The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) of China has set a goal of modernizing its warfare capabilities by 2027 and developing military capacities to counter that of the U.S. in the Indo-Pacific region, with the aim of forcing Taiwan into negotiations by then, according to a Pentagon report released on Wednesday.
The 2021 version of “Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China,” published by the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD), says the People’s Republic of China (PRC) continues to increase its military capabilities to achieve regional and global security objectives beyond a Taiwan contingency.
PLA ground, naval, air and missile forces are increasingly capable of projecting power at greater distances from China and they are expanding the PLA’s capacity to contest U.S. military superiority in the event of a conflict, it said.
In 2020, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) announced a new milestone for PLA modernization in 2027, which will be the 100th anniversary of the PLA’s founding.
The new milestone is broadly understood as the modernization of the PLA’s capabilities to be networked into a system or systems for “intelligentized” warfare, said the report.
If realized, the PLA’s 2027 modernization goals could provide Beijing with more credible military options in the event war breaks out with Taiwan.
Chinese media, citing a military source, connected the PLA’s 2027 goals to “developing the capabilities to counter the U.S. military in the Indo-Pacific region, and compel Taiwan’s leadership to the negotiation table on Beijing’s terms,” said the report.
In response, Pentagon says Taiwan is taking important steps to compensate for the growing disparities between its military capabilities and that of the PLA, including building its war reserve stocks, growing its defense-industrial base, improving joint operations and crisis response capabilities, and strengthening its officer and noncommissioned officer corps.
However, these improvements only partially address Taiwan’s defense challenges, it warned.
Asked to comment on the Pentagon report, Chen Ming-tong (???), the director-general of Taiwan’s National Security Bureau (NSB), told reporters on Thursday in Taipei that Beijing has always wanted to pressure Taiwan into negotiations with the use of force.
He stressed, however, that Taiwan will never engage in talks with China under military coercions.
Chen also said that it is unlikely the PLA would invade Taiwan within the next three years, when asked to comment on the 2027 goal set by the PLA, but he didn’t comment on the likelihood of war by 2027 or shortly thereafter, only saying that the NSB will continue to monitor the situation closely.
The Pentagon’s Wednesday report also warns that the PLA is seeking to build a stockpile many times larger than the one it already has as part of its decades-long march to establish a “world-class” fighting force that can challenge the U.S. in the air, on land, at sea, in space and even in cyberspace.
The accelerating pace of the PRC’s nuclear expansion may enable it to have up to 700 deliverable nuclear warheads by 2027. The PRC likely intends to have at least 1,000 warheads by 2030, exceeding the pace and size the DOD projected it would have in 2020.
The annual report is released as mandated by the U.S. Congress to serve as an authoritative assessment of the military and security developments involving the PRC.
Source: Focus Taiwan News Channel