Sea Control - Sea Control 481 - Logistics Interdiction in Taiwan Unification Campaigns with Michael Hugos and Dr. Ed Salo

Episode Date: November 19, 2023

Links1. Logistics interdiction for Taiwan Unification Campaigns, by Jacob Maywald, Benjamin Hazen, Edward Salo, and Michael Hugos, War on the Rocks, August 21, 2023.

Hey, folks, it's Jared, and Nate Miller is back as host, editor, and producer today. He has our own Dr. Ed Salo and Michael Hugos exploring logistics interdiction in a Taiwan campaign. Here at SimSec, we aim to further international maritime peace and security through an exchange of ideas and the rigor of critical thought and writing. If you haven't already, please check out SimSec.org for new articles on the most important maritime topics. If you'd like to contribute to the discussion, check out the Write for SimSec tab to learn how you can submit articles for publication. Finally, I want to take the opportunity to recommend our partners in the SimSec Podcast Network, The Bilge Pumps. You can find Alex, Jamie, Drack, and Apollo of Iron Brew Bottles wherever you download your podcasts. And with that, Kimber's Men.

You're listening to Sea Control, hosted by the Center for International Maritime Technology. Hello and welcome aboard the Sea Control Podcast. I'm Nathan Miller. My guests today are Michael Hugos and our very own Dr. Ed Salo. We're discussing their recent article for War on the Rocks entitled Logistics Interdiction for Taiwan Unification Campaigns. Michael, Ed, welcome aboard. Michael, could you start us off by telling us a little bit about your background, please? Yes, my background was all on the corporate civilian side. I zigzagged my way up the ladder between corporate and consulting gigs.

My last big corporate job was the chief information officer of an $8 billion distribution cooperative, actually what it was. And we learned to use logistics as a differentiator. I mean, I was the IT guy, so everyone figured, hey, hey, it must be an IT problem. So a lot of my career since has been focused on how to use supply chains for competitive advantage. Wonderful. Thank you. And and first question for you is, how does it feel to be on this side of the microphone? It feels good. You know, it's great. I did one interview a couple of years ago about my dissertation on ferry boats. But yeah, this is different. And it was a great team to work with. And I feel kind of honored as kind of the historian with a bunch of these logistics guys and had to learn a whole new language. But it was kind of cool to bring out different ideas.

Well, can you remind the listeners a little bit about your background? Yes. I'm an associate professor of history at Arkansas State University. Like I said, I was doing consulting history. I wrote my dissertation on ferry boats in South Carolina because no one had done anything on that. and it's always good to do your dissertation on something that no one else has really studied because then no one's there saying no you're wrong um and i've been interested we've while consulting i did a lot of work with uh the navy those kind of things and you know one day volunteered to help with sea control podcast they were like hey you want to edit a podcast i'm like i don't know what i'm doing they're like you'll figure it out um so i've been involved since then and really enjoyed it.

Fantastic. Well, as a reminder to the listeners, all opinions expressed here are strictly our own and not reflective of any of the institutions with which we might be otherwise associated. So, Michael, I'm going to start out by asking you a little bit about what brought your team together and what question you were looking to answer in your research.

I had already been working with Air Force Institute of Technology, and when the Russians invaded Ukraine and we started seeing the availability of really good open-source intelligence, I said, well, heck, let's start using that open-source intelligence. Let's map out the Russian supply chains, which is what our simulation software does, is you draw that map on a map of the world. In this case, we're using Google Maps, but any digital map. And then you run it. And as you have defined what the elements do, they interact. That's what the simulation is doing, and you start to see what's going to happen. So very quickly, like in the first couple of weeks, the simulations and we got a couple of professors at AFIT, Air Force Institute of Technology, as well as Ed, and we started putting this together and it started to look like, you know what, they can't sustain this thing.

