Taiwan’s Deterrence Equation: Calculating Gray Zone Strategies to Address China’s Assertiveness

In contemporary international affairs, major changes in the balance of power do not occur as a consequence of military conquest. In other words, major military powers rely on conventional military force, but such endeavors rarely achieve their broader geopolitical outcomes. We can observe these failures in the cases of U.S military intervention in Afghanistan in 2001, Iraq in 2003, and Libya in 2011, as well as Russia’s 2022 military intervention in Ukraine.Concurrently, China’s capacity to engage and maintain a military campaign is limited by logistical, technological, and other professional constraints. First, China requires the maintenance of a robust supply chain and logistical infrastructure to support expeditionary kinetic operations. This is currently a major challenge for China. (Chen et al. 2020; Li and Yang 2017; Xiufeng and Chen 2016; Huang 2015) Second, The PLA consists of multiple services (Army, Navy, Air Force, Rocket Force, and Strategic Support Force) that historically operated independently. Integrating these services into cohesive joint operations remains a challenge, as it requires overcoming organizational barriers, improving inter-service coordination, and enhancing joint training and exercises. (Lei and Luo 2019; Li and Lianquin 2018; Li 2017) This logistical delineation of forces is connected to the third challenge of civil-military fusion. China's military-civil fusion strategy aims to leverage civilian technological and industrial capabilities to enhance military modernization, as well as maintain robust political command over the armed forces. Such civil-military fusion has historically been associated with lacking military professionalism, and thus fighting capacity. (Zhang 2018 and Huntington 1957) Even though the impact of these factors on combat capacity remains speculative, the lack of combat experience is most likely to divert China’s strategy away from kinetic operations.China's military, the People's Liberation Army (PLA), has not engaged in large-scale combat operations since the 1979 Sino-Vietnamese War. The relative lack of recent combat experience may limit the PLA's ability to adapt to modern warfare dynamics, including urban warfare, joint operations, and system of systems approach. (Jacobs 2019; Gartzke and Lindsay 2016) Even though China’s conventional military capacity is relatively limited, its science-like approach to non-military means of influence has enabled Beijing to cultivate a robust infrastructure to compete in the gray zone. As a function of these factors, China has expanded its capacity to conduct operations in the gray zone, below the threshold of open warfare. With Beijing’s ability to centrally mobilize political, economic, and cyber resources, it is necessary to formulate and implement a comprehensive non-military strategy of deterrence. (Belo and Rodriguez; Belo 2022; Carment and Belo 2018) Canada and its allies may be able to play a key role in this collective strategy. However, before focusing on what the transatlantic community can do, it is necessary to understand China’s perspective and capabilities in gray zone conflict.