Taiwan’s Army has crossed a symbolic and operational threshold: on June 10, 2026, it conducted its first-ever live-fire exercise with US-supplied HIMARS launchers on the island’s western shoreline, sending rockets directly into the Taiwan Strait from Taichung. Every previous HIMARS firing — including the system’s Taiwan debut in 2025 — took place on the Pacific-facing east coast, safely pointed away from the mainland. This time, the precision rockets flew toward China.

In 2023 and 2024, the PLA Rocket Force underwent a sweeping personnel purge. Senior commanders were removed. The political commissar was replaced. Multiple defense industry executives associated with missile programs disappeared from public view. Western observers initially read the purge as evidence of catastrophic problems: missiles filled with water instead of fuel, silos with non-functioning lids, corruption rotting the strategic deterrent. Two years on, a more measured reading is possible.

The People’s Liberation Army has been studying the problem of amphibious assault on Taiwan for longer than most of its current officer corps has been alive. The scenario has driven force development decisions, procurement priorities, and joint operations doctrine across three decades of modernization. What the PLA has built is not a military designed to fight a generic adversary in generic conditions. It is a military designed, among other things, to cross 110 miles of water against a prepared defender while managing American intervention. Understanding what that military looks like is the starting point for any serious assessment of Taiwan Strait risk.

The Center for Strategic and International Studies published a major wargame analysis of the Taiwan Strait in January 2023. It ran 24 iterations of a Chinese invasion scenario, varying assumptions about Chinese military capability, American intervention, Japanese participation, and Taiwanese defense posture. The headline finding — that the United States and its allies could likely defeat a Chinese invasion but at very high cost — made international news. The details of the analysis were more nuanced and more alarming than the headline suggested. Understanding what the wargames actually show, and what they cannot show, is prerequisite to understanding the current state of Taiwan contingency planning.