That will be quite a trick. The Taiwan strait is 120 miles wide. It is blue water, deep enough to float aircraft carriers. The Chinese will have to put the their troops into ships and landing craft. It will take maybe ten hours to steam across the strait. We have a navy and we have pledged to support Taiwan. Which means the US Navy must steam into the Taiwan Strait and sink all the troop ships. The Chinese Navy will defend their troop ships and landing craft. I hear the Chinese navy has more ships than the US Navy. They have aircraft carriers, not as many or a good as ours, but they are working on that. The Chinese have plenty of aircraft and missiles with which to potshot US Navy vessels operating in the strait. Taiwan has a respectable air force as well.
The crossing will be made at night, so the landing force hits the beaches in Taiwan at daybreak. An after dark engagement at sea wants good IFF on every ship and aircraft to prevent fratricide. We have that, the Chinese ought to, the technology has been around since WWII.
It is traditional to do a landing on a rising tide, so that landing craft that go aground will be floated off as the tide comes in. We can check the tide tables, the days with a rising tide in the early morning are the days they will invade.
I would expect the Chinese navy to do some practice maneuvers, too big to conceal, before D-Day. So far all I have heard of is some aircraft flying into Taiwan's Air Defense Identification Zone. They gotta do more than that before I will believe they are really coming, touching off a war with the United States. The last Pacific power to try that got nuked for their trouble.
We ought to make a point of building as many ships for our navy as the Chinese have in theirs. And they ought to carry enough SAMs to fend off the inevitable Chinese air strikes.
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