going to start off with opening questions for each of them, and then we'll leave plenty of time at the end for questions and answers, including questions from the audience. If you're watching this on the USIP website, there is a chat box on the website page, and you can enter your questions there. If you're watching us on YouTube, you'll need to go to the USIP page to type in your questions. So with that, let's dive in. Our first speaker will be Dr. Andrew Scobell. Dr. Scobell is a distinguished fellow for China at the United States Institute of Peace. Previously, he was a senior political scientist at Rand. He has published a number of books and monographs on the PLA, China's Grand Strategy, and Civil Military Relations in China. He was born in Hong Kong and earned a PhD in political science from Columbia University. So Andrew, thank you for getting us started off and for organizing today's event. We'll pass the first question to you, which is this, an easy one to get us started. Is China preparing for war with Taiwan? Thanks, Jennifer. I guess the short answer is yes, but there has been a long-term goal of the Chinese Communist Party is to achieve unification with Taiwan. And this hasn't precluded the use of force, but this goal to have the capability to capture Taiwan is more of a medium to long-term one rather than a short term, a short timeline. So the good news is, if you can call it good news, is there's no discernible sense of urgency. But on the other hand, there's plenty to be worried about. Let me make four quick points. First, Taiwan's always been a high priority of the Chinese Communist Party realizing unification. It's become even more prominent under Xi Jinping. And now there is an explicit link made between achieving national rejuvenation and realizing unification with Taiwan. And Taiwan has always been, or for many decades, has been identified as a core interest for China. And of course, what does core interest mean? It means what's worth fighting for. And Taiwan's a category, the highest category in that core interest. And in fact, China's foreign minister, I'm sorry, defense minister last November in a face-to-face with Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said explicitly that Taiwan is the core of the core. So I think it just accentuates that Taiwan is extremely important for Beijing. Secondly, the PLA continues to build up its capabilities that are useful in a Taiwan scenario. It stepped up exercises and trainings with a clear focus of preparing for a military operation against Taiwan. Thirdly, what we've seen as you alluded to in your introductory remarks, we've seen elevated tensions, extreme gray zone activities. More and more, it's become routine for PLA forces to violate the median line in the Taiwan Strait. You mentioned the tensions around the Pelosi visit. That was the most sizable show of force in the Taiwan Strait since the mid-1990s. And that was the third so-called third Taiwan Strait crisis. So many people refer to what happened last August as the fourth Taiwan Strait crisis. Fourthly, since the 1980s, the strategy or policy from Beijing vis-à-vis Taiwan has been peaceful unification. That said, Beijing has never renounced the use of force. I think it's worth asking, what does peaceful mean? It may not mean what the US Institute of Peace thinks it means, or anyone in Taiwan thinks it means, or anyone listening to this thinks it means. From Beijing's perspective, peaceful, it's worth what that means. It's worth looking at some, how they've used that term and an analogy that's been used in recent years. That is, the peaceful surrender of Beijing, which was then called Beiping in the Chinese Civil War. This has been an explicit analogy made by authoritative commentators in China. So they talk about the peaceful, made the explicit parallel between peaceful resolution of the Taiwan unification and the surrender of Beiping. So what's important to keep in mind is that the surrender of Beiping was, yes, it was peaceful, but it was the result of extreme coercion. That probably wouldn't have happened without the bloody seizure of Tianjin. So this is actually called the Pingjin campaign. So as seen as one campaign, Beijing and Tianjin are quite close together. And so the bloody seizure of capture of Tianjin signaled to the nearby nationalist garrison in Beiping that if you don't surrender, you're going to suffer thousands of casualties, thousands of deaths, and tens of thousands of injuries. And the alternative is surrender. And that's indeed what happened. So this is how Beijing in 2023 understands peaceful. So that's a rather ominous thought. So to wrap up really in a sense, we tend to think of dichotomy between war and peace. And I think what's worth bearing in mind is that in the mind of Xi Jinping and other polypures to any committee members, there is a continuum between war and peace. And so while we should be concerned about a major military operation, aka the invasion of Taiwan, we shouldn't ignore gray zone activities because that's another way for Beijing to achieve so-called peaceful unification. Thanks. Stop there. Great. Thank you very much for getting us off to a strong start and plenty of ideas to think about and talk about as the session goes on. Our next speaker will be Dr. Philip Saunders. Dr. Saunders is the Director of the Center for the Study of Chinese Military Affairs and a Distinguished Research Fellow at the Institute for National Strategic Studies at National Defense University. He previously worked at the Monterey Institute of International Studies where he directed the East Asian Nonproliferation Program. And from 1989 to 1994, he served as an officer in the Air Force. Dr. Saunders is the co-author with David Gompert of The