The Rocket Force: China's Missile Arsenal and What It Can Do to Taiwan in the First Hours
The PLA Rocket Force — elevated to service branch status in 2015 from the former Second Artillery Corps — is the component of Chinese military power that most directly shapes Taiwan Strait risk assessments. Its inventory of conventional ballistic and cruise missiles, built over thirty years of investment that accelerated after the 1996 Taiwan Strait crisis demonstrated American carrier leverage, is the primary instrument through which China can threaten Taiwan’s military infrastructure, its population centers, and the American and allied forces that would respond to any attack. Understanding what the Rocket Force can do in the first hours of a conflict is prerequisite to understanding every other aspect of Taiwan Strait security.
Taiwan sits within range of virtually every conventional missile system in the Rocket Force inventory. The DF-15 and DF-16 short-range ballistic missiles, positioned in bases across southeastern China, can reach any target in Taiwan within minutes of launch. The DF-21 medium-range ballistic missile extends the range envelope and adds anti-ship capability against surface combatants attempting to operate in the strait. The DF-26 intermediate-range ballistic missile — the carrier killer — has a range sufficient to threaten American carriers operating as far east as Guam. The land-attack cruise missile variants, particularly the CJ-10, provide a different flight profile that complicates integrated air defense by combining with ballistic threats arriving on different trajectories and different timescales.
The salvo problem is the central challenge for Taiwan’s air and missile defense. Taiwan’s Patriot and domestically designed Tien Kung air defense systems are capable systems with real intercept probability against individual missiles. Against a simultaneous salvo of hundreds of missiles — the opening strike that PLA operational planning envisions — the intercept math becomes unfavorable. Missile defense works by multiplying the cost of each successful attack: if an attacker must fire three missiles to defeat a defender’s one interceptor, the defender has leverage. When the attacker has enough missiles to saturate the defense regardless of intercept probability, the leverage disappears.
The prioritized target set for the opening strike campaign, as inferred from PLA doctrine documents and exercise patterns, is Taiwan’s integrated air defense network — radar systems, command and control nodes, communication infrastructure — followed by its air bases and naval facilities. The goal is to degrade Taiwan’s ability to defend against subsequent strike waves and against the air and maritime operations that support the crossing force. A Taiwan that cannot coordinate its air defense system is substantially more vulnerable to both the sustained air campaign and the eventual amphibious operation.
American bases in the region are also within Rocket Force range, and this fact is central to the deterrence calculus that underlies American military planning for a Taiwan contingency. Kadena Air Base in Okinawa, Andersen Air Force Base in Guam, and facilities in Japan and the Philippines are all targetable. A PLA decision to strike Taiwan without also striking American bases would leave American forces free to intervene from those bases. A PLA decision to strike American bases would transform the conflict from a bilateral Taiwan conflict into a direct US-China military confrontation with all the escalation implications that carries. This dilemma — sometimes called the “left of launch” problem — is at the heart of American extended deterrence in the western Pacific.
Taiwan has invested in hardening its military infrastructure against missile attack: underground aircraft shelters capable of housing fighters, dispersed fuel and ammunition storage, command facilities hardened to survive near-miss detonations. These investments reduce the damage any given strike can inflict. They do not provide immunity against sustained attack by a force with the Rocket Force’s inventory. The realistic assessment is that Taiwan’s exposed military infrastructure will take severe damage in the opening phase of any PLA military campaign, and that the question is whether what survives is sufficient to sustain the defense until allied intervention becomes decisive.
The Rocket Force does not need to destroy Taiwan to serve its strategic purpose. It needs to destroy enough of Taiwan’s military capability in the opening hours that the subsequent phases of a PLA operation face a degraded rather than an intact defense. Whether it can achieve that threshold of damage against a hardened and dispersed target set is the operational question that billions of dollars in both Chinese and Taiwanese military investment have been trying to answer.