Small Units Win Wars

Everyone knows the Marine Corps is the world's greatest fighting force, but few appreciate the simple secret underpinning 250 years of warfighting success. The backbone of the Marine Corps is young enlisted Marines serving in small units led by non-commissioned officers (NCOs). The Marine Corps is beautifully simple in its doctrinal description of the smallest infantry unit, the rifle squad:

The mission of the rifle squad is to locate, close with, and destroy the enemy by fire and maneuver, or repel the enemy’s assault by fire and close combat. The Marine Corps rifle squad is the fundamental maneuver unit of the Marine Corps infantry.

The Marine Corps' success has bled over to Big Army – an organization 10x larger – and the US has since exported the science of small-unit warfare to its most important allies. For decades, the United States has been exerting pressure on the Taiwanese military to acknowledge the escalating Chinese threat. It has not worked. For the most part, American warnings have been disregarded, overlooked, or understated. The rationale is simple: war between China and Taiwan would be cataclysmic, so accordingly, Taiwanese policymakers have decided on the worst strategy of all: never fully and publicly naming the risk and, as a result, allocating inadequate resources to address it.

FT in 2022.

Taiwan’s former top military official issued a dire warning last week. The armed forces lacked a clear strategy to defend the country against a Chinese attack and the president might not understand the conceptual thinking needed to counter that threat, said Admiral Lee Hsi-ming, former chief of the general staff.

2024 is the year to take China seriously

According to the FT, Taiwan will, for the first time, fully simulate the whole-of-military response to a potential Chinese invasion.

This time, we are exercising the ability of small units to operate in the event that they are cut off from more senior command. The focus is on how to adapt, how to decide what to do, under what circumstances to engage the enemy.

So why is Taiwan rethinking the Chinese threat now, after neglecting it for so long?

It seems to me that a few threads come together in a, ahem, problematic stew.

First, it looks increasingly likely that Donald Trump will be the next president of the United States. If Trump wins, the Taiwanese cannot, in good conscience, rely on the United States as they have done over the past 40 years.

Next, Xi and his cronies seem to have convinced themselves that the United States is overextended because of its massive support for Ukraine against Russian forces. Resource-strapped countries are less threatening, or at least that is what the Chinese hope.

Finally, Xi now has total control of the Chinese state; all economic, strategic, and military resources have been centralized under one man. With no checks, Xi may view a second Trump presidency and an open-ended Ukraine-Russia war as the perfect pretext for launching his much-desired war of reunification.

If Chinese military incursions into Taiwanese space are a signal, "one country, two systems" may not survive Trump a second time.