Paradox of Power, Sino-American Strategic Restraint in an Area of Vulnerability, and the editor of eight books on Chinese military and security issues. He attended Harvard College and received his MPA and PhD in International Relations from Princeton University. Phil, thank you so much for joining us today. And for all of your work on this volume, following up on Andrew's excellent remarks, can you tell us a little bit more about how and why China might launch a war against Taiwan? Thanks. Sure. Let me pick up where he stopped. I think China's preference for peaceful unification is real because that avoids the high costs and risks of trying to resolve this issue with force. But I agree with him. Peaceful for the PRC mind doesn't mean that military force won't be used in coercive ways to get there. And in my chapter of the book, I talk about PRC policy toward Taiwan and make the argument that they've mixed and matched three different tools, persuasion, why Taiwan ought to want to be part of a unified China, united front tactics, and leverage. And the problem they've had is persuasion is less and less effective as the PRC becomes more authoritarian, as people in Taiwan look at what's happened in Xinjiang, and especially as they look at what's happened in Hong Kong. And they think if we do a deal with Beijing, they're not going to live up to their side of the bargain. So persuasion is less effective. United front is good for opposing Taiwan independence, but it's a lot less good for encouraging unification. And the result has been an increased PRC reliance on leverage and coercion, that set of tools in dealing with Taiwan. So what might cause Beijing to use force? I can think of a couple different things, and I'll walk through them. One of them are formal conditions. If Taiwan declares dujeure independence, if the U.S. reestablishes official relations or military alliance with Taiwan, those are conditions that Beijing has said would justify the use of force. A second set of things involves chaos or instability on Taiwan, or a decision by Taiwan to pursue nuclear weapons. Again, these are conditions Beijing has said formally would justify the use of force. And precisely for that reason, people on Taiwan and Taiwan leaders are not stupid. They're not going to try to do those things that might trigger a war. Then we get into more subtle things. What if PRC leaders decide that peaceful unification is impossible, and that the time has finally come to unify? I think to date they've been very careful not to set a hard deadline and to box themselves into it, because a deadline turns into an ultimatum, and then you face a decision, do I go even if I'm not ready, or do I back down from a deadline and look weak? So they've been careful not to do that. Even the much-vaunted date of 2027 is a capability goal that the PLA wants the capability to be able to invade Taiwan by then. There's two other things that are mentioned that I don't think are very likely, but I'm going to mention them here for completeness. One is domestic pressure in China or the idea of a diversionary war. If there's problems on the PRC side, might they start a war with over Taiwan to divert attention? I think these are both unlikely. The PRC leaders have a lot of ability to control the propaganda apparatus, to suppress protests, and they can switch to the goal of deterring independence, which is easy to do, and away from the goal of achieving unification, which is harder to do. So I don't think they're likely to be pressured into a war they don't want. And then the other scenario talked about sometimes is a small military incident that escalates into a broader war, an airplane collision, ships crashing into each other or a little bit of a fire incident that escalates. It's interesting that people in Taiwan and the PRC both see that as really unlikely. They think you don't get escalation into war unless one side or the other wants it to happen, and I tend to agree with that. So I'll close with the final point. What does worry me? What worries me is that Taiwan takes a step toward independence that they think is just another little tiny salami slice, and Beijing says, whoa, you've gone over the red line. Or in the case of the United States, we do a little bit more in our official to make our relationship with Taiwan more official or a little more on the military side. We see it as an incremental modest step and Beijing decides that's a step over the red line. It's not tolerable. We have to use force to resolve this. So that potential for misperception where the US and Taiwan think we're doing something incremental that's not qualitatively different, and Beijing decides that is a step over the red line. We have to use force. We can't allow this to stand. And the biggest worry is Beijing might redefine what its red lines are, something that was okay last week. This week is intolerable. We wouldn't have a lot of visibility into that. So let me close there. Wonderful. Thank you. A lot of more terrific food for thought. So look forward to diving into some of this in the discussion period. But we'll turn now to our third speaker, Dr. Joel Wuthnow. Dr. Wuthnow is senior research fellow in the Center for the Study of Chinese Military Affairs in the Institute for National Strategic Studies at National Defense University. He also serves as an adjunct professor at Georgetown. And Dr. Wuthnow has worked as a China analyst at CNA, a postdoctoral fellow in the China and the World program at Princeton University, and a predoctoral fellow at the Brookings Institution. He holds degrees from Princeton and Oxford and received his PhD from Columbia University. So Joel, our first two speakers have really laid an excellent foundation of how China is thinking