On the Eve of Destruction

The rapid seizure of operational port facilities has typically been a vital objective of any major amphibious invasion. Conversely, effective measures aimed at the denial of these facilities can significantly hinder an opponent’s operations. This article looks at the continued relevance of port destruction, using the current threat posed by mainland China to Taiwan as an example.

The risk of an invasion of Taiwan

Few military problems receive as much attention as the threat of a Chinese amphibious invasion of Taiwan. China’s acquisition of the world’s largest navy reflects its shift towards the maritime domain, partly in the hopes of grasping the glittering prize that it has sought since 1949. The opposition of the Taiwanese people and their government are bolstered by American support, despite a stated US position of ‘strategic ambiguity’ regarding whether American forces would defend Taiwan in wartime. Many other nations also oppose a potential Chinese conquest of Taiwan, though they lack US military capabilities and even its ambiguous degree of commitment.

China may aim to seize Taiwan without launching an amphibious invasion. It could conceivably coerce the island to surrender via a combination of measures: blockading the island, manipulating or severing communications channels, targeting electrical grids and other key infrastructure, ‘decapitating’ it by assassinating political leaders, and demonstratively destroying Taiwanese aircraft on the ground. This would echo the previous occasion in which a mainland regime conquered the island: instead of conducting an amphibious assault, it coerced the Taiwanese leadership to accept terms after a battle at sea.

On the other hand, the possibility of a full-scale amphibious invasion remains, and the degree to which China finds it enticing will depend heavily on its perception of risks and costs, both broadly defined. As in any amphibious invasion, the early capture of a port would be a critical enabler. Moving materiel and people from ships onto a beach via landing craft is highly inefficient, in terms of both the time and resources required. Unless the area around the beach has highly favourable topography or a substantial road network, forces may have difficulty breaking out from their initial positions. Landing on a beach may be necessary at the outset, but it is far more advantageous to move supplies and equipment through an established port. Using a port, including the road infrastructure adjacent to it, can drastically shorten timelines to get forces from large ships onto ground vehicles that are heading for key objectives.

The ability of ports to shorten timelines is particularly valuable for China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) in a Taiwan invasion scenario, since China is impelled to seek a rapid conquest for multiple reasons. Speedily moving forces inland, rather than having them build up on a bare beach, makes them less vulnerable to bombardment. By eliminating the need for ships to linger offshore while landing craft shuttled between them and the beach, ships could move larger quantities of personnel and equipment to Taiwan in shorter times. Speed could keep Taiwan’s military forces and its population off-balance, limiting the effectiveness of the former and contributing to the despair of the latter. Perceptions of a fast-moving juggernaut could even induce swift surrender, as happened in France in 1940. A quick conquest would limit the effectiveness of any American intervention, given the long lead times to move forces to the western Pacific, or deter the United States from intervening altogether. Politically, the achievement of a fait accompli could help to quiet international voices that would otherwise support Taiwan during a protracted conflict. Finally, a quick, low-resistance conquest, leaving Taiwan mostly intact, would enable China to maximize the economic benefits it would subsequently derive from the island.

The threat of port capture

There are two broad ways in which Chinese forces could attempt to take a major port. The first is straightforward: People’s Liberation Army (PLA) forces could come ashore on beaches and then seek to capture an adjacent port facility. The second, more complex one entails using Special Forces to infiltrate a port. They might emerge from a vessel or enter the facility from the land side, infiltrating it after posing as intensely muscular tourists. Some might don Taiwanese uniforms and impersonate Taiwanese soldiers, particularly if given linguistic and cultural training. A PLA soldier who inflects their Mandarin with popular expressions from Taipei, or speaks Taiwanese dialect, could be difficult to distinguish from a local. The mere knowledge that such impersonators existed could cause Taiwanese forces to impede themselves; when a few dozen Germans impersonated Americans during the Battle of the Bulge in 1944, they caused massive disruption as units and individuals all suspected and apprehended one another.