They better win in about a week and a half or they're going to be SOL. And just it wasn't entirely computer genius, but in the act of drawing the map, you can zoom in on the app. You can flip over to satellite view. You can look. You can look at these roads, and you see, look, there are little two-lane windy roads going through forested terrain over little rivers and things. Wow, this looks like ambush country to me. so and we just said could this be i mean you know we don't want to be a bunch of armchair generals and we don't want to second guess people but i think they made a big mistake and then that's

that's what started to play out is that do you recall that ed yeah you know it was um yeah it was just like well let's let's see what what would we want to do if we were russian and i just kind of played it out and the software was really good that we could actually go down to you know figure out okay this looks like where a depot would be or this is you know and and realize like hey no surprise bridges are going to be important and you know every time now i you know get the news story of the ukrainians blowing up a bridge or whatever i you know i send it to everyone like yep i guess we were right about that one too so we we published it with the modern war institute put it on their website the article we did for that

you know got some good praise for that and you know it was a good turnout and then we decided that hey what should we do for you know a second album kind of thing and and we were like well let's let's look to the pacific so well uh looking at the pacific uh and in the piece you uh you and your team highlight a lot of different ways that um the pla and plan could engage in taiwan to affect the outcome that they want could you kind of elaborate on on what some of those possibilities are yeah we wanted to keep it somewhat simple and just kind of go with broad ideas the first one just the blockade idea of that communist china would blockade taiwan try to control what's going on a siege and kind of

you know starve them out the second just is the um you know tactical strikes you know just not full invasion just enough to make them want to think about what they're doing and then the full-scale invasion and we looked at how logistics would be associated with those three operations you know we kept it kind of just like we weren't looking at the actual invasion um because you know that could be a whole big huge model depending on a lot of stuff we just assumed okay they do get to the beach can they sustain if they you know so a lot of it was we were trying to just go with looking at the broad level and not you know get too mired down in specifics of that and you know it's like okay they need to take ports where are the ports in taiwan

you know they need airfields where are the airfields and like okay we know they need to to get these. And if they don't have it, well, how's that going to slow down the logistics? So staying on the logistics here, the Taiwan Strait is not a huge body of water, but it is big enough to play a difference, you know, to make a pretty big difference here. So how does that proximity play into your team's modeling and how the study came out? Well, you know, the first thing is we all think, of course, of Overlord, D-Day, and then we forget that the English Channel was about 20, 25 miles wide, and the Taiwan Straits are about 100, give or take. And we also took for granted during World War II, because we had control of the air and the sea, that the Germans were not going to be able, unless they got a couple of, you know, E-boats or U-boats into the channel, but the channel could be blocked and was pretty effectively blocked. And so we forget this isn't quite like D-Day.

The Chinese won't have complete control of the air, won't have complete control of the sea. It's 100 miles. It's very stormy. I believe a lot of the sources are saying there's only really about two times of the year that you could do your invasion. So everyone would be expecting that. After that, it becomes very stormy, cyclones, et cetera. So it's not quite as easy as it was for us. And I think that the D-Day operation was obviously, I'm sure that General Eisenhower felt, my God, we got lucky there.

So, you know, the Chinese would have to get four times as lucky in order to make it work. And, you know, we also considered aspects of, you know, new weaponry, new ranges of weapons that weren't, you know, yes, everyone thinks about the invasions in World War II. But, you know, at the same point, it's like now with drones, longer range missiles, you know, Taiwan could hit targets in mainland China potentially and, you know, cause, you know, slow from there. And of course, China can hit Taiwan with, you know, things that are land based. So, and the other thing that we were kind of talking about is, unlike Ukraine, where it's seems that, and I always find this just incredible is that, you know, that we can, that Western nations can still supply war equipment to Ukraine. and you know and i just assumed that you know russia would be able to control the air and stop trains from coming in but you know the fact that we can send heavy equipment and everything there i'm like well that's when i when i noticed that i'm like that's the first thing where i'm like yeah they're not gonna win if this is how it's gonna be and you know with taiwan it's a lot

the logistics train to get stuff there is going to be a lot longer and it's going to be a lot more difficult so that's another thing especially with the blockade that we were talking about and kind of some of the original drafts which i think we had to take out for size you know looked at some of these that you know how much how much are western nations and other nations in the world going to allow this fight to go without um you know that you know are they going to kind of put their political pressure and other pressure to make this end because economically it's going to be horrible for everybody i think that that's you know unfortunately I don't think the Ukraine has that worldwide economic effect, so I don't think a lot of

people care as much. Again, just my opinion. No, no. Really, really good point. Definitely. And you can see that the whole world would get drawn in. When you start to draw the supply chains and how they would support, how would we support the Taiwan resistance and how would the Chinese support their invasion? We're drawing in a whole heck of a lot of the world's economies. The amount of stuff that it takes to supply a modern army of any size on a daily basis. And, you know, a lot of my non-logistics friends, they'll say, oh, yeah, there's a lot of stuff. And you say, do you understand we're talking thousands of tons per day, not just once a week or every now and again. Thousands of tons every single day.