about a potential war. Can you tell us a little more about what a war might actually look like? Thanks. Sure. Thanks so much, Jennifer. Thanks to USIP for hosting this and also for co-organizing the annual PLA conference that this research flows out from. So this is a big and complicated question. I'm going to kind of focus on some of the insights from the volume, looking mostly at how we think the PLA is preparing to fight a future conflict with Taiwan. So the first point I would make here is that even though Department of Defense has recently started talking about Taiwan as sort of the pacing scenario, I think it's fair to say that for the PLA, this has been their pacing scenario since 1993, when they fundamentally overhauled their military strategy, started orienting towards Taiwan and have been building up certain capabilities to do these sorts of things. And so this is not new for them. It's really something they've been fundamentally focused on. So they've given a lot of thought to different cross-strait operations. In a nutshell, I think what we find is that they've been talking mostly about three different distinct campaigns relevant for Taiwan. So a fire strike campaign, so that's really a missile bombardment campaign, a blockade campaign, and then finally, of course, the island landing campaign that gets all the attention in the war games. So in the volume, Michael Casey does a pretty good job in sketching each of these campaigns based on a lot of PLA writings from the last 20 years. Although it's worth noting, I think that as of two and a half years ago, the PLA started to revise its joint doctrine. And so the wars they might fight in the future along these lines may not look exactly like they would have 10 or 15 years ago. So I think we could potentially see the first two of these campaigns being conducted alone to put huge pressure on the Taiwan government, so either a bombardment of sorts or a blockade of the main island or of an offshore island. The alternative is really to kind of to do it all at once with as little advanced notice as possible given to Taiwan and the United States. So maybe not quite as surprising as Pearl Harbor 1941, but something as close as possible to that. What we don't see is a distinct counter-intervention campaign, but the PLA is candid that in all these approaches, the US probably will intervene. And so the PLA will have to take steps to delay or to frustrate or to defeat intervening US forces, mostly through long-range strike, and they have a lot of different ways they can do that, but also through non-kinetic means against US systems and capabilities. So I think one of the strengths of this volume is that we go into a pretty great amount of detail on the specific means that the PLA is going to have to solve the logistics challenges of any cross-strait campaign. So how are they actually going to get troops and equipment across 100 miles of water, which is truly a logistical nightmare worse than the Russians have faced in Ukraine, of course, because Taiwan is an island. So we learn in this book about the organizational reforms to the amphibious forces, which have been fairly significant over the last decade. We learn about some of the new concepts they're pursuing in terms of using civilian assets and even artificial harbors to facilitate landings when they don't have a port. And we learn about the airborne corps, which has also been reorganized in the PLA, but it's sometimes sort of lost from these discussions. One of my favorite chapters, I would say, is by one of our Taiwan colleagues, Chung Chie, who plumps through a lot of PLA sources to describe really the mammoth logistics and mobilization requirements for any operation across the Taiwan Strait. And this isn't to say that they have sort of given up and said, well, it's impossible. It's an impetus for reform. And so they've done quite a lot of changes to their logistics and mobilization systems, and I think more are being planned. A lot of the discussion also in the book is about how the PLA is trying to become more joint. And it's going to have to be because all of these campaigns require a very high degree of coordination between the different services and branches. But historically, this hasn't been the strength of the PLA. And of course, we've seen from the Russian case in Ukraine that jointness and practice can be very, very difficult in real world circumstances. So in my own chapter in the volume, I talk about improvements to the PLA's command structure. So the Eastern Theater Command is really quite a lot more joint than its predecessor in the managing military region, but also about some of the ways in which there are still bottlenecks in the system and what that could mean for defensive operations against the PLA. So to kind of wrap up, I think the PLA has been working this problem for decades, but they're still sort of in a place of transition. I don't think there's a lot of question anymore about their ability to pull off or to sustain the fire strike campaign or a blockade, assuming that the US doesn't intervene. But a full-scale amphibious invasion, I think, remains very difficult for the PLA. And they're working on the specific challenges they're going to need to deal with to be able to pull this off at some point. So this isn't a call for complacency, but I think it does suggest that there still is sort of a window. And this is distinct from the so-called 2027 Davidson window that Phil referenced earlier. But I do think there's a window now for Taiwan assisted or helped by the United States and some of our core allies in the region to get even more serious about Taiwan's defenses and the equipment and the training that they're going to need to pose a significant danger to