The ability of Special Forces to take over a port would be enhanced if they could suborn select Taiwanese individuals to work on their behalf. At key moments, even having a few Taiwanese civilians or military personnel remain inactive could be valuable. Once Special Forces had taken the port, while the fog of war was still thick, they could use it to get limited numbers of vehicles, personnel, and air-defence equipment ashore. Combined with a blizzard of disinformation about who actually controlled the port, these would provide enough protection to enable larger forces to disembark there and swiftly expand the perimeter. Paratroopers could also be landed around the port to take and secure its landward approaches.

Regardless of which method is used, the result of a port capture would be devastating for Taiwan’s defenders. China’s inability to capture Taiwan for the last 75 years has been driven by its inability to get forces onto the island: there has never been any question regarding which side would win a ground war, if their respective armies were brought to bear. Once a major port had been captured and its environs secured, further build-up could only be prevented by sinking or incapacitating an extraordinarily high percentage of both conscripted civilian vessels and PLA Navy warships in transit. The massive port of Kaohsiung, which handles most of Taiwan’s port throughput, would be a particularly desirable target. Just before the pandemic, it was handling an average of 29,000 containers and 312,000 tons of cargo each day. Its main disadvantage is that its location in the island’s southwest puts it over 300 km by road from Taipei, the island’s capital and centre of gravity in the north. Alternatively, the ports of Taipei and Keelung each have a fraction of Kaohsiung’s capacity, but are adjacent to the capital. Other ports could also be considered, such as Taichung, in the middle of Taiwan’s west coast. Even the seizure of a relatively small port could accelerate the delivery of equipment and supplies ashore by an order of magnitude relative to plodding delivery via landing craft onto a bare beach. The capture of a port could also be psychologically devastating, as the population perceived the speed at which they could be overrun, deflating hopes that US intervention could protect them. The result could be rapid surrender of the island without a costly fight for the PLA, after which the world would need to accept a fait accompli.

The criticality of invaders seizing a port has long been recognised. During the largest-scale amphibious invasion in history – the Normandy landings of 1944 – the Allies aimed to take the port of Cherbourg to accelerate their build-up of forces on the continent. While the artificial ‘Mulberry’ harbours that the Allies brought with them to the beaches of Normandy helped, they also knew that a real port would greatly bolster their ability to move materiel. Unfortunately, the Germans also recognised this. As the allied forces pushed outwards from the beaches and sent forces north towards Cherbourg, the Germans utterly destroyed the port over the course of three weeks.  It took additional weeks for the Allies to reconstitute even select parts of Cherbourg’s port capacity, and months for the port to achieve full capacity for debarkation. According to one historian:

“The harbor was strewn with a variety of different types of mines. All basins in the military and commercial port were blocked with sunken ships…the electrical control system and heating plant for the port were demolished and 20,000 cubic yards of masonry were blown into the large deep basin that had been used in peacetime for docking Atlantic liners…quay walls were severely damaged. Cranes were demolished in all areas. The left breakwater for the inner harbor was cratered so that the sea poured through.” [1]

Another notable instance of port destruction took place in the Korean port of Hungnam during December 1950. As Chinese and North Korean forces pushed south, United Nations forces evacuated roughly 100,000 troops and nearly 90,000 civilians from the port, along with massive quantities of equipment, during the course of ten days. As they pulled out, the 10th Engineer Combat Battalion and Navy demolition teams destroyed the port’s facilities. The final explosion let out a roar with 400 tons of dynamite and ammunition, 500 thousand-pound bombs, and roughly 200 drums of fuel. [2]

How Taiwan can destroy its ports

A Taiwanese effort echoing the Cherbourg and Hungnam operations could help to prevent a port’s imminent capture from facilitating the rapid Chinese takeover of the island. Port-destruction activities can broadly be divided into those on the land and sea sides of the port. On the land side, cranes and other handling equipment can be destroyed in numerous ways, such as severing wires, fouling optics, and smashing controls. Pipes, pumps, and storage tanks can be damaged with small-arms fire. Live wires can be exposed throughout the port in places where unaware individuals would be likely to injure themselves. Some equipment could even have built-in self-destruct modes: for example, electronics can heat themselves to the point that they melt key components or start fires. Similarly, pre-established ‘kill codes’ can be entered and malware injected into equipment. Controlled explosions within the port can be used to destroy equipment and control centres, and then followed by spraying fuel from hoses to burn whatever is left. Following this, deploying copious booby traps throughout the port will cause the invaders to perceive every item they touch as a possible threat; this will slow them directly and induce frustration that degrades their ability to do precision work. Small electronic jammers can be distributed in concealed locations around the port to interfere with communications and navigation. Such devices can intermittently flicker on and off, both to make them hard to localize and to reduce demands on their batteries.

