Assessing the Likelihood of a South China Sea Face-Off

Major Chip Hazard on Overwatch

An analysis from guest author First World Refugee.

Is China going to invade Taiwan in 2024, or will Team “Nothing Ever Happens™” come out on top?

Never mind the fact that “nothing ever happens” is a cope by too-online folks whose dopamine receptors are so fried that they think anything short of Thermonuclear Armageddon is a “nothingburger” — let’s do a little layman’s analysis of the situation.

A brief Google search turns up daily speculations and analyses on this very question. Every Chinese military drill, troop movement, airspace incursion, and diplomatic statement regarding the South China Sea drives further scrutiny and pontificating by a chorus of media and think tank wonks. For their part, U.S. forces in the region seem to send another thinly-veiled-as-just-another-training-exercise message to China each month.

The experts who get paid the big bucks say that some indicators of an imminent Chinese invasion of Taiwan would mean a production surge in precision munitions for long-range beach bombardment, a freeze on key exports to make their economy invulnerable to sanctions, public blood drives, and a national mobilization of forces. These are all fine and dandy indications and warnings from the pencil-neck policymaking pipsqueaks, but also sort of boring. Ho-hum.

I suggest a simpler heuristic for assessing the likelihood of an imminent Chinese invasion of Taiwan — or, at least for assessing how likely the U.S. government thinks such an invasion is.

Look no further than the general recently appointed to lead III Marine Expeditionary Force, the Corps’s stand-in force in China’s backyard, General Chip Haza— I mean Lt. Gen. Roger Turner.

The guy really only had one choice in life.

With that physiognomy, did Roger Turner even have any alternative choices in his life? I mean, really, was that guy ever going to sell insurance in Topeka, Kansas? While his biography states that he’s a mustang and that he enlisted in 1984, I like to imagine that he was spawned, fully-grown, in the rolling hills of Quantico, where he built up his tactical knowledge observing freshly-minted Marine second lieutenants bumble around the woods and get their platoons (notionally) annihilated, thereby learning exactly what not to do as a combat leader.

Seriously, if the Chicoms decide to get froggy in the South China Sea and the balloon goes up, is this the guy you want in charge, or what? Now, I know what you’re thinking: Turner’s pedigree, which includes combat deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, of course pales in comparison to Admiral Rachel Levine’s storied career referring children to castration slaughterhou— er, gender-affirming care facilities. Unfortunately, Admiral Levine’s already got “her” totally feminine and not-at-all-manly hands full combatting a different national security threat. I assume that Levine has just as much firsthand experience combatting this vicious foe as Turner does fighting insurgents. “Masks ON in the San Fran bathhouses, gentlemen! Trying to slow the spread here!”

Don’t hold your breath for a “2 weeks of stop having sex with random strangers to flatten the curve” campaign.

While for good reason much has been made of the scourge that is the DEI-ification of the U.S. military, the regime still knows that it needs to keep Turners around for when something real pops off. (Thought experiment: how would Turner combat the syphilis pandemic? Would tanks roll into the bathhouses of San Francisco? Ban Pride Parades?) And yet, this is little comfort, really.

General GigaChad notwithstanding, if the U.S. intervened in the event of a Taiwan invasion (President Biden has stated multiple times we would), it would take a Herculean effort for us to win. And by “win,” I just mean that Taiwan maintains its independence at the expense of thousands of U.S. service members’ lives, not to mention many aircraft and surface vessels, and who knows what other knock-on effects in the geopolitical arena. For some reason, we can only get microchips from Taiwan; we could not possibly make them here. Therefore, we must expend an indefinite amount of American blood and treasure defending another nation’s borders, which are sacred and inviolable, unlike our own, of course.