Communist China Envisioning Supersized Landing Ships To Put Troops and Vehicles Ashore in Any Invasion of Free China

These aren’t like the troop landing ships one sees in World War II movies, disgorging troops on beaches from Normandy to Iwo Jima. These troops will be invading the enemy in style, in trucks and tanks rolling off bridges protruding more than 100 meters from sleek barges extending stern to stern a mile into the sea.That’s the scene the Communist Chinese envision for the invasion of the future, most likely starting with the independent island province on which is headquartered the Republic of China. It’s an enclave of democracy about 90 miles from the mainland of Communist China at the closest point. Easy though it might seem for the Communists to bomb strategic targets on Taiwan and then unload troops into the surf, that kind of attack is likely to endure only in history books.If the Chinese choose to conquer their enemies rather than simply intimidate them in aerial and naval exercises, they’re going to do it in a manner befitting the war of tomorrow, not yesteryear. That’s the way the invasion of the future will begin as envisioned by Naval News, reporting the latest trends on war at sea.“China Suddenly Building Fleet Of Special Barges Suitable For Taiwan Landings” is the headline on an article by a Naval News analyst, H.I. Sutton. “China is building at least five new special purpose barges which appear tailor made for amphibious assault,” he writes. The barges may provide “a unique way to offload large numbers of tanks directly onto Taiwanese roads.”Those five vessels would hardly be enough to sustain an invasion for long, but China’s many ship-builders could make a fleet of them in a year or two. That would be soon enough for China’s president, Xi Jinping, who has said his “People’s Liberation Army,” a term that includes all services, could take over the island in 48 hours. He’s also reportedly set 2027 as the year to bring Taiwan back into China’s fold, but has denied setting a specific deadline.Already, according to an American-financed network headquartered at Washington, Radio Free Asia, China “appears to be conducting amphibious landing exercises with specially built vessels at a beach on the South China Sea,” the large body of water south of the mainland on which the Chinese have built air and naval bases on atolls and islets. The Chinese fleet, RFA reports, includes “invasion barges” for landing heavy vehicles and troops “quickly.”The beauty of these barges, which look nothing like the typical image of a barge as a rather cumbersome vessel used for hauling goods on rivers and canals, is that their cargo of heavy equipment and troops never have to get wet, as the bridges that shoot out from the bow are long enough to reach roads and pathways just beyond the beach. Also, barges don’t have to sit beside one another facing the beach. They line up forming a pier quite far into the sea, each barge connected to the next by the same type of bridge that lands men and materiel onto the beach.Although photographs abound of the vessel, no one outside China seems to have studied it up close and personal. At Washington’s Center for a New American Security, an analyst on subsurface warfare, Thomas Shugart, estimates vessels linked stern to bow by their bridges, “combined into one long causeway,” would allow “a much longer reach and access to deeper water.”Although the barges, shaped into modern curves and contours, bear little resemblance to the boats that carried soldiers between Britain and Normandy in 1944, they are “reminiscent of the Mulberry Harbours built for the allied invasion,” Mr. Sutton writes in Naval News. “Like those, these have been built extremely quickly and to novel designs.”He quotes a sea power researcher at the Council on Geostrategy, Emma Salisbury, as predicting “a build-up of construction” of these strange new vessels. “Invasion of Taiwan from the mainland,” she notes, “would require a large number of ships to transport personnel and equipment across the Strait quickly, particularly land assets like armoured vehicles.”

Communist China Envisioning Supersized Landing Ships To Put Troops and Vehicles Ashore in Any Invasion of Free China

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