Going beyond the port facility itself, roads and railways can be cratered with explosives, and can have small, low-visibility sharp objects distributed along them to slash tires. Even visible land mines atop road surfaces would take time to redress, while larger devices – akin to the improvised explosive devices that tormented US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan – can be concealed along sides of roads and railroad tracks, detonating when they sense a vehicle’s magnetic signature or the vibrations it generates. Roads and tracks can also be obstructed with what appear to be rocks, but which detonate when someone tries to remove them. Railway tracks can also be subtly damaged in ways that cause derailment.

Equally extensive destruction can be inflicted on the maritime side, much of which can be achieved through naval mining. Vessels can litter numerous naval mines throughout the port complex and in the approaches to the port. Those naval mines can be designed to hinder mine countermeasures efforts. Minehunting sonar will have difficulty detecting and classifying bottom mines that have irregular mine shapes, shapes that foster self-burial, or shapes resembling cast-off refrigerators. Seeding minefields with a few moored contact mines – the classic ‘spiky balls’ of First World War vintage – requires a separate minehunting process, further extending timelines. There are also many ways in which to hinder the complementary tactic of minesweeping, in which equipment creates ship-emulating signatures to prematurely detonate mines.  For example, some mines can be programmed to detonate only after they have been exposed to ship signatures multiple times, or to have a given probability of detonating each time they are exposed.  This not only protracts sweeping processes, but can also lull people with a false sense of security: a detonation-free sweep can be mistaken for a sign that no mines are left, only for transiting ships to then fall victim to them.

Going beyond mining, a simple means of impeding maritime access is by scuttling ships in various chokepoints. Salvage operations to clear those ships could be impeded by littering the ships with explosive booby traps before they sink, and the previously mentioned chorus of jammers would further disrupt them.  Before cranes are destroyed, they can be used to drop large concrete or metal obstacles into key channels.  These obstacles may be most effective if they are not tall enough to breach the surface, but tall enough to impale or effectively ground ships with moderate drafts. In addition, explosives can be affixed to seawalls and detonated. Concealing the explosives below the waterline and having the detonation occur with a substantial time delay would disrupt attempts to reconstitute the port.

Once the heavily damaged port has fallen, sustained external attacks can impede the considerable work of reconstituting its capacity. Repairing or setting up equipment, defusing booby traps, and other activities require painstaking attention to detail, during which time specialised equipment and personnel are exposed to attack.  Personnel and machines engaged in reconstruction are fixed targets, while mine countermeasures assets are generally fragile and move slowly in predictable patterns. Lobbing occasional rockets, mortars, or missiles at the reconstruction effort can cause people to scurry for cover, disrupting their work. Uncrewed vehicles can also strike from multiple domains. By conducting information operations to create frequent false alarms regarding incoming threats, Taiwanese forces can further protract timelines, exacerbate psychological effects that degrade performance, and make the crews less responsive to real alarms. The extent to which such attacks are possible depends on how the rest of the conflict is going: what weapons Taiwan has available at what ranges, and whether outsiders have intervened.

Challenges in undertaking port-destruction operations

There are four key challenges related to such a scorched-earth operation. The first is how to coordinate these efforts so that they do not all interfere with one another or cause human casualties on the Taiwanese side. For example, the cranes need to put obstacles in place before they are destroyed, the arson needs to avoid harming personnel who are placing explosives, naval mines need to be spaced far enough apart to avoid sympathetic detonation, and the malware should be injected into the communications system after it is no longer needed. The destruction needs to take place while the port may be under some degree of fire, and while the PLA may be degrading tactical communications, or poisoning those communications with false information and orders. The operation may also be interrupted by port capture at any time, so it needs to be designed and coordinated so that it still has a substantial effect even in the event of premature termination.