anything the PLA tries to get across the Taiwan Strait. So let me wrap up there and turn it back over to you. Terrific. Thank you very much. And we'll now turn to our fourth speaker for the morning before we open up for discussion. And that's Dr. Alexander Huang. And Dr. Huang is a professor at the Institute of Strategic Studies at Tom Kong University and founder and chairman of the Council on Strategic and Wargaming Studies in Taiwan. He previously served in the Taiwan government as Deputy Minister of the Mainland Affairs Council, and he's worked closely with consecutive governments on foreign insecurity policy matters. Dr. Huang did his graduate work at Georgetown University and at George Washington University where he received his doctoral degree. Dr. Huang, thank you so much for joining us as we know how important it is to make sure that voices from Taiwan are included as part of this conversation. So my question for you is how is Taiwan preparing for the possibility of an attack from China? Thanks. Well, this has been an issue or a question that Taiwan has been dealing with for over 70 years. Thank you for the United States Institute of Peace and the NDU that host in this virtual conference. And I have several points to address the issue. The People's Republic of China or the People's Liberation Army has not engaged in a real war fighting since 1979. And the Taiwan military has not been engaged in a war since 1958. So for China, 43 years of no war experience in Taiwan military with 64 years without actual combat and war experience. The two sides are actually not in the major league in terms of international military conflict. Sometimes I joke that now the world is focusing on a possible kinetic military conflict between two amateurs. And that lay out an even more dangerous situation in the world. We had at the conference that finally produced a book Crossing the Strait. Before the Economist magazine identified Taiwan as the most dangerous place on earth and before the People's Liberation Army's drill in August 2022, immediately after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's visit to Taiwan. And as time passed, this is a great time for us to review and reassess that the probability of a military conflict across the Taiwan Strait in the immediate future and whether Taiwan is sustainable. In that book, Drew Thompson and I are in a specific category that we talk about the defense of Taiwan. While other authors were talking about China's preparation for a military attack on Taiwan. So we focused on our discussion on how Taiwan could defend itself. I have to say that it has been a long debate between the United States and Taiwan and professionals within Taiwan on the issue of how effectively that we can defend Taiwan, given the new development of the People's Liberation Army. One thing that we focused when we had the conference and when we revised the paper for publication was on a concept called Overall Defense Concept, ODC. And through the experience in the past two years, we realized that it is more crucial now for Taiwan to think seriously about a real possibility of the Chinese use of force against Taiwan. And Taiwan had the experience, especially in 2022 with two wake-up calls. One is the Russian full scale invasion of Ukraine. And the second one was the August 2022 military exercise that encircled Taiwan. And that two scenarios or two big events that actually reflected the topics of our chapters and the issues that we address during our conference and continue to guide us to look into how Taiwan can defend itself. The major topics that people are looking at is whether Taiwan has and or will adopt a full version or full capacity that following a concept of a fortress Taiwan or porcupine strategy that invests our modernization and military programs that focusing on the sustainability of Taiwan, that if China attacks that, that how Taiwan can defend itself individually or long enough until the international inference or support coming in politically, diplomatically, monetarily in all holistic perspective that can change the posture or change the situation surrounding Taiwan. In our discussion, both in the conference and the following year that looking at the same issue, we still focused on the deficiencies of a fortress Taiwan or porcupine strategy because there are issues like maritime energy supply lines that could not be fully addressed by the porcupine strategy. How Taiwan could deal with the gray zone tactics through traditional weapon systems and how Taiwan should utilize its newly adopted or introduced asymmetrical warfare concept to reframe that Taiwan's defense strategy. Right now, we have other issues. For instance, the backlog delivery of weapon systems that Taiwan has procured from the United States due to the COVID and other production problems. And also, we are also looking at the problems of Taiwan's mobilization of reserve forces and what kind of training that they could receive and whether Taiwan can extend its compulsory military service. All these issues have been dealt with but in a slow motion picture sense. So I would conclude by saying that there are good recommendations. There are new awareness about the situation, but given the potential of a kinetic military conflict, Taiwan still need a lot of time to reform and prepare. And before Taiwan can reach that point or a point of relative confidence to deal with a Chinese invasion alone, probably we need to focus also on diplomatic and other preventive diplomatic measures to help Taiwan by time. So the Taiwan Ministry can reform itself and connect better and train better with the assistance from the United States and other liberal democratic countries. So I believe this is an important subject and the