It Won’t Happen, But Taiwan Should Arm Its People
And, unlike Ukraine, do so before being invaded.
Every once in a while, among articles you would expect from a gossip tabloid, FoxNews.com posts something resembling news. Today, it has an article citing unnamed “sources” for the proposition that Red China will invade Taiwan between November—when the Chi-Coms hold their party conference and “reelect” their current tyrant, Xi—and our 2024 presidential election, to take advantage of nominal president Joe Biden’s inherent weakness and, presumably, his historic lack of judgment and loyalty to anything other than himself and his spawn.
A more thoughtful article on the same topic, by Helen Raleigh, agreeing that an invasion of Taiwan is “inevitable,” also appears today on TheFederalist.com. Not mentioned in either article: If the communists have Biden on the payroll in some fashion, as some suspect, he might allow them to attack Taiwan without intervening in a decisive manner, to prevent his corruption from being exposed.
Assuming it’s a matter of when, not if, the communists will attack, if Taiwan wants to win, or at least have the satisfaction of killing communists before it loses, it should become Switzerland on steroids.
That is, Taiwan should repeal its oppressive gun restrictions: hardly anyone in Taiwan is allowed to own a gun. At the same time, it should give (not lend) its people T91 rifles identical to those used by its military, like Switzerland does and like Ukraine did after the Russians invaded. Then, begin training the rifles’ new owners in combat marksmanship, individual and small unit tactics, urban operations, night time operations, guerrilla operations, and other relevant topics. And the government shouldn’t keep records on people to whom the rifles have been given. Once on the ground in Taiwan, the communists could use such records to round up armed Taiwanese and execute them, the standard operating procedure for leftist tyrannies.
Riflemen won’t prevent an invasion. (It’s a ridiculous myth that, during WWII, the Japanese didn’t invade the U.S. because millions of Americans owned guns.) Blunting an amphibious and airborne invasion of Formosa is a task for Taiwan’s air, naval, and ground-based missile forces, with whatever help it can get from the navies of the U.S. and friendly countries in that part of the world. But once the communists are on the ground in Taiwan, riflemen can make them pay. Of Taiwan’s population of 23 million, approximately nine million are of military draft age and fit for service. That’s potentially a lot of bullets “going the other way,” to use Donald Trump’s phraseology from the 2016 presidential campaign.
The T91 is similar to M16-series rifles used by our military, and the far more numerous AR-15 rifles owned by individual Americans. Thus, newly-armed Taiwanese could be trained by retired U.S. military personnel and American civilians who have equal or greater knowledge and skills in the use of the rifle, though the former would, of course, be of better service in terms of the other warfighting topics in which Taiwanese civilians would need to be trained.
Unfortunately, there’s no reason to think that Taiwan’s government will adopt this course of action. Also, it will likely not occur to the Taiwanese people, conditioned as they are to being denied the right to keep and bear arms. They may have a different opinion when the boots of communist soldiers land on their necks, but by then it will be too late. Alas, it’s a recurring practice of societies and individuals alike, to deny reality until there’s no turning back the clock.
© Mark Overstreet 2022