A second challenge relates to command and control: ensuring that the operation is conducted if, and only if, the port’s fall is imminent. The PLA could attempt to infiltrate command channels to prevent the operation, enabling it to seize the port largely intact. Conversely, the PLA could aim to induce Taiwanese forces to damage key ports that it was not intending to capture. Either goal could be achieved through the use of cyberattacks, information operations, or, as was previously referenced, having PLA personnel disguised in Taiwanese uniforms countermand key orders. Taiwanese forces will need to ensure highly reliable, redundant command-and-control mechanisms that are resistant to all of these potential types of PLA tampering. The fact that it is psychologically hard for people to conduct scorched-earth operations in their own country, even when the need to do so is well-justified, also needs to be taken into account. However, unwillingness to do this should not be overstated, given ample historical precedents, including by Chinese and Russian forces during the Second World War.

The third challenge relates to speed. Unlike in the case of Cherbourg or Hungnam, there may not be weeks or even days in which to thoroughly destroy the port. If the PLA uses Special Forces to seize a port stealthily, the process may be measured in hours. Even if the port is captured using ground forces that have already established a beachhead nearby, there will be an understandable reluctance to destroy the port until its capture is assured. Moreover, port-destruction forces may come under fire that impedes their work. The PLA could use anti-personnel weapons, such as guns mounted on small uncrewed aircraft, to hinder efforts to destroy the port without inflicting damage on the facility. Given these considerations, implementation of the operation requires well-exercised plans, prepositioned assets, and enough defensive capabilities to enable the people destroying the port to survive and operate.

Finally, the fourth challenge is that in peacetime, well-exercised port destruction plans should be visible enough to contribute to deterrence, but also not revealed to the point that the PLA can effectively figure out how to stymie such operations. Ostentatiously demonstrating swift port-destruction plans can help to convince the PLA that it will not capture a port intact. Alongside many other efforts to influence China’s leadership, this may cause them to defer an invasion indefinitely. Still, the details of what is happening during exercises need to be somewhat obscured, perhaps literally by overhead smoke cover to provide concealment from Chinese intelligence.

Closing thoughts

It is to be hoped that deterrence prevails, bolstered by China’s perceptions of Taiwan’s port-destruction capabilities. However, hope is not a strategy, and Taiwan can best deter China by achieving robust self-defence capabilities, including the ability to thoroughly destroy its ports before they are captured.

This does not need to entail a large portion of Taiwan’s defence budget. Port-destruction capabilities can be acquired at relatively low cost, particularly compared with fighter aircraft and other prestige weapons. Naval mines, booby traps, malware, and other items can be developed indigenously, and none of these is expensive. The main costs are for planning, training, and exercising port-destruction operations wherever they are needed.

If the conflict ends with a Taiwanese victory, friendly nations can send copious assets and personnel to help remediate the damage to the port. Some of the damage can be time-limited by design: for example, mines and booby traps can self-sterilise after a fixed period. Regardless, it could take weeks or months for specific ports to recover to full capacity, greatly damaging Taiwan’s economy. On the other hand, that would be far less iniquitous than permanent occupation by PLA forces.

To conclude, a scorched-earth capability to destroy a port would be a valuable addition to Taiwan’s defensive capabilities. By preventing the seizure of an intact port, this capability can hinder the PLA’s ability to rapidly conquer the island, providing critical time for Taiwanese and outside forces to respond effectively.

Notes

1. Harrison, Gordon A, United States Army in World War II: The European Theater of Operations—Cross-Channel Attack, 1951, updated 1993. Washington, DC: Office of the Chief of Military History, Department of the Army, pp.441-442.

2. Mossman, Billy, United States Army in the Korean War: Ebb and Flow November 1950-July 1951, United States Army Center of Military History, 1990, pp. 174-176.

Author:  Dr. Scott Savitz is a senior engineer at RAND. He has led numerous studies for the US Navy and Coast Guard, as well as allied services, on subjects such as uncrewed vehicles, naval mine warfare, and non-lethal weapons. He earned his bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from Yale University, as well as a master’s degree and PhD in the same field from the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of a book, The Fall of the Republic, on a historical conspiracy in ancient Rome.

Scott Savitz