ENDING CHINA’S THREAT TO TAIWAN

The single greatest threat to peace in the world, the one with the most potential to escalate into all-out and even nuclear war between China and the United States, lies in the Formosa Straits, the 100 miles of ocean separating mainland China and the island of Taiwan.

At this moment, the Communist Chinese have 1,400 CSS-6 and CSS-7 short-range ballistic missiles aimed at Taiwan.  The handful of Tien Kung-3 (Sky-Bow-3) air defense missile batteries (based on our Patriot II system) the Taiwanese have is wholly inadequate against this massive threat.

What Taiwan needs is a missile defense system that can blanket its west coast facing the mainland as well as its cities, that is cheap to build, quick to build, easy to operate, and very effective.  A system that would allow few if any Chinese missiles to get through, that would blow any Chinese attacking warplanes out of Taiwan's skies, and against which any Chinese landing craft in an amphibious invasion would be dead ducks.

This system could be put in place within 24 months.  Once it is, China's threat to Taiwan is essentially gone.  Here's how Taiwan can do it.

We start with warthogs.  The A-10 tank-busting fighter jet affectionately known as the "Warthog," because it's so ugly.  But thanks to the GAU-8 Avenger 30 mm gattling gun mounted in its nose, it can obliterate the most heavily armored tanks in seconds.

What Taiwan needs to do is acquire a license to manufacture the GAU-8 from General Dynamics Corp., and make 20,000 of them. 

They are not complicated to make, requiring no ultra-sophisticated technology.  It will not be difficult to set up a factory in Taiwan producing 100 a day.  In 200 days, less than seven months, you have 20,000.  They will cost less than $50K apiece.

Mount them on tank or even bulldozer chassis, which can easily handle the 10,000 pounds of GAU-8 recoil, are highly mobile, and are easily operated with little training by a two-man crew.

The GAU-8 fires 30mm high-explosive rounds with a depleted uranium core at the rate of 4,000 a minute going Mach 3 (three times the speed of sound or 2300mph).  The effective range, depending on the target (see below), is five miles.

Place 12,000 of the tank chassis-mounted GAU-8's – let's call them Warthogs –  along the west coast of Taiwan, concentrating them on the northwest coast closest to China where an amphibious invasion would be focused.  Place 1,000 each around the five main cities of Taipei, Hsinchu, Taichung, Tainan, and Kaohsiung, and 3,000 more sprinkled around other population centers.

You hook bunches of them to Patriot-type radars – with distributed processing software, one radar can connect to over 100 Warthogs.  Any incoming Chinese missile, any Chinese jet plane, any Chinese landing craft will be met with a wall of depleted uranium slugs and shredded to smithereens. 

Adaptations can be made to the Warthogs relative to the intended target.  The original design of the GAU-8 has a purposely increased dispersion – 20 feet at 1,000 yards – to make it easier for a fast-flying A-10 jet to hit a tank.  For destroying incoming missiles and landing craft while firing from a stationary tank/bulldozer chassis, less dispersion is desirable.  This can be obtained with a very minor manufacturing change and will result in groups less than 8 inches in diameter at 1,000 yards.

Yet the effective range will be far greater than that, because the targets are not heavily armored tanks but thin-skinned landing craft, warplanes, and missiles.  The range is especially increased for missiles coming at up to 3,000mph.  Even if the GAU-8 projectiles are essentially stationary at maximum attainable altitude, a missile running into a cloud of them having the sectional density of depleted uranium at that speed will be shredded and its warhead destroyed

As for civilians below who could be hit by a rain of deadly explosive GAU-8 shells, the shells self-destruct after a predetermined fuse burn time, which can easily be lengthened or shortened if necessary.

Once the system is fully deployed, the entire island will be converted in to one big A-10 Warthog, albeit a stationary defensive one.  Such a Warthog Shield neutralizes China's threat to Taiwan.  Taiwan can now defend itself, and the US Navy obligation to risk war with China defending Taiwan in the Formosa Straits thus greatly reduced.

As a purely defensive system, the Warthog Shield poses no conceivable threat to China.  Whining by the Chicoms about its deployment would only be an admission of their aggressive intentions.

One of the most substantial advantages of the Warthog Shield is that it can be put in place at reasonable cost (total estimate: around $2 billion) and quickly.  It has to be done quickly for after the Chicom Olympics (before and during which the Chicoms will avoid wardrums), the odds for war with Taiwan will increase steadily.

That's because the odds of an economic collapse are increasing steadily.  For just one example of why, consider that China is running out of coal.  It only has a few days' of coal stocks left as of this writing (4/24), demand has completely outstripped production, coal prices have rocketed skyward, and since 70% of China's electricity is from coal, China's economy can't function without it.

The Chicoms can't function without a monopoly of power, which will be gravely threatened if China's economy tanks.  They will deflect the citizenry's anger away from them towards a foreign devil.

That foreign devil, Taiwanese know, is them.  So the need for such a Warthog Shield is mortally urgent.  The great tragedy is that Taiwan's new government may ignore it.

The now-ruling KMT or Kuomintang Party wants re-unification with the "Chinese motherland" under the delusionary fantasy that Taiwan won't be swallowed whole by the Chicoms in the process.  Thus KMT leaders will be against anything that would greatly increase the chances for Taiwan independence.

The Warthog Shield does just that.  The DPP (Democratic Progressive Party) was thrown out of power in last month's elections.  If DPP leader Frank Hsieh had been elected president on March 22, the Warthog Shield could have become a fast reality.  Now Taiwan's only chance of survival may lie in Hsieh somehow convincing his rival, incoming president and KMT leader Ma Ying-jeou that his patriotism lies with Taiwan and not Communist China.

Good luck, Frank.  For it's either ending China's threat to Taiwan or the end of Taiwan.

[Note:   A TTP hat-tip of thanks for technical consultation to aerospace weapons systems physicist and war games theorist TTP'er "Skye."]