issue will be with us for years to come. And thanks for the opportunity for me to contribute a chapter and I'm willing to continue to engage in discussion with all parties. Thank you so much. Wonderful. Thank you very much, Dr. Huang. And thank you to all of our speakers this morning for some really terrific introductory remarks. You've raised a number of really important and interesting issues and we're already getting some terrific questions in the chat, which we'll be exploring over the next half hour or so. So again, to those of you who are watching online, if you have a question that you'd like to pose to our panelists, please enter it into the chat box on the USIP website and we will be collecting those and trying to get in as many as we can before the event ends. So thanks. To start things off, I'd like to ask a question that has been on the mind of many here in Washington and really around the world over the last year or so, which is really trying to look at Russia's invasion of Ukraine and try to understand what lessons Beijing might be learning from what has seen transpire there. So I know this is a very popular question and a popular issue, very hard to really understand exactly what's going on. But fortunately, we have some panelists who've done a lot of thinking about this topic. So I want to turn first to Joel to see if he could shed some light on the lessons that Beijing may be drawing from Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Thanks. Sure. So I think I would kind of make three three points on this question. First of all, China cannot help but to have realized that there was a very high level of alliance coordination in terms of sanctions and even in terms of some of the training and assistance that had been provided to Ukraine. And so this probably did be Beijing to some degree to revise its assessments on the willingness, the ability of US allies to even pay a price in their relations with China if there ever were to be a war. And so I think what that has done is probably been to trigger more thinking at a higher level on the ways in which China can inoculate itself or to reduce the costs of sanctions of any conflicts. And so that's both on the financial side, but also on access to critical resources that China wouldn't want to have shot off for it in a conflict. And so I think there has been greater attention to this. The second is really on the military lessons for the PLA. What we don't have right now is sort of the authoritative readout or dissection of Russia's military ineffectiveness. This is a touchy subject for China. It's something that they don't necessarily want to humiliate their Russian colleagues that they're trying to show solidarity with right now. What you do see, however, are a lot of portraits of individual systems, weapons, and equipment. Some of this was reported in Reuters just a couple days ago, very good article. But they're looking at all dimensions of this, both the kinetic system, things like HIMARS that were very effective, but also things like Starlink, which proved to be very effective for Ukraine. And I think trying to puzzle through what that would mean for a Taiwan contingency, not only in terms of Taiwan's access to that and avoiding an information blackout by China, but also US use of those kinds of systems to preserve access to the Western Pacific. And then the final thing would be in terms of strategic deterrence. I think from China's perspective, one of the things that went right for the Russians was able to coerce the West, not to really militarily intervene in terms of boots on the ground, mainly through nuclear signaling at the start of the conflict. And so China has a similar idea of strategic deterrence as the Russians have. And so I think from their point of view, what this does is to make them more confident or even overconfident that they in some way could actually deter or diminish US and Western intervention by means of their signaling through their larger and more advanced nuclear and strategic capabilities. And so I worry that that would actually give them overconfidence in being able to deter US intervention and what that would mean for sort of crisis stability in a future of conflict with two nuclear armed countries. So I'll stop there. Terrific. Thank you very much. Very helpful in trying to understand this complicated issue. I think we'll turn next to Andrew Scobell to weigh in on the same question. Thanks, Jennifer. One quick observation falling from Joel's excellent analysis. Beijing and the PLA may not be learning the lessons from Ukraine that we hope they're learning or we think they might be learning. And so I think they do, as Joel said, probably have some overconfidence. That said, as I think Phil emphasized, it is a risky launching a major military operation against Taiwan is risky. And it's riskier than Ukraine. So we can't see inside Xi Jinping's mind. But in some ways, that's what it comes down to because he is China's Commander-in-Chief and he is so powerful, it really is his decision. But in my chapter, I'm trying to apply prospect theory to thinking about Beijing's calculus about to use it to use or not to use force against Taiwan. And so what's important is is does Beijing see itself in the domain of gains or in the domain of losses? So in other words, if things are going well, in terms of managing the Taiwan issue, in terms of China's economy and so on, is the outlook looking positive? Are things going in Xi Jinping, the Communist Party's general direction? Then in that atmosphere and that climate, Beijing is much less inclined to launch a risky operation against Taiwan. However, if things shift to a much more negative atmosphere, things aren't looking good economically. And from Beijing's