It’s a very obvious solution once you take a look at what a lot of their coastline looks like. Elevated armor delivery. Skip the beach. Dump ‘em’ straight on the coastal roads. Makes a shocking amount of sense. Definitely much more specific of a use case than the more general purpose landing support vessels that the USN/USMC employs, but for their primary missions and targets in the next decade, this is exactly the hardware that will significantly increase the CCP’s chances.
This is the an evolution of the combined arms amphibious assault tactics that the US has refined for the better part of a century. For heavily built up targets - specifically those that need to be assaulted and captured quickly for any reasonable chance of success (read: Taiwan + establishing a foothold on the island), this is PERFECT. This basically lets you dump 1000 tanks and a ton of IADS and 100k infantrymen in like, an hour.
That’s a paradigm shift right there.
Makes me wonder what kind of missile and drone defenses PLAN has as these are some pretty large and seemingly fragile targets.
They have made leaps and bounds in their AEGIS-equivalent destroyers and cruisers. Look up the Type 052D and onwards. They’re gonna park nearly every single one they own right off the shore of Taiwan and just wait. Granted, they’ve not been in an actual combat situation, and up until fairly recently they generally set up their military exercises in a Soviet-esque “playing for the audience” fashion instead of NATO-sequel “training hard/mission easy”, but they’ve apparently been making some significant changes on that front too.
Honestly, it’s not clear how things would pan out if the flag actually goes up.