And a unit, when they land, could organically contain maybe three days, four days at most of supplies. And after that, you know, I always say, is a soldier still a soldier when they run out of ammunition? Yes, of course they are. But they're not an effective soldier. And that, you know, the modern military system can't live off the land. So we're not like, you know, a party of raiders or commandos. This is industrial strength consumption of stuff. You all mentioned this in the podcast and you mentioned in the piece, but there are some parallels between Operation Overlord D-Day.

But as you're talking, it kind of makes me think more of the Tokyo Express of, you know, the Japanese trying to push supplies into contested water in an austere environment. And as the resident historian here, do you think I'm on to something? Is this more of an apt description? Yeah, I mean, I think so. I think that, you know, that even the British with the Falkland Islands, this kind of long range expeditionary force and going into areas where the other side, that's the cat, is has, you know, the power to hit far away before you even get close is going to be something that we need to look at. And yeah, and I mean, and I think that we can learn a lot of lessons from World War II to figure those kind of things out. And, you know, yes, Normandy, you know, I studied it. I was lucky enough to study it as an undergrad, get to go there, see everything.

And but not every invasion is going to be Normandy and not every invasion is going to be, you know, Iwo Jima and everything. So, you know, I think something like this is going to help us figure this out. And, you know, it's also the thing is that the Chinese haven't been successful in their past attempts to invade Taiwan. And, of course, those were, you know, earlier, but, I mean, it's not like they have a military that has a lot of experience and a lot of expertise in this. So, you know, we're also assuming that they have learned all the lessons from other people. And to build off that analogy of Tokyo Express, the Japanese further divided into rat and ant. And RAT was the fast moving destroyers that they would send. And then the Ant Express was the little coastal barges that would creep down the coast and hide during the day. And that is a pretty good example of the sort of thing that we would have to be doing. We would also add barely submersible vehicles. One of the things that became obvious was that we ought to look at what the cartels are doing to smuggle drugs into North America.

They are doing a continuous supply chain in a contested environment. They're using a lot of adaptive techniques. And one of them that I've seen several times in these articles are these barely submersible. It goes down about 10 feet. It doesn't need to go down to 100 feet and then stays the heck out of sight and out of trouble. And then often it is not even worth worrying about once you beach it, you unload the cargo. So we'd be getting into a lot of that. So that Solomon Islands-Tokyo Express is.

Hadn't thought of that. There are some interesting parallels there. yeah and i i saw the article and i think it may have may have even put it up on um on the simsec page about the ideas of bringing back you know flying boats and seaplanes and you know and i was like that that would be so cool and great idea and i'm not sure how much and you know saw the c-130 that they were wanting to put pylons on to have it land in water I mean, I think that we're going to have to look at these and look at non-traditional ways of supplying islands for this kind of activity. Well, at this point, I think for the listeners, it's pretty obvious what some of the conclusions were of your work.

that it's going to be exceptionally difficult for China to supply and resupply and re-resupply their forces in any of these scenarios that you outlined. But what further detail can you provide about what those challenges are specifically and any further conclusions that you got from the piece? Yeah, I mean, I'll start with one thing is that we found And this is taking what we looked at here and other things is that for this to be successful, from the blockade, the strikes, the whole invasion, it needs to be quick. It needs to, you know, it's not in any way are the Chinese going to want this to stretch out for any amount of time. A, from logistics, it's going to make so much headaches. B, it's going to politically, internationally cause so much problems for them economically.

And C, you know, it's going to be an embarrassment. They're a rising power. They want to be seen as a superpower. and you know if they struggle um with this in any way it's going to have people questioning well maybe we thought their military you know we gave too much credit to it and i think that any kind anything that isn't just i mean you know the analogy i use is like college football if it's one of the powerhouse teams and they don't you know score like 70 points on some smaller team then you're like, maybe they're not as good.