perspective, Taiwan seems to be moving away from unification, Phil talked about, then that changes the calculus in Beijing and you'll see a more willingness to accept risk. So the problem is, as I mentioned at the outset, is to answer the question of does Beijing see itself in the domain of losses or the domain of gains, we have to see inside Xi Jinping's brain. So the good news is if or it's clearer, it would be much clearer if Beijing is preparing for, actually preparing militarily for an operation against Taiwan, we would have indicators and warnings of that. But thinking in looking into the calculus of Chinese Communist Party leadership, that's a much more gray zone or ambiguous endeavor. Great. Thank you. Well, speaking of gray zones, I guess we'll go there next and we'll ask the question. There's a lot of conversation about gray zone operations and what that means for Taiwan as well as the rest of the region. So I guess just to start off, Dr. Huang, perhaps can you tell us a little bit about just what gray zone operations are and how should we think about gray zone operations in the context of Taiwan? Thanks. Well, I think that within the professional community that we all know that the gray zone term actually is not a new one because it has been there in different forms in the military operations or the tactics that have been used through military means in the past. For Taiwan, it falls into two categories. Number one is something about inference campaign, cyber attack, and other non-traditional measures that would psychologically or in terms of propaganda that try to change the perspective or crush the will of Taiwan's defense. That's category one. And category two is by employment of military force without attacking Taiwan but performing the actions. For instance, what we usually call partial blockade or targeted coercive quarantine of maritime shipping, especially on energy ships to Taiwan. Everybody knows that during the military drills in August 2022 that encircling Taiwan, when China announced its military drill, it stated in the very beginning that it will last for only 72 hours covering seven zones that surround Taiwan. And that was only three days, but we all understood in Taiwan that if the length of the military drill was not three days but three weeks and that will significantly disrupt the energy shipping to Taiwan from the Middle East through South China Sea and get into Taiwan. If we apply for the overall defense concept or 100% asymmetric, a porcupine type of military investment and modernization or buildup Taiwan would not have the ability to deal with the second category of military pressure and squeezing Taiwan's defense capability. Let me give you one example that when China step up its naval and air coercion or pressure over Taiwan's air defense identification zone as a new normal, Taiwan's air defense assets have been, especially the Air Force fighter jets, are wearing out much faster than our original investment and procurement assessment. In other words, that the parts and critical equipment on board our Air Force fighter jets would have much less interval of maintenance and logistic support with the back-ordered and other restrictions by the defense procurement contracts. And Taiwan's air defense capability is wearing out pretty fast. Those kind of gray zone area would not involve in a direct kinetic military invasion or amphibious landing against Taiwan, but will be able to significantly weaken Taiwan's defense capability. Another is that the energy. Taiwan had talked about social endurance for years, but if our LNG ships and oil tankers would be stopped or quarantined by the Chinese Navy, Coast Guard, or maritime militia for whatever reasons. And that would create a lot of problems for the psychological impact on the general public in Taiwan. And that's the part that Taiwan ministry may not be helpful for the overall defense of Taiwan. So these are the issues that we see gray zone challenges are mounting and is real and we need external help to assist Taiwan to address all these issues. Great. Thank you very much. That was incredibly helpful. This is obviously an important issue. There's a lot to say about it. So we've got a few other folks to chime in on this question. We'll turn first to Phil Saunders. Just a couple brief points. First, there's a great chapter in the book by Matthew Dushetel from the Institute Montaigne in France, which goes into this in some detail if you want to read more. I think of gray zone as the use of military pressure while staying below the threshold of lethal force and sometimes substituting paramilitary forces for military forces. And that's certainly something that the PRC and the PLA have ramped up against Taiwan since President Tsai took office, but also especially since the Pelosi visit. One issue there is, yes, military pressure can impose costs. But if it's not using lethal force, can it really force Taiwan to capitulate on the fundamental political issues at stake in this conflict? And I think that's an open question because it's not, in my view, probably enough pressure to force them to give ground on the main issue. And then as you start increasing, you move toward the threshold of lethal force. Some of the things being talked about are akin to a blockade, which is an act of war, even if the PLA tries to force Taiwan or other forces to take the first shot. So it's certainly something that China is doing. It is applying pressure. It is a challenge for Taiwan. But I don't think it gets the PRC all the way toward Taiwan conceiving the main point and agreeing to unification. Let me stop there. Great. Thanks. Joel, over to you. So just a couple quick points on the gray zone issue. First of all, this is a bit similar to what Phil was mentioning there at the end. But it's really a question. Now we're sort of in a new normal of heightened military activity, both air, maritime, you name it. But if it's not lethal, is it discounted as hollow symbolism? In other words, if they're doing more of this, does it become sort of like the mid 1950s when China was on again, off again, shelling the offshore islands for show, but it wasn't really crossing any particular boundaries and therefore the signaling is much less effective? And so we'll not lead them to a more dangerous place as they realize it's not having the effect that they anticipated. And then the other thing is if they're going to do much larger exercises around Taiwan, and we saw a bit of that in August and September last year, but at some point in the future, maybe not this year, are they going to get to the point where they're really starting to come close to the actual parameters of a real invasion? And what would that do for our meeting Taiwan, the US and Western ability to correctly predict whether this is actually an exercise or whether it's an invasion? And would that potentially allow us into a rather complacent state? This is just another exercise, but actually it's a strategic deception. And so those are some of the things that I worry about as they ramp significantly ramp up and get closer to the scale of real combat operations. Terrific. Thank you very much. I know we are getting a lot of great questions. We're also getting short on time. I guess I would ask thinking about what all this means for the United States, what can or should the United States and perhaps also its allies and partners do now to help deter China from deciding that this is the right time to launch an invasion on Taiwan? What can we do to affect Xi Jinping's decision calculus and try to prevent a war? Anyone want to jump in on that question? Sure. Thanks. I'll be brave and go first. So first off, there's a lot of things on the military side, but I think one of the most important ones is to say this is a different case than Ukraine. This is one where the US stakes are higher, both its stakes in protecting Taiwan's democracy, but also its stakes in terms of the credibility of our commitments throughout Asia. And like it or not, our allies, Japan, South Korea, Australia, look to how we handle the Taiwan issue as an indicator of US commitment and staying power and willingness to uphold our commitments. So I think the first point is to make clear to China that our stakes are higher here and a vague nuclear threat like Putin gave with respect to Ukraine isn't enough to keep the US out of a conflict. I think there's other specific things that I'll leave to my colleagues to mention in terms of military deterrence and efforts to improve Taiwan's capabilities and the US capability to operate close to China within their anti-access area denial envelope. There's a lot of things the US services are doing to build new operational capabilities, including standoff weapons, including multi-domain task forces that can operate in the cyber and electromagnetic domains. So there's a lot the US military is doing. But the point I want to make here is it's important that the leaders in Beijing not give up hope that there is a peaceful resolution to this, that there is the possibility of peaceful unification. If they give up hope of that, this turns it into a strictly military competition. I don't think that's good for Taiwan. I don't think it's good for the United States. I don't think it's good for China. So I think part of our policy has to be reinforcing the credibility of our one China policy. And on Taiwan's side, signaling a willingness to talk to the right mainland. That doesn't mean concede to them. That doesn't mean surrender to them, but a willingness to talk to them and give them a chance to try to persuade people on Taiwan that unification would be a good thing. I think that's part of a good deterrent strategy is to have some of those assurances to Beijing that Taiwan's not going to declare independence. And the US is not going to create an alliance with Taiwan. And there is still some hope, maybe slim hope, but not no hope of peaceful unification. Wonderful. Thank you very much. Does anybody else want to weigh in on that point? Sure, Jennifer, just a couple, a couple additional thoughts on this from a military perspective. I think fellow's right that Taiwan is not Ukraine, although there are probably some lessons, military lessons from Ukraine that can be applied by Taiwan to improve deterrence, including use of and stockpiling of some of the more advanced systems that have been helpful for Ukraine in dealing with the Russians. At the operational level, I think what's most useful for the United States is being unpredictable, being surprising, having something that, to quote Schelling, leaves something to chance if we're China because they don't quite know where we're going to show up in what way, how, and so on, that this would be opening a can of worms for them, that they're not really prepared to deal with and can't really simulate in their exercises. And then finally, we've been talking a lot recently about so-called integrated deterrence. And it's been a concept or an idea that's been sometimes badded about and even sort of dismissed as sort of empty rhetoric. But I think it does point to a particular comparative advantage that the United States has over China in both respects of, number one, international coordination, especially with some of our closest allies in the region like Japan, which have moved much more close to actually being involved in this conflict. And then second, in terms of interagency coordination between the Department of Defense, but also other critical players that play a deterrent role, including things like commerce, the State Department and treasury and so on, and being able to do that really cohesively in peacetime to signal that we're sort of, we have a pretty coherent plan all across the government. And that would be very difficult for China to match given their problems with interagency and international coordination. So I'll leave it there. Great. Thank you again. We've covered a lot on this topic over the last hour. There is a lot more to say. Certainly more of these, these issues are covered in more detail in the volume, which I hope everyone will get a chance to read. But before we end the event today, I want to go around and give each of our speakers an opportunity to share some final thoughts on this topic before we wrap up. So we'll go in the same order and I'll turn first to Andrew Scabel. Thanks, Jennifer. I want to return to the parallel or analogy of Ukraine and make one key point. Earlier or last year, shortly after Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine, a colleague at USIP and I wrote a, wrote a commentary on the USIP website titled China is not Russia, Taiwan is not Ukraine. And I think one of the key points we make in, in that is, in that piece is that a key difference is that when Putin was, Vladimir Putin was making the decision to invade Ukraine, he was pretty confident that the US and NATO would not join the fight. And so his risk calculus was, you know, that, that, that was reassuring to him, I think, and, and so he went ahead with the invasion and he was, that calculus proved right. By contrast, where, where Xi Jinping is concerned and Taiwan, I think he, he presumes that any military, if China were to launch a military operation against Taiwan, the US, that would necessarily almost certainly involve conflict with the US, that the US military would come to China's to, sorry, to Taiwan's side. So that, that is, that is a fundamental difference between Ukraine and Taiwan and the respective calculuses of the irredentist leaders here. And so we often hear this term strategic ambiguity. And I think it's my, I think it's misunderstood. I don't think there's any ambiguity, almost no ambiguity in the US stands with Taiwan. Where the ambiguity comes in is when and how the US exercises its military support for Taiwan in a crisis or a conflict scenario. Thank you. Wonderful. Thank you. We'll go next to Phil Saunders. I'll just hit the top line points. There's a lot Taiwan needs to do to improve its military capabilities, including spending more and in a more focused way. There are things the US military needs to do to improve our ability to project power through China's anti-access area denial zones. But for me, the other part of this is remembering the reassurance side, that Taiwan is not going to declare independence. The US is not going to reestablish an alliance with Taiwan. And there is still hope, maybe slim hope, but that's not no hope, of a path to peaceful unification. That's important to keep Beijing from using force. Terrific. Thanks. Joel, over to you. And along those lines, I think, you know, one of the questions is how do you deter without provoking? And I think that's really going to be a question not only for a US administration, we're facing our own electoral cycle here 2024 being another election, but also with respect to Taiwan and their 2020 for election, what do you say? What do you do that will convince China that today is not the day to fight, but that also is not going to push them over their red line? And it's a challenge because they have been ambiguous about what their red lines are. And so how do we know do we have a feedback mechanism in place to correctly perceive what China is making of what we and what the Taiwanese are doing in this equation? And is this more provoking them? Is it more deterring them? How to know the difference? And where do you kind of find the optimal solution? So that will be the question, I think, for all the administrations that are about to come in next year. Wonderful. Thanks. And for the final word, Alexander Huang. Yeah, I think we are pretty much in line in the overall concept. I think deterrence without provocation, assurances without appeasement are good to say, but it's a difficult balance to maintain. What I want to say finally is that if we have more than three dozens of recommendations for Taiwan's defense improvement, modernization, and reform, if we still need several years for the Pacific Defense Initiative to be funded and for the American forces in Asia or in the Indo-Pacific region to get into more newer operational concept and new platforms, we all need to buy time. So how to maintain peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait and buy time for both the United States and Taiwan to improve and better defend our common interest is a crucial area. Lastly, I want to say that this book come into the market in time, and I believe that it should be read by a much wider community and I myself am very happy to be part of this effort. Thank you. Terrific. It's a great note to end on. I just want to say thank you to all of our speakers. This really was a terrific discussion of a hugely important issue. Of course, we were only able to scratch the surface of most of these issues today. So I hope that those of you who are watching who are interested in learning more about these issues in greater detail will pick up a copy of the book. It's called Crossing the Strait, China's Military Prepares for War with Taiwan, published by NDU. This again has been a terrific discussion. Really thanks to all of our speakers and thanks to those of you who are watching us online. And we hope to see you again at another USIP event. Thanks so much.