re: Why would China not be able to take down Taiwan easily?

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I know a guy who is fairly high ranking in the Air Force, who has spent a significant portion of his career planning the US response to a Chinese invasion of Taiwan.

His exact words to me “we cannot stop them if they really want to take it.“

It’s too close to China. It would be a logistical nightmare for us.

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China has a fleet of 1000 civilian ships that would surround the island.
And they would perform strategies that we do (disable internet, gas, power, water, telecoms). And they would attempt to overload the island with a 90 minute beach strategy (they have 3 piece floating bridges that will spear the land invasion).
They will hit US bases in Japan and S Korea at about the same time with their invasion.

If we don't kill the invasion immediately, we will have supply line issues. Ships need to reload missiles and torpedoes and our supply lines right now are vastly deficient.

The best way to deal with China vs Taiwan is to deal with it the way that the US should have dealt with Russia before the Ukraine invasion. Move all of the dominoes in place (Venezuela, Iran, Cuba, Russia, South America, Greenland, India). Weaken China politically, internationally, industrially, and economically so that they see too much downside risk with an invasion.

The best wars are cold wars.

The US and the allies built up for two years to simply go across the English Channel. 7000 ships took part in this invasion and the Germans were caught napping.

It still was difficult. With mind boggling resources.

But with satellites complete surprise is much tougher. You need about 3:1 numerical superiority at the point of attack to succeed.

The Chinese fleet would get pounded by Taiwan with air strikes, artillery, missiles etc. The Chinese would not want to destroy chip manufacturing etc so they have to be careful in their response. Not to mention a few American subs may have fun putting Mark 48s into ships.

It may be possible for China to succeed but they could also fail and that would be catastrophic for them. It may be too close to 50-50 yet.

I think that ultimately ends with submarines dropping lots of Chinese ships in the Pacific.

Comparing Venezuela to Taiwan.

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Also, what if they succeed? The US would cut off all fuel supply to the region. The US, Europe and the ME would all cease trading with them. We’d choke them out economically.

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all of the simulations were done before the Venezuela/Maduro initiative and the Iran initiative took place. Russia cannot produce enough oil for China to exist. If this happened and they attacked Taiwan, the world would sanction China and there would be no free trade of oil.

Even if China succeeded by taking Taiwan, they would be effectively isolated from the rest of the crude oil trade. They are already having problems buying crude oil in the open market with dollars. They cannot afford to be cut off completely, because they do not have enough crude storage and enough crude production and access to Russian crew to exist as a country.

The Chinese could win the Taiwan battle, but lose the energy war

You should probably look at a map

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They would effectively isolate themselves for at least a decade or more.

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Covid should have been enough to accomplish this, yet here we are.

Well China, while not totally down, has some internal problems. Revenge against society attacks (mass stabbings, car attacks) show a deep unhappiness within Chinese society. There are many people who don't get paid regularly and many of the regions/cities have unsettled finances due to the issues with China's economy. Any prolonged conflict or further disruption might lead to some sort of internal disturbance.

Militarily, there have been rumors of military issues - lack of readiness and even theft. My favorite rumor was that the fuel for rockets was siphoned off and replaced with water which coincided with one of the many purges of military personnel. Also there were reports of faulty lids on silos that would prevent launches. Source

There was also a fairly recent purges in December 2025 and then 2026.
The most recent two were Liu Zhenli and Zhang Youxia who were removed for corruption and apparently, disagreement with Xi's objective to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027 (they supposedly thought a realistic date would be 2035).

Now Xi Jinping and Zhang Shengmin (who was recently appointed to take someone else's place from his position as an anti-corruption official) are the only people reportedly on the Central Military Commission.

Long read on the purges

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The purges of Zhang Youxia and Liu Zhenli are instructive. The PLA Daily stated that Zhang and Liu were removed for fueling “political and corruption problems that threaten the party’s absolute leadership over the armed forces and undermine the party’s governance foundation,” and it said they had “seriously trampled on and undermined” Xi’s authority as CMC chairman. Some have speculated that this indicates Xi felt Zhang in particular had amassed too much influence within the PLA or that factionalism threatened CCP rule over the military. Whatever way Xi seeks to refill or restructure the CMC, he will likely seek candidates that are not only loyal to him but have demonstrated little evidence of amassing their own followers within the military

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There are some real issues in building up a force, actually getting it to Taiwan, and then taking control. But it's not out of the question that China could do it. But then you get into 2nd and 3rd order problems like the disruptions in trade to/from China, global boycotts or sanctions against China, and the potential actions of other nations to keep semiconductor manufacturing/shipments running. The potential ramifications are staggering if you look deep enough.

Trump