I mean, you can still win, but if it takes you longer and it's struggle win, it looks bad. And I think, you know, maybe they achieve their military objectives. But if it takes longer, I think that that will cause a lot of people, a lot of nations to maybe not have as much faith in the Chinese superpower as they hope. And there seems to be, actually, Ed, as you kind of pointed out earlier, with these weapons now that allow you to hit precision strikes far, far behind whatever front lines there are, you know, hundreds of miles behind. And the ability to destroy logistics infrastructure is going to be – in World War II, that was the bombing campaign for three years at horrendous losses for Allied airmen. But now it's going to be drones and missiles. It'll be more precise. It'll be more intense.

And it's almost as if we're creating a mutual assured destruction scenario of logistics, which in a way is better than mutual assured destruction enforced by nuclear weapons. It will be a catastrophe for the world and for the Chinese in particular. If they want to be the world's factories, they have about two weeks to win this war and be done with it, or else the Chinese are not self-sufficient in petroleum or in food. And we will, of course, start interdicting all those supply chains. It will start to come unglued. It's like the world is turning into a big bar. And when some of the larger drinkers start, you know, hurling insults at each other and then, you know, get sort of swinging, we're going to have to figure out a way to break up these bar fights, even if we don't agree, actually, with either one of them. And I think the world is starting to learn, you know, we're hitting the global south now with food supply problems because of the Russians and Ukrainians.

With the Chinese, it would be 10 times worse. Is there anything that you feel like I've missed? Anything that you want our listeners to take from your piece that we haven't covered so far? Well, I would say, you know, we take logistics for granted because we're so good at it. You know, we, 80 years ago in World War II, we perfected war as logistics and we overwhelmed them. Obviously, you know, the heroism of the troops is unquestioned. But then second only to that, I think, was the logistics. We overwhelm them with stuff.

And so because we're so good at it, it tends to be taken for granted. And now suddenly it was all, you know, three years ago we ran out of toilet paper. Hey, where's the toilet paper? And we suddenly realized, oh, logistics is the foundation of everything else. So without adequate logistics, all of the fine structures that sit on top of that will crumble and crumble quickly. Yeah, I mean, I totally agree. I think that, you know, we're seeing that maybe this, maybe seeing these kind of simulations, which I'm sure are being done, you know, all over, that people will see, like, maybe military action isn't, you know, isn't going to get us what we want. And, you know, yes, we don't want any kind of conflict, but maybe we can – maybe people will say, like, well, we don't want to go kinetic. Maybe we can just, you know, argue about it.

Stick with insulting – stick with insufferable insulting words and videos instead. Diplomats or, yeah, economic or whatever. Because, I mean, honestly, looking at it, the blockade is probably the best case scenario for the communist government, because, you know, you don't want to lose the stuff, the economic base of Taiwan, because it's important worldwide. And it's, you don't want to have to rebuild the country. You know, it's, if you captured it and it's a big, you know, mess with everything destroyed, that's going to be a stress on your economy. It's going to be a stress on the world economy. It's going to probably cause economic, international recessions, depressions, and that's just not going to help. I mean, you know, people want to make people want to make money. And the best case for them would be if they could get it without destroying stuff. But, you know, sometimes it's not going to always work out. Yeah.

Well, I'm sorry, but that is all the time that we have for today. I would like to thank my guests, Michael Hugos and Dr. Ed Salo. Michael, where can we find you online? And what are you working on next? scm globe supply chain management globe all one word scm globe.com and actually tomorrow we're going to start with this work has led to another little little project with affit and i'm going to start working with three of the professors there on building and going into more detailed scenarios for the taiwan invasion and trying to figure out what would be some good ways to counter it what

If we were logisticians on the blue team, where would we want to strike? Well, I'm looking forward to seeing that. Ed, same question to you. Where can we find you online, and what's coming up? Well, I'm on Twitter, or X or whatever it is now, amphwar, A-M-P-H-W-A-R. um i'm still doing some um sea control and i was lucky enough the past couple weeks to find out that i was named a research fellow at the modern war institute and the joint uh special operations university so i'm going to have a bunch of cool projects to be working on in the next year so i'm

pretty excited about that um looking at weaponization of heritage which kind of goes with my um my academic background and heritage preservation so i'm gonna be working on that but also some more looking at historic studies of contested logistics so gonna be some fun stuff out there wonderful i'm looking forward to that too uh thank you both again uh for joining us and to the listeners thank you for tuning in we'll see you next time © BF-WATCH TV 2021 © transcript Emily Beynon