China and Taiwan War - U.S. Chinese Military Relations. August 9, 2015 - 0400 Hours The war for Taiwan starts in the early morning.
There are no naval bombardments or waves of bombers: That's how wars in the Pacific were fought 70 years ago. Instead, 1200 cruise and ballistic missiles rise from heavy vehicles on the Chinese mainland. Taiwan's modest missile defense network—a scattered deployment of I-Hawk and Patriot interceptors—slams into dozens of incoming warheads. It's a futile gesture. The nearest aircraft carrier is the USS Nimitz, which had just left the Japanese port of Yokosuka on Tokyo Bay when the missiles landed on Taiwan. Until the Nimitz arrives, it's up to Kadena Air Base in Okinawa, 400 miles northeast of Taiwan, to defend the island. Next, early-warning satellites detect the infrared bloom of 25 ballistic missiles launched from the Chinese mainland. China and Taiwan War - U.S. Chinese Military Relations. August 9, 2015 - 1230 Hours The Kilo-class submarines are waiting.
Like any patient hunter, that's what they do best. Smaller and slower than their nuclear-powered counterparts, the 230-foot boats are fitted with diesel–electric engines and sound-absorbing tiles that make them virtually invisible to active and passive sonar. They have chosen the spot for an ambush wisely, lurking near rises in the seafloor that clutter sonar returns, and the Nimitz's escorts don't detect the Kilos. The Chinese subs rise to launch depth and fire two missiles each from their torpedo tubes.
Alarms are wailing on every ship as sailors dash to battle stations, but the Nimitz is the sole target of these Russian-built antiship cruise missiles. In the final moments, chaff launchers on the Nimitz release a volley of decoys, while a trio of robotic chain guns aboard the Nimitz—the last line of missile defense—automatically pivot toward the warheads and fire hundreds of 20-mm rounds per second. China and Taiwan War - U.S. Chinese Military Relations. The U.S.
Military shocked the world when it unveiled the sophisticated weaponry used to defeat Iraq's military in 1991. Now potential adversaries have invested in tools similar to those that made the United States military so dominant during the Gulf War. "Since the end of the Cold War, we've been in the position to unleash substantial quantities of precision firepower on our adversaries, while suffering none of that type of attack," says RAND's David Shlapak, one of the authors of the think tank's original 2000 report on a war over Taiwan as well as the followup